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Nineteenth-century Bengal and Tales of Early Magic Realism

Book Review by Basudhara Roy

Title: Tales of Early Magic Realism in Bengali

Author: Trailokyanath Mukhopadhyay

Translator: Sucheta Dasgupta

Publisher: Niyogi Books

A good translation is a sorcery of desire, determination, and language. It opens a portal into not just another culture, reminding us of the texts, subtexts, contexts and conned texts richly underlying words but involves an admission into a whole new world that the reader would have missed altogether had it not been for the sincere striving of a visionary translator.

For, indeed, all translation is built around a vision that extends beyond that of giving life to a work in another language. There has to be a rationale as to why this reincarnation should, at all, be necessary or worthwhile, a logic as to how this can be effectively worked out in the asymmetrical arena of languages, and a dream as to what can be accomplished through this.

In Sucheta Dasgupta’s case, the translation of Trailokyanath Mukhopadhyay’s Tales of Early Magic Realism in Bengali stems from a desire to introduce readers of English to the wide, vibrant, unusual and remarkably fabulist world of the author as a pioneering attempt in the field of global speculative fiction.

Speculative fiction as a genre, is an umbrella term that stands for all modes of writing that depart from realism. It includes myth, fable, fantasy, surrealism, supernaturalism, magical realism, science fiction, and more. Being a speculative fiction writer herself, Dasgupta finds in Trailokyanath’s world an interesting attempt at “creating these genres and bending them in Bengali, in nineteenth-century United Bengal” which, to her, was a revelation of sorts.

Her intention to bring Trailokyanath Mukhopadhyay to the attention of a wider international audience has helped to add to our understanding of the rich and diverse society of nineteenth-century Bengal and its conflicting intellectual inheritance. This translation, in vital ways, also does service to Bengali literature in which Trailokyanath’s reputation has remained eclipsed and which, following Tagore’s estimation, has mostly looked upon him as a children’s writer.

A mere glance, however, at the six interesting translations in Tales of Early Magic Realism in Bengali will clarify that they are far from yarns meant for children. Driven by a clear vision to make sense of their times by negotiating between two distinct epistemologies – the native and the colonial, these are essentially narratives of ideas that speak to the confused public conscience of the age.

The tales, in question, are ‘Lullu’, ‘Treks of Kankabaty’, ‘Rostam and Bhanumati’, ‘The Alchemist’, ‘The Legend of Raikou’ and ‘When Vidyadhari Lost Her Appetite’. These are, properly speaking, ‘tales’ that stem from and echo a fecund oral tradition of storytelling and answer to no formal conceptions of the short story genre. They are indiscriminate with regards to length, plausibility, fineness, and intention and except for the last story which exemplifies a certain tightness of plot and effect, these tales are characterised by a clumsy looseness which marks oral forms.

Rich in description and sensory detail, each of these stories has its own distinct style and flavour. While ‘Lullu’ and ‘Treks of Kankabaty’ are pure fantasy, ‘Rostam and Bhanumati’ and ‘The Legend of Raikou’ weld elements from myth and folklore. ‘The Alchemist’ attempts to combine moral treatise and scientific history together while ‘When Vidyadhari Lost Her Appetite’ sticks to realism, emerging as the most well-told tale in the collection terms of both craft and cultural representation.

How far it is justified to call these six narratives ‘tales of early magic realism’ remains a question well-raised in the ‘Foreword’ to the book by Anil Menon where he points out that the bringing together of realism and fantasy sans the socio-political context of the twentieth century seems inadequate. “What we can say is that there is a magic realist reading of such-and-such work. The classification refers to the relationship between the reader and text, and not to some essence in the text itself.”

Trailokyanath’s world, whether realist or fabulist, is the world of a robust, liberal, discerning intellectual who is well aware of the various currents and counter-currents of native and colonial reflection of his times, all of which he adroitly conjures in his fiction to offer readers sumptuous food for thought. While these tales might want in artistry and unity of effect, they revel in ideas and the multiplicity of points of view which offer readers today a very faithful portrait of nineteenth-century Bengal and the intellectual debates that actively ranged on issues such as religion, widowhood, sati, women’s education, fashion, the codes of marriage and remarriage, caste, family, and economy.

Dasgupta makes sincere efforts to offer as honest a translation as possible, (“I fully intend my work to be the ‘same text in a different language’ and not a transcreation”, she points out in her ‘Translator’s Note’.) retaining native words where there are not acceptable substitutes and offering a well-researched and nuanced glossary at the end of each tale to point out Bengali meanings and usages. The prose style of the book, following the original, tends to be ornate at places but the humour and satire that gives sinewy form to these tales is unmissable.

In ‘Lullu’, for instance, Aameer insists that the only qualification for an editor of a newspaper is the ability to curse and his purpose in choosing to appoint a ghost as editor was that “…all the curse words known to man have been spent or gone stale from overuse. From now on, I will serve ghostly abuse to the masses of this country. I will make a lot of money, I am sure of it.” In our own times, the experience of sensational headlines and of fake news, and the sight of bickering spokespersons and screaming anchors in newsrooms makes us smile at Trailokyanath’s foresight.

In ‘Treks of Kankabaty’ which attempts to be a Bengali adaptation of Lewis Caroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865), a mosquito informs the protagonist that the true purpose for which humans have been created is so that mosquitoes “can take a drink of their blood”. “All mosquitoes,” states Raktabaty “know that humans have brains, but no intelligence. The foolish amongst us are called humans in the pejorative sense.”

A comic geographic, cosmic and karmic purpose for the traditional religious prohibition on travel for Indians emerges in this tale:

“India is surrounded by the black waters on three sides while on the other, there are gargantuan mountain ranges. Just as animals are kept inside a paddock, so, too, we had kept Indians enclosed by the means of these natural fences. By staying in India, Indians so far had remained at our service and humbly donated their blood for the purpose of our nourishment. Not so any longer. Today, some of them are waging attempts to cross the high seas and conquer the mountains. That if they behave thus and deprive us of their blood, they commit a great sin is common knowledge.”

Again, on hearing that “the British have banned the custom of sahamaran[1]”, the monster Nakeshwari says:

“Well, the British did ban the custom, but do you know what the young and educated Bengali men believe today? They believe in restarting old customs in the name of Indian pride. They have gone stir-crazy in the name of throwing their grief-stricken mothers and sisters into the burning fire. And we, monsters, heartily support them in their mission.”

In ‘When Vidyadhari Lost Her Appetite’, humour aligns with stark realism in this argument between two maids:

“One day, Rosy addressed Vidyadhari, ‘Have you lost your judgement? Just this morning, you went to the confectioner’s shop and bought Sandesh for the master. Before serving it to him, you let the brahmin lick at it twice and then you, yourself, gave it ten good licks. When did you say to me, “Rosy, why don’t you, too, give it a couple of licks?” If one attains something, one’s duty is to share it with others.”

Common to all these tales is the empowering of the marginalised, a challenge to status quo, and a sustained intention to speak the truth for empowerment. In that sense, these narratives are all anti-authoritarian and disrupt various forms of hegemony to establish a vision of life that is swift, changing, capable of responding to oppression with wit, and where the spoken word has sacral value. That is why in ‘Lullu’, Aamir’s thoughtless remark ‘Le Lullu’ to frighten his wife actually summons a ghost called Lullu who spirits her away. Similarly, in ‘Treks of Kankabaty’, the moment Kankabaty’s father says, “…if a tiger appears in this very moment and asks for Kankabaty’s hand, I shall give it to him”, a roar is heard and a tiger appears seeking her hand in marriage.

