Category: Writings Page 3 of 4

Speaking of social justice, there was a programme announced with great fanfare- Beti Bachao, Beti Padhao- Save the Daughter; Educate the Daughter. It is meant to address the skewed sex ratio, encourage literacy among women etc. I read a post on Facebook where someone opined that now, rather than being the name of a welfare scheme, Beti Bachao sounds more like a warning. Looking at the incidents in Hathras over the last few days, one is inclined to agree. Manisha is dragged away into the fields and assaulted, her tongue mangled, spine broken- and she dies in hospital after giving a statement on video where she says she was raped. There had been a previous attempt to assault her that she had escaped. Her mortal remains were brought to her village in the early hours of the morning and cremated by the police on a hastily assembled pyre. She was not allowed to be brought home one last time. And the village resembles a garrison. No one is allowed in. The opposition is roughed up when they try to go in and meet the family. The press is categorically and implacably stonewalled.

The government has gone into damage control mode, hired a PR agency and made the father of the girl sign statements that he is happy with the investigations. A few police officers have been suspended. But those who follow the news will recall a certain police officer with a henna- dyed beard who was charged with a cold encounter killing in the state where Gandhi hails from. He has been promoted in February 2020- six years after his retirement. Thankyou very much.  I remember reading about times when public figures assumed moral responsibility and resigned. Now they hire PR firms.  The caste of the raped girl is important. Very important- because it informs the impunity of the crime. But such is the conundrum that I don’t know if the caste should qualify Manisha. That she was raped stands above it all. It is like a Rorschach test for the mind. Only, the patterns are not random. They are systemic and smug.

The post mortem report states that there had been no rape. Must be because the body is now a handful of ash and there is no way to confirm or deny. And because those who made the report do not understand the meaning of rape. And since the post mortem report says so, there was no rape.

And slightly before all this, there was a judge on a superbike who was tweeted about by a lawyer. The lawyer was suo motto charged with contempt and asked to tender an apology. There was an interesting train of thought that ensued in the courtroom where he was told there is nothing wrong in tendering an apology…that it is not a sin…that one enters the league of Mahatma Gandhi when one apologises…and by this statement- asking a man who does not mean the apology to anyway just apologise, the powers that be rob the word of any meaning.  Smug power that appropriates all that it fancies.

No demolition, No rape. No apology. No words.

Cynic though I may be, I realise that those with something to hide are actually afraid of words. Of the revelatory power of words. At their permanence. Of their power to bear witness. That’s why Sanjiv Bhatt went to prison for 30 years and R K Raghavan went to Cyprus as High Commissioner. It about how they each used their words. And named names. Or forgot to.

This is the reason our poet of this week is so special. There is a flame lit underneath her cauldron of words and she stirs them to dole out portions of molten angst. She names things. Calls them out, contests them. Talks about anger, subjugation and the need to be free. Her liberty is not one that comes from the sweetness of a docile apology. It is one that looks people in the eye as it walks out of the door slamming it with a resounding bang. Katyayani is one of the best-known names in Hindi poetry.

Let’s do this

Let’s do this
Let’s conspire-
lay tunnels of gunpowder
and blow up the
world of silence

(Translation mine)

These silences come in many forms and take a heavy toll. Katyayani hails from Gorakhpur in Uttar Pradesh, India. She has been widely anthologized as well as been translated into English and Russian. She is featured in Penguin’s Their Own Voice. She has four collections of poetry to her name - Saat Bhaiyon Ke Beech Champa, Is Pourushpoorna Samay Mein, Chehron Ppar Aanch and Jadoo Nahin Kavita.

Her intense words reflect the violence inflicted on personhood and subjectivities and the extent to which society relentlessly ‘worries’ about women-

To have no body

One day a woman ceases
to be a body
and
topsy- turvy turns
the whole world
suddenly!

She believes that a true poet must be an activist. A good poet must understand and write of that which ails the world. The work must be political. For her, the real problem that haunts us stems from capitalist greed and policies. The fear of minorities, xenophobia, social tensions all come from neo-colonial power structures. And this power is not dependent on political might. The conversations initiated by liberal thought are ill- prepared to combat it. She urges the working classes to realise their strength and to rise. It is a call to the many Lefts to mobilise and congregate. The Left for Katyayani means anyone who is willing to stand out of power structures. The political Left in India, she feels, is merely a constitutional one- one that fights elections and thus obliquely supports the neo colonial agenda by adhering to prescribed structures. The sense of purpose and resistance that pervades her poetry is subtle and yet resounding.

