അങ്ങേയറ്റം  രസകരവും പ്രയോജനപ്രദവുമായ ക്ലാസ്സുകളും പ്രായോഗിക പരീക്ഷണങ്ങളുമാണ് ഇവിടെ നടക്കുന്നത് എന്ന് കണ്ടതില്‍  വലിയ സന്തോഷമുണ്ട്.

സര്‍ഗ്ഗാത്മകത എന്നാല്‍ കലാപ്രവര്‍ത്തനം മാത്രമാണെന്ന  ഒരു ധാരണ പരക്കെ നില നില്‍ക്കുന്നുണ്ട്. എന്നാല്‍ അത് മനുഷ്യജീവിയുടെ ഒരു അടിസ്ഥാന സ്വഭാവം തന്നെയാണ്. നിലം ഒരുക്കി വിത്ത് വിതയ്ക്കുന്ന കര്‍ഷകനും കുടമുണ്ടാക്കുകയും പായ് നെയ്യുകയും മുറവും കുട്ടയും ഉണ്ടാക്കുകയും  പാട്ടു പാടി  ഞാറു  പറിക്കുകയും  ചെയ്യുന്ന കൈവേലക്കാരും കര്‍ഷകരും കാറ്റില്‍ നൃത്തം ചെയ്യുന്ന  ആദിവാസിയും എല്ലാം ആവിഷ്കരിക്കുന്നത് തങ്ങളുടെ സര്‍ഗ്ഗാത്മകത തന്നെയാണ്. ഇതിന്റെ മറ്റൊരു തലമാണ് പ്രപഞ്ചരഹസ്യം തേടുന്ന  ശാസ്ത്രജ്ഞനും തത്വചിന്തകനും വെളിപ്പെടുത്തുന്നത്. ചിത്രം, ശില്‍പ്പം, സാഹിത്യം, വാസ്തുശില്‍പ്പം, സംഗീതം, നൃത്തം, നാടകം , ചലച്ചിത്രം തുടങ്ങിയ കലാപ്രവര്‍ത്തനങ്ങള്‍ സര്‍ഗ്ഗാത്മകതയുടെ മറ്റൊരു മുഖം വെളിപ്പെടുത്തുന്നു. സാമൂഹ്യസേവനം മറ്റൊരു സര്‍ഗ്ഗാത്മക പ്രവര്‍ത്തനമാണ്. അപ്പോള്‍ എല്ലാ മനുഷ്യരിലും സര്‍ഗ്ഗാത്മകതയുടെയും വിജ്ഞാന കൌതുകത്തിന്റെയും ഒരു വിത്തുണ്ട് അതിനു മുളച്ചു വലുതാകാനുള്ള വളവും വെള്ളവും വെളിച്ചവും  നല്‍കുകയാണ് വിദ്യാഭ്യാസപ്രവര്‍ത്തനത്തിന്റെ കടമ. ഇവിടെ നടക്കുന്നതും അതാണെന്ന് കാണുന്നതില്‍ വലിയ സന്തോഷമുണ്ട്

സ്നേഹപൂര്‍വ്വം, ആശംസകളോടെ,
സച്ചിദാനന്ദന്‍ 

INTERROGATING THE STATUS QUO
Kamala Das ( 1934-2009)

K.SATCHIDANANDAN

Madhavikkutty, Kamala Das to the aliens, was the last of the golden icons we Malayalees nourished with our sleazy gossips and affectionate tears. Excuse us if we become too possessive when it comes to our dear writers, even if we do our bit to make their lives somewhat unpleasant while they are alive and at times even kindly drive them out of home. In this fever of possessiveness we sometimes tend to ignore their contributions in other languages endearing them to people of diverse lands and their creative dimensions little known to us. But we do compensate in the end as those glued to the Kerala television channels on those gloomy days after Madhavikkutty’s demise must have known: it was a funeral procession fit for a queen of letters that she really was and finally when her body that she had both celebrated and spurned was interred under a tree in the precincts of the Juma Masjid in Thiruvananthapuram, we decided to come together to mourn the legend, burying with her bones, if only for a while, our caste feuds, religious rivalries and party battles.

This unique writer, though no Fernando Pessoa to write in four distinct names and styles, did have many voices all strung together by her disarming frankness that unwittingly shocked a conservative society so that they left the complacency of their staus-quoist beliefs to undertake painfully difficult inward journeys. In the end they would realise, even if vaguely like Eliot’s magi, that there was certainly a new birth, and a transformation of the order was afoot. Her many identities were in fruitful dialogue with one another and coalesced into one at the point of realisation: Amy, the beloved of the aristocratic Nalapptt family in South Malabar where she was born and the dearest and the most generous of friends to the small circle of intimate companions to whom she opened her heart completely; Kamala Das , the radical Indian poet writing in English who did not mind sacrificing the sterile aestheticism of older poetry for the freedom of the body and the mind and managed to ‘gatecrash into the precincts of others’ dreams’ (Anamalai Poems); Madhavikkutty, the Malayalam fiction writer who redefined the very genre of the novel and short story in the language and gave it singing nerves and Kamala Surayya who sought refuge for her tired wings in the total surrender to Allah who was to her the very embodiment of the love she had sought all her life. She was honest in the deepest sense of the word , but was not naïve and foolish as many seem to imagine: she was strong-willed and could interrogate her community as few Indian women-writers before her had done. She could be naughty and mischievous when she wanted and had a great sense of humour and irony evident in her memoirs as well as her poems. She continued to laugh at religious superstitions even after her conversion and was openly critical of the Malayali inhibition and hypocrisy in man-woman relationships.

I had ( forget ‘us’ now) , as an adolescent school boy, first known her as Madhavikkutty, a Malayalam writer of a novel kind of fiction that bordered on poetry that kept appearing in the Mathrubhumi Weekly which in those glorious days of the publication under the editorship of N. V. Krishna Warrier the scholar-poet and later of M.T. Vasudevan Nair, the fiction writer and film maker, used to feature all our beloved poets and fiction writers. Her first story, Kushtarogi (The Leper) had appeared in the Mathrubhumi Weekly in 1942 when she was a little girl and I was yet to be born; with the publication of Mathilukal ( The Walls) , her first collection in 1955, she had already established her place in Malayalam shortstory. She belonged to a generation that includes M.T. Vasudevan Nair, T. Patmanabhan and Kovilan who had all gone beyond the socialist realist mode employed by their predecessors to explore the tormented psyche of the solitary human beings haunted by guilt, pain and lovelessness. These writers- Vaikom Mohammed Basheer for their forerunner- travelled from the outer drama of social events to the inner drama of emotions; the states of mind became more important to them than the states of the community to express which they developed a taut and cryptic lyrical idiom. The narrative content became so thin in their stories and the form so much an organic part of it that they could hardly be retold in another voice.

In Madhavikkutty this inward evolution touched its peak; her stories most often evolved from a central image and expressed a mood or a vision. Even the titles of her stories sounded like the titles of paintings or poems (she herself practised painting for a while, her female nudes too shocking the prudish section of the Malayalis prone to be startled at the very mention of sex, their secret obsession): The Red Skirt, The Red Mansion, The Child in the Naval Uniform, The Father and The Son, The Moon’s Meat, Sandalwood Trees, The Secret of the Dawn, Boats, The Scent of the Bird, The King’s Beloved, A Doll for Rukmini..Her vocabulary was limited as she had little formal education and had mostly grown up outside Kerala; but she turned this limitation to her advantage by her deft and economic employment of those few words in her stories that were always spare and crisp to the point of being fragile. Many of her stories were not longer than two or three book-pages, including the famous ones like ‘Padmavati, the Harlot’. Here a harlot, like in the Arun Kolatkar poem where a prostitute longs to be photographed with Vithoba and Rukmai, goes to the temple, requests God to accept her ragged body that was like a river that does not dry up even if thousands bathe in it, meets her god who is growing old and gets dissolved in him for a while to return purified. In her later stories like ‘Pakshiyude Manam’ ( The Scent of a Bird), ‘Unni’, ‘Kalyani’, ‘Malancherivukalil’( On the Mountain Slopes), and ‘Karutta Patti’ ( The Black Dog) the element of fantasy grew stronger; they became more and more compressed often taking the form of brief monologues.