Language, in its diverse potential, becomes an important thematic link in these tales and in this immensely polyphonic text that unleashes a host of voices, human and non-human, to capture a reality that operates on multiple axes and can be best appreciated through the third eye of the imagination.

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[1] Dying together — A wife(or Sati) was burnt in the funeral pyre of her husband. This custom was banned in India by the British in 1829 and continues banned.

Basudhara Roy teaches English at Karim City College affiliated to Kolhan University, Chaibasa. Author of three collections of poems, her latest work has been featured in EPW, The Pine Cone Review, Live Wire, Lucy Writers Platform, Setu and The Aleph Review among others. 

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PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL

Click here to access the Borderless anthology, Monalisa No Longer Smiles

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A Lyrical Love Song for Milkwood Trees

Book Review by Basudhara Roy

Title: A House of Rain and Snow

Author: Srijato, translated from the Bengali by Maharghya Chakraborty

Publisher: Penguin Random House

“I believe I would want nothing else if I am allowed to just think. If it were a real job, I would be the first to get it. The only problem then would be that I would have to think on someone else’s command. Now I am free to think whatever I want.”

A quiet tenderness beckons the reader to A House of Rain and Snow. The title suggests everything generous and hospitable. Once inside the cosy house of this novel set in days before the internet revolution, there is, indeed, no disappointment. A translation of Srijato’s[1] Prothom Mudran, Bhalobasha [2]from the original Bengali into English by Maharghya Chakraborty[3], the novel offers, on the face of it, a simple coming-of-age story but such simplicity is only deceptive. Churning within the novel’s agonised romantic spirit are vital interrogations of the relationship between life, living, and livelihood, art and the market, the value and significance of art to life, and the question of integrity in both.

A Künstlerroman[4] that primarily focuses on Pushkar’s journey from an aspiring poet to a published artist, the novel frames more narratives than one. There is the story of Pushkar’s parents – Abanish and Ishita, of his friends, Abhijit and Asmita, and that of his mentor, Gunjan (and Parama), each constituting a mirror of the narrative prism in which Pushkar, the reflected subject, kaleidoscopically understands himself and his journey better. But Pushkar is not alone. Journeying with him in spirit are Nirban and his circle of poet-friends, the girl he is in love with – Saheli, and his most cherished friend and ‘confession box’, the milkwood tree.

Where does art come from? For Srijato, art is not extraneous to life but intrinsic to the very fabric of living. Every character in the world of the novel needs art, in one form or another, to survive. Not everyone, however, can become an artist. This privilege and responsibility is offered to the chosen few — those who can step out of their self-obsessed private worlds to establish a sincere relationship with the wider currents of life. Pushkar, for instance, tells the milkwood tree:

“…solitude is entirely a relative thing, silence too. I cannot understand myself without the immense tumult of this city, that’s where my silence lies. Unless I am standing in this swiftly moving crowd, I cannot find any solitude.”

Art, as the novel seems to assert, cannot be born except within life’s chaotic womb. A house of rain and snow can only be a nursery, a protected locale to nurture vision and aspiration. For the artist to grow, an engagement with the wider world would be mandatory.

But how does one engage with the world? Would the world even be worth engaging with? Is art a means of engagement or retreat, activism or escapism? No clear-cut answers to these questions are possible but A House of Rain and Snow attempts, as all worthy stories do, to shine its own light upon them. The novel’s world is divided into two kinds of people — those who view art as an existential end and those who, like Parama or Sumit Dastidar, view it only as a means or an avenue to something else. Those who see art as an end in itself understand that commitment in art does not necessarily guarantee accomplishment. Neither does accomplishment guarantee material success. As an aspiring artist, one can only bring all of one’s life and living to art without expecting anything in return, the fact of journeying being the artist’s only receipt.

There is very little physical action here. The journeys in A House of Rain and Snow, as the reader will observe, are all psychological. Place and time are important coordinates in this movement. The city of Kolkata emerges evocatively as inspiration and muse, its descriptions exuding a clear eye for detail, a deep sense of cultural nostalgia, a delineation of not just place but of spirit, and a documentation of the city’s multifarious, shapeshifting life — its strength, tenacity, and bustling beauty. Concrete yet shapeless, definite yet blurred, prosaic yet poetic, the city firmly anchors this novel as both stage and ship, contouring its artists’ perspectives on life and art.

The idea of time, in the novel, is as fluid as that of space. There is the constant sense, awareness, and reminder of its passage and yet, in Srijato’s fictional world, time refuses to be linear with the past, present, and future merging frequently through hallucination, dream and memory:

“Today, Gunjan notices the newspaper, he has never seen one in the moonlight. He bends over to pick it up from the mosaic floor gleaming under the light of the moon and, instead of the paper, comes back up with a tiny doll that had fallen on the ground a little while ago. A little more than seven years, to be precise.”

There is a strong visual quality about Srijato’s writing, intricately woven cinematographic effects which, had they been of any significance to the plot, might have amounted to magic realism. But being strictly organisational and descriptive in function, this cinematic quality is instrumental to the novel in other ways — it insulates the narrative from realism, liberates it from answerability to everyday logic, defamiliarises the familiar, and renders the strange intimate. Most importantly, it creates a surrealist impression, reminding us of all that remains constant in our consciousness in the most bizarre of circumstances, and manifests itself in the novel as an artist’s specialised and idiosyncratic way of relating to the world. Examine the windows of rain and snow, for instance:

“No one other than Pushkar knows about this, neither does he wish to tell anyone. There are two windows in his room, side by side, one almost touching the other. Outside one of them it rains the entire day and snows throughout outside the other. On the days this happens, Pushkar finds himself unable to leave the house.”

It is worth noting that it is not Pushkar alone who has such experiences. Other characters like Abanish and Gunjan also experience such strange reconfigurations of time and space — expansion, compression, repetition, alternation, all of which can be interpreted at a symbolic level.

Surcharged with intense lyrical passages, A House of Rain and Snow is quintessentially an exploration of the aching need for art in life. Life, in the pages of the novel, is almost unliveable without the solace of art. Art, in turn, can be born only out of love, the kind of love that Pushkar can extend to the milkwood tree and the world around him:

“He, Pushkar, is in love. A little too much, with everything. …Why, he is not sure. How, he is not sure either. All he knows is that at this very moment, it is love that is becoming his language, his constant recourse. Love. Not just for the people close to him or his writings or his own life. Love for everything. Everything happening around him at this moment, the moving earth, every incident everywhere in the world, the forests, the oceans, the mountains, the plains, the cities, the sky, even the vast outer space beyond earth.”

The translation wonderfully captures the linguistic nuances of Bengali in the English language, its semantic eccentricities, syntactic pace, and its lush images, making the novel a rich and rewarding read. A number of images linger steadily in the reader’s mind long after the book has been read – a tall, wet milkwood tree, an idol-maker shaping a goddess out of clay, and a young boy lifting his exhausted father on his palm.

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Click here to read an excerpt.

[1] Srijato, one of the most celebrated Bengali poet-lyricists of our times, is the recipient of Ananda Puroskar in 2004 for his book Udanta Sawb Joker (All Those Flying Jokers).

[2] Literal translation from Bengali: First Gesture of Love

[3] Maharghya Chakraborty is a well-known translator. He teaches at St Xavier’s College in Kolkata.