My personal favourite among the twenty odd poems that I have read of Katyayani’s is Saat Bhayiyon Ke Beech Champa (Champa amidst seven brothers). The poem addresses, loudly and clearly, how a woman is perceived by the family and by society. How she is at times found drowned in a river, sometimes found hanging from the ceiling, or is charred to ash and how she comes back- each time, every time. The poem is powerful, symbolic and true. It is true. Dissent comes back and looks oppression in the eye, buildings collapse and the rubble settles in lungs, women grow their tongues and their spines back.

Words like Katyayani’s could well be the ones to wipe the smirk off smug faces. There it is again. That word. Smug. It has been haunting me all week. I say to myself, Words words words.

Sonya J. Nair
Editor

So, is there something called an honest memoryscape? One that plays those movies where you have the villain? That shows you a mirror of your horrors and mistakes? That’s a question you must ask yourself. Memories build palaces of illusions where the backdrop changes from time to time. Sometimes the participants in the same memory remember things differently. What do we do then? I still have a running dispute with a friend over whether we watched a certain movie together or by ourselves. And I can remember being in her house, the furniture and the weather outside while we watched it. Yet, we haven’t reached a resolution.

The trigger for these ruminations on memory is a blog, alakananda.wordpress.com authored by Remitha Sateesh. The contents of this blog are mostly memories of tastes, smells, sights and cultures. She also writes of her native place, Nagercoil, which is located in the southern part of the Indian state of Tamil Nadu. A part of my childhood was spent in a place quite close to Nagercoil and my mother went to college there. So I have a special fondness for the place. Nagercoil means Temple of the Snake Gods. The temple of the snake gods is an ancient one and is visited by devotees and those who wish to remove baleful influences from their horoscopes- or seek relief from woes of a specific nature. Faith is a very important part of worshipping snakes. The rituals and systems of snake worship do not leave any place for ambiguity or doubt and possibly because snakes are very real, as opposed to other gods who are out of the line of sight of ordinary mortals, the belief in them is very strong. At Nagercoil, there are many rituals and customs one can offer as expiation. I remember, people offering little figurines of snakes or replicas of snake eggs wrapped in gold to propitiate the snake deities. One could also offer turmeric and milk for lesser sins or grievances.

On my way to the temple, as a child, I remember, occupying one of the front seats of the bus. My grandfather was sitting next to me. And I remember, him telling me that when the temple was part of the Travancore time in pre-Independent India, the King of Travancore, Marthanda Varma, who was cured of skin ailments after praying there, wanted to renovate the temple. Apparently, the snake god appeared in his dream and told the King that he wants the sanctum- sanctorum to remain thatched as that was how the temple had always been, for hundreds of years.

I still wonder if it all was really a dream where the snake god manifested or the King’s mind telling him to let at least some things remain the way they were. Guess, we will never know. I don’t think the King himself knew. And now, we have a nearly 2000-year old temple, with a roof of thatch and around which modernity continues its march.

I read Remitha Satheesh’s blog posts and see her sharp memory, the delight and the nostalgia that serve to make her writing so refreshing and genuine. She creates these streets, snacks, people through her posts and we are left wanting more.

This is what I find appealing in her poetry too. The strong strand of memory that runs through them. Some deliberate, some inadvertent. The reluctance to come unstuck from the past gives her poems a vintage feel. And when the present is a constant spool of ever-changing witness statements, rescinded narratives, issues that unfold on prime-time news and have the lifespan of a cereus, memories might be the thing we need to remember that we had a lived reality. That these memories are grounded in a life we once lived. In these distanced times, remembrances of a snake-god under a thatched roof could just be what we need to feel normal!

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 ask

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.

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.

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 Israel’s biggest names.

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 with

It’s August. The only thing to breathe is everybody’s stains
Sometimes when I board a train
Or just stand along the empty platform—
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.

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.

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. Haven’t 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 – 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. What’s not to identify and understand when a woman/ poet says,

In your world I’m 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  year’s 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 cows’ 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, won’t be something I encountered for the first time in The Discomfort of Evening. I came with that knowledge ingrained.

