Some years ago, I read Elena Ferranteâs My Brilliant Friend and was intrigued by the opening chapter. Lila, a character disappears. With all her belongings. Disappeared as she always wanted, leaving ânot so much as a hair anywhere in this world.â I thought it was wonderful. Aspirational. To vanish would be to break out of the shackles of being the filling in a middle-class sandwich. But then the mind is its own doctor and it began playing the films of forced disappearances, notions of escapism, the dangers of being unprotected and then the waves of life, employment and love rushed in, inundating and extinguishing a gypsy in the making. This week, I was reading Madhuri Vijayâs The Far Field and it brought back all those candy floss memories and the inevitable association with Ferrante. It also made me think of the hundreds who go âmissingâ because they are uncomfortable citizens. They and their questions cause discomfort or well, they can be disappeared because they can be taken away and no questions asked- or those questions can remain unanswered or unheard.Â
It is one thing to pack a bag, plug in headphones and set out to search for the meaning of life and quite another to be plucked off the road while on your way to school or while taking food for your parents working in the fields. The history of political violence and disappearances of political activists or innocent people is not restricted to any one country or specific struggles. It is an almost uniform pattern. Of power. Of the ways power desperately exerts itself to stop having to hear dissent.Â
And it is not only people who disappear. Over the years, vast swathes of forests have disappeared. Ways of lives have vanished and habitats have melted away. In their place we have structures rising. Different in design, but identical in their genesis and intentions. To replace all that diversity. And what is the role of the poet or poetry in all this? Is the act of writing a mere flapping of wings in the void? The verses that have survived decades of persecution inform me otherwise. The fear with which Authority burns books and the passion which with these songs are sung, tell a different story. Like Kaagaz Nahi Dikhayenge (We will not show papers) that became an anthem for those resisting citizenship rules.
At the end of the day, poetry does not discharge a weapon or cause bodily harm. But what it does is, unite voices as they march as an act of resistance.
Remember Bamian,
we were the Buddhas there,
now there the desert dwells.
Look birch, how the dust flies
in Aleppo and dies
all intertextual.
- Aleppo
This is Amit Shankar Saha writing about the ways silences seep into our lives when we do not react. When I read Amitâs works, I realised that here is a poet who has refused to be bracketed under any category. His poetry is free and far ranging, the images within are clear and fresh. There is a very sharp perspective that he brings into his lines.
The malady of love lives
in malignancy.
- In Defence of Passivity
His poems are a study in economy. They are austere. And evocative. The sweeping statements of love declared from mountaintops or from blimps in the sky are not for this poet. He expends just a couple of words and creates a universe.
Some winters are so cold
you need to hug a hope
for warmth
or discover the tree
within.
-Birch
Thematically, Amit resides on a number of planets. But reading his works in their almost entirety gives me an idea that Nature and human geographies are subjects he likes to revisit. When asked if his origins influenced his poetry, this is what he had to say, âBorn in the late seventies in Calcutta I inherited a chequered ancestry of land owner, historian, magician and school principal. With such eclectic forefathers it was perhaps destined that I will become a chronicler. From my early childhood I was attracted to writing while devouring stories from Russian comics and myths and legends from the Picts to the Greeks.â
The urban and the rural coexist comfortably in Amitâs oeuvre. Kolkata, where he hails from and Bolpur, where he works, serve as metaphors for the kaleidoscopic experiences he writes about. The places and the people take up residence in his poetry and we see the ways he weaves them together in to a quilt- memory is a major presence in Amitâs writing.
From under the quilt
I used to hear
My grandmother
Calling Lado Gopal
From the courtyard.
-Under the Quilt
In times such as ours, it seems that only memory can prevent things, people, places, languages and worlds from disappearing. I am reminded of Yoko Ogawaâs Memory Police where things disappear once and for all when they are taken away and all that is written about them destroyed. Last week, in the space of one speech, 38 million people disappeared, rendered invisible. Maybe Amit can find them?
Refu chacha became all frantic
when he heard the leader say
that the newly elected government
will impose the dreaded NRC.
He said that he would be forced to
leave without any place to go.
I have a kameez in my closet,
a dull garment I no longer wear,
which had once got ripped long back,
and he had mended it so well
that no naked eye could make out
the invisible tear in the fabric.
I once saw a poster that read, âA woman who reads is a dangerous creature.â It made me smile. Truth is often as simple as that. I had an addendum- Beware the woman who dares. I stop that statement there because, while there are writings and writings- the sort that grabs you by the collar and drags through the mire requires courage. It is that sort of writing that bleeds out of you after you howl at the moon and slice your eyeball with a paper-thin razor.
When I first read Tali Cohen Shabtai, I thought of Frida Kahlo. The wilderness of colours that pervaded Kahloâs art, the way her body was an ambassador of her art and how the person in totality was art. And when I went through Taliâs collected works- I found I was not far off the mark.
Inebriated/ Also a poet That with him we looked like Diego Rivera and Frida KahloâŠ.
These are the opening lines of one of her poems from her bi-lingual collection, Protest. The more I read her, the more I began associating her with the sort of lineage that gave us poets such as Eavan Boland and Hollie McNish. The sort that carry the ghosts of Plath, Sexton, Rich, Angelou. Those that disrupt the conventional lines of what poetry by âwomenâ must sound like.
As an Israeli who has lived in many places, the memories of her heritage and legacy lie heavy on her hands as she interrogates the meaning of her nationality, her identity and what it signifies to the world. Rarely does one see a poet askÂ
I sought an immersion of my bones From a different nation I left the bounds of Isssrael.
This time free, shouting, enjoying myself. How did you know to have intercourse with me for years, Israel?
(I offered myself to Tourists)
But Tali does more than to interrogate the effect that nations and histories have on the minds and bodies of people. She draws maps to her bodies and invites worlds to come reside in her. And has an uncanny knowledge of the ways minds work.Â
They wonder If I behave The way I live My poetry Much more Maiko
(From the collection Protest)
This wonderful awareness brings to mind the beautiful abandon that is so much the part of the philosophy of Lady Gaga, that icon of personal liberty in the twenty-first century. In the world of suits and power dressing, Tali shimmers in Samba attires. And that is welcome.Â
There is a wonderful, vibrant poetic culture that stems from Israel, that goes beyond the immeasurable expressions of Yehuda Amichai, Dan Pagis, Dahlia Ravikovitch and Michal Govrin- some of Israelâs biggest names.Â
At poetry festivals in Israel, some of them organized by the poets themselves, thousands gather to reminisce in verse the history of violence, wanderings, displacement, pain, love and other gratifications. These narratives are powerful and evocative and carry their geographies and interrogations. There is something distinctive about poetry from and about Israel. The questions seem tinged with red, love is written with an iron nib, the smell of earth permeates everything. There is a primal feel to the way the poets sing of everything from God to land to food.
In the beginning God created the heavens that really are not and the earth that wants to touch them. In the beginning God created threads stretched between them between the heavens that really are not and the earth crying out. And the man he created the man who is a prayer and a thread touches that which is not with a touch of softness and light.