[4] A coming-of-age novel about an artists

Basudhara Roy teaches English at Karim City College affiliated to Kolhan University, Chaibasa. Author of three collections of poems, her latest work has been featured in EPW, The Pine Cone Review, Live Wire, Lucy Writers Platform, Setu and The Aleph Review among others. 

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PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL

Click here to access the Borderless anthology, Monalisa No Longer Smiles

Click here to access Monalisa No Longer Smiles on Kindle Amazon International

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A Case for the Body: Kuhu Joshi’s My Body Didn’t Come Before Me

Book Review by Basudhara Roy

Title: My Body Didn’t Come Before Me
Author: Kuhu Joshi
Publisher: Speaking Tiger Books

The body is a text, writing and written on. As much of this text is ‘given’ as it is ‘fashioned’, its meaning continually negotiated at the intersections of self, society, and culture. Thoroughly personal, the body cannot, at the same time, escape from being spectacularly public because in its corporeality, it constantly responds to the material and metaphysical dimensions of the world around it. A body is being, becoming, possession, as also performance. It is, at the same time, uncertainty, liability, incarceration, and an alibi against everything that we might wish it to be.

In Kuhu Joshi’s slim collection of thirty-five poems titled My Body Didn’t Come Before Me (Speaking Tiger, 2023), the problematic of the body is placed at the centre of poetic inquiry. The crisp and categorical title catches the readers’ attention first and in many ways, the cover offers a brilliant paratext to the ideas in this book as it evocatively underlines a conversation between girlhood, body, nature, and form.

We are never merely inhabitants of our bodies but also bear responsibility for our embodiment. The question of identity is, to a great extent, framed by questions of embodiment, and the conformity of the body to established cultural codes. Such conformity, however, is a sheer travesty of nature. Kuhu Joshi’s poems chart the development and growth of selfhood through severe scoliosis or spinal deformity and the experience of alienation that gathers around it led by societal conventions of normalcy.

Central to these poems is a conflict between embodiment and selfhood, and the numerous ways in which socio-cultural codes of accomplishment, lifestyle, and beauty dictate the need for possessing the ‘perfect’ body. Often, ideas of romance and scripts of love and longing also reiterate the same narrative, rendering desire and its fulfilment both difficult and transgressive. This book is an ardent statement of such experiences of otherness and an activist desire to dismiss them into the idea of individuality or selfhood.

Joshi’s poems delineate subtle contradictions between the body-as-construct and the body-as-experience with insight, freshness, and candour. There is little sentimentality in these pages, almost no lamentations of victimhood, and hardly any regret for life as it has been or is. But in their abrupt matter-of-factness and remarkable economy of expression, these poems manage to communicate a startling range of emotions – pain, fear, shame, depression, self-loathing, forbearance, and self-confidence.

The collection, interestingly, begins with ‘I tell myself I am beautiful’, a poem that on the page curves itself like a scoliotic spine: “…And I tell myself/ I am beautiful/ so I do not feel the need/ to be normal. I tell myself/ I am beautiful/ so I do not feel the need/ to be something I am not.” The poem offers a convergence of several themes that will underlie the book – embodiment, normalcy, beauty, de/form/ity, narrativisation, and selfhood.

Despite the grand diversity of bodies that inhabit this world and the  numerous modes of embodiment, stereotypes of normalcy rule our everyday lives to such an extent that even the slightest deviation from the norm sparks reactions that inject within us feelings of otherness. Such narratives of otherness can only be combated through self-fashioned narratives of beauty, experience, identification and identity.

The body at the centre of these poems is a body consistently othered by medical discourse. But it is also, and with equal tenacity, a female body that through its girlhood, adolescence, pubescence and growth, must bear the implications of this otherness in more ways than one with the result that everyday narratives of friendship, safety, love, and desire are complicated in their enunciation. In ‘The girl with a rod’, one of the most tender poems in the collection, the subtle yet dramatic inter-gender confrontation between two adolescents raises several questions on normalcy, vulnerability, and comfort in social spaces – here, the seemingly innocuous space of a school bus.

And yet, the speaker in these poems acknowledges that when it comes to another scoliotic body, her own gaze is marked by the same curiosity that borders on the invasion of privacy and the transgression of personal space. In ‘A girl. Scoliotic’, she begins with the confession “I don’t remember her name./ I remember her Instagram handle. sco.lio/-something. I remember clicking on her/ to compare her/ curves to mine. ” In this virtual encounter, the social media profile representing the individual becomes the object of the speaker’s scrutiny and realisation that ‘my curve/ was never that curvy’, she offers a mirror-reaction to socio-cultural perceptions of her own identity.

The cold professionalism of medical procedures and the seeming detachment or unconcern of medical practitioners that work together to objectify the dis-eased body, establish themselves strongly in these poems – “I think a lot about the cold, wet plaster./ And the hands of the doctor/ moulding it around my waist.” (‘In this one you win’) In ‘The day of the fitting’, the doctor at the Spinal Injuries Hospital who ‘does not look at me. He says namaste to Mom’ is, paradoxically, also the one whose hands ‘messing’ with plaster across her torso intimately gather “the skeleton of my body. In his hands/ the silence of my spine, white and hollow. ”

In the two poems ‘What your doctor will not tell you:’ and ‘What your doctor will tell you:’, Joshi compresses with remarkable skill and deftness the two sides of the experience of embodiment – the private and the public, the subjective and the objective, the circular and the linear, and most importantly, the marginal and the mainstream. The doctor’s “Kuch nahin hota hai” and “Lacheeli” (with regard to the spine), find their alternative truths in the speaker’s “Hard-back chairs will hurt no matter what. ” and “Do not listen to ‘Sexy Back’”.

A hint of the Father as Patriarch lurks decisively in this collection in the speaker’s equivocal relationship to male figures of reverence and in her repeated seeking for comfort among women. There is the father who, because he is absent in ‘Nani’s house[1]’, the children are “free to dream”. In ‘The protector of life’, Joshi writes:

…The protector of life
is a man, and I
am not surprised. Neither are you.
I assure you. God
was a man too. This is what we
were given, you and I, Eves weeded out
of the garden of life.

In ‘Enter a garden in new delhi’, she contrasts the injunctions placed on the female body with the careless freedom of male bodies that manage to remain beyond cultural surveillance– “all around you there are/men/spread/men spread out/spread all around/legsflopping backssprawling/handscratching bodiesrelaxing” In ‘Five stages’, the speaker asks “Is it odd to extend responsibility/ for my body?” and the unarticulated answer is ‘no’ since our bodies are continually being transformed and redefined both physically and psychologically by our personal and social encounters.

With its articulate language, assertive voice, and sharp images, Kuhu Joshi’s My Body Didn’t Come Before Me makes a potent debut, emphasising subjective embodiment as a form of resistance, and offering an alternate cultural site to reimagine normativity.

*Note: Kuhu Joshi has recovered from scoliosis or spinal deformity and is currently based in New York City where she is a professor of creative writing and English composition. She has been the recipient of the Jane Cooper Poetry Fellowship and was awarded an honourable mention for the Academy of American Poets’ University Prize in 2021. She is the co-author of the chapbook Private Maps (Human/Kind Press, 2020) and founder of the poetry workshop ‘The Terrible Joy of Poetry’.

[1] Maternal grandmother’s house

Basudhara Roy teaches English at Karim City College affiliated to Kolhan University, Chaibasa. Author of three collections of poems, her latest work has been featured in EPW, The Pine Cone Review, Live Wire, Lucy Writers Platform, Setu and The Aleph Review among others. 