At times her stories became pure poetry, just emotional contexts with no narrative content . Look at ‘Premattinte Vilapakavyam’ ( An Elegy for Love): “You are my beloved. You are the old sweet mango tree for my jasmine creeper to wind around. You appear before me with the sad halo of a king in exile. I longed to have you in my lap, heal your wounds and ease your wearines. You are fortunate and you are the fortune.. You are pure, unmixed manliness.Woman’s soul is the garden where you roam. You are inside me and outside me. You rest on the banks of the sanguine streams inside me like a king tired of hunting. You trample my nerves with your boots, thinking they are the roots of the wild trees long ago dead…” In some stories , especially those around the character Janu, a house-maid, Madhavikkutty employed the dialect of her Valluvanad to great effect. Thus the stories collected in her seven volumes in Malayalam show great thematic and structural diversity while being linked together by their essential femininity, their sisterhood with nature ( her stories are full of birds and trees, sand and fields and moonlight ) and the presence of her rural locale, either as real setting or as a nostalgic landscape. She is one with the Modernists like O. V. Vijayan, Anand, M. Mukundan, Sethu, Kakkanadan and Punattil Kunhabdulla in urbanising fiction in Malayalam, but she had her own way of doing it: her urban women are mostly schizophrenic, torn by conflicts and desperate for real love while her rural women, mostly drawn from the lower classes, are less inhibited and openly critical of the master-race and patriarchal interventions. They also seem more at peace with themselves as they feel the presence of a community and of comforting nature around them. Women and nature here appear to fertilize each other. Even in the city the woman feels pacified by the soothing touch of the tender mango leaf on the terrace. Ammu who in Sarkara Kondoru Tulabharam ( An Offering with Jaggery) visits Guruvayur for the offering with her husband Biju cured by her prayers and refuses to go back with him to the city, attracted by her farmer-cousin in the village living in harmony with nature, sums up this attitude.

Probably her autobiographical writings grew out of her monologic tales. Ente Katha ( My Story) that was written during her treatment for lukemia created a sensation when it was serialised in Malyalanadu Weekly. Her father, the powerful V.M. Nair who was the Managing Director of the Mathrubhumi group, ( whom Kamala Das remembers in a poem on his death as her occasional visitor ‘who came with banana chips and abuses’) asked the editor to suspend its publication, but the proud author would be the last to yield. The readers were drawn into a charming and threatening life of love and longing, of desire and disloyalty. Her readers, in the typical Malayali fashion, lapped up the story of forbidden delights and then condemned her ‘moral aberrations’. And she, the eternal Sphinx, kept them tantalized by dropping contradictory hints, first confessing it was nothing but truth and then declaring it was just a wish-fulfilling fantasy, an alter-life she had created for herself. She wrote other memoirs too: Balyakalasmaranakal ( The Memories of Childhood), Varshangalkku Munpu ( Years ago) and Neermatalam Poottappol ( When the Pomegranates Bloomed). It is safe to view all her works as part real and part fantasy as she was adept at genre-crossing. Her novels- there are seven of them if we follow the publishers’ categorization, including Chandanamarangal -Sandalwood trees- that obliquely deals with same-sex love- are long stories, most of her stories are like poems, the style of her poems is often not very different from her stories’ and the one-act play, Memory Great Moody Sea combines all these genres!

I came to her poetry later, reading, in 1968 her Summer in Calcutta (1965) and Descendants (1967) together , being charmed by her eloquent images and her unconventional attitude to the art of poetry. I had already started corresponding with her by now and had received generous praise from her-she was the poetry editor for The Illustrated Weekly of India then- for my early poems like Anchusooryan (Five Suns)., though we began meeting occasionally later , mostly in public functions. Now I began following her poetry closely and read her later collections like Old Playhouse and Other Poems (1976), The Best of Kamala Das (1991) and Anamalai Poems( 1992). I knew how much she trusted me only when she insisted on my writing the introduction to her collected poems Only the Soul Knows How to Sing. I undertook the mission with genuine involvement, finding in her poetry unnoticed nuances and muted voices that transcended the narcissistic obsession with the body and with herself often attributed to her. This transcendence comes partly from her political engagement and partly from her secular spiritual concerns.

“ I am a million, million people/talking all at once, with voices/raised in clamour…/ I am a million, million silences strung like crystal beads/ onto someone else’s song..”-these lines seemingly so uncharacteristic of a poet of solitude ever in search of intimacy betray Kamala Das’s intense desire to identify herself with the silenced victims of oppression, patriarchal as well as political. Kamla Das’s very first collection of poems, Summer in Calcutta , broke new ground in Indian poetry in English dominated until her entry by men from Nissim Ezekiel and Dom Moraes to Adil Jussawallah and A. K. Ramanujan who had already de-romanticized poetry and liberated it from its earlier flamboyance and verbosity. Here was a voice that was feminine to the core, often confessional in vein, that spoke uninhibitedly about woman’s desire and her unending search for true love. She had little respect for tradition and yet many traditions went into the making of her poetry : the rebellious spirituality of the women Bhakti poets, the sonorous sensuousness of the Tamil sangam poets, the empathy with the down-trodden and the hatred of violence central to the great poetry of her mother Balamani Amma, the melancholy tempered by a larger vision of life characteristic of the poetry of her uncle Nalappatt Narayana Menon (who was the translator of Victor Hugo, of Havelock Ellis too.) ‘An Introduction’, her most discussed and paradigmatic poem with its defence of her trilingualism, her opposition to male power, her rejection of the traditional roles of the house-wife and the cook, and her longing for love was a clear announcement of her arrival on the scene. “I am every woman who seeks love/… I am the sinner, I am the saint. I am both the lover/ and the beloved. I have no joys which are not yours,/ no aches which are not yours/ we share the same name,the same fate, the same crumbled dreams…” The direct kinship with her reader that she establishes here, the identification of female physicality with female textuality, similes drawn from nature, the opposition to feudal norms and man-made hierarchies, the quest for intimacy and an almost clinical exploration of the landscape of the self and the interrogation of the family as an oppressive institution became the hallmarks of her writing in the years to come.

Kamala Das denounced the extreme forms of feminism as she could not imagine a world without men or think that replacing male hegemony with female hegemony would create an egalitarian world; she never wanted to master anyone including herself. She is deeply aware of her difference as woman but would see it as natural rather than glorify it. Her Radha melts in the first embrace of Krishna until only he remains (Radha). In the panic of surrender, Radha tells Krishna: “Your body is my prison../ I cannot see beyond it/ Your darkness blinds me/ Your love words shut out the wise world’s din”.But she also wants to escape: “As the convict studies/ his prison’s geography/ I study the trappings/ of your body, dear love,/for, I must some day find an escape from its snare.” Poetry to her became an organic extension of the body as also a means to ultimately transcend it.