Rivka Miriam (In the Beginning)
Or this that comes from one of the forces to reckon withÂ
Itâs August. The only thing to breathe is everybodyâs stains Sometimes when I board a train Or just stand along the empty platformâ Sometimes when I'm thirsty, I mean really dying of thirst
Jessica Greenbaum (The Yellow Star that Goes with Me)
The modern writers in a sense bridge the gap Israel and the world as they write of violence and unrest across the world that speaks the same language across continents. Â
Once in a village that is burning because a village is always somewhere burning And if you do not look because it is not your village it is still your village
Elana Bell (Your Village)
These are some of the noteworthy female poets of Israeli origin. I thought it would be better to concentrate on the female-identifying voices for this post. By no means is this account exhaustive, but it offers an insight into the cadences of verse from the region. The ways that displacement is interwoven into lines about love or moonlight are a testimonial to the unhomed, who are never at peace. Their quest, their journeys still continue across deserts and mountains and oceans. There is the realization that much of these will have to part to bring the departed and living to their homes.Â
To love is to tell the story of the world. There was an ocean with a boat mountains a meadow too painful to stare at directly. Havenât I been here before? Yes. No: not quite here.
Nomi Stone (On World making)
I have wondered if poetry truly speaks a universal language and if the ideas in one language are perfectly comprehensible in another and if poems written in one language, translated into another and read by the light of a third can make sense. These poems made me realise that it is not about the language at all- it is about the intensity of experience, the sensibilities that waken to pain, love, envy- words that stir in the soil composed of hopes, dreams, ambitions and lives trampled underfoot- the memory of rot, decay and flowers â all of which coalesce into spaces where it is rocks that bloom on the branches of plants and memories are irrigated with tears and blood. These are human experiences. These are lines of poetry growing in fields that are littered with laughs, rainbows and rib cages. Whatâs not to identify and understand when a woman/ poet says,
In your world Iâm in fifth place after the one in power after the generation that is sorta new after the Mizrahi who enters the fucking pantheon after the radicals who come after. You sit in circles and never shut up. Fifth place my ass, Mizrahi women will write a million poems.
Tehila Hakimi (Fifth Place)
Or when Agi Mishol, writes of those insidious cycles that govern life on earth:
On the kitchen counter
the goat-eyed cat carries a blue-feathered bird already dead the beak still in a pincer grip on a pomegranate twig
each of us holds something in our mouths.
(Blue Bird)
And while talking about the politics of language and comprehending cultures in translation, the opening lines of the winner of this yearâs Man Booker International comes to mind. I was ten and stopped taking off my coat. That morning, Mum had covered us one by one in udder ointment. It came out of a yellow Bogena tin and was normally used to prevent dairy cowsâ teats from getting cracks, calluses and cauliflower-like lumps. This was the first I was hearing of udder ointment on faces! But sitting vigilant near the corpse of a loved one- in case it was all a mistake and they decide to wake up, wonât be something I encountered for the first time in The Discomfort of Evening. I came with that knowledge ingrained.Â
The pain was shared.Â
The poetic oeuvre from Israel must be discussed widely in terms of the vast landscapes it covers and the diaspora that sends in its writing from the world over. Notable names such as Navit Barel, Tal Nitzan, Hagit Grossman have a significant impact on the way verses have highlighted the fragmented lives of this country.Â
Tali Cohen Shabtai, produces a potent cocktail of narratives and a shamanic energy that permeates everything she touches. Her words seem incapable of standing still on the page. They flicker, sizzle and throw bizarre shadows on the walls. Words seem incidental to this poet as she seems to be able to communicate through energy.Â
I build tactics While you sleep On how to admit To my crime We make love Between Your Carnival And my War
(Gyur)
It is here that I leave you to shoot up on the inimitable poetry of Tali Cohen Shabtai, a persona who is at once everywhere and nowhere. And it is fitting- as she comes from a land that since the beginning of some concepts of time has been a dream that was dreamt of so ardently that people parted oceans, crossed deserts and yet havenât arrived at. Like all those promises.Â
Ideology as a way of life
Women like me, yes
have been added over the years to overshadow
what preceded us
that is mostly
not in line
with our agenda.
The accepted wording is
not what
will satisfy our desires â
Desires? Ours? Well then, I write
in the female first person plural
so as not to sound
as one who sins with pretension
as an individual woman,
however
I do not have many female friends for this journey
and those who have already passed
through a station or two
according to
the
fixed
rules
of society
A woman like me
tries
to stay free
from society
and at the same time
to be in it
with boycotts in double-digit ages
until the arrival
of the adolescence age
and beyond
I bear this bitter
in
sult
so far.
So! Spare judging
me
that âCohen Shabtai
has rules
of her ownâŠâ
as Amos Levitan* wrote about me.
I came
with the goal of
satiating inspirations
based on
my theories
Therefore
I collect poems of the margins of humankind,
since
they have a greater potential
to waver from
the conventions â
just like me!
With 50 cents
in my wallet
I
live my own actions
lest
my inarticulate mouth
will be passed over and my eyes?
My eyes are blinded.
Women like me, particularly
at the beginning of
the fifteenth century
were persecuted and burned
for being independent and strong
at the Catholic churchâs instruction
Nowadays? You can petition
the High Court of Justice.
So it is for a woman like me
*A well-known Israeli poet and editor.
Sunset before sunrise
âThe sunset is preparation for the strengthening sunrise the next dayâ
This sounds to me sloganistic if nice to write, yet
not patently accurate and can even be interpreted
as lowering the value of
the intelligence
that knows a thing or two about ârising.â
By the way,
I checked this statement at twighlight
the sunset was even observed
in âCogan Marinaâ in Oslo.
And the sunrise the following morning amounted to an incline that I trod and rose from a flat, slightly elevated footpath that can be climbed by foot and reach a level
slightly higher by a few centimeters between each stair.
Secondly, there is no necessity for the sunset I
feel it covering itself every evening between my breasts
beyond the western horizon
watching from within the earth while I am
in the east.
So it is true
some phenomena occur with the rising of the sun
such as
as we rise higher, the atmosphere is thinner at a height of a few hundred meters and then it dissipates into space
and there are also those who believe that the sunâs red color at sunset is explained by the sun passing in the evening over hell and in the morning at sunrise over the roses of
paradise
and this is indeed a nice allegory.
â but â
In order to remain sane
immediately after sunset I adopt the time between the suns â time between day
and night
that ends with the starsâ coming out
When I rise for the shacharit morning prayer and recite the blessing âI thank you in front of you,â opposite a hazy
mirror
Observing every wheel of the sun under the line
of view is a creation that many
have knowledge of
It is known that in the Jewish halacha (ritual law) that the time of the sunset determines the timeline for various commandments, such as the mincha afternoon prayer,
or when the Sabbath
commences
For me? Itâs just sunset
I am Tali
I read prose only in the third person,
and only translated prose,
poetry, I also read in Hebrew.
I love Wislawa Szymborska, she copies in written word
the creation
in a brilliant fashion, and was recognized during her lifetime and was not among
the female poets who danced the âdance of death in lifeâ
for that I lowered her credit.
I think itâs impossible to tag in one breath! A contemporary poetess with
characters that preserved the myth of the âcursed poetessesâ. For they are
found only in the underground or tomb
There is no negotiation with this judgement
Mainstreamism repels me.