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PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL

Click here to access the Borderless anthology, Monalisa No Longer Smiles

Click here to access Monalisa No Longer Smiles on Kindle Amazon International

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Anthem of Hope

Review by Basudhara Roy

Title: Greening the Earth: A Global Anthology of Poetry

Editors: K. Satchidanandan and Nishi Chawla

Publisher: Penguin Random House

At a time when apocalyptic unease about the precarity of our home on this planet grips us as a civilisation and is concomitantly coupled with the irremediable apathy that governs our everyday mundanity, a collection of poems on the subject by some of the finest poets from around the world writing in our times, is both an existential alarm of urgency and a spiritual balm that soothes our despondency enough to spur us to action. Greening the Earth: A Global Anthology of Poetry edited by K. Satchidanandan and Nishi Chawla, and recently brought out by Penguin Random House is, as its editors point out, an act of “responsible activism”.

A tonal sequel to Singing in the Dark, their first co-edited anthology of poems around the pandemic which had already foregrounded nature’s clear vengeance against human greed, this collection attempts to grapple with the more sinister and nemetic darkness of environmental crises by establishing a dialogic space for the affirmation of ecological citizenry through poetry and “the articulation of a new aesthetic of survival”.

Poetry has, always and undeniably, been at the forefront of every revolution and the reasons for this are not hard to seek. Out of the circuit of formal epistemology, poetry has mostly been free to encode and perform alternative knowledges. The language of poetry, being generically unanswerable to established patterns of syntax and semantics, has been, historically, at liberty to pursue and present its own ensemble of meaning. Again, just as poetry, dispensing with literacy and formal training, has offered little resistance or discouragement to potential creators, it has also always been widely accessible to the general public owing to its capacity for oral dissemination and circulation in minor media such as notes, letters, greeting cards, placards and advertisements.

But poetry’s chief merit, most significantly, lies in its ability to accomplish a multifaceted and compound expression encompassing reality and possibility, facticity and vision, statistics and emotions. To declare in editorial essays or news reports that the world is coming to an end is one thing, to express its consequences in poetry is something else. Ecological poetry or ecopoetry has been on the scene for a considerable period of time now. An extension or intensification of the genre of nature poetry, ecological poetry evinces a keen political and activist consciousness geared to fight back the environmental crisis through determined human effort. Integrating perspective, observation, information, emotion, vision and testimony, ecopoetry attempts to establish a deeply personal relationship between man and nature underlining, thereby, their indispensability to each other’s survival.

Greening the Earth with its staggering set of around a hundred and eighty-five poets and poems from across the world, offers us an essentially global anthem of hope. The planet cannot be greened by afforestation alone. Greening the planet requires a systemic reconstruction of our relationship with it that envisages love, responsibility and sustainability. It is a recognition of  nature’s intrinsic worth beyond her instrumental value and the fierce acknowledgement of the inextricability of the two.

A walk through the anthology is an immensely moving and personal tour through innumerable poetic moods and ecotopes, our teeming biodiversity, and our shared vulnerability as inhabitants of the cosmos. At the heart of each of these astonishingly diverse and beautiful poems is a sense of kinship to a wider and infinitely unknown world, an awareness of the mutability of life-forms within the unmapped continuity of time, a strong condemnation of human selfishness and myopia, and a more-than strong suspicion of the imminent end of humanity.

At the same time, here is also the urgent and extraordinary tenderness that arrives only with the knowledge of transience and the prophecy of loss. If life and the world are to be lost to us as a species, there will never be time enough to dwell on all that we love. Each of these poems is, therefore, also about love – love not merely for the natural world but for every little thing that holds up our lives and which we have been taught to discount as inessential or marginal in our daily drive to build a living.

Greening the Earth, thus, advocates a different ontological ethics – one that calls for wide inclusiveness, greater mindfulness, minute attention, and an adjustment to the flow of time around us instead of attempting to govern this flow. It embodies an intense desire to reverse the cycle of alienated technological growth and to revert to an era of deep feeling and conscious interconnectedness. Here is joy, agony, grief, fear, beauty, despair, isolation, and community but most significantly, here is the possibility of building both ourselves and the world anew through searching self-analysis.

In ‘Signs and Wonders’, Paul Hoover sketches a barren civilization which can be revived only when “a child will write them back into existence,/one branch at a time”. Toi Derricotte’s ‘Unburying the Bird’, similarly, is a deeply moving poem about bird deaths “because of too much/ something” and yet, the poem’s onus is on resurrection rather than on accusation:

Feed her from the tip of your finger.
Teach her the cup of your hand.
You breathe on her.
One day,
you open up your hand
and show her sky.

The recognition of the human as one insignificant dot within the immensity of the universe marks many of these poems. Sarah Key’s ‘Ode to the Scarce Yellow Sally Stonefly’ is one among several poems where humans are treated as textual equals with other species. The poem pays tribute to a critically endangered variety of the stonefly that was rediscovered in the United Kingdom after a period of twenty-two years owing to the efforts of conservation biologists like John Davy-Bowker. After eight stanzas of describing the stonefly, its disappearance, and its rediscovery, the poem in its final stanza, deftly but unassumingly, turns to the larger and logical picture – the extinction of homo sapiens from the planet:

Tell me, flighty friends, will there be
A Mr. Davy-Bowker for me?
Will some AI god come along, algorithm my scent,
go where my species has gone?

Rochelle Potkar’s ‘Confluence’ raises concern regarding the legal personhood and rights of our natural environment. Embodying the spirit of the ‘Rights of Nature’ movement that believes in the right of every ecosystem to flourish without victimisation by humans, the poem makes a strong case for the rights of water bodies which are relentlessly drained, contaminated, and exploited by human activities, its opening line being highly potent in its irony:

Waters when they evaporate, meet…
at a global conference, to speak of fish dropouts,
obscura of clouds, near-deaths, hydrological dynamics,
monocultures, and metals:
nickel, lead, chromium, at their beds.

The constant awareness of despair and inertia runs in a large number of poems as in Michael Cope’s ‘We Watch the Signs’ where the awareness of danger leads to numbness rather than action, the first and third lines of this first stanza being a constant refrain throughout the poem:

We watch the signs in numbness and regret.
Midwinter summer, chaos in the year,
And still our money’s on the outside bet.

David Ebenbach’s ‘Viaduct Greene’ eloquently traces the possibilities of companionship in a posthuman world – a date through “this expanse of soda bottles and human waste” when “a subway dies and you make it a garden.” In Meg Eden’s ‘Scene of a Dismantled Village outside Pripyat’, “The forest has become/ a radioactive living room.” Humans are absent from this scene altogether, their “heirloom china,/ covering the forest floor!” Animals have taken over:

Inside one cup, a chipmunk
makes its home. Inside another,
a spider breeds. Soon, her eggs
will hatch and from where
there was one body, there will be
thousands. Think about that –
something still lives after all of this.

‘Lakeside Walks’ by Arvind Krishna Mehrotra is, entirely, an exercise in mindful perception, the poetic consciousness establishing itself as intimately one with its immediate environment. Here rain, squirrel, friend, four-lane highway, letter, piebald cow, pinwheel flower, poem, face mask, mynah and park bench are all emotive equals drawing the poet’s attention “aimlessly, which is the same as purposefully”, articulating thereby an intense ecopoetic vision of connection and harmony. 

What makes the book a trifle inconvenient to handle is the absence of a table of contents so that attempting to look up a specific poem in this anthology becomes entirely a matter of labour, memory, and chance. Its Preface, however, constitutes a comprehensive and well-researched essay on ecological consciousness in literature and will be an appreciable resource for readers in general and those with special interest in ecocriticism. What is also valuable about this anthology is its inclusion of poems in translation from a wide variety of global languages.