Her poetry soon showed a widening of concerns and an extension of empathy to embrace the victims of all forms of tyranny and discrimination. If to begin with the personal was the political for her, later the political became personal as in her poems like ‘Delhi 1984’, a severe indictment of the genocide of Sikhs in Delhi and the new cult of hatred and senseless violence it implied, turning “the scriptural chants into a lunatic’s guffaw”. She denounced terrorism in no uncertain terms: “If death is your wish, killing becomes/an easy game.”In ‘Toys’ too her indictment is unambiguous: “Doomed is this new race of men who arrive/ With patriotic slogans to sow dead seeds…” The genocide of Tamils in Sri Lanka-whose climactic orgy we recenly witnessed- grows into a metaphor of collective violence in her poems like ‘Smoke in Colombo’, ‘After July’ and ‘The Sea at Galle Face Green’. She sees here the macabre re-enactment of the first holocaust: “Hitler rose from the dead, he demanded/ Yet another round of applause; he hailed/The robust Aryan blood, the sinister/ Brew that absolves man of his sins and/ Gives him the right to kiill his former friends…” ( Afer July) She bemoans the loss of innocence: “We mated like gods, but begot only our killers./ Each mother suckles her own enemy/ And hate is frst nurtured at her gentle breast..” ( Daughter of the Century).

In her last poems old age , death, nothingness and the desire for transcendence become recurring presences. “At my age there are no longer any home comings” (Woman’s Shuttles). She sees death as “life’s obscure parallel”. The encounter with physical decay forces the poet to look beyond death into a state of spirituality that has little to do with conventional religion.“Bereft of soul,/ My body shall be bare;/ Bereft of body, /My soul shall be bare”(Suicide). The Anamalai Poems are full of references to this tortuous inward journey. “There is a love greater than all you know/that awaits you where the red road finally ends”. Its embrace is truth and she seems to have found this great love in Allah as her poems in Ya Allah testify. Her conversion to Islam at th age of 65 was understood and accepted by her family and close friends while it angered several sections of her admirers including feminists and even some leftists, not to speak of the Hindutva spokesmen, though on different grounds. Kamala, now Surayya, again confused them by attributing different reasons at different times to her conversion, from a friendship misunderstood as love to the indifference of the Hindu scholars who never introduced her to the scriptures even while criticising her and a desire for ultimate peace. She however continued to be what she was but for occasional compromises so that she might not hurt her Muslim sisters and brothers (like refusing to meet Taslima Nasreen when she visited Kerala) and declared that God is one for all religions and women receive no respect in any religion. She wanted to launch a political party, Lokseva, to serve the causes of destitute women and of secularism. She found no contradiction between loving Krishna and revering Allah as Krishna was a lover and Allah was the supreme God. (Rediff Interview, 1999). She was working on two books then: From Malabar to Montreal, a collaborative work on women’s empowerment and a book on Islam for Harper- Collins, though she feared her failing eyesight and poor health might not allow her to complete them. They may still be incomplete, but the tasks she completed in her lifetime are enough to guarantee her a place among the most iconoclstic writers of our time, a beacon and a model especially for every honest woman writer with a story to tell, a song to sing or a shackle to break. Perhaps she has realised that great love she spoke of in the last of the Anamalai Poems, a love above “the random caress or the lust that ends in languor” that “erases even the soul’s ancient indentations so that some unknown womb shall begin to convulse to welcome your restructured perfection”. @

CULTIVATING HOPE:
MAHMOUD DARWISH (1941-2008): AN OBITUARY

K.Satchidanandan

My country is the joy of being in chains,
A kisss sent in the post.
All I want
From the country which slaughtered me
Is my mother’s handkerchief
And reasons for a new death.

I recalled these words of Mahmoud Darwish when I first met the poet in the French city of La Rochelle in 2003 . Both of us had been invited to a reading tour of five French cities as part of the poetry festival, Printemps de Poetes ( The Spring of Poets). I had read Darwish’s poems and translated a few of them into Malayalam years before; yet listening to his passionate and at times musical recitation was a different and exciting experience.

Once Darwish said of his poetry :

When my words were wheat
I was earth.
When my words were anger
I was storm.
When my words were rock
I was river.
When my words turned honey
Flies covered my lips.

Darwish seldom allowed his poetry to turn honey, even during those spells when he was charmed by what is often called ‘pure poetry’. He was primarily a political poet, but one who did not shy away from looking at the mystery of life and death, as demonstrated by many of his later poems that confront the reality of ‘eternity’, Darwish’s euphemism for death, that he began to anticipate since his first heart attack almost a quarter century ago. “As for me,” he wrote in the poem, ‘Mural’, “now that I am filled with all the possible reasons for departure, I am not mine, I am not mine, I am not mine.” The poet himself is aware of the contradictory pulls in his poetry. He says in an interview given to New York Times: “When I move closer to pure poetry, Palestinians say go back to what you were. But I have learned from experience that I can take the reader with me if he trusts me. I can make my modernity, and I can play my games, if I am sincere.” He was trying to develop his own kind of modernity, with native imagery, thematic immediacy, lyrical simplicity, political suggestiveness and concerns like identity and exile. His poetry grows denser as he evolves, making the imagery more involved and poetic structure more complex and multilayered. It is possible that he was also striving to survive his early influences. In the process he developed a fresh Arabic idiom that could well express the real life of the Arabs, both inner and outer, that earned him the title, ‘the saviour of Arabic language.’ He played a major role in shaping Palestinian consciousness and his lines have become part of the very fabric of Modern Arabic culture.Edward Said, the distinguished thinker and critic and a friend of Darwish tells us how his early poems reflect the exile’s need to reassemble an identity out of the refractions and discontinuities of exile. “ (His) considerable work amounts to an epic effort to transform the lyrics of loss into the indefinitely postponed drama of return”. ( See Said’s essay, ‘Reflections on Exile’ in the book with the same title) Darwish depicts his sense of homelessness in the form of a list of unfinished and incomplete things:

But I am the exile.
Seal me with your eyes.
Take me wherever you are-
Take me wherever you are.
Restore to me the colour of face
And the warmth of body
The light of heart and eye,
The salt of bread and rhythm,
The taste of earth…the Motherland.
Shield me with your eyes.
Take me as a relic from the mansion of sorrow.
Take me as a verse from my tragedy;
Take me as a toy, a brick from the house
So that our children will remember to return.

Darwish knew that the pathos of exile was in the loss of contact with the solidity and the satisfaction of earth: home coming was out of the question.

2

Darwish was born in 1941 in the Birwa village east of Acre to parents who were middle range peasants. He was brought up by his grand father as the parents were busy on their land. He was six when Israel attacked his village and had to flee to Lebanon with the family. They came back later, only to find the village obliterated. So they settled in Galilee. Darwish’s home had no books; his first experience of poetry was listening to an itinerant singer on the run from the Israeli army. His elder brother encouraged him to write poetry.

The Israeli Arabs had been under military rule from 1948 to 1986; they were second class citizens not free to move about or to engage in political activity. He could not sincerely join the anniversary celebrations of the founding of Israel. His first poem , written while still in school , was in the form of a conversation between an Arab boy and his Jewish friend. The Arab boy tells the friend, he has a home, toys and games and celebrations, but he had none of these, so why can’t they play together? This poem irked the military governor who warned the boy that his father would lose his job in the quarry if he continued to write poems in that vein. Having been away from Beirut, Darwish had little chance to acquaint himself with modern Arabic poetry being developed there by poets like Adonis and Nizar Khabbani and other poets around the journal, Al-Shi’r. He grew up reading mostly Hebrew poets like Yehuda Amichai or translations of poets like Lorca and Neruda in Hebrew.