Bestsellers I do not touch.
I love nonfiction books.
Newspapers do not count at all as the writing and reading genre.
And my therapist I address in the second person singular
while omitting the third degree: âdoctorâ, itâs ok, itâs acceptable â
many poetesses have sat in my chair in front of him
Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath,
and those who ended up as their own hangman.
I often write in the first person singular and also to talk
It is
my way to circumvent
myself from afar.
And do not ask what I often write about! I do not like rhetorical questions that belittle
my intellect
Such a therapist
I play games in my mind â behind papers never
Written about the tired person I am â
Sheâs trying to praise my grief
On papers gone to early retirement
On shelves of book stores
Where the bourgeois are the first clients to borrow
The fairy tale thatâs posted in Fridayâs edition of a
Leftist Magazine
Sheâs trying to decorate me with
A lower analogy of R.I.P. poets
Who produced the best comedies
Of their life
By blank papers and faked orgasm
And ending
As their own hangmen
But She, She must be warned! Itâs a static position!
« A woman who gets lost,
Lost
In translation »
Will never be tested twice
Not in this scenario
Tali Cohen Shabtai was born in Jerusalem and has lived in places like Norway and the USA. She has three collections of poems to her name, of which Purple Diluted in a Blackâs Thick and Protest are bilingual. The third is Nine Years From You. Her fourth book is slated for release in 2020.
I am the patient etherised upon the table. It is midnight already, the steady hum of crickets merges with the clatter in my head. The words I had once written, now return every now and then to haunt me. Perhaps the words that return are not mine alone, they arrive without warning, fragments of lines, now longer tethered to the text, they arrive like the breeze on cold city nights. âYou always seemed to go round in circlesâ, I murmur to myself. I discern few other sounds. A leaky tap in the kitchen, must get it fixed, I make a mental note. The sound of the clocks ticking go on as ever, âNo man goes down to the same river twiceâ. I think of entropy for a while, the second law and time. The tap keeps leaking. By now I have almost become used to its incessant rhythm. âAll of art is resistance against entropyâ, I scribble on a piece of paper, knowing once again that I am indeed going round in circles. The phone rings, I let it. The traffic lights blink. I have grown tired of conversations, of platitudes, of âart, beauty and the meaning of it allâ. Hollowed out from inside, I roam these streets like a shadow of myself. This city, its neon facade, its filth, its contradictions, look at me questioningly. I smile back at it and keep walking in this âunending chorus of human feetâ. I slip into my dreams. My dreams are of smoke and death. Stray faces appear behind glass, a dog bares its fangs, licks a bone clean, mannequins walk gingerly, a one eyed man grins.
Neon
A faraway house overlooking the highway, the lights of which always flicker the same way in my memory, always the dim yellow of longing chasing me. Just as a seafarer knows the sea by the way starlight meanders over it, I discover the city late at evening, walking along its illuminated contours, and find in every corner the disjointed strands of time and distance and being and non-being, shaping their own narratives, even as I keep searching for effervescent light trails of headlights and cold neon.
Tonight
Here I am in this cafeteria having a bowl of noodles all by myself with a dozing watchman and the soft, mellow glow of an electric flycatcher for company. I put on my headphones, my playlist switches to Norah Jones. I think of my friends for a while and then my mind shifts elsewhere. The song begins , âCome away with me â she sings and I here alone in this midnight shack think to myself that I would if only I knew where.
Movement as Metaphor
Droplets of light condensed on night lamps split open caught in a flux in spools of thought held in equilibrium mid-air nesting in the emptiness of every atom in every cell and the continuum in between where motion begins only in the mind as a single twist of phrase unlocking doors, as a trickle going down the endless slope, as a nameless soul receding from its shadow.
Notes from an unfinished diary
I
Criss cross zig zag pools of light, comfort is disappearance and then oblivionâŠoblivionâŠoblivion just writing the word is bliss, poetry is tapping buttons on a phone and auto correct results , erasure is art is life and the continuum in between , the excess of everything has choked me , life is perennial asphyxiation, an endless process of fading away moving zipping past cities, civilisations the old man under the tree telling us tales of our dreams and the mats that waiters dry at night, the loverâs hand groping in the dark , How do I trust anything?memory , literature is artifice, art is truth , truth naked without embellishments of language, of anything , thoughts clear as water, clear as a sentence that does not employ a metaphor. Must wake up sometime before they arrive, then again the next day and the next, life is a series of such days , how does one break away ..
II
Antidote to melancholy :The act of naming ,The colours ,the sounds, the flesh and all that remains hidden In the shadow all that diffuses out of the surface of our being and the air expanded by our emptiness as it passes in and out through the nostrils as days turn to nights, as all that remains of a once familiar name.
III
The currents in the vein , blood flowing like a river, the banks on both sides unknown, the day draws to a close, a boatman begins his song, sound penetrates silence, bit by bit, the first poem on a cave wall reaching beyond time to us, gathering silt of time, of memory as the world passes in a long drawn breath, the very act of naming is creating, the rebirth of the world in the head, the sounds ring hollow , a skeletal hollowness, the night endless..
IV
The world held out as if a piece of paper. Plain white eye balls, stars replaced by LEDs, the sky cellophane, I scream and hear the sound of my voice which separates into sine waves.
It moves outwards, upwards ephemeral wisps of smoke. The ceiling buzzing incessant, the sound of crickets in my head, the static from satellites, orbits losing its course, language born in the womb of silence, reaching towards what cannot be known, cellophane skies reaching out to usâŠus? thin lights of the night , absolute silence , the mind melting words, sounds, the mind on a sprint out run by light, the first embers of the fire, the signs drawn but never understood, not of death or of life, a mystery without resolution, words pushing against air, enlarging space, the self diffused , the shadow of the shadow keeping us where we are.
V
Condense droplets cold surface night ice cream blank page the sun lanterns night lamps heat youtube voices.
Voices information the world trapped in a skull, stream of consciousness no boundary, end of the page the point of it all? Deadlines dead line cooler night gives way to morning shifts work and repeat, what am I looking for, the end apocalypse starting over the physicality of writing poems, people in photographs and people beside you and then people into nothingness me into nothingness, with them who are they ?friends connected by invisible threads, to her whom I love, to her whom I think I love, the way the fingers move over the keyboard backspace backspace heat boredom solitude split open empty space time body tv series transport in a story of someone somewhere pinned down to time, place, location, country, family, caste, name, universe? Face the man in the mirror thinking in devised metaphors language handed down how does one step out of oneâs own feet ?words as vehicles of release, Hormones ?
happy chemical? Sad chemical?
VI
Symmetry breaking triggered by the first word, in the perfect vacuum of silence, the trigger pressed, time – the noose around the neck, entropy fluctuation, a probabilistic blip in the all encompassing halls of nothingness, propelled forward, the brain fist sized presiding over the universe, and you caught in between . All poetry is reminiscence of time when there was no time, space uncharted, a raft caught in the ocean currents of neurons, torn apart by genetics, strands entwined condemning us to a name, to 3.14 , to loneliness, to this eternal separation, to an alpha numeric name next to a blob of green, to anonymous chat rooms, to curious blizzards in Russian novels, to the unsayable buried in the ambient.Â
Smoke
We wither slowly awaiting our eventual invisibility. The hourglass fills bit by bit, we turn vaporous, appear as frost on the windows of our unborn children.