The pain was shared.

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.

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.

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 haven’t arrived at. Like all those promises.

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 –

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 “Cohen Shabtai
has rules
of her own…”
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 –
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 church’s 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

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 ‘rising.’

By the way,
I checked this statement at twighlight
the sunset was even observed
in “Cogan Marina” 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 sun’s 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.
– but –

In order to remain sane
immediately after sunset I adopt the time between the suns – time between day
and night
that ends with the stars’ coming out
When I rise for the shacharit morning prayer and recite the blessing “I thank you in front of you,” 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? It’s 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 ‘dance of death in life’
for that I lowered her credit.

I think it’s impossible to tag in one breath! A contemporary poetess with
characters that preserved the myth of the ‘cursed poetesses’. 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: “doctor”, it’s ok, it’s acceptable –
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 – behind papers never
Written about the tired person I am –

She’s 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 that’s posted in Friday’s edition of a
Leftist Magazine

She’s 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! It’s 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 Black’s Thick and Protest are bilingual. The third is Nine Years From You. Her fourth book is slated for release in 2020.

There is a wonderful everydayness or (dailiness-as she says) to Kashiana’s poems. They hold within them the deafening roar of the metropolis and the silences of the soul. She belongs to long walks, seasons, companionship and good cheer. It’s a world where things are beautiful and the sunsets sublime. There are people and experiences that you wished you had. Something breezy, something spiritual. An unnamable fullness of existence.  You long for this world. Wished you inhabited it and breathed in it.

The October sun endeavors hard
Wanting to keep his assurance
The leaves crackle golden before they fall
At daybreak

(Deepening Colours Part 1)

singeing puckered lips honey
honey drizzles like rain drops
hymns of bubbling tea
that steams gentle furrows
lemon ginger aromas
infuse each cup
with kindness and
a cinnamon saltiness of tears

(Acquired Taste)

This joy is probably the result of her personal ethics. She employs the Hebrew word, Arodah which can mean both to labour and to worship. The poems presented here are a very conscious choice on my part to put across the sheer range of this poet and the beauty of her observations. There is a very heightened sense of the tactile. Her recall is perfect, the people come alive and are tangible. It is a veritable garden of personalities and experiences that she presents.

But the flowers in her garden have petals of steel. They occasionally catch the glance of the sun and reflect fire and fury. I found Kashiana to be very vocal about violence against women. The verses are forged in the foundry of narratives of violence that shook her lands and people for long, from the accounts she has been entrusted with, that she is the custodian and activist for. In her world, death is not the preferred alternative to dishonour. Because, there is no dishonour.

Invitation to my nectar
I offer, as I kneel into
my firmament
almost
in prayer

unraveling
a moaning of absence
as I churn into myself
and flow full
into the earth
the cosmos
confessional
as it constricts
and contracts
shredding itself

into a cyclical
flourish
adequately
reclaiming itself
at the altar
of my flames
my Kali

(Reclaiming Kali)

It is now that we ought to arrive at her first collection of poems Shelling Peanuts and Stringing Words, which she considers a tribute to her parents. The collection is a vivid set of memories, personal and recounted. The verses, the words are strongly suggestive of an individual who seeks answers to the questions that have been swirling around her for decades. She seems to articulate the anguish, the subliminal enquiries that seek homes, questions that make the long journey home (for it is home) and are greeted by a cup of tea.

It is also on the backs of these dispossessed, these unhomed people with unanswered questions that this nation was built. I wonder if we have forgotten this. Because, a nation that came into being on the strength of its multitudes now seeks dull uniformity. That once stridently sang for freedom now seeks silence.  ‘Why’ is a dangerous word and it is feared in high places. Today, there are images of long walks home, a high-end bike, some contempt and a lot of questions. Who will answer them?  I suggest those involved read Kashiana. She speaks for generations.

For hour’s I devoured, stories of a world relinquished
Faraway lands that came to life, his pupils and his hands in tandem;
I sat on my dada’s knee
Shaking couplets, tears intercepted with guffaws
Fingers caressed the spineless book that had also escaped, outlawed;

…

I sat on my dada’s knee
Preparatory words; maimed, raped, orphaned, robbed
I asked why he hated train journeys – he murmured something about the whir;
I sat on my dada’s knee
I also asked why he was so tall yet so bent; so handsome yet so forlorn
He hunched under the weight of his Kashiana
Separated and disembodied;

The partition of his wondrous subcontinent had left him ragged;
He lived with the ghosts of the countless he could not mourn;
I sat on my dada’s knee.