Darwish’s early volumes, Leaves from the Olive Tree (1964) A Lover from Palestine (1966) and End of the Night (1967) were published from Israel. He was by now a member of Rakah, The Communist Party of Israel and the editor of its Arab newspaper, Al- Ittihad. He was in jail or under house-arrest several times. His earliest poetry followed classical forms, but by mid-Sixties he had developed a more direct and popular idiom capable of dealing with everyday life. His images came from the rural soil- olive groves, orchards, thyme, basil, rocks and plants. Most of the poems had a staccato effect like verbal hand grenades. Irony, anger and outrage at injustice wee the hall marks of his poetry of resistance. The Palestine issue was for him a prism to reflect internationalist feeling; the land and history of Palestine was a summation of millennia as they showed the influences of Canaanite, Hebrew, Greek, Roman, Ottoman Turkish and British influences, still retaining a core identity of their own. Darwish’s eclecticism and openness comes from an understanding of this inherent diversity of influences that had shaped Arab identity.

Darwish left Israel in 1971 to join the Moscow University and later joined the Palestinian Research Centre in Beirut. Then he moved to Tunis and Paris. He became an executive member of the PLO in 1987 and edited the influential literary review, Al-Karmel. He helped draft the Palestinian Declaration of Statehood, along with the novelist Elias Khouri and Edward Said .But he sagaciously kept himself away from factionalism. He declared , ‘I am a poet with a particular perspective on reality.’ He also wrote afew short stories and his poems mixed observation, irony and humanity. He maintained his optimism against all odds in the 80s:

Streets encircle us
As we walk among the bombs
Are you used to death?
I’m used to life and to endless desire.
Do you know the dead?
I know the ones in love

Or , as he wrote much later,

We do what prisoners do
And what the jobless do,
We cultivate hope.


The Beirut Memoirs he wrote while in Paris, Memory for Forgetfulness, was a poem in prose, a medley of wit and rage and reflectioons on exile and violence. He turned towards mysticism in his last years; human mortality became a major preoccupation. He had heart attacks in 1984 and 98. He resigned from PLO Executive Committee in 1993 as he could not agree with the Oslo Agreement between Israel and PLO which he thought was ‘a risky accord.’ He never regretted the decision; in his New York Times interview he said: “ I hoped I was wrong,I am very sad that I was right.” He went back to Israel in 1995 to visit his mother for whom he has written many poems. ( “ I long for my mother’s breadMy mother’s coffee/Her touch/ Childhood memories grow up in me/Day after day/I must be worth my life /At the hour of my death/Worth the tears of my mother…’, from ‘My Mother.’) Israel allowed him unlimited stay in the self-governing parts of Palestine’s West Bank. He spent his last years in Ramallah and Amman, the capital of Jordan. Darwish’s selected poems translated into Hebrew were published in July 2007 and he held a reading of his works before 2000 people in Haifa. He deplored the Hamas victory in Gaza. His comment was prophetically ironic: “We have triumphed; Gaza has won independence from West Bank.One people now have two states, two prisons, who don’t greet each other. We are dressed in executioner’s clothes.”

By the time he passed away on 9th August after an open-heart surgery in a Texas hospital, Mahmoud Darwish had won several important prizes and honours: The Lotus Prize (1969), Lenin Peace Prize (1983),Lannan Prize for Cultural Freedom (2001) and the Principal Prize of the Prince Claus Fund (2004).The King of Morocco had honoured him with the ‘Moroccan Wissam of Intellectual Merit’ and France, with the Knighthood of Arts and Belles Lettres.He was twice married and divorced without children; most of his poems into English have been done by his first wife, Rana Kabbani.

Meanwhile In 2000, the Israeli Ministry of Education had tried to introduce Darwish’s poems in their school carriculum, but had to give up the move due to the right wing threats. The Prime Minister eclared that ‘the country is not yet ready’. Now after Darwish’s demise the idea has been mooted again by the Government of Israel. Gush Shalom, the Minister for Education remarked : “Mahmoud Darwish was born between us and grew up as an Israeli citizen, not more, and not less. The fact that the State of Israel was unable to give this great creative talent a feeling of belonging, pushing him into decades of exile- isn’t that our badge of infamy?”


3

Mahmoud Darwish taps universal concerns with identity when he explores the paradox of being Palestinian. This paradox of ‘being and not-being’ was even worse for some one like Darwish who was a Palestinian residing in Israel. He speaks of this paradoxical idenity in the poem ‘Mural, whose tone is radically different from that of his famous early poem, ‘Identity Card’:

Whenever I search for myself
I find the others
And when I search for them
I only find my alien self
So am I the individual-crowd?

The interiority of this poem renders its tone radically dfferent from an early assertive poem like ‘Identity Card’:

Put it on record.
I am an Arab.
And the number of my card is fifty thousand.
I have eight children
And the ninth is due after summer.
What is there to be angry about?

Darwish had an open conception about what an Arab is. It was never a closed identity for him, but a plurality ever open to others. His poetry was a dialogue with several cultures and he employed in his poetry Islamic, Christian as well as Jewish myths. Munir Akash notes in the introduction to Darwish’s The Adam of Two Edens that the poet’s work stands out best when read in the context of Yeats, Saint-John Perse, the Surrealists, the Greeks, or the Hebrews. He points out how Darwish draws upon the diverse traditions represented by The Epic of Gilgamesh ,the Biblical Book of Jeremiah, The Egyptian Book of the Dead and The Descent of Ishtar to the Netherworld , for example. But his is a coherent eclecticism as he is exploring the dimensions of Palestinian identity through the incorporation of myth and tradition which speak metaphorically. In the exiled poet’s imagination, even the Native American experience becomes a tool to re-spiritualise the Palestinian universe in a healing way as seen in an epic poem like Indian Speech, so well analysed by the critic, J. Kristen Urban (Literature and Nation in the Middle East).The epic reflects the reality of life under an occupation which is becoming ever more permanent, threatening the historical reality of the Palestinian people while also symbolising the universal condition of man:

Winds will recite our beginning and end
Although our present bleeds, our days are buried
in ashes of legend….
…Strange is what the stranger says!
He hunts down our children, and butterflies as well.
What promises to our garden, stranger,
Can you make? Brass flowers prettier than our own?
As you wish. But do you know
A deer will not approach grass that has been stained
with our blood?

And this is the Native Indian’s prayer to the masters:

Take what you need of night
but leave us a couple of stars to bury
our celestial dead.
Take what you want of the sea
but leave us a few waves to catch some fish
Take all the gold of earth and sun
but leave us the land of our names.
Then go back, stranger, to resume your search
for India once more.

And they remember:

We keep the memory of our loved ones
In jars, like oil and salt-whose names
We tied to the wings of water birds.

The subjugated want ‘the wind to have the flute to weep for the people of this wounded place, and tomorrow weep for you”.They recall the time when they had flourished in America before the onslaught of English guns, French wine, and Influenza, learning their oral history by heart side by side with the people of the deer

We brought you tidings of innocence
And daisies, but you have your god
And we have ours.

The poem transcends hatred by a desire for integration and a robust acceptance of diversity. It avoids simple utopian political solutions and going through it we become ‘integrated beings in a world capable of integration’.