Debarshi Mitra is a 25 year old poet from New Delhi, India. His debut book of poems Eternal Migrant was published in May 2016 by Writers Workshop. His second book Osmosis was published by Hawakal publishers in 2020. His works have previously appeared in anthologies like Kaafiyana, Wifi for Breakfast and Best Indian Poetry 2018 and in poetry journals like âThe Scarlet Leaf Reviewâ, âThumbprint’, ‘Guftuguâ, ‘The Seattle Star’ ,âThe Pangolin Reviewâ, ‘Leaves of Ink’, âThe Sunflower Collectiveâ, âColdnoonâ, âIndiana Voice Journalâ, âThe Indian Cultural forumâ among various others. He was the recipient of the The Wingword Poetry Prize 2017, The Srinivas Rayaprol Poetry Prize 2017 and was long listed for the TFA Prize 2019.Â
One among the many odd things I have done is walking at 2 AM through the corridors of a hotel undergoing renovations, in search of water. A friend and I had booked this place online for the duration of a conference and when we reached, we found they had just completed rebuildingâŠthe protective covering from some sections had not even come off. But they honoured their part of the bargain and let us stay there. All was good till at about eleven at night, when I thoughtlessly finished off all the drinking water. Later, finding my friend extremely thirsty, I rang up Housekeeping and Reception by turnsâŠto no avail. So, feeling evangelical, I stepped out of the room in search of water and walked into utter and total darkness. I walked to the other end of the passage, peered down and found the reception a gaping black void. Thatâs when it struck me that we were the only people in this hotel- all the staff had gone home. There was no guard either. As I walked back to the room, the doorway looked like a block of light in a chunk of darkness. It was a most beautifully desolate sight. Back in the room, I remembered a bag of oranges we had bought earlier. Nothing like freshly squeezed orange juice to assuage guilt and take care of a cranky, thirsty friend.
The real reason we made the trip in the first place was not the quest for academic excellence, but rather, to visit the final resting place of a young man very dear to my friend. His untimely demise had shaken her and this trip was a search for the much-needed closure. We travelled a long, long way, on roads hewn out of mountains, the chocolate brown of the earth covering every conceivable surface. Summer was at its height and I was careful not to drink more than a mouthful of water at a time.
We reached the cemetery. There were rows of graves, marked and unmarked. There was no way to find him except ask for help at the office of the nearby church. The office was a relief, with its cool tiled floors and a ceiling fan. The priest called the father of the young man and asked him, âThere are two women here to pay their respects. What is the number of your sonâs grave?â The poor man couldnât remember. And I wondered how one forgets the number of the grave of oneâs only son. The priest hung up and looked sheepishly at us. âMaybe we just look at all these graves and say a general hello?â I tentatively asked my friend. She remained silent. The priest sensing her grief, sent for his assistant and they combed through a huge register and located the number. Upon reaching that simple, unmarked grave, we stood in a pool silence. Us and a raven that we imagined was the soul of the departed.
The priest and assistant came to see us off. It was quite the occasion in those parts- two mysterious women visiting the grave of a young man. I think the last event to cause this sort of flutter in the village was the coming of electricity. I mentioned this to my friend on ourlong way back to the hotel and she burst into laughter. Maybe that is what is called closure. I did not mind the dust anymore.
Personal commitments and the vagaries of lockdown keeping us geographically apart, the next time I saw her was in yet another cemetery. We were the only two people there. The burial had not happened. The prayers were still going on at church. The cemetery had no graves. Only vaults sealed with concrete, with iron rods drawn across them. In some cases, two rods crisscrossed the vault. I caught sight of my friend walking towards me. The first thing I asked her on seeing her in person after a year was, âWhy the rods? Do they imagine the dead might push open the vaults and leave?â Such is the nature of sorrow that no reply was needed or given. It was almost afternoon and we stood in pouring rain, staring into the depths of a newly opened vault, the edges jagged and raw. The darkness within made me think of the hotel corridor and that single column of light. Two very different types of darkness and two very different experiences of light. Perhaps, two very different vaults.
The search for the somewhere else is what takes us across continents, oceans and chasms. I wonder if that search ends. Or in most cases, if it even begins. We are too rooted, too afraid, too busy preparing for some inevitability that these journeys remain unembarked upon. Our stories for never setting out are almost often the same, only the characters change. The philosophy of the quest demands the sacrifice of excuses. The charm of the excuse is so great that we lose the courage to leap. I once spent ten minutes staring into the depths of a swimming pool, unable to dive in, despite there being no danger of drowning. It was the inability to take the plunge. A stranger at the pool finally put me out of my misery and pushed me in as she casually walked by.
Kiran Bhatâs poetry, like the poet himself, is not afraid of diving in at the deep end. It is fearless and speaks loud and clear. Written from various parts of the world that Kiran has made his home in, the verses reveal the poetics of a bright and beautiful mind. Having begun travelling at the age of twenty, he has been to 132 countries, learnt twelve languages, and has called nineteen corners of the world home (Atlanta, New York, Mysore, Bangalore, Madrid, Lisbon, Cuzco, Florianopolis, Delhi, Malindi, Istanbul, Tokyo, Yogyakarta, Shanghai, Moscow, Paris, Mumbai, Cairo, and Melbourne). But his heart resides in Mumbai. He speaks English, Kannada, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Turkish, Indonesian, Hindi, Japanese, French, Russian, and Arabic to various levels of proficiency.He generates very energetic conversations with creative people across the globe and his crucial participation in online events such as Golchakkar keeps the discourse flowing.
The strength of his poetry comes from the interrogations that he subjects himself and the world around him to. What interested me was that the questions he asks are the ones we may ask ourselves in the course of a day. But the answers are very different from the ones we are wont to give. Kiran answers with no subterfuge. The responses hold nothing back- just like the poet himself. this can only come from a person who is at peace with himself and in control of his identity. The incidental nature that one ascribes to identity is shattered with the conscious, lucid way that Bhat addresses his own.
The whole process of standing up and walking away from the world you have set up in a space of a few years or months and entering a new culture, handling a new currency, a new history and political custom is not an easy task. The self becomes a disciple of the mind in the process. The body- a mere vehicle- not the core of our existence as we often consider it to be. Little wonder that one of Bhatâs signature works is Kiran Speaks, a series of conversations that he has with his consciousness. Modeled on the styleof Confuciusâ teachings, these poetic interrogations take on different voices. To quote the poet, âI believe mostly in the strange serendipity that comes with the chaos of our world.â
The effervescence of Kiran Bhatâs personality shines through in his narration. This why I have preferred to let him speak through the videos. This is also the first time that Mandarin is being featured on Samyukta Poetry. To convey the sense of peace that these poems bring about and because in these chaotic times, a little bit of art that navigates and replicates the pathways of the mind seems appropriate, we feature doodle art by Kukku Xavier. I think they go well together- the questions asked and answered with the openness of skies, smells of cities once called home, thirst quenched with orange juice, lost loves, slivers of light at the end of corridors and the shadows cast by death. All meet in art. All is art.