(On my Dada’s Knee)

Sonya J. Nair
Editor

When the river eventually changed its course and flowed next to the temple, people abandoned the pond, preferring the river. In time, Perunthachan constructed a bridge across the river but also placed a doll that would dip and emerge from the river as soon as someone stepped on the other end of the bridge. By the time the person reached the doll, it would squirt a mouthful of water at the passer-by, drenching and embarrassing him.

Perunthachan was a proud man who earned respect through his blazing ability. He is said to have stopped at a site where a temple was being constructed. The carpenters paid him no heed and even went to lunch without inviting him. In their absence, Perunthachan is supposed to have quietly marked sections of the wooden rafters that were to form the roof of the temple. The carpenters returned and upon seeing the markings, assumed that the senior carpenter might have made them to indicate the length that needed to be sawn off. The carpenters did exactly that and found that the rafters were now short and just would not do. Upset, they went off to make new ones. In the meantime, Perunthachan had already carved out the necessary supports. He connected them to the rafters which were now the perfect length. And finally gave a hard blow to the top of the roof and fixed it in place once and for all. The carpenters returned and were filled with wonder. They fell at his feet. Perunthachan was pleased.

In these narratives, Perunthachan was not alone. He was accompanied by his son - Kannan (a fictitious name as mentioned in the English translation of the Aithihyamaala by Sreekumari Ramachandran) who was said to be a craftsman of extraordinary skill. When Perunthachan constructed the temple pond, Kannan is supposed to have asked him if the people would cross the river to bathe in the pond. The father brushed away his query as at the time, the river was far away. But it changed course as I mentioned earlier. This proved the son’s foresight.  Kannan placed another wooden doll on the bridge that would slap Perunthachan’s doll, causing it to turn its face and squirt the water harmlessly. All these were supposed to have caused considerable affront to Perunthachan.

Kannan had also witnessed and learned the way Perunthachan had joined the rafters- a technique that was something of a professional signature. It is said that the father began to grow jealous of the son who was gaining fame with each passing day. One day, as they were working on a temple site, Perunthachan on the roof and his son right below him, Perunthachan’s chisel is supposed to have slipped and fallen on the son, instantly killing him.

One doesn’t know whether the act was a deliberate one or if it was genuinely an accident. On the one hand, a master carpenter whose tools are an extension of himself – meaning, that such a slip was well nigh impossible. On the other hand, it could have been an accident. The ambiguity is what makes this tale alluring. The labyrinthine ways of a gifted mind. The possibility of having to choose between artistic immortality and filial love that Perunthachan presents is also symbolic of the way our choices shapes our legacy. It is also cathartic as it shows the vulnerability that nestles in human nature. More importantly, that no one is above these frailties of character.

G SankaraKurup’s Perunthachan is one of the few dramatic monologues in Malayalam and Vijayalakshmi’s Thachante Makal takes the narrative of this legendary figure further as she plumbs possible depths. Vijayalakshmi is one of the best-known poets in contemporary Malayalam literature. Her works are powerful statements about being a woman. Though not explicitly feminist in their tone, her poems voice women’s concerns with nuance. Vijayalakshmi is a poet who uses subtlety and understatement to make a powerful impact. This technique is itself disruptive and one is left wondering at the possible layers that can be peeled off a single phrase. Her first poem appeared in the iconic Kalakaumudi when she was barely seventeen and she has not looked back ever since. She has several acclaimed collections to her name such as Thachante Makal, Mazha Tan Matteto Muhkam, Andha kanyaka, Mazhakappuram, Seetha darsanam and Vijayalakshmiyude Pranayakavithakal. 

Her works have brought her numerous awards, including the Kerala Sahitya Akademi Award and the Vylopilly Award. In 1995 and 2018 she won three prestigious awards in a calendar year. She is an influential voice in Malayalam poetry and has served on various literary bodies such as the Kerala Sahitya Akademi and the Samastha Kerala Sahitya Parishad.