With a memorable green cover showcasing an opulent spread of maple leaves, here is a body of poems intended to woo us to an earth-centric view of life and the world, and as Rainer Maria Gassen writes here in his poem ‘To Nature – Three Sonnets’, “should this poem fail to win you over/ there’ll be hundreds if not thousands more of them.”

Basudhara Roy teaches English at Karim City College affiliated to Kolhan University, Chaibasa. Author of three collections of poems, her latest work has been featured in EPW, The Pine Cone Review, Live Wire, Lucy Writers Platform, Setu and The Aleph Review among others. 

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PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL

Click here to access the Borderless anthology, Monalisa No Longer Smiles

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Review

The Seduction of Words

Book Review by Basudhara Roy

Title: Meanwhile

Author: Prerna Gill

Publisher: HarperCollins India

There are many places that poetry comes from — desire, death, dream, memory, sharp sensuous apprehension, the wrist-grip of language’s freedom and magic, the joys and fractures of the world that we engage in everyday, the necessity to commit to paper (or to posterity) what weighs upon the heart or head, the existential imperative to express, or the naïve hope of making the world a better place.

In general, the act of poetic creation draws its sap simultaneously from several of these sources. Many a time, however, one of these inspirations is bound to tower over all the rest. In the case of Prerna Gill’s Meanwhile (HarperCollins, 2023), the mysterious seduction of words combined with an urge to dress the world in impenetrable veils of meaning by conscientiously shuffling the charted signifiers and signifieds of language, seem to offer the veritable will-to-poetry.

One is drawn to the studied casualness of the title which, with its quiet, meditated understatement, purports poetry to be a by-the-way affair, a random afterthought. Nothing could be farther from the truth. In the title as well as in the book as a whole, there is a skilled juxtaposition of two contiguous temporal frames — the physical and the psychic. The physical frame is the one in which the seemingly significant events of life take place. The psychic frame constitutes the ‘meanwhile’ of poetry.

This ‘meanwhile’ is not to be treated lightly for it is in these pockets of found time that the actual business of confronting the self for survival takes place. Here is a drawn-out negotiation with history, experience, emotions, pain, and trauma, and a poignant reconciliation with each of them. The psychological explorations of the ‘meanwhile’ in this collection are all-absorbing and have the potency to completely obstruct, offset and vanquish the eventful flow of physical time — “it’s always hungry in here” (‘An Hour Stays’). Nevertheless, this is not allowed to happen and both frames persist together, their density often overlapping.

If one pays sufficient aural attention, there is to be heard a silent ticking within Prerna’s poems, a tense balance between the physical or material and the psychic or mental, that threatens at any moment to collapse – “I sink through deep green waters/ To a cement floor buried/ Under boxes, old chairs, a pantheon in a funk” (‘Visit’). The fifty-nine poems in Meanwhile, then, manifest themselves as an acknowledgement of this essential fragility of time, balance, and life — a realisation that if the mind’s playhouse is affected or darkened, the lights in life’s theatre will inevitably be extinguished.

In the author’s words, the book is “an attempt to understand the less-than-shiny things that I can’t quite ignore any longer. The everyday things. The things that let the shadows in.” The paradoxical nature of time, emotional spontaneity and polyphony, the weaving/unweaving of the self, its fragile alignment/dealignment with the world, and the conglomeration of being constitute the thematic canvas of these poems. The cover image of a huge butterfly replacing the forehead and eyes of a human (woman’s) face looms to significance here. The symbolic suggestion of an alternative (inward or non-human) vision is hard to rule out (for animals occupy an enviable space in many poems of this collection) even as one is brought to mind of the butterfly effect of causation that operates, perhaps, most relentlessly in the headspace.

The acuteness of experience, the intensity of its processing, and its configuration through terse but often abrupt and abstruse images constitute the three essential prismatic walls of Meanwhile. Here is a carefully constructed theatre of the mind where lights and sounds radically transform in meaning through connotative and symbolic suggestions. In much of Prerna’s poetry is a semantic and narrative inscrutability that seems to operate as conscious poetic strategy. In the noumenon of these poems is both illumination and construction. Language is both torch and subterfuge, revelation and concealment, statement and retraction so that travelling through these poems is to traverse an experiential space that is deliberately half-lit.

In ‘Unmasked’, the poet writes:

Glaucous moon shivering inches of glass 
She cuts her shape, cuts at it in echo 
Grows it asking after her sons and rent 
The possibility of rain and grandchildren 
And if they glimpsed her first body 
In birthmark, headline, running stitch

Here, as in many of her pieces, the real and the surreal walk together, undistinguished. In ‘Chedipe’, for instance – “Never could tell if she first saw him/ From behind green bottles or tall grass” – the atmosphere often turns disturbing and sometimes, singularly acherontic. In ‘Tributary’, the witnessing of the phenomenon of death opens a startling avenue of perception:

Until his splintering close enough to see 
How easily a tributary is made: 
A young man slipping from the course of the day 
His hours held close as cards

In these poems’ handling of the self as subject, one finds little narcissism. The mind that is sculpted by particularity of experience, memory and upheaval of feeling is, to be sure, intensely subjective and yet, the distillation of these experiences in poetry makes way for a rich reading. What animates these poems and renders them more than abstract musings of an idiosyncratic mind is their keen and devout understanding of life’s complexity, its essential sense of injustice, and its brief but significant redemptions – “days pressed to currants between/ Pages folded for the edge of winter/And winters still” (‘Ant, Grasshopper’) or “Things of a hard blue sky yearn/ For the only light they do not share” (‘Before This Summer’) The use of short, clipped, often dramatic sentences; the frequent avoidance of punctuation; a polished, urban vocabulary; and an essential belief in the lability of time chisel these poems into pieces reflective of a deeper and highly nuanced reality of the mind as of the world.

The collection has several memorable poems. ‘Bucketsful’, for instance, brilliantly conjures childhood memory, loss, diminishing, and incommunicability through the bulbous image of frogs “Leaping to the rim/ Like it knew a boiling hurry” and ends with words that “balloon my throat and the only ones who would understand them/ Have long skipped town”. In ‘Trees’, the “verdant announcements” of foliage are capable of sustaining life despite its monotony – “Allergies, dry cleaning, soup” so that “in one glance/ The world becomes/ Leaves”. ‘Autopsy’ builds itself around a single cinematic image – “The naked bulb above the table/ Flickered too much” and as a verb, can symbolically extend itself from a person to a situation to life itself. ‘The Dollmaker’, one of those poems that makes the act of reading this collection inseparable from the recognition of the author’s experiences as a woman in the world, skilfully builds up the automated rhythms of a woman’s being in a sexist universe.

Meanwhile, thus, offers a whole new world for our absorption, intriguing in its opacity, and plumbing a depth that is accessible only to those who are prepared to lose themselves in the sharp silhouettes of its images. Here is the gradual but steady eclipsing of material geography to throw light upon the imperialism of the psyche and in this, there is a fine and fluid celluloid effect at work. On the wide screen of language, Prerna’s images travel with a terse celluloid confidence – aware, both, of being and non-being, of leading the reader through a range of signification that can never be pinned down to conclusion, of living a lie and yet upholding the truth.