A loud noise asked:
When will you find peace?
Kiran says:
I ought to stop listening to what my family says.
First, I will be able to listen to myself.
Then, my purpose will come.
Then, I will follow my purpose.
Then, I will know peace.
A Stranger on the Bus Asks: What Do You Love the Most?
A stranger on the bus asks: What do you love the most?
Kiran says:
To pet a dog on its belly.
To watch mindless television.
To make my parents happy.
To rest after writing well.
Kiran then clarifies: but this is how to please my mind and not my body.
A mangrove, so bright, itâs color cuts my tongue.
Eyes so sapphire, they belong to the dragon,
But these are eyes that do not belong to the wild,
A thousand naked flames -
One hundred gypsies in dance -
But to my future lover.
Communicating through the primal tools of humanity to understand another personâs self.
A handsome boy at the bar approaches me and asks: What is the kind of guy you like?
A handsome boy at the bar approaches me and asks: What is the kind of guy you like?
Kiran faces him and responds:
A lotus flower has petals dimmer than the luster of his smile,
A dragon fruit imparts a lesser taste than the thrust of his kiss.
He might be short, he might be chubby,
But he asks me about my favorite books,
He forgives me when I say something wrong.
Some call him Krishna,
Some call him Rama,
I call him my habibi.
Is he handsome?
Just okay.
Is he smart?
Relatively so.
But, while we make love,
And our skin rubs against each other,
My skin darkens,
His skin lightens,
We become the same shade of brown.
The handsome boy at the bar scoffs.
He asks why I do not want,
Someone who is handsome, or smart.
Kiranâs answer is simple.
Because when a waterfall flows,
With the full vigor of the cascade,
It needs to drop down,
Into the most stolid of ponds.
"A Handsome Boy" was previously published in Fearless Love: Anthology, by Mohini Books
I answered: Because according to nature, we should be together.
It is not that the universe dictated it by law,
it was never a government mandate,
nor the will of the Heavens.
It is the simply the nature of you and I together.
It is natural for you and me.
Let me give an example.
The ocean is made of many particles.
When the ocean is moved,
The ocean does not know why it is being moved,
It simply reacts.
We are like the ocean.
You move me.
I move you.
I do not know where you begin.
You do not know where I end.
Kiran knows;
I want you to see every part of your body.
I want you to know the limits of me.
I want to mate with you the way the angler fish does.
To be that little fish that squirms into the female body.
In spirit two,
in body, one.
"My Boyfriend Asked" was previously published in the What Rough Beasts blog run by Indolent Books
Kiran Bhat is an Indian-American traveller, polyglot, and author. He is the author of the English-language story cycle, We Of The Forsaken World... (Iguana Books, 2020), the Spanish-language poetry collection Autobiografia (Letrame Editorial, 2019) the Mandarin-language poetry collection Kiran Speaks (White Elephant Press, 2019), the Portuguese-language story collection Afora, Adentro (Editorial Labrador, 2020), and the Kannada-language travelogue Tirugaatha (Chiranthana Media Solutions, 2019). He has had his writing published at The Brooklyn Rail, The Colorado Review, The Florida Review, Eclectica, Waxwing, The Free State Review, Cha, The Mascara Literary Review, The Chakkar, and several other places. You can currently find him nested in Melbourne, but he calls Mumbai his eternal home.
Kukku Xavier is an Assistant Professor in English at All Saintsâ College, Thiruvananthapuram.
A land of eternal dusks, where days and nights are just shades of dark and darker. The lives of the inhabitants run parallel, yet intersect. Independent and interconnected. The polyphony when listened to, tells stories of people who are segments of each otherâs lives and yet live worlds apart. Love is poetry and poetry, a sharp blade in a velvet casing. Take for example these lines:
Blame it on the ocean, on my frothing sea-breath, on this opium air, for all I can see now are your plucked-out eyes that continue to dream big and become planets in your hands. (Disorientation)
The attendant revelation is sublime. However, sublimity does not guarantee tranquility. Rather, it carries the promise of distant thunder. And anticipation.Â
This is the multiverse that Anupama Raju has created out of vegetable markets that might be adjacent to flats from whose windows slivers of lives are beamed across the night sky. It is a place where memories of school days jostle for space alongside motherâs fish curry. Rajuâs words echo the rhythm of Time itself. Unhurried and magnificent. She has a great eye for detail. And draws from the world around her. Some of her signature works such as the Windows series came out of her stint as writer in residence at the University of Kent where she was on a Charles Wallace Fellowship. Her time in La Rochelle in France, thanks to the residency programme by Le Centre Intermondes yielded Surfaces and Depths, a collaborative effort with the photographer, Pascal Bernard.Â
Apart from the evocative visual imagery, what stands out is the use of sound in her poems.
The lady upstairs grates a coconut, drags a chair across the room, hopes it will drown the argument with the other whom she cannot hate. (Everyday Sounds)
At her hands, space, like everything else, is rendered transcendental, mutable. People metamorphose into walls, time melts and refashions itself and memories become edible. The effect is fascinating. Her language conveys the intangible longing that pervades maddening crowds and blank windows alike.Â
Hailed as one of the most interesting voices in contemporary Indian poetry, Raju has been featured anthologies such as the Harper Collins Book of English Poetry, Yellow Nib Modern English Poetry by Indians, Ten â The New Indian Poets, Big Bridge Anthology of Contemporary Indian Poetry. Her works have been carried in The Hindu, The Caravan, The Little Magazine, Indian Literature, Mint Lounge, Pratilipi. Her first book of poems, Nine received great acclaim and showed her capable of, to quote Arundhathi Subramaniam, ââŠtransforming familiar tropes of blood and longing, pain and death, into the “burnt letters” of warm, pulsating verse. Anupama Raju cuts close to the boneâŠ.â
This ability to transform extends to her presentation of the female. She engages her spaces and language to present a Calypso like persona who takes all or nothing. The demand for the absolute is unwavering and surgical. The trauma of abuse has been a great concern for Raju, who along with Karthika Nair, K. Srilata and Priya Sarukkai Chabria, has written a series of poems that deals with the body vis a vis female sexuality. The ways in which the female body counters violence with instinctual power have been presented in extraordinary language. In a powerful image, a woman wonders if using a conditioner would have helped âsmoothenâ the systemic abuse she encounters at each step. The word conditioner being a brilliant jibe at the conditioning that women undergo. The systematic recounting of abuse is as much a mental documentation as it is defiance.  The last lines read
Next time, I will condition myself, she thought, as she brushed her down her knotted hair. (Conditioner)
When not writing with such smouldering intensity, Anupama Raju is a communications professional and a literary journalist. She is a great conversationalist who can hold forth on any subject with aplomb. Her refreshing frankness is reflected in the honesty of her poetry. This week, we bring you the vinegary, molten, subtle and edgy words of Anupama Raju. Hereâs to eternal dusks!
