Category: Book Reviews

Usha Akella

Spinifex Press, 2021

Reading Usha Akella’s I Will Not Bear you Sons is like walking into the middle of a conversation. A conversation that seems to have been going on for a while, and yet is also one that seems to be waiting for you join so it could finally begin. One of the main reasons for this could be the thematic focus of the book, which is to articulate the feminist concerns with space, cultural legacies, patriarchies, religion, political redactions and the very complicated histories that women share amongst themselves.

I Will… is a collection of poems that has a rather urgent, demanding tone. It does not narrate daisies or lilies nor does it have the wistful fragrance of lost loves. The staccato tone that most of the poems engage with are in keeping with the emergent voices of the women who are speaking around the globe. Akella hacks through the undergrowth of patriarchal white noise with a machete, trying to find the roots that connect women all over the globe.

The book is divided into two sections, I and We. The first section brings intensely personal poems that mark the poet’s journey of self-discovery and the battles encountered in the process of un-learning one’s legacy and culture. The poem from which the book gets its title, is in this section and is remarkable in its execution. The resolute tone of the title carries within it the generational memories of hurt, erasure and an awareness of the obliteration of non-male identities.

        So, let us speak of hands—women’s hands, generations of hands,
        hands that wash pots with tamarind and mud and feed
        drunkards of husbands, hands that pen poetry and fire the guns,
        hands that write, harvest paddy with the rising sun,
        hands that answer phones and stave off
        rapists’ hands of soldiers from both sides of the border,

                                                                  (I Will Not Bear You Sons, 19)

Akella uses personification to great effect and her metaphors ring true and breathe fire. There is a force with which her verse arrives that conveys the immediacy of her intentions. However, there might be the lingering feeling that the poems could have occasionally employed a little more subtlety. This line of thought poses an ethical dilemma on account of the rawness of Akella’s verse. The age-old debate of beauty and its nuanced treatment versus the diamond-edged hardness of narrating reality with warts and all raises its head with this collection. But these doubts are dispelled soon enough when one meets the personae who occupy Akella’s poems. The violence- physical, social, cultural, economic and racial absorbed by these bodies cry out for narratives that are organic, stripped of ornamentation and densely populated. There are lines that force one to stop and revisit them due to the brilliance with which they weave the premise and have the reader fall into the web of the verse Akella has spun. Take for example Harmony which speaks of a man being served dinner by his dutiful wife, as though a God is being given offerings. She is aware of his every need, when the sambar must be served without vegetables, with vegetables, or with just one preferred vegetable. The husband remains quiet, without a word of appreciation lest she become too proud of herself and fail in her subsequent duties. He thus, remains silent for her sake. The orchestra of this mimed performance goes on while the poet remarks,

And I watched exiled from this
soundless solemnity for a decade,
wondering why I could not see the beauty of it. (26)

And in Porcupine where she quotes a line from Kamala Das, she says,

I digest nothing           I roam black tunnels at night,

I am a dart board             unskinned animal salted,

                        dervish-vertigo prays often in my head.

                                                                                    (35)

The metamorphosis that women’s bodies undergo, the turns and twists of the female or female identifying mind are all laid out in graphic detail.

The second half of the collection titled We draws upon the intersections that connect women across time, the globe, culture and history. The many dimensions of life that Akella dedicates to women ranging from Meera Bai, Anne Boleyn, Draupadi to Sylvia Plath, Meena Kandasamy, to women in paintings, the goddess Katyayini, to Akella’s grandmother, mother, daughter and the women who remain unnamed, or who are named Astur, speak of violence, longing, love, cuisines, struggles to reclaim bodies and identities. The addresses to these women are deliberate acts of creating art through the very process of naming, an imbrication of the image in the mind.

There is a sense of grandeur in the poems of Akella as they travel comet-like across the various realms, illuminating realities and faces of women who have been relentless witnesses of the ravages and power narratives of history.

Usha Akella has produced a remarkable volume of work that shows the path for academically informed creative literature. Experimental in nature, militantly vocal, furiously urgent, I Will Not Bear You Sons is a collection that is intensely personal and deeply political. The footnotes point to the commitment of the poet towards her craft as she assiduously names her sources and makes the readers aware of the sheer diversity of lives she has connected with.

Akella must be commended for her intellectual integrity as she carefully documents the articles and journals she has read, marking a refreshing fusion of the academic and the creative.

I Will Not Bear You Sons is a resolution, a promise that women make. A promise to bring forth into the world, people who are unafraid to be alive, people who are not bound by the chains of ossified thoughts and who seek to heal the injuries perpetrated by ignorance, superstition and power politics.

I burst into petals of the sun,

                            I throw comet from mine

                        navel, I am sprouting auburn blossoms

                                                            I burn the day. I am hell,

                               I am your air

                                                            Centuries, breathe if you can.

                                                                                           (Recant at St Maxim, 120)

Sonya J. Nair
Editor

Priya Sarukkai Chabria.

156pp, ₹499, Context (Westland), 2021

Since its publication in 1913 and the subsequent award of the Nobel Prize for Rabindranath Tagore, Gitanjali (1913) has remained alive and relevant in the collective consciousness of Indians as a text that, apart from defining Gurudev, as Tagore is popularly known, symbolized the validation of the cultural and intellectual wealth of the subcontinent.  In the West, Gitanjali, captured the attention of W.B Yeats, Thomas Sturge Moore and William Rothenstein, among others, creating an aura around Tagore, the glow of which refuses to fade to this day.