Darwish created a new poetics in Arabic poetry, a poetics of space and place. Intensely lyrical and meticulous in depicting Palestinian places,trees, soil, animals,food and smells, Darwish’s poetry powerfully employs the Arabic convention of Sufi love in his poetic epics like Qasidat al-Ard ( Poem of the Land). Recalling the killing of five girl student demonstrators by the Israeli army on 30 March on the Palestinian Day of the Land, he makes the metaphor move elegantly from land to plant to girls to blood:“ In the month of March / in the year of the uprising / earth told us her blood secrets/In the month of March / five girls at the door/ of the primary school / came past the violet / came past the rifle/ burst into flame. / With roses / with thyme / they opened / the song of the soil / and entered the earth / the ultimate embrace/ March comes to the land / out of earth’s depth / out of the girl’s dance / The violets leaned over a little / so that the girls’ voices / could cross over / the birds pointed their beaks / at the song and at my heart…” The poet calls the soil an extension of his soul, and his hands, the pavement of wounds.

I name the pebbles
wings
I name the birds
almond and figs
I name the ribs
trees
Gently I pull a branch
from the fig tree of my breast
I throw it like a stone
to blow up the conqueror’s tank.

For Darwish, most tragically conscious of the loss of his homeland and his roots, metaphor becomes a synthesising power that magically reconstructs his atomised world. Metaphor becomes an empowering outlet for the powerless and a home for the homeless. They lyrically embrace every corner in his homeland and through them the poet recreates artistically his lost Palestine. In his lyrical world, stone becomes wind, and the prison flowers. There is also intense irony as in the lines,

Ours is a country of words. Talk. Talk.
Let me rest my road against a stone.

The same irony is found in these lines:

They feathered his mouth with chains
And tied his hands to the rock of the dead.
They said; You’re a murderer.
They took his food, his clothes and his banners,
And threw him into the well of the dead.
They said: You’re a thief.
They threw him out of every port
And took away his young beloved.
And then they said: You’re a refugee.

He defines poetry in The State of Siege :

To a reader: do not trust the poem,
The daughter of absence.
It is neither intuition ,nor is it
Thought,
But rather the sense of the abyss.

‘Mural’, his 20th book of poems had a meditative vein; here he contemplates eternity: “There is no age sufficient for me/ To pull my end to the beginning.” But the passion of his early poetry returned in the poems written in 2001-2 like ‘Mohammad’, ‘The Sacrifice’, and ‘A State of Siege’. In ‘A State of Siege’ he captures the state of Palestine in profound images:

The siege is a waiting period
Waiting on the tilted ladder
In the middle of the storm

or

A woman asked the cloud:
Please enfold my loved one
My clothes are soaked with his blood.
If tyou shall not be rain, my love,
Be trees saturated with humidity, be a stone,
And if you shall not be a stone, my love,
Be a moon, be a moon in the loved one’s dream,
So said a woman to her son, in his funeral.

The poet invites thiose who stand in the doorway to come in, drink Arabic coffee with his people so that they feel reassured that Arabs too are men like them.

Let me close with a few lines from the acceptance speech the poet made receiving the Principal Prize of the Prince Claus Fund in Austria: “A person can only be born in one place; however he may die several times elsewhere; in exile and in prisons, in a homeland transformed into a nightmare by occupation and oppression. Poetry is perhaps what teaches us to nurture the charming illusion: how to be reborn out of ourselves over and over again and use words to construct a better world, a fictitious world, that enables us to sign a pact for a permanent and comprehensive peace…with life.”
(K. Satchidanandan is a Malayalam poet, bilingual critic and the former Secretary of the Sahitya Akademi)

INTERROGATING THE STATUS QUO
Kamala Das ( 1934-2009)

K.SATCHIDANANDAN

Madhavikkutty, Kamala Das to the aliens, was the last of the golden icons we Malayalees nourished with our sleazy gossips and affectionate tears. Excuse us if we become too possessive when it comes to our dear writers, even if we do our bit to make their lives somewhat unpleasant while they are alive and at times even kindly drive them out of home. In this fever of possessiveness we sometimes tend to ignore their contributions in other languages endearing them to people of diverse lands and their creative dimensions little known to us. But we do compensate in the end as those glued to the Kerala television channels on those gloomy days after Madhavikkutty’s demise must have known: it was a funeral procession fit for a queen of letters that she really was and finally when her body that she had both celebrated and spurned was interred under a tree in the precincts of the Juma Masjid in Thiruvananthapuram, we decided to come together to mourn the legend, burying with her bones, if only for a while, our caste feuds, religious rivalries and party battles.

This unique writer, though no Fernando Pessoa to write in four distinct names and styles, did have many voices all strung together by her disarming frankness that unwittingly shocked a conservative society so that they left the complacency of their staus-quoist beliefs to undertake painfully difficult inward journeys. In the end they would realise, even if vaguely like Eliot’s magi, that there was certainly a new birth, and a transformation of the order was afoot. Her many identities were in a fruitful dialogue with one another and coalesced into one at the point of realisation: Amy, the beloved of the aristocratic Nalapptt family in South Malabar where she was born and the dearest and the most generous of friends to the small circle of intimate companions to whom she opened her heart completely; Kamala Das , the radical Indian poet writing in English who did not mind sacrificing the sterile aestheticism of older poetry for the freedom of the body and the mind and managed to ‘gatecrash into the precincts of others’ dreams’ (Anamalai Poems); Madhavikkutty, the Malayalam fiction writer who redefined the very genre of the novel and short story in the language and gave it singing nerves and Kamala Surayya who sought refuge for her tired wings in the total surrender to Allah who was to her the very embodiment of the love she had sought all her life. She was honest in the deepest sense of the word , but was not naïve and foolish as many seem to imagine:she was strong-willed and could interrogate her socielty as few Indian women-writers before her had done. She could be naughty and mischievous when she wanted and had a great sense of humour and irony evident in her memoirs as well as her poems. She continued to laugh at religious superstitions even after her conversion and was openly critical of the Malayali inhibition and hypocrisy in man-woman relationships.

I had ( forget ‘us’ now) , as an adolescent school boy, first known her as Madhavikkutty, a Malayalam writer of a novel kind of fiction that bordered on poetry that kept appearing in the Mathrubhumi Weekly which in those glorious days of the publication under the editorship of N. V. Krishna Warrier the scholar-poet and later of M.T. Vasudevan Nair, the fiction writer and film maker, used to feature all our beloved poets and fiction writers. Her first story, Kushtarogi (The Leper) had appeared in the Mathrubhumi Weekly in 1942 when she was a little girl and I was yet to be born; with the publication of Mathilukal ( The Walls) , her first collection in 1955, she had already established her place in Malayalam shortstory. She belonged to a generation that includes M.T. Vasudevan Nair, T. Patmanabhan and Kovilan who had all gone beyond the socialist realist mode employed by their predecessors to explore the tormented psyche of the solitary human beings haunted by guilt, pain and lovelessness. These writers- Vaikom Mohammed Basheer for their forerunner- travelled from the outer drama of social events to the inner drama of emotions; the states of mind became more important to them than the states of the community to express which they developed a taut and cryptic lyrical idiom. The narrative content became so thin in their stories and the form so much an organic part of it that they could hardly be retold in another voice.