It was raining here today as I sat down to write this post. So, I stopped writing and watched the rain. And thought. About the long days and the long nights and the incredibly short days and nights that are not long enough. I thought about people who live through these days and who are sometimes sustained by the memories of some wonderful days and nights. Who are encouraged by these memories to remain standing for another day. Thoughts about standing led me to think about two women I saw nearly twenty six years ago on a crowded local train in Mumbai. (Well, there is no other sort of local train in Mumbai). It was that time of the day when people wanted nothing more than to get home and the metal walls of the train bulged with the sheer volume of people inside it. Yet, miraculously, there would be place for more people at the next station. Getting into or out of these trains is an art that no amount of rugby training can teach you. You have to be born into it. We who are from Mumbai can hustle with the best of them. These compartments have a life and ecosystem of their own. Men get in with briefcases and vegetables bought at the overhead walkways of the railway stations and proceed to dive for a seat, place the vegetables in the briefcase, pull out a knife and start chopping vegetables while having conversations with the other season ticket travelers. Women have capacious bags for the same purposes. And conversations flow all around you. Somehow, privacy is alien to these locomotive communities where everyone is an Ai, Tai, Didi, or simply, AreyâŠ.Â
It was during one such torrid journey that I spotted actress Sonali Bendre standing right next to me as we hurtled towards Mumbai CST! She was just starting out then, had made a few appearances in the inner pages of the movie magazines that my mother was very fond of purchasing on our trips to Mumbai as these were hard to come by in Oman. For a kid of ten, spotting a celebrity, however minor, was thrilling though I never went up to her and said anything. One has oneâs dignity you know. After that, all through that summer, I scanned the railway compartments, looking to spot my next celebrity. On one such rush hour evening, in the ladies compartment of a local train in Mumbai, when women were chopping vegetables and going plunk plunk with their embroidery needles, and people were packed like sardines in a can, I saw a woman place her arms around the woman in front of her and place her head on her shoulder and apparently go to sleep. I found it immensely interesting that someone could go to sleep standing up. Like a horse. On a stranger. Because both of them did not even have a conversation the whole time they were standing there.Â
When the train reached her station, the sleeping woman withdrew her hands, but not before the one in front held her finger for a fraction of a second. And then the hand was gone, swallowed by the millions climbing the overhead bridge. In my compartment, the woman shaped vacuum was filled inside of three seconds. It was like they were never there. Years later, reading Lihaaf, I realised that, that was my Lihaaf moment. It was like discovering a tiny plant with purple flowers growing in between the cracks on your cemented front yard. Â
And today, yet again, I thought about them. How would they keep meeting once they retired? Which they should have by now. How would they meet if they had stopped working or had to take different trains to work or home? What became of them and why did they not care that there were all those people around? Did they know that a ten- year old was watching them with irrepressible curiosity and that they would be thought of decades later on a rainy day? Did they think they mattered? I donât know. But I know what love looks like.Â
Almost two decades later, while taking my PG students back to Kerala after their excursion to Bengaluru, we had office commuters taking up space in the sleeper compartments. A group of them settled themselves on our side berth as I sat curled up opposite my colleague. Like I said, on trains, my space is your space and all Indian are my brothers and sisters. So, these two men sat down and in an instant, began singing Kannada songs. Of them one would sing duets all by himself. What was really hilarious was that he would preface the female singerâs part (mid song) with the words, âladies voiceâ, and then proceed. The non-duet singerâs station was fast approaching and he urged his friend to get down and sing some more and go later by another train. Not this time though. He had duets to sing elsewhere.Â
The same train had two young men sitting just a few seats away from us. I interrupted their deep conversation to ask if they would mind switching their seats with some of our girls so we could have our group together. And one of them replied, âsorry, we had booked these seats by the window months ago so we could travel like this.â Returning to my seat, I fumed at useless men who gave vapid excuses and mentally suggested they buy a train for themselves. Sometime around ten or so at night, we heard some of the pilgrims traveling to Sabarimala yelling at these two to behave themselves and go to sleep. And was I snarkily satisfied. I hoped they slept by their windows.Â
Again years, later, it came to me that perhaps, that journey was very precious to them. That months of planning might have been needed to coordinate vacations and book the perfect seats so they could have their personal space. Only to be interrupted by office commuters, women seeking to uproot them and men asking them to shut up and go to sleep. In this world made of ossified thoughts, some loves can exist only in a state of permanent transit. And they do. I wish they did not have to. I know I owe an apology to those young men and the singers. They were only trying to get by. In this vast world of intersecting trains, I will do so, if we meet somewhere.Â
This post signals the end of the celebration of the Queer Pride Month here at SamyuktaPoetry. A month ago, when we started down this path, I did not imagine that it would fan out to 10 poets, 12 posts and have over 5600 visits. It is wonderful to receive so much of love. In the course of this month, we have travelled down a number of different roads, talked about issues of vintage and contemporary value and featured some tremendous art. It was hectic coordinating all of this, but with an excellent support team backing me, I barely felt a thing. To all our poets, thankyou for sharing the best of your work with us, for spending time discussing aspects of your life and your activism. For the way you shared our vision. Our artists, Sarah Saju Kallungal, Akshay A. S, Ruchi Sinha and Harikrishnan G who responded to our ideas with splendid works. Thanks to your enthusiasm, I know that this is not over. That we have more to come somewhere down the line.Â
It is a fact that this is not the end of the road. It is not even a halfway mark. Because even as we speak, there are laws and regulating procedures that make life impossible for those who refuse to conform to a matrix. A country like India, which is the worldâs largest constitutional democracy, is important in influencing the sexual democracies of countries in its immediate and cultural (post-colonial) vicinity. And this is not as simple as building walls to hide slums. We should be an example of how soft power must work. By enabling civil liberties for its citizens, India can ensure that it touches millions of people worldwide.Â
I want to imagine. That the two women on the train held each other, without having to avert their eyes. That the singers got down and went home together. That the young men gave up their seats for the girls because there is a lifetime of journeys they can take.
I want to imagine. That the two women on the train held each other, without having to avert their eyes. That the singers got down and went home together. That the young men gave up their seats for the girls because there is a lifetime of journeys they can take.
Though I know itâs a solo, I imagine the duet singer singing the Kannada version of Johnny Mathisâ immortal words.
Sometimes we walk, hand in hand by the sea And we breathe in the cool salty air You turn to me, with a kiss in your eyes And my heart feels a thrill beyond compare Then your lips cling to mine, it’s wonderful, wonderful Oh, so wonderful, my love And I say to myself “It’s wonderful, wonderful Oh, so wonderful, my love.’
(Ladies voice)
Sonya J. Nair Editor
Featured today is the Google Doodle created by Rob Gilliam, that honours Marsha P. Johnson, the queer activist and drag queen who was at the forefront of the Stonewall movement, which was what we had started our first post with. She also set up shelter homes for homeless LGBTQ+ youth. Johnson was an inspiration for all people looking for their identity in a chaotic world. In 2019, New York City decided to honour her and her fellow transgender activist Sylvia Rivera with statues. Johnson, posthumously, was also the grand marshal at the 2019 New York City Pride March.Â
Mumbai Trains, Queer Love, Johnny Mathis, Marsha P. Johnson, Samyukta Poetry
Every year, I teach Margaret Atwoodâs Notes Towards A Poem That Can Never Be Written to my Undergraduate students and talk to them about how year after year, in many parts of the world, the freedom of speech and expression is squashed by unlawful regimes. I tell them about how people go missing in the middle of the night on account of an article, a sentence, or maybe just for frowning while listening to the rhetoric of a dictator. We talk about Liu Xiaobo and others. We go onto journalists who are never heard from again or are imprisoned for years either in their homelands or in distant lands where their brave coverage of ground realities gets them arrested for conspiracy, treason or dissent or just like that. Like Mahmoud Hussein of Al Jazeera who is being held in an Egyptian prison for more than three years and to mark which, the channel runs a ticker counting off the number of days he has been imprisoned. The personal losses this man suffered while in prison are inestimable. I tell the students, it hurts physically to see that ticker that says Mahmoud Hussein imprisoned for 1200 days and then to see it turn into1201 days and so it has gone on for days and days.