As a debut collection of poems, Meanwhile stands out for its innovative experimentation with language which borders, often, on the existential, as if sanity and survival depended upon these elaborate linguistic disguises — the trickery of words, the enticement as well as the connotative distance of images, and the impossibility of locating a referential kernel to crack. In the measured pace of Prerna’s poems is a chromatic adventure that navigates the complex terrain of human emotions via a symbolism of shape, feeling and colour illuminating the little-known multiverse of the subconscious – “Square fingers running a pen/ Over prescription or continent” (‘Maps’) or “You, with nights under your fingernails/ Tell no one how it happened” (‘Black’).

In the excavated or found space of ‘meanwhile’ flows a continuous and consistent dialogue between the various selves – the past and the present, the mentor and the mentee, the seeing and the knowing, the forgetful and the cautious, and so on and so forth. When this space transforms itself into the intersubjective bond of poetry it becomes therapeutic, healing both the speaker and the listener from a pain that is deeply shared as inhabitants of a difficult world — “Some mornings I think of a rabbit with orchid ears/ The stray toms left her in a pit in my stomach/ Filled with lettuce and sweet straw (‘Keeping’) or “In this way, we are brittle femur/ And like this, we are sky” (‘White’).

The world will, perhaps, continue to be what it is. Meanwhile, here is a book that promises to be a friend.

Basudhara Roy teaches English at Karim City College affiliated to Kolhan University, Chaibasa. Author of three collections of poems, her latest work has been featured in EPW, The Pine Cone Review, Live Wire, Lucy Writers Platform, Setu and The Aleph Review among others. 

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PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL

Click here to access the Borderless anthology, Monalisa No Longer Smiles

Click here to access Monalisa No Longer Smiles on Kindle Amazon International

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Review

A Dialogue with Stillness

Book Review by Basudhara Roy

Title: Ukiyo-e Days… Haiku Moments

Author: Bina Sarkar Ellias

Publisher: Red River

The wonder of art acknowledges and affirms the potency of stillness, its pregnancy vouching for a revelation that is both vital and imminent. Ambitious as the thought is, is it possible to engage in a dialogue with stillness, to distil the flurry of a day into the transcendence of a moment, and to transform that moment, in turn, into a metaphoric prism for the illumination of all our hereafters? In her recent collection of poems Ukiyo-e Days… Haiku Moments, Bina Sarkar Ellias can justifiably claim to have assayed each of these tasks with remarkable felicity and quiet grace.

A form of Japanese art that flourished between the 17th and the 19th centuries, ‘ukiyo-e’ is a composite of three words – ‘uki’ (floating), ‘yo’ (world) and ‘e’ (pictures), literally meaning “pictures of the floating world”. The ‘floating world’ referred to the theatre districts and (licensed) courtesan quarters that flourished in Japan’s major cities during the Edo period and constituted an important source of attraction for the nouveau-riche of the era. Inhabited largely by courtesans and the traditional kabuki actors, this floating world, despite its low status in the social hierarchy of the times, made its impact as valuable cultural capital, its sartorial customs and mannerisms becoming quite effectively, a rage among common people.

Since paintings could be afforded only by the prosperous, the ukiyo-e artists made a distinct historical move to democratise art by being the first to experiment with woodblock prints which could be produced cheaply and in large numbers, thus making ukiyo-e widely accessible to the  populace. Actors, courtesans, legends, folklore, and landscapes were some of the common subjects that marked this art, the heroic and the erotic being significant thematic notes within it.

Ukiyo-e Days… Haiku Moments revisits this memorable Japanese artform to bring to the reader a remarkable collection of 68 ukiyo-e by 28 artists from across the seventeenth to the early twentieth century, showcasing a delectable mix of the traditional and the modern in Japanese art and its unique blend of native and foreign influences. Compounding the effect of the Ukiyo-e here, is a set of 62 haiku by Bina that excavate, explore and expand the meaning and value of the artworks by bringing them into dense ekphrastic conversation with her own mind and times. “My haiku travels with each of the ukiyo-e works as a companion through this journey, responding with a deep kinship I feel with the artworks,” she writes in her Preface.

In this collaborative project of creativity, the haiku become a companion to the historical journey of the ukiyo-e, illuminating them in a transcultural framework which even as it asserts the omnipotent significance of art, helps draw attention to its omniscience across temporal and cultural divides. “To read a haiku,” says Jane Hirshfield, “is to become its co-author, to place yourself inside its words until they reveal one of the proteus-shapes of your own life.” As Bina places her contemporary and complex historical self within the sensibility of the ukiyo-e, her unravelling of meaning through the haiku becomes yet another act of seeking connection and consolation in an alienated world.

As a poetic form, the haiku establishes a constant romance with the brevity of expression on the one hand and the expanse of space on the other. Its sharp imagism helps to illumine both the moment and the emotional ambience that will render this moment organic in every context. Scale, speed, succinctness and surrealism can all work in concert within the seemingly fragile universe of the haiku to make it an emblem of and testimony to the wide-ranging historical forces within which it is birthed. The animated and tender conversation between colour, form and script in Ukiyo-e Days… Haiku Moments works similarly holding both word and beauty in suspension, mirroring the moment as self and self as moment, and asking us to return to the quintessential celebration of both:

you want to be free
but maya mesmerises-
locks all the doors

The haiku is, often, a lesson in perception. It is characteristic of the haiku to be profoundly epiphanic and in many of her pieces, Bina ascends to that level of quiet illumination wherein an inner truth becomes simpler by the sole virtue of its lucid expression. Art, life, hope, faith, poetry, war, human vulnerability — all emerge as important themes here. One cannot help noticing, however, the collection’s loving partiality toward women. Women and their myriad-layered lives constitute a recurrent thematic motif in these poems:

into the long night
her toil of pleasure-giving
a tale of two worlds

Since in much of the ukiyo-e, the women represented were courtesans, Bina brings a profound sense of tenderness and understanding in reinterpreting their situation for modern women whose lives, in different contexts, remain emotively the same. In their intensity and in the overall poignance with which these haiku delineate women’s ever-shifting roles in terms of profession, domesticity and relationships with the world, Bina evinces a deep knowledge of women’s spiritual multiplicity. To Torii Kiiyonaga’s delicate artwork ‘Bathhouse Women’, for instance, Bina, deflecting attention from the voyeuristic potential of the scene to give the bathhouse a larger cultural and political logic, responds:

a day for washing
wash away patriarchy
energise our souls

Another beautiful narrative turn in haiku is offered in response to Kitagawa Utamaro’s print ‘Naniwa Okita Admiring Herself in a Mirror’ in which Bina imagines a different (more youthful) face emerging from the mirror. While the mirror has mostly been used as a truth-telling device in literature and a means of shattering illusion, this particular mirror becomes a gateway to the discovery of the magical self within, unmarred by the winter of time:

i see a mirage
see my youth in winter years
does the mirror lie?

With Chobunsai Eishi’s ‘The Courtesan Hanaogi of the Ogiya Brothel’, Bina communicates thus:

within the prose
of her pleasure-house living
she breathes poetry

Here is a mature and perceptive weaving of art and life — a recognition of art as art and of life as life with the potential of building strong and tenable bridges across them. It is noteworthy how each haiku stands independently even as it adds a significant hermeneutic or experiential dimension to the ukiyo-e, imparting a certain luminosity to this book. There is a distinct sensation of time-travel in this collection, of moving through the slow whirl of centuries while remaining undivorced from the crises and flavours of the present:

realisation
we were not born violent
let’s repair ourselves

Empathy becomes a powerful voice in Ukiyo-e Days as Bina’s haiku touches raw spots within our shredding cultural fabric to draw attention to greed, war, exploitation and the relentless process of needing to find our integral human selves:

all the world’s armies
trained as cannon fodder
they live to die

In these delicate and consummately-crafted pieces, one finds doors open to deep investigation of the moment and what it stands for in life’s ever-shifting landscape. There is a stillness that the collection speaks from and to, a stillness that characterises both the ukiyo-e and the haiku as art forms. Invested with extraordinary visual and tactile charm and an interesting Preface that throws light on the genesis and growth of the ukiyo-e in Japan, this book accomplishes a unique synthesis between two valuable Japanese art forms, bringing to a connoisseur-reader the unforgettable enchantment of both.