In Madhavikkutty this inward evolution touched its peak; her stories most often developed from a central image and expressed a mood or a vision. Even the titles of her stories sounded like the titles of paintings or poems (she herself practised painting for a while, her female nudes too shocking the prudish section of the Malayalis prone to be startled at the very mention of sex, their secret obsession): The Red Skirt, The Red Mansion, The Child in the Naval Uniform, The Father and The Son, The Moon’s Meat, Sandalwood Trees, The Secret of the Dawn, Boats, The Smell of the Bird, The King’s Beloved, A Doll for Rukmini..Her vocabulary was limited as she had little formal education and had mostly grown up outside Kerala; but she turned this limitation to her advantage by her deft and economic employment of those few words in her stories that were always spare and crisp to the point of being fragile. Many of her stories were not longer than two or three book-pages, including the famous ones like ‘Padmavati, the Harlot’ .Here a harlot, like in the Arun Kolatkar poem where a prostitute longs to be photographed with Vithoba and Rukmai, goes to the temple, requests God to accept her ragged body that was like a river that does not dry up even if thousands bathe in it, meets her god who is growing old and gets dissolved in him for a while to return purified. In her later stories like ‘Pakshiyude Manam’ ( The Smell of a Bird), ‘Unni’, ‘Kalyani’, ‘Malancherivukalil’( On the Mountain Slopes),and ‘Karutta Patti’ ( The Black Dog)the element of fantasy grew stronger; they became more and more compressed often taking the form of brief monologues.

At times her stories became pure poetry, just emotional contexts with no narrative content . Look at ‘Premattinte Vilapakavyam’ ( An Elegy for Love): “You are my beloved. You are the old sweet mango tree for my jasmine creeper to wind round. You appear before me with the sad halo of a banished king.I longed to have you in my lap, heal your wounds and ease your wearines. You are fortunate and you are the fortune.. You are pure, unmixed manliness.Woman’s soul is the garden where you roam. You are inside me and outside me. You rest on the banks of the sanguine streams inside me like a king tired of hunting. You trample my nerves with your boots, thinking they are the roots of the wild trees long ago dead…” In some stories , especially those around the character Janu, a house-maid, Madhavikkutty employed the dialect of her Valluvanad to great effect. Thus the stories collected in her seven volumes in Malyalam show great thematic and structural diversity while being linked together by their essential femininity, their sisterhood with nature ( her stories are full of birds and trees, sand and fields and moonlight ) and the presence of her rural locale, either as real setting or as a nostalgic landscape. She is one with the Modernists like O. V. Vijayan, Anand, M. Mukundan, Sethu, Kakkanadan and Punattil Kunhabdula in urbanising fiction in Malayalam, but she had her own way of doing it: her urban women are mostly schizophrenic, torn by conflicts and desperate for real love while her rural women, mostly drawn from the lower classes, are less inhibited and openly critical of the master-race and patriarchal interventions. They also seem more at peace with themselves as they feel the presence of a community and of comforting nature around them. Women and nature here appear to fertilize each other. Even in the city the woman feels pacified by the soothing touch of the tender mango leaf on the terrace. Ammu who in Sarkara Kondoru Tulabharam ( An Offering with Jaggery) visits Guruvayur for the offering with her husband Biju cured by her prayers and refuses to go back with him to the city, attracted by her farmer-cousin in the village living in harmony with nature, sums up this attitude.

Probably her autobiographical writings grew out of her monologic tales. Ente Katha ( My Story) that was written during her treatment for lukemia created a sensation when it was serialised in Malyalanadu Weekly. Her father, the powerful V.M. Nair who was the Managing Director of the Mathrubhumi group, ( whom Kamala Das remembers in a poem on his death as her occasional visitor ‘who came with banana chips and abuses’) asked the editor to suspend its publication, but the proud author would be the last to yield. The readers were drawn into a charming and threatening life of love and longing, of desire and disloyalty. Her readers, in the typical Malayali fashion, lapped up the story of forbidden delights and then condemned her ‘moral aberrations’. And she, the eternal Sphinx, kept them tantalized by dropping contradictory hints, first confessing it was nothing but truth and then declaring it was just a wish-fulfilling fantasy, an alter-life she created for herself. She wrote other memoirs too: Balyakalasmaranakal ( The Memories of Childhood), Varshangalkku Munpu ( Years ago) and Neermatalam Poottappol ( When the Pomegranates Bloomed). It is safe to view all her works as part real and part fantasy as she was adept at genre-crossing. Her novels- there are seven of them if we follow the publishers’ categorization, including Chandanamarangal -Sandalwood trees- that obliquely deals with same-sex love- are long stories, most of her stories are like poems, the style of her poems is often not very different from her stories’ and the one-act play, Memory Great Moody Sea combines all these genres!

I came to her poetry later, reading, in 1968 her Summer in Calcutta (1965) and Descendants (1967) together , being charmed by her eloquent images and her unconventional attitude to the art of poetry. I had already started corresponding with her by now and had received generous praise from her-she was the poetry editor for The Illustrated Weekly of India then- for my early poems like Anchusooryan (Five Suns)., though we began meeting occasionally later , mostly in public functions. Now I began following her poetry closely and read her later collections like Old Playhouse and Other Poems (1976), The Best of Kamala Das (1991) and Anamalai Poems( 1992). I knew how much she trusted me only when she insisted on my writing the introduction to her collected poems Only the Soul Knows How to Sing . I undertook the mission with genuine involvement, finding in her poetry unnoticed nuances and muted voices that transcend the narcissistic obsession with the body and with herself often attributed to her. This transcendence comes partly from her political engagement and partly from her secular spiritual concerns.

“ I am a million, million people/talking all at once, with voices/raised in clamour…/I am a million, million silences strung like crystal beads/onto someone else’s song..”-these lines seemingly so uncharacteristic of a poet of solitude ever in search of intimacy betray Kamala Das’s intense desire to identify herself with the silenced victims of oppression, patriarchal as well as political. Kamla Das’s very first collection of poems, Summer in Calcutta , broke new ground in Indian poetry in English dominated until her entry by men from Nissim Ezekiel and Dom Moraes to Adil Jussawallah and A. K. Ramanujan who had already de-romanticized poetry and liberated it from its earlier flamboyance and verbosity. Here was a voice that was feminine to the core, often confessional in vein, that spoke uninhibitedly about woman’s desire and her unending search for true love. She had little respect for tradition and yet many traditions went into the making of her poetry : the rebellious spirituality of the women Bhakti poets, the sonorous sensuousness of the Tamil sangam poets, the empathy with the down-trodden and the hatred of violence central to the great poetry of her mother, Balamani Amma, the melancholy tempered by a larger vision of life characteristic of the poetry of her uncle Nalappatt Narayana Menon (who was also the translator, of Victor Hugo, of Havelock Ellis too.) ‘An Introduction’, her most discussed and paradigmatic poem with its defence of her trilingualism, her opposition to male power, her rejection of the traditional roles of the house-wife and the cook, and her longing for love was a clear announcement of her arrival on the scene. “I am every woman who seeks love/… I am the sinner, I am the saint. I am both the lover/ and the beloved. I have no joys which are not yours,/ no aches which are not yours/we share the same name,the same fate, the same crumbled dreams…” The direct kinship with her reader that she establishes here, the identification of female physicality with female textuality, similes drawn from nature, the opposition to feudal norms and man-made hierarchies, the quest for intimacy and an almost clinical exploration of the landscape of the self and the interrogation of the family as an oppressive institution became the hallmarks of her writing in the years to come.

Kamala Das denounced the extreme forms of feminism as she could not imagine a world without men or think that replacing male hegemony with female hegemony would create an egalitarian world; she never wanted to master anyone including herself. She is deeply aware of her difference as woman but would see it as natural rather than glorify it. Her Radha melts in the first embrace of Krishna until only he remains (Radha). In the panic of surrender, Radha tells Krishna: “Your body is my prison../ I cannot see beyond it/Your darkness blinds me/Your love words shut out the wise world’s din”.But she also watnts to escape: “As the convict studies/ his prison’s geography/ I study the trappings/of your body, dear love,/for, I must some day find an escape from its snare.” Poetry to her becomes an organic extension of the body as also a means to ultimately transcend it.