The resultant dominant image of the mystic-philosopher that surrounds Tagore often obscures the lasting concerns he had about Nation, nationalism, Art and the role of the Artist. The soul search that is the hallmark of the artist and the quest for an elusive beauty that appears only through art has been a pivotal point in informing Tagore’s enunciation of the Divine. It is this quest that poet and novelist Priya Sarukkai Chabria joins as she attempts a revision of the Gitanjali.

Sing of Life is many things at once. It is a tribute. To the great and wonderous vision of the Gurudev which revels in the exquisiteness of the Cosmos. It is a reimagining of Gurudev as one who sings in rapture like the Baul singers or the Bhakti poets who saw the Eternal-as-Beloved and outside of the confines of gendered semantics. Sing of Life is an act of love, one that sees and celebrates the best of this Beloved. It is an act of veneration, one that stems from Chabria’s own spiritual philosophy. As with her landmark work on Andal, the eighth century Bhakti poet, here too, Chabria commits her heart and soul to this revisioning.

At the very outset, the book lays out its purpose in a wonderfully readable and erudite introduction by Chabria herself, wherein she speaks of the very personal process that helped articulate the poems. Reading the account gives one the idea of the intricate and organic methods that the best translations benefit from. That Chabria reveals her process through examples from the book points to a selfless desire to help others commit to this process and perhaps take this work further. This is commendable and I must say, in keeping with the spirit of Gitanjali that sees knowledge as free and unfettered.

Chabria too has 103 poems in her book, just like the original. What she does with them is entirely another matter. She has read into the soul of these poems and distilled their essence. Where Tagore translated Gitanjali into English as a series of prose poems, Chabria brings us verses from those very lines. She does not, she says, “alter his word order, nor interpolate…I will stay with the present tense to honour the work’s energy. I stay with the thrall.”

There is a sense of urgency and immediacy that informs Sing of Life, one that can only come from an intuitive knowledge. And this intuitiveness is what informs the purity of purpose of this book. Chabria employs juxtapositions, connectives, singularities to Tagore’s lines and presents lines of rare luminosity. She writes Tagore in the language of the present day. The book is a palimpsest – layers upon layers of meanings that come through the process of repositioning the words to form a new pattern of ideas. It is a symphony being performed by two people across Time.

For me, what sets this book apart is the freedom it embodies. The interiority of the journey undertaken together by Tagore and Chabria makes the work one that espouses spiritual liberty. It is a full-throated song of a bird at dawn, the gurgle of a river that refuses to obey. And like John Donne, even when she is done, Chabria is not done. Beneath every poem that she has translated from Tagore, are her own readings – austere in their composition, seismic in their impact.

One cannot help but admire the monumental work that has gone into the book in terms of chiseling away at the songs, particularly ones as lengthy as songs 41, 48, 51, 52, 60 and leaving behind a structure through which light enters, forming interesting patterns. These patterns become very visible on the page through the white spaces that Chabria leaves between words and lines. These line breaks do not indicate rupture. Rather, they are pauses for the readers to contemplate and respond. These are meditative spaces, in which everyone is a poet, everyone bathes in the benign light that wafts in. Chabria foregrounds the elemental aspects of Tagore’s work – rain, sunlight, air, dust, darkness – all find a home in these pages.

It is a cathartic experience to read Sing of Life on account of the unbridled, molten passion and devotion that stand revealed. The book also contains the text of the Gitanjali and when each reading is placed beneath Chabria’s work, it creates a stunning overlay – a route map to the very core of being. The words that she saw, chose, was inspired by, listened to – the patience and dedication of making those choices – fills one with a sense of wonder and humility. She sheds the weight of the Thee and Thou and chooses a more intimate You, bringing the Divine closer as in the Bhakti tradition.

For when

Ever in my life have I sought thee with my songs. It was they

who led me from door to door, and with them have I felt about

me, searching and touching my world….       (excerpt from song 101)

becomes

I have sought you

With my songs     With them….

one has to sit back and catch one’s breath at the economy of words, the expansiveness of imagination and the sonic effect of the pause. And then as a bolt of lightning, at the end, separated by the tiniest of marks, comes what Chabria found “floating”- another facet to the gem.

with

            my songs

                        i feel about

                                       searching, touching

                                                                                    guide

                                                     me to

                                                                        the mysteries

Sing of Life is a book that treats its pages as a sanctuary, as places of peace. In a way, it is an epigrammatic expression of the life and message of Gurudev. Chabria comments that while working on the book, she started with Tagore and ended with Gurudev. The same might be the case for readers as well. I love the way Chabria reads the celebrated introduction to Gitanjali by Yeats,passing it through the same process as the poems- indicating consistency, but also being delightfully cheeky! The book is tastefully designed and the attention to detail in the cover design and inner pages heightens the sense of aesthetic awareness.

 In these days of self and state-imposed incarcerations, when human contact is at a premium, when one needs a sense of connect, Priya Sarukkai Chabria’s Sing of Life come to us crossing a century-old ocean, bringing with it the beating heart of a Bhakti poet, the rhythm of his raptures on a page inked in a language that is of the present and yet timeless.

Sonya J. Nair