Basudhara Roy teaches English at Karim City College affiliated to Kolhan University, Chaibasa. Author of three collections of poems, her latest work has been featured in EPW, The Pine Cone Review, Live Wire, Lucy Writers Platform, Setu and The Aleph Review among others. 

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PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL

Click here to access the Borderless anthology, Monalisa No Longer Smiles

Click here to access Monalisa No Longer Smiles on Kindle Amazon International

Categories
Review

Reconstructing a Broken World with Sufism

Book Review by Basudhara Roy

Title: Evening with a Sufi: Selected Poems

Poet: Afsar Mohammad

Translator: Afsar Mohammad and Shamala Gallagher

Publisher: Red River

I’m sorry, my Lord. 

My poem is not your slave,
it’s a sickle with its head to the sky. 

My poem is not a damsel timid in your moonlight,
it’s a tiger prowling in a shadowed forest. 

My poem won’t be your grand constitution, 
devoted to your happiness 
at all costs.

-	‘Outcast’s Grief’ from Evening with a Sufi

Not all poetry can be read with the same eye or ear. Certain poems demand to be seen and heard on their own terms, offering to the reader their own canons of understanding and appreciation in imaging an idea that, through them, has just been born into thought. Afsar Mohammad’s Evening with a Sufi sets out to be one such thought-provoking book of poems.

A slim collection of twenty-six verses selected and translated from Afsar Mohammad’s extensive oeuvre in Telugu by Shamala Gallagher and the poet himself, these are existential political poems that are as theoretically perspicacious as they are urgent and astounding in their overwhelming sincerity. Like Eliot’s The Waste Land, Afsar Mohammad’s Evening with a Sufi aesthetically documents a difficult world, especially one criss-crossed with systemic hegemony, and bereft of equality. An engagement with these poems is a direct invitation to the reader to embark on an epistemological tour into a sharp symbolic landscape that encapsulates visceral records of social meaning.

The title, to begin with, itself upholds a strong symbolism. Its ‘evening’ bespeaks the twilight of civilisation, the personal-social moment of the unleashing of despair, and a decadent global landscape thriving on inequity and deprivation. And yet, evening, in these poems, is also the transitional period of awareness, self-reflection, evaluation, and the collective envisioning of an egalitarian dawn. These poems, therefore, become investigations and articulations of both fatigue and rest, of falling apart and re-gathering, and of old failures and new beginnings, leading us to look at the idea of the Sufi or Sufism anew.

“For me, Sufism is nothing but a tool of resistance,” avers the poet, indicating how Sufism, as a philosophy, offers a vigorous counternarrative to transnational policies and practices of discrimination, marginalisation, disempowerment and exclusion. “In my village Sufism, I see how people of diverse colours and castes share food, rituals and stories. As a village person, it’s not a far-fetched utopia for me — but an everyday reality. My writings are nothing but reminders of that shared realm of life.”

In Afsar’s poems, Sufism becomes a political as well as existential search for a vision of oneness. This vision is, at the same time, philosophical and social, local and global, integrating and intimidating in the way that most revolutions are – “The drop that can swallow a desert” (‘Another Word’) or “Where walls are knocked down,/ we won’t need the splendour of curtains” (‘The Spectator is Dead’) or “I always speak the language of war.” (‘A Green Bird and the Nest of Light’)

Identity surfaces as a significant theme in this book. Most of the twenty-six poems in Evening with a Sufi embark on a complex exploration of identity on geographical, cultural, social, historical or linguistic terrains. However, the book’s conceptualisation of identity is far from monolithic. Germane to the vision of these poems is the essentially dialogic space of identity and its characterization as an ever-contingent work-in-progress.

Mark the first poem in the collection, for instance. Titled ‘Name Calling’, an ambiguous phrase that poignantly addresses the phenomenon of naming as an act of use and abuse, the poem captures the essential seamlessness of names and identities. The protagonist of the piece is a boyhood contemporary called Usman who is visibly an ‘other’ to the speaker of the poem, the difference between them marked out distinctly in class terms and perhaps also (less evidently) in terms of physical ability – “You scared all the children/ away from the river./ A body like a wound/ peeks from your torn shirt.” It is, however, to this social pariah – “the one street dog doggedly haunted by a ball” that the speaker feels affiliated in his later life:

Now I don’t see much difference between you and me. 
We are the same.[…]
Usman, times never change 
only the roles change.

Muslim, Telugu and Third-world migrant, the poet reads the theory and experience of otherness on a number of sociological axes and through a variety of cultural lenses. In ‘The Accented Word’, he uses the idea of accent to explore the complex genealogies of language on the intersections of purism and cultural hegemony, contemplating variously, through the three sections of the poem, on linguistic integrity, capitalist subordination, and postcolonial erasure:

Words 
are stillborn babies. 

Their blood has gone bad with white poison, 
their words have gone bad from the accent. 

I’ve been poured, shared, and bathed in white poison 
since I was little 
and now I want to speak out for myself. 

But my voice is in chains 
and my language is poisoned, 

and the language of my time is poisoned. 

We live on the brackish water of life.

While Shakespeare’s Caliban in The Tempest felt that the colonizer’s language profited him by teaching him “how to curse”, Afsar’s poems approach language with utmost caution, forever mindful of the possibility of trampling and obscuring buried histories of domination and betrayal. Many of the poems, here, are metapoetic in their thrust, assiduously exploring the value of meaningful postcolonial poetic creation from the inescapable inequities and ideological loopholes of language: “a market piles up words sounding like poetry” (‘The Accented Word’) or “How long this slavery to white poems?” (‘Outcast’s Grief’) or again as in “Poetry: / just one dried leaf.” (‘Walking’)

In ‘A Piece of Bread, a Country, and a Shehnai’, bread, music, war and pain – all come together to avow our subcontinent’s shared heritage of poverty and cultural intimacy brutally shredded by politico-religious separation. In ‘No Birthplace’, the speaker of the poem is as much the Indian subcontinent as its hapless postcolonial citizen faced with the inability to reconcile its historical legacy of cultural plurality with the blind spots in its mythological and ideological machinery:

Come, divide me by myself, I say. 
Not by forty-seven. 

My laughs, screams, harangues, deaths, and rapes — 
They’re all yours too!

It is interesting to note how Afsar’s poems consistently invigorate and socially translate the idea of spirituality through sinewy sociological imagery with the result that spirituality is transformed from a closeted and socially-indifferent personal practice to a welfare-oriented everyday social ritual. In ‘Iftar Siren’, the idea of fasting as self-purification is ironically brought to bear on the understanding of the hunger-stricken socially dispossessed as perpetually cleansed while the overfed victimisers walk about unconcerned:

What a great life. 
In the holy month, 

do you see how you are all becoming pure? 
I’ve been like this for years 

burning in the divine fire. 
Unable to turn into ashes. 

I’m a fire-pit you try 
and try to stamp out. 

Yes, the fire-pit 
is tired too.