Her poetry soon showed a widening of concerns and an extension of empathy to embrace the victims of all forms of tyranny and discrimination. If to begin with the personal was the political for her, later the political became personal as in her poems like ‘Delhi 1984’, a severe indictment of the genocide of Sikhs in Delhi and the new cult of hatred and senseless violence it implied, turning “the scriptural chants into a lunatic’s guffaw”. She denounced terrorism in no uncertain terms: “If death is your wish, killing becomes/an easy game.”In ‘Toys’ too her indictment is unambiguous: “Doomed is this new race of men who arrive/ With patriotic slogans to sow dead seeds…” The genocide of Tamils in Sri Lanka-whose climactic orgy we recenly witnessed- grows into a metaphor of collective violence in her poems like ‘Smoke in Colombo’, ‘After July’ and ‘The Sea at Galle Face green’. She sees here the macabre re-enactment of the first holocaust:” Hitler rose from the dead, he demanded/ Yet another round of applause; he hailed/The robust Aryan blood, the sinister/Brew that absolves man of his sins and/Gives him the right to kiill his former friends…” ( Afer July) She bemoans the loss of innocence: “We mated like gods, but begot only our killers./Each mother suckles her own enemy/And hate is frst nurtured at her gentle breast..” ( Daughter of the Century).

In her last poems old age , death, nothingness and the desire for transcendence become recurring presences. “At my age there are no longer any home comings” (Woman’s Shuttles). She sees death as “life’s obscure parallel”. The encounter with physical decay forces the poet to look beyond death into a state of spiriuality that has little to do with conventional religion.“Bereft of soul,/ My body shall be bare;/ Bereft of body, /My soul shall be bare”( Suicide). The Anamalai Poems are full of references to this tortuous inward journey. “There is a love greater than all you know/that awaits you where the road finally ends”. Its embrace is truth and she seems to have found this great love in Allah as her poems in Ya Allah testify. Her conversion to Islam at th age of 65 was understood and accepted by her family and close friends while it angered several sections of her admirers including feminists and even some leftists, not to speak of the Hindutva spokesmen, though on different grounds. Kamala, now Surayya, again confused them by attributing different reasons at different times to her conversion, from a friendship misunderstood as love to the indifference of the Hindu scholars who never introduced her to the scriptures even while criticising her and a desire for ultimate peace. She however continued to be what she was but for occasional compromises so that she might not hurt her Muslim sisters and brothers (like refusing to meet Taslima Nasreen when she visited Kerala) and declared that God is one for all religions and women receive no respect in any religion. She wanted to launch a political party, Lokseva, to serve the causes of destitute women and of secularism. She found no contradiction between loving Krishna and revering Allah as Krishna was a lover and Allah was the supreme God. (Rediff Interview, 1999). She was working on two books then: From Malabar to Montreal, a collaborative work on women’s empowerment and a book on Islam for Harper- Collins, though she feared her failing eyesight and poor health might not allow her to complete them. They may still be incomplete, but the tasks she completed in her lifetime are enough to guarantee her a place among the most iconoclstic writers of our time, a beacon and a model especially for every honest woman writer with a story to tell, a song to sing or a shackle to break. Perhaps she has realised that great love she spoke of in the last of the Anamalai Poems, a love above “the random caress or the lust that ends in languor” that “erases even the soul’s ancient indentations so that some unknown womb shall begin to convulse to welcome your restructured perfection”. @

Meet the Author at Sahitya Akademi, Delhi, My Talk, 15 Sept 2008

ABOUT POETRY, ABOUT LIFE

K.Satchidanandan

I cannot tell from where poetry came to me; I had hardly any poet- predecessors. Whenever I try to think about it, I hear the diverse strains of the incessant rains of my village in Kerala and recall too, the luminous lines of the Malayalam Ramayana I had read as a schoolboy where the poet prays to the Goddess of the Word to keep on bringing the apt words to his mind without a pause like the endless waves of the sea. My mother taught me to talk to cats and crows and trees; from my pious father I learnt to communicate with gods and spirits. My insane grandmother taught me to create a parallel world in order to escape the vile ordinariness of the tiringly humdrum everyday world ; the dead taught me to be one with the soil ; the wind taught me to move and shake without ever being seen and the rain trained my voice in a thousand modulations. With such teachers, perhaps it was impossible for me not to be a poet , of sorts. I have looked at my genesis with detachment in an early poem ‘Granny’ : “My grandmother was insane./As her madness ripened into death,/My uncle, a miser, kept her in our store room/Covered in straw./My grandmother dried up, burst,/Her seeds flew out of the windows./The sun came and the rain,/one seedling grew up into a tree,/Whose lusts bore me./ How can I help writing poems /About monkeys with teeth of gold?”.It was not only my grandma who was insane; there were three in the family, all women.That explains the celebration of madness and the suspicion of sanity in many of my poems.

Our village was beautiful though I was unaware of its charms as long as I lived there. It had paddy fields that would fill with water during floods and with blue flowers after harvest in August, hills with named and nameless creepers and flowers, backwaters on which little open boats plied with men and merchandise, little peaceful temples, mosques and churches which bred genuine gods and not devils as they sometimes seem to do now. The northern part of our village, Pulloot, was dominated by communists and the south by Congress men. My primary and upper primary schools were in the north which meant I was a tiny communist there, but at home all went with Congress. Even our gods whose pictures adorned the pooja room seemed to belong to either of these parties, though a little more violent than the party men were for they never wore garlands of skulls, carried swords and spears nor had several heads like the gods: still those Goya- figures the family worshipped seemed to go well with those post-Gandhi times. That was also my second lesson in sur-realism, the first having been the three-month long fever that had almost killed me when I was four and given me Dali-like nightmares that crowd my early poetry.

I was born in a middle-class home, and by the time I was born it was a unitary family, with my parents not educated beyond the high school, and a sister and a brother who were elder to me. My father was doing odd jobs, farming on our family land -where we helped too-, working in a lawyer’s office, helping people prepare legal documents for land transactions. Earlier he was in the police force from which he had voluntarily retired . Two of my sisters had died in accidents before I was born; I have written a poem addressed to one of them who had appeared before me one night, put her soft betel-leaf hand on my palm and invited me to her enchanting land, slightly above earth but below heaven. My mother taught me to respect all religions, and I accompanied my little friend Abdul Khader, to chandanakkudam, the festival in the mosque with the same enthusiasm with which I attended thalappoli, the temple festival and liked the pathiris made at his home by his sister Khadeeja. My brother used to write poetry- though he ended up as an engineer- and by the time we needed higher education, the family, now larger with my sister’s children, had been rendered even poorer by the inevitable land reform that took away a good part of our land which had been with the tenants. But scholarships helped us pursue studies in college. My divorced sister had now married V T Nandakumar, a fiction writer adding one more writer to the family already struggling with two aspirants! My friends in the Malayalam medium schools in the village were mostly from very poor families:I have remembered them in a poem on my classmates, Kunjimuhammed, Vasu and Janaki none of whom went to college. Some of my teachers, especially in the High School at Kodungallur, the little temple town-earlier Muziris, a port that brought Greeks, Romans and Arabs to Kerala-that I reached after crossing a river and walking miles, encouraged me to write. Raghavanmaster, my Malayalam teacher, would send me to every poetry competition and the disciple seldom disappointed him. I cannot forget also Sankaran, a mad man, said to have been a Malayalam munshi, who introduced me to Kumaran Asan’s great poetry that he would sing and interpret every morning to an eager crowd in the village square. I would reach school late, but this was better education. My first poems were published in the manuscript journal of the village library and the high school magazines.