The Carpenter’s Daughter (Thachante Makal) reimagines Perunthachan’s story to include a daughter who is talented in her own right. The poem gives a voice to the young girl, grieving for her big brother and going through the trauma of having to wonder at the nature of his death. Vijayalakshmi preserves the element of doubt, but opens a few windows through cleverly building an image of a lurking father, who pauses at doorways. The poet through her images reveals the world of the protagonist that centred around the sibling.  The idea of a girl setting out on her own to wield a chisel in the world of men is just the sort of poetic surprise you can come to expect from Vijayalakshmi. The lines that the father addresses to his daughter resonate with pain and possible regret. But regret about what?  The act or the shadow of accusation or the death itself. That is the question the reader must answer -the best they can.The poem was translated by Vasanthi Sankaranarayanan and was featured in the Oxford India Anthology of Malayalam Literature edited by P.P. Raveendran and G.S. Jayasree. Ms. Sankaranarayanan is a celebrated translator who has translated a number of acclaimed works from Malayalam such as Lalithambika Antarjanam’s Agnisakshi (Fire, My Witness), C. N Sreekantan Nair’s Kanchana Sita, Matampu Kunhukuttan’s Bhrushte (Outcaste), Kovilan’s Thattakam, P. Vatsala’s Agneyam, and Sara Joseph’s Oorukaval (The Vigil), into English. Her translations have been published by the Sahitya Akademi and major publishing houses such as the Oxford University Press and Aleph. She is also a poet and has been featured on Samyukta Poetry. For more on Ms. Sankaranarayanan, do visit  http://www.samyuktapoetry.com/5-vasanthi-sankaranarayanan/

Sonya J. Nair
Editor

When I think of Soni, which, given the frequency of our communication, I do quite often, I like to think of him as eternally busy chiseling ideas from monoliths, breathing life into them and setting them free to roam the earth and bring back the sights they see, the people they meet and the friendships they forge. For, Soni is well regarded in poetic circles.

Says Sumana Roy, “Soni Somarajan's poems have – to use a phrase from one of his poems – the 'vapour of stories'. That is his aesthetic  – being caught unaware by the moment, catching the moment unaware. That secret is the secret of his poems – a secretive and intimate pleasure, as nutritious as dreaming.”

And here, I would like to leave you with Soni’s words. I think no one can tell his story like he does.

“Two different lives in a single lifetime.

The first part is all memory — nebulous, therefore endangered. The second, the world today, takes most of who I am, to exist. As years went by, I feared I might lose the first, or most of it — the finer details — due to the enormity of the second. The trauma of everyday existence threatened to efface what I hold dear: the memories of my younger years.

For the past thirty years, I've borne the brunt of a progressive neuromuscular disorder. Two-thirds of this time, I've made do with a permanent sidekick: a wheelchair. It's almost as if I've accessed a parallel world. Quite naturally, I yearned to express this experience.

However, I do not possess the gift of the gab. The spoken word eludes me; public speaking is my Waterloo. Prose was not it either, I felt, for memory has a transitory form: diminishing, failing, effacing, shifting, evolving. I needed a medium that best reflected this transience.

Poetry, I realise, is the finest way to express myself and my fading past. I recognised its unique ability to speak for me in ways inconceivable. Where social anxiety overpowered me, poetry became my anthem of freedom — a confession in an everyday tongue, coded with secret doors and traps. Perfect for my anxious need to hide in plain sight.

With poetry, I began to record my two lives — a memoir in verse. It hasn't been easy. It has taken a while longer than I've imagined. Memory is an adamant child: you've to be patient. At first, when I tried remembrance, the details refused to yield. How do you know what to find if you aren't aware of its existence?

One thing led to another, one detail to another — a slow release over time. It's astonishing how much you begin to remember if you persist. Memory can be kind when it chooses.

As the verse emerged, it became my deliverance. The horrors and joys I experienced daily, it did set free — so that I may exist, live further. In poetry, I learnt to process the tartish upsurge of sentiments I woke up to every day, to be unspooled to a semblance of clarity on a page.

I remain ever astonished by how verse takes form: a miraculous assemblage of impressions — of the past, the present, and the future — transmuted to words by a random play of grey-cells and a breath-taking, inexplicable force we’ve come to call life. With poetry, I never know where I’ll end up — my kind of armchair adventure.