And then from the poem I read out:
This is the place you would rather not know about, this is the place that will inhabit you, this is the place you cannot imagine, this is the place that will finally defeat you where the word why shrivels and empties itself. This is famine.
This week, Dr. Nithya Mariam John introduces us to her creative realms where poems roam free and unfettered. Her works seem to be leading lives of their own- their rhythms refusing to be scripted. Her gardens are overgrown, the creatures residing in them, fearless. Nature is at her hedonistic best. The tone is simultaneously romantic and genial.Â
Nithya reveals âTo write is to healâŠ. It helps me imagine beauty in the beast, look out for the beast in the beautiful, and also believe in different shades of both.â
And it is this world that she throws open for us.
Dr. Nithya Mariam John is an Assistant Professor at the Department of English, BCM College, Kottayam. She has published a collection of poems- Bleats and Roars, edited àŽȘà”à”ș-ink and was also one of the translators translating into Malayalam the short stories of the Kannada writer, Vaidehi (Vaidehiyude Cherukathakal).
One among the many odd things I have done is walking at 2 AM through the corridors of a hotel undergoing renovations, in search of water. A friend and I had booked this place online for the duration of a conference and when we reached, we found they had just completed rebuildingâŠthe protective covering from some sections had not even come off. But they honoured their part of the bargain and let us stay there. All was good till at about eleven at night, when I thoughtlessly finished off all the drinking water. Later, finding my friend extremely thirsty, I rang up Housekeeping and Reception by turnsâŠto no avail. So, feeling evangelical, I stepped out of the room in search of water and walked into utter and total darkness. I walked to the other end of the passage, peered down and found the reception a gaping black void. Thatâs when it struck me that we were the only people in this hotel- all the staff had gone home. There was no guard either. As I walked back to the room, the doorway looked like a block of light in a chunk of darkness. It was a most beautifully desolate sight. Back in the room, I remembered a bag of oranges we had bought earlier. Nothing like freshly squeezed orange juice to assuage guilt and take care of a cranky, thirsty friend.
The real reason we made the trip in the first place was not the quest for academic excellence, but rather, to visit the final resting place of a young man very dear to my friend. His untimely demise had shaken her and this trip was a search for the much-needed closure. We travelled a long, long way, on roads hewn out of mountains, the chocolate brown of the earth covering every conceivable surface. Summer was at its height and I was careful not to drink more than a mouthful of water at a time.
We reached the cemetery. There were rows of graves, marked and unmarked. There was no way to find him except ask for help at the office of the nearby church. The office was a relief, with its cool tiled floors and a ceiling fan. The priest called the father of the young man and asked him, âThere are two women here to pay their respects. What is the number of your sonâs grave?â The poor man couldnât remember. And I wondered how one forgets the number of the grave of oneâs only son. The priest hung up and looked sheepishly at us. âMaybe we just look at all these graves and say a general hello?â I tentatively asked my friend. She remained silent. The priest sensing her grief, sent for his assistant and they combed through a huge register and located the number. Upon reaching that simple, unmarked grave, we stood in a pool silence. Us and a raven that we imagined was the soul of the departed.
The priest and assistant came to see us off. It was quite the occasion in those parts- two mysterious women visiting the grave of a young man. I think the last event to cause this sort of flutter in the village was the coming of electricity. I mentioned this to my friend on ourlong way back to the hotel and she burst into laughter. Maybe that is what is called closure. I did not mind the dust anymore.
Personal commitments and the vagaries of lockdown keeping us geographically apart, the next time I saw her was in yet another cemetery. We were the only two people there. The burial had not happened. The prayers were still going on at church. The cemetery had no graves. Only vaults sealed with concrete, with iron rods drawn across them. In some cases, two rods crisscrossed the vault. I caught sight of my friend walking towards me. The first thing I asked her on seeing her in person after a year was, âWhy the rods? Do they imagine the dead might push open the vaults and leave?â Such is the nature of sorrow that no reply was needed or given. It was almost afternoon and we stood in pouring rain, staring into the depths of a newly opened vault, the edges jagged and raw. The darkness within made me think of the hotel corridor and that single column of light. Two very different types of darkness and two very different experiences of light. Perhaps, two very different vaults.
The search for the somewhere else is what takes us across continents, oceans and chasms. I wonder if that search ends. Or in most cases, if it even begins. We are too rooted, too afraid, too busy preparing for some inevitability that these journeys remain unembarked upon. Our stories for never setting out are almost often the same, only the characters change. The philosophy of the quest demands the sacrifice of excuses. The charm of the excuse is so great that we lose the courage to leap. I once spent ten minutes staring into the depths of a swimming pool, unable to dive in, despite there being no danger of drowning. It was the inability to take the plunge. A stranger at the pool finally put me out of my misery and pushed me in as she casually walked by.
Kiran Bhatâs poetry, like the poet himself, is not afraid of diving in at the deep end. It is fearless and speaks loud and clear. Written from various parts of the world that Kiran has made his home in, the verses reveal the poetics of a bright and beautiful mind. Having begun travelling at the age of twenty, he has been to 132 countries, learnt twelve languages, and has called nineteen corners of the world home (Atlanta, New York, Mysore, Bangalore, Madrid, Lisbon, Cuzco, Florianopolis, Delhi, Malindi, Istanbul, Tokyo, Yogyakarta, Shanghai, Moscow, Paris, Mumbai, Cairo, and Melbourne). But his heart resides in Mumbai. He speaks English, Kannada, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Turkish, Indonesian, Hindi, Japanese, French, Russian, and Arabic to various levels of proficiency.He generates very energetic conversations with creative people across the globe and his crucial participation in online events such as Golchakkar keeps the discourse flowing.
The strength of his poetry comes from the interrogations that he subjects himself and the world around him to. What interested me was that the questions he asks are the ones we may ask ourselves in the course of a day. But the answers are very different from the ones we are wont to give. Kiran answers with no subterfuge. The responses hold nothing back- just like the poet himself. this can only come from a person who is at peace with himself and in control of his identity. The incidental nature that one ascribes to identity is shattered with the conscious, lucid way that Bhat addresses his own.