Christ College, a well-run Carmelite institution where I did my graduation in biology, had a well-stocked library. My early readings had already been done in the village library that bears the name of Kumaran Asan. That is where I read not only the great Malayalam fiction writers and poets, but translations of Tagore, Bankim, Saratchandra,Tarasankar, Manik Banerjee, Bimal Mitra, Yashpal, Jainendrakumar, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Hugo, Zola, Maupassant, Flaubert,Thomas Mann and several others. The Malayalam weeklies of the time never forgot to serialise at least one novel each in translation, especially from Bengali or Hindi . But in Christ College I began reading books in English somewhat systematically, helped on by the librarian , John Master who was a Latin scholar.I read the Holy Bible with great attention and that had a lasting impact on my vision and imagination; many of its books were great literature, besides being moving human documents; I especially liked the Book of Job, Revelation- that was my third lesson in sur-realism- and the Psalms, especially of David. Perhaps only Mahabharata that I read later in Kunjikkuttan Thampuran’s Malyalam translation had a similar impact on me. Buddha’s Dhammapada I read when I was nineteen also has had a great impact on my ethical imagination. The Communist Manifesto was another book that awakened my moral sensibility. At Christ College I also read the Complete Works of Shakespeare spending a whole vacation on it and making notes, and the collected works of Wordsworth, Shelley , Keats and Byron and translated some of their poems., especially Shelly’s ‘To a Skylark’, ‘The Cloud’ and ‘Ode to the Westwind’, Keats’s ‘Ode to the Nighingale’ and many short lyrics of Byron. Translation, however, was not new to me: I had translated a lot of Omar Khayyam’s rubayis while in high school from the Fitzgerald version.( I translated all the sonnets of Shakespeare much later, for a volume of Shakespeare translations edited by Ayyappa Paniker.) Looking back I feel they were a part of my training as a poet though I continued doing translatons whenever my own poetry went dry so that I have now more than 1500 pages of world poetry translated by me.

Maharajas College in Ernakulam where I did my post graduation in English played even a greater role in my evolution as a writer: My reading grew more intense and focused ; I read also a lot of theory including the Marxist classics. And I got my real taste of modern literature as Yeats, T.S. Eliot, James Joyce and Samuel Beckett were part of the syllabus and I was burning midnight electricity on Sartre, Camus , Kafka, Baudelaire , Rilke and the Black poets. My poems and critical articles had begun to appear in Malayalam magazines by now, and I had a small circle of eccentric admirers though that did not ensure my victory in the college elections where I was an independent candidate supported by the Students’ Federation who always lost to a local party, the Democratic Front. My good friends included late T.K.Ramachandran who grew up into a leftist intellctual, N S Madhavan, now a major fiction writer in Malayalam, P.V. Krishnan Nair who later became Secretary of the Kerala Sahitya Akademi, Sankaranarayanan (Nambu as we called him) who is now with the Deccan Herald in Bangalore besides others.This was the time when I also met Ayyappa Paniker, the pioneer of New Poetry in Malayalam, and a fine scholar who was to play a major role in my life later, sending me to various festivals of poetry, making me translate several poets from across the world for the poetry journal, Kerala Kavita edited by him -that also published my first important poems- and later encouraging me to come to Delhi taking up the editorship of Indian Literature in the Sahitya Akademi. Maharajas college had some excellent teachers of literature and provided me the kind of ambience I was looking for with heated discussions on literature and politics, sharing of books and creative confusions. I was an angst-bearing little existentialist and at the same time a half-baked Marxist besides being attracted to the radical humanist ideas of M. N. Roy introduced to me by the senior intellectual and poet M Govindan.There was a little circle of actively dying Royists at that time around the town of Trichur. I occasionally joined their discussions along with and died a bit too. My roommate C.T.Sukumaran( who later joined the IAS and was murdered by the mafia) also joined me at times.

I began to take my poetry seriously in the mid-1960s when Malayalam poetry was undergoing a sweeping transformation in terms of theme, mood and form. The new poets , tired of the excesses of the Romantics and the shallowness of the Progressives were striving to create a novel poetic idiom that would capture the conflicts and complexities of contemporary life in its totality. They had learnt their lessons from three sources: the specific -oral as well as written- traditions of Malayalam poetry, the larger - classical as well as modern-traditions of Indian poetry, and the avant-garde practices of modern European poetry. New rhythms, metaphors, images, word patterns and structures of feeling and thought and radical deployment of archetypes, myths and legends from diverse cultures together transformed the landscape of poetry in my language as in many others at that time. The change had its impact on my poetic practice giving it new directions and dimensions. We rallied round Kerala Kavita, the release of each of whose quarterly issues became an occasion for discussions on poetry as well as readings, some of them directed by Theatre and Film directors like Kavalam Narayana Paniker and G. Aravindan. In the Seventies, I published a little magazine , Jwala (Flame), with my friend P. K. A. Raheem, a great supporter of the new movements as the publisher, that carried the latest in Western thought and writing.;Allen Ginsberg, John Cage, Limericks, Concrete Poetry, Argentine microtales including Borges…A new fraternity based on modern sensibility was evolving in Kerala, that included besides writers, modern painters, sculptors, film makers and playwrights. I wrote a series of articles on Modern painting besides on other art forms and also took to painting for a brief while when I had lost my faith in language and suffered a crisis of faith and consequent depression. My first collection of poems, Anchusooryan had been published in 1971 and a book on Modern poetry, Kurukshetram, one year before it; and many short collections followed, almost one every two years. That was also the time of the Film Society movement and we organized one in Irinjalakuda,the town where I was teaching, holding many retrospectives, of filmmakers from Eisenstein and Bergman to Godard and Tarkovsky. Later I added many more to my favourites, from Kurasowa and Jansco to Kieslowsky, Parajinov and Angelopoulos. I had never thought of becoming a critic; but there were few to interpret the emerging modern sensibility and I was constrained to play that role, leading me to write books or articles on new poetry, new fiction , modern painting etc.. My academic research in post-structuralist poetics and critical endeavours cannot be said to have helped my poetry; but they did improve my understanding of the complex linguistic processes involved in creative writing and the essential anonymous and polyphonic nature of all writing, making me less possessive about my own writing.

In the second half of the 1970s, a new political alertness revitalised this modern poetry; it was now ready to take on larger social issues and historical situations and interrogate the status quo.The new poetry got the eyes of history; and the impetus came chiefly from the New Left ( Maoist) movement that attracted several young idealists in Kerala as it did in Bengal and Andhrapradesh. I can now very well see that its politics had problems; but it did generate a lot of creative energy that transformed our poetry, fiction, theatre and cinema. There was a reorganization of the earlier high modernist fraternity; some poets were changed completely, giving birth to what Yeats would call ‘a terrible beauty’ while some got partially transformed and were sympathetic. Even senior poets like Ayyappa Paniker , N. N. Kakkad and Attoor Ravivarma wrote poems fired by the new social awakening with tribals and landles peasants at its core, and there were poets like K.G.Sankara Pillai and Kadammanitta Ramakrishnan who were in the forefront of the new cultural ferment. We were all active in Janakeeya Samskarika Vedi , the Forum for Peoples’ Culture that upheld avant-garde practices. Journals like Prasakti ( Relevance) and Prerana (Persuasion) gave a new impetus to the movement; street and proscenium theatres flowered with new plays and adaptations; translations ( most of them mine) of Latin American poets like Pablo Neruda and Cesar Vallejo, Black poets like Senghor and David Diop and European poets like Paul Eluard, Louis Aragon and