My poetry is also a testimony to how I negotiate the world's expectations, and its default normalcy. In a more profound sense, it became the device to chart my story and how I accomplish what's expected of me in return for my right to life, a privilege we're all given. Poetry records my gratitude for this privilege as well, a thanksgiving.

I'm often asked why I write poetry. I'd say it's how I’ve come to make sense of my world.”

Look at the cloak of secrecy, what might hide within
The grey-green spires. In the blueprint of an assault,
Countless flowers have fused into one, the dovetailing
Whorls a labyrinth for seekers.
….

Sightless, it yields under a resolute sun—
Observe the wedges lined with tiny honeytraps,
Prepare for a counter-charge on your senses.

(Ode to a Pineapple)
(Featured on the Facebook page of The Quarantine Train)

And then one day, she began to write. Verses of such magnificence. Not for her the flamboyant laments, the dirges or elegies that she taught…her verse cuts close to the bone, there is fire and passion- regal, demanding.

I am not all heart you know;
I shall pierce your three- strong force
With my twin rapiers of ire
And pin you so
Till you see my heart, my love,
And cry out loud
And melt in my leaping fire.

(Triad)

A student of Ayyappa Paniker, she had the good fortune to be a part of his poetry club. She went on to help edit a book on him- a tribute to the great teacher by his students, Ayyappa Paniker Forever. Geetha Nair is an active member of Poetry Chain, one of the oldest poetry groups in Thiruvananthapuram, that has at its helm, veteran poet, Gopikrishnan Kotoor. She is also a prominent presence in Literary Vibes, an online magazine run by the renowned Odiya writer Dr. Mrutyunjay Sarangi.

If her poetry gets close and upfront with the stark beauty of mindscapes, her short stories examine the vulnerabilities of human relationships and those undercurrents that bind unlikely people together. There is always a sense of hope in her works. A feeling that they are about to set out on a journey.

The critic Sulochana Rammohan comments “There are poems that are not so easily digested. Metaphors, irony, a tongue in cheek disregard for sentiments, all add to the uniqueness of this collection. You cannot read with a mindset that is conformist or parochial. You must be ready to be surprised, taken aback, irritated, maybe even played on as a fool.”

Our towers of silence sleep now;
For how long?
Will smoke billow soon,
Build steeples here
And pierce the sun that dims in fear?

It is an uneasy peace.
(An Uneasy Peace)

She has two collections of poems to her name-  Shored Fragments and Drawing Flame. Her works have been favorably reviewed by prominent publications such as The Journal of the Poetry Society (India). Her short stories have been published in The Punch Magazine, Literary Vibes and The Mag. Her first collection of short stories, Wine, Woman and Wrong has also been published.

As someone who has taught poetry for more than three decades, verse is probably as integral to her as oxygen. Geetha Nair’s poems are a pleasing blend of the traditional and the modern. There is the wonderful disruption of normative thought with the sudden turn of phrase, the ability to navigate winding staircases or take flight. Her works come from the world around her. And the erosions and resurrections they undergo.

In vain she scans the sky
To glimpse the gift of him
Returning strong
from the empty blue.

Then, grown red-tongued, ten-armed,
She moves;
Her gleaming weapons
Drawing flame… .

The cry of crows rends the captive air.
(Pind Daan)

This wonderful thematic spectrum of the poet has come in for considerable praise from many quarters, with Sheeba Ramdevan Radhakrishnan commenting, “The truths of life painfully interwoven, do truly and candidly stand out within the closely knit structure of the poems.”

The poems here are a testimony to the versatility of the poet. Her staunch refusal to be labelled. Schoolboy in one, scrubbed raw in another, a keen, merciless observer in some others, she sees gods and people as they are. And is unafraid to say what she sees.

Geetha Nair writes as she has taught- truthfully, with flair, leaping from life to life and captivatingly. As one of her students, I should know.

Sonya J. Nair
Editor

It is thus contextualized that we feature Easterine Kire who wrote the first Naga novel in English. When I read her work A Naga Village Remembered that was reissued as The Sky is My Father, I was struck by the span of generations that she covered in that slim book. Their struggles with religions, attempts to harmonise the old and new and the burdens that are carried in the souls of the people were rendered in extremely poetic language. It is not an easy task to accomplish. Her subsequent works- A Terrible Matriarchy, Mari, Bitter Wormwood (shortlisted for the Hindu Prize 2013); When the River Sleeps - Hindu Book Prize Winner 2015, Son of the Thundercloud (winner of the Bal Sahitya Puraskar 2018 and the Tata Literature Live! Book of the Year Award 2017), Don’t Run, My Love and A Respectable Woman (winner of the Printed Book of the Year by Publishing Next, 2019) -  have built a strong case for picking the threads of history of the North East through its fiction.