The haunting and incendiary metaphor of hunger as fire and the stomach/body as the fire-pit, tired of being stamped out or dispossessed, makes these poems powerful bandages for social injustices as well as flaming flags of protest. In ‘Qibla’, the posture of prayer, again, pivots on the stomach – “a belly turned deep/ into itself/ in which I obscure my body,/ feet, hands and everything/ for a long time” – suggesting the omnipotence of hunger as surpassing all acts of asocial faith. The poem concludes with considerable uncertainty of the efficacy of prayer and with an ideological pun on “arms” (arm/armament) as a means of erasing human hatred.

The stupendous yet composed energy of the book needs no forestatement. Every single word here is deftly chosen, well-placed, and tersely poised to make emotional leaps on command. The images are taut, the sentiments thoroughly grilled in the fire of creative originality, and everywhere, there is a sense of potential unruliness held firmly in check by a balanced and farsighted imagination.

In considering these poems, one must not forget, also, their complex linguistic history. Though translated from the original Telugu, the Telugu language itself includes, for the poet, “the entangled history of Urdu, Hindi and English — the languages that indeed shaped my emotional realm.” Arriving into English via such multi-layered linguistic travails and travels, these exceptionally well-translated poems infuse postcolonial English with a visceral depth, a spiritual profundity and a razor-sharp urgency that would be difficult to come by in the original English.

Accompanied by a very relevant author interview and insightful essays by the translator and  valuable first readers of this collection, Evening with a Sufi arrives, in its essential philosophy and call for humanitarian action, with a new theory and praxis for the world, determined to reconstruct rather than redeem it.

Basudhara Roy teaches English at Karim City College affiliated to Kolhan University, Chaibasa. Drawn to gender and ecological studies, her four published books include a monograph and three poetry collections. Her recent works are available at Outlook India, The Dhaka Tribune, EPW, Madras Courier and Live Wire among others.

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Click here to read the book excerpt from Evening With a Sufi

PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL

Categories
Review

Re-deciphering the Human

Book Review By Basudhara Roy

Title: Burn the Library and Other Fictions

Author: Sunil Sharma

To embark on a relationship with a meaningful collection of short fiction is to hone one’s awareness of the world that shapes us and is, in its turn, shaped by us. A well-conceived short story is a sharp ray of light that undertakes to illuminate a particular plane of the compound and poly-faceted experience that reality will always be. Urging us to concentrate on that angle alone,  the short story crucially assists in peeling off our familiarity with life at that point of being and invites us to locate new meaning in what we might have long known.

In the company of Sunil Sharma’s Burn the Library and Other Fictions, a collection of twenty dense pieces of short fiction, one is on a riveting journey into the physical and psychological entrails of a society that is blissfully absorbed in plotting the architecture of its own doom. Sunil Sharma is an academic from Mumbai who has relocated to Toronto post-retirement. Acutely conscious of the subtle but definite ways in which social life, interaction and communication are being endangered by stereotypes, prejudices, capitalist strategies, ICT, artificial intelligence, eroding faith, self-doubt and the surrender to myopia, Sunil Sharma attempts, in these tales, to not merely draw our attention to what ails us as a society but also offers valuable possibilities of grace and redemption.

Ranging in form from flash fiction to full-length short stories, the themes in this collection are eclectic. Dreams, conjugal relationships, diasporic intimacy, the plight of migrants, women and elderly people, the breakdown of the family, the disruption of social cohesiveness and harmony, the threat of being transformed from consumers to victims of hyper-functional gadgets, and the consistent search for meaning amidst life’s ruins contour this collection through angst, satire, tenderness and hope. 

What immediately draws one towards Sharma’s style is his capacity for intricate observation and his incisive, almost brutal honesty in his descriptions. Here is a writer who does not hesitate to call a spade a spade without resort to satire, irony or humour to dilute the effect of his statements. In fiction where it is easy to camouflage and refract ideas, Sharma impresses and inspires by keeping critique frank and unencumbered by location, ideology or craft.

In ‘Love: Beyond Words’, the reflective narrator-husband observes:

“Our worlds, exclusive, were held together by an arranged marriage and later on, by the kids only…like rest of the middleclass Indians. Two perfect strangers brought together by common practices who discovered each other in initial years of marriage and then lost by the pressures of work and antiromance conditions of our living in an Indian metro…like others of our ilk.”

In the poignant flash fiction ‘Skeleton in the Attic’, once the skeleton has been identified as that of the paternal grandmother whom the family forgot to unlock from the attic when it left for its vacation in a hurry, the omniscient narrator quietly points out, “Once the shock was over, food was ordered and video of the visit played out and they forgot the skeleton.” In ‘Beware! Migrants are Coming!’, the interrogator minces no words in establishing the migrant’s statistical invisibility and thereby his ontological dispensability:

“You are a scum. A bloody scum. You come first to our holy land. Then you bring your entire hungry village that sucks us dry. We will no longer tolerate this N-O-W. The thieves are disposable. None cries for a thief. You are not human. You are not us, your death will not affect us, or anybody here, or anywhere.”

Concern for the margins remains central to Sharma’s intellectual, emotional and moral vision of a sane and progressive society. In story after story, it is these interstices that he examines, emphasizing their structural importance to the well-being of the centre. The malady, as the writer establishes, is rampant and global. Whether it is women, the poor, the elderly, the disabled or the migrant, the health of the margins directly determines the health of the centre. In ‘Two Black Stones and an Old God’, for instance, faith in divine reward and punishment becomes a device of empowerment for the grandmother and granddaughter both of whom are victims of the family’s neglect. In ‘The Street’, the narrator maps the entire cultural change that has taken place in his native town of Ghaziabad by observing the difference in the metrics of spatial arrangement and communication. The transformation of the public space that once symbolised community, shared concern and active empathy into a space of inequality, indifference and social apathy marks, for the narrator, the apotheosis of postmodernist social fragmentation and alienation.

However, the most stringent and memorable critique of postmodern and posthuman culture is perhaps put forward through the eponymous story ‘Burn the Library’. Though the setting of the story is 2071, around fifty years into the future, the conflict that it explores between information and knowledge, between programmed intelligence and creative thinking and between human growth and entropy is vital to the fabric of contemporary intellectual debate. What is the future that we are enthusiastically chasing, the writer seems to ask. Does it promise an unfolding of our rational and emotive powers or does it seek to arrest and freeze them unconditionally? For Sharma, the possibility of resistance to the omnivorous challenges of technology usurping humanity lies only in and through the circulation of ideas via writing. Ideas alone, for Sharma, are indestructible and even if all libraries were to be burnt and all sources of information were to be destroyed or corrupted, new knowledge could be founded and resurrected in the world through the strength of individual creative thinking alone. The Advanced Homer (AH) virus that seeks to alter “consciousness about culture” says, “Wake up! Find out authenticity. Life. Real life beyond the wired universe. Think – alternatively. Subdue the dominant of technology. It is not our master anyway. Go human. Re-think culture.”

‘Go Human’ is a powerful slogan, lethal in its simplicity as it indicates how far we have strayed from what we were meant to be. For me, it richly encapsulates the vision of the entire collection since it is only by the reclamation of our own humanity and that of others around us that we can battle the evils of discrimination, prejudice, violence and self-destruction.

Basudhara Roy teaches English at Karim City College affiliated to Kolhan University, Chaibasa. Author of three collections of poems, her latest work has been featured in EPW, The Pine Cone Review, Live Wire, Lucy Writers Platform, Setu and The Aleph Review among others.

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