The whole process of standing up and walking away from the world you have set up in a space of a few years or months and entering a new culture, handling a new currency, a new history and political custom is not an easy task. The self becomes a disciple of the mind in the process. The body- a mere vehicle- not the core of our existence as we often consider it to be. Little wonder that one of Bhatâs signature works is Kiran Speaks, a series of conversations that he has with his consciousness. Modeled on the styleof Confuciusâ teachings, these poetic interrogations take on different voices. To quote the poet, âI believe mostly in the strange serendipity that comes with the chaos of our world.â
The effervescence of Kiran Bhatâs personality shines through in his narration. This why I have preferred to let him speak through the videos. This is also the first time that Mandarin is being featured on Samyukta Poetry. To convey the sense of peace that these poems bring about and because in these chaotic times, a little bit of art that navigates and replicates the pathways of the mind seems appropriate, we feature doodle art by Kukku Xavier. I think they go well together- the questions asked and answered with the openness of skies, smells of cities once called home, thirst quenched with orange juice, lost loves, slivers of light at the end of corridors and the shadows cast by death. All meet in art. All is art.
It has been a while since we brought you an edition of poetry. A lot has been happening in the interim. All over the world. A second wave of the pandemic is sweeping through, regimes are in for a change in America, Britain is still rummaging around seeking an equitable answer for its dilemma. Meanwhile, we have learnt that there is âtoo much democracyâ in India. I have heard of too much food, too much money, too much power, too much evilâŠbut too much democracy is a new one. And rather problematic too. How much is too much? Much has been made of this muchness.
And it was also during this time that there were storms gathering on the southern and northern parts of the country. Too much of a coincidence? While Cyclone Burevi ravaged parts of South India, uprooting trees, electric poles and homes, up north, farmers were gathering in huge numbers to protest against oppressive farm laws. To stop the government from uprooting their livelihoods. To use up a bit of their bountiful democracy. They have come and camped. Women, children and men. In tractors, trailers and other assorted vehicles. With enough food to lay siege to the capital and with more food on the way. They grow it after all.
A few years ago, I read about the havoc caused in the lives of potato farmers who had signed contracts with PepsiCo to supply potatoes for chips. The intricacies of corporate stipulations put paid to the financial securities of a lot of farmers. To ask a farmer to grow potatoes of a certain size is probably the plot of an absurdist play. No one can dictate how much vegetables ought to grow. Least of all potatoes. There is a reason they prefer to do their growing underground. They have got used to too much democracy.
Now there is an elected government telling farmers that they donât understand the benefits of the laws that have been drawn up without â consulting them, including them and going by the nuances,â them. The MSP has been the cushion that has broken the fall of many a farmer and has assured them of securing a projected income. As someone who comes from a family of farmers, I know the struggles undertaken to make ends meet. The back-breaking labour, eyes that have spent more time looking at the sky than at your family, the inability to appreciate the poetry of off-season rain, the mathematics of water sharing, bund making, bund breaking, census of rats, rodents and related pests. And at the end of it all, when the crops come home, it is bliss. Till it is time to start again. It is not a wonder that my family doesnât farm anymore. This generation is faint hearted.
It is an interesting age to be alive in this country. The most intelligent people govern us. They know everything- about everything. The farmers do not know about farming, the minorities donât know about citizenship, students do not know how to study, teachers do not know how to teach, comedians donât know how to crack jokes, they only offend the apex courtâŠI can go onâŠbut there is poetry to come.
What sort of poetry must one write at times like these? When your trust in governance is a sliver of soap under a waterfall and humans have been battling the cold and, in some cases, old age to wrest some form of control over their own destinies. When the worldâs largest democracy realises that it has too much democracy,what sort of poetry do we write? Angry? Mournful? Witty? â thereânow there is too much of choice. Perhaps we should ban buffet spreads as well.
India in these last couple of years reminds me of America in the Vietnam era. When much of the populace was out on the streets protesting and asking that the violence stop. The tone-deaf regime is yet another stark, staring similarity. It is quite telling that in the ages that followed, amidst all the protests, the activism and the cultural upheaval, what stood out was a music festival in the middle of nowhere, on a sprawling farmland- a festival that set out to sell tickets, but then became free, where the audience helped construct the stage and some stayed back to clean up after. Where for the better part of a weekend, there was music, music and more music. Well, that and a lot of psychedelic drugs and love. Woodstock in 1969, brought the biggest names in music who set anthems for lost youth.
Queen, Jimi Hendrix, The Who, Ravi Shankar and Santana were there and so was Janis Joplin- with her persona- a voice way older than her age and pain that knew no name. âFreedom is just another word for nothing left to loseâ, she sang in Me and Bobby McGee, a rendition of Kristoffersonâs words. And listening to it in these days of constricted throats, I am inclined to believe.
And if it is the power to convince that I am looking for, then I needed to go no further than young Debarshi Mitra, who writes,
You close your eyes and draw a blank. The fog is everywhere around you. The past continues to keep you at bay. Your dreams begin to turn yellow like the flame of a distant star.
(On a Winter Night)
Debarshi has an extraordinary voice that manages to get one to follow it down tricky rabbit holes. Reading the selection for this feature made me think of the scenarios in Alice in Wonderland and numerous smoky memories from past lives. The range that he presents is immense, using the gaps between the words in the text to fashion new narratives.
The night thickens around the bush
not a footstep to be heard
a snake slithers back to the undergrowth.
(Oblivion)
Cities, lives, time, he animates them all and sets them free- there, there it is again- that word. It stains the air we breathe and the flights of birds and the borderlessness of thoughts. The ecosystem that Joplinâs voice occupied seems to be where Debarshiâs poetry resides. The grit, the silk, the strobe lights are a part of his soul too.
There is a great deal of Cyberpunk influences in his poetic imagination and I am sure that William Gibson would appreciate the folds and neural pathways that he lights up with his ability to surprise. And he does surprise in more ways than one. even when he is extravagant in the length of his poems, he is frugal with the amplitude. The stillness of his poetry is commendable. And while he is a physicist at IISER, he also writes poems. If that is not the freedom to be, then what is?
He says, âI’m a theoretical physicist by day. My specialisation is Condensed Matter Physics. My two primary interests:poetry and Physics emerge from similar concerns, that is of understanding and gaining insight. While Physics allows one to build theoretical models for natural processes, poetry offers new ways of interpretation and defamiliarization of lived experience.â
The quest to be unsettled, to be ruffled is an artistic endeavour and Debarshi is the eternal journeyman. The bohemian in him is a kindred spirit to all the songs sung, all the notes played and all the colours that mushroomed at Woodstock decades ago. Those are the songs that last- full throated, bloody and unabashed. His voice belongs to jazz music and vinyl records.
When the common man out on the streets resists with all his might, then the powers that be must sit up and take note. That is the ultimate rule of a democracy. In a land where increasingly symbology, citizenship, history, love, the right to marry- much of what makes us who we are is being dictated, food is a very important frontier. For a regime to dig in its heels and wait out the siege in hopes that a bitter winter will send protesters away, it must be that convinced of its righteousness or of the weakness of the intentions that oppose it.
Perhaps India is ready for its own brand of the Woodstock. A place to sit back and wonder how everything has gone so wrong and when. To throw strictures to the winds and also the rules that govern love- to dream of times when in the span of the same year, migrant workers did not have to walk away from the capital and farmers did not have to march in. There wasnât too much democracy in that, was there?
âWho you are is what you settle for, you know?â – Janis Joplin