Like us, other people were returning to their homes. We saw several women mourning loudly because they could not find their houses any more. Kohima village was like nothing we had seen before. (A Respectable Woman)

In a 2006 feature carried by the International Cities of Refuge Network (ICORN), Kire writes, “I continue to pray and dream of peace for my people and reflect it in my poetry. At the same time, I am now able to admit and talk about the long-term damage to my people the years of protracted conflict have inflicted and I have slowly begun to address this in my new writings. While many of the writers in cities of refuge have experienced prison physically, my people and I have been living within an invisible prison for many years, denied freedom of expression, freedom to nationhood and most painfully, freedom to life itself. I am now thinking of new ways to help my people, especially the young, because this period away has from my homeland has to be utilized positively. …I feel that our only hope is in our young. Their futures should not be shadowed any longer by the conflict. I hope I can sufficiently contribute to enabling them to move away from the bitterness and vicious cycle of killings and transcend the present gun-culture of my society. They deserve a better life than what we have known.”

Once a part of the ICORN programme, she is currently living in northern Norway with her family.

There is, in her writing, violence, hope, love, reconciliation and above all, resilience,  healing….and poetry. Lots of poetry. Her writings bring out the orality of her culture and she has also worked to compile much of these orally communicated stories and has published them through her publishing house. In her opinion, the rhythms of the natural world are apparent in these folktales where there are characters who are 400 or 380 years old. Such is the power of the narration that the listener does not question this. “The miraculous is so much a part of folklore”, she says in an interview.

Her poems bring out a different side of her, perhaps because, as she wrote to SamyuktaPoetry, she writes to “relax, to record some special moments, to have fun because poems can be playful, and mostly to calm down from the stress of living. Poetry is a non-commercial activity: its good for the soul. I find soul satisfaction in writing and reading poetry. ”Thematically, her poems deal with nature and life. The everydayness of living. I was quite taken by her Diamonds that she also performed at the Bangalore Literature Festival.

I don't like diamonds
Øystein
something hard about diamonds
something cold

razored stalactites.

I think of the men
who ripped out the stone
from cold
dark earth entrails
their hands grimy
with unnecessary soil.

Nature is quiet and reflective in her poems as evinced by Moonbeam.

Rounded flakes of moon
falling thickly
and landing like snow in the valley
ringed moon

While reading Kire’s poems, one has the feeling of time standing still. There is a sense of waiting that she conveys. A bird that crashes down a chimney, the memories that the body carries…all form her subjects.

Easterine Kire’s work has been translated into German, Croatian, Uzbek, Norwegian and Nepali. She was awarded the Governor’s Medal for Excellence in Naga literature in 2011 and the ‘Free Word’ prize by Catalan PEN, Barcelona in 2013.

The poems featured here have not published elsewhere and they are, as Kire said, “on life.” Long after you have read these poems, they will come back to you, with the wisdom that she conveys in just a few lines. The little notes at the end of the poems seem like her way of holding conversations with the readers. It is a beautiful and intimate relationship that she thus establishes. And interestingly, one of her poems here is on food. Not Axone. Just food. Which is what food must be. Ask the hungry.

While reading Kire’s poems, one has the feeling of time standing still. There is a sense of waiting that she conveys. A bird that crashes down a chimney, the memories that the body carries…all form her subjects.

Easterine Kire’s work has been translated into German, Croatian, Uzbek, Norwegian and Nepali. She was awarded the Governor’s Medal for Excellence in Naga literature in 2011 and the ‘Free Word’ prize by Catalan PEN, Barcelona in 2013.

The poems featured here have not published elsewhere and they are, as Kire said, “on life.” Long after you have read these poems, they will come back to you, with the wisdom that she conveys in just a few lines. The little notes at the end of the poems seem like her way of holding conversations with the readers. It is a beautiful and intimate relationship that she thus establishes. And interestingly, one of her poems here is on food. Not Axone. Just food. Which is what food must be. Ask the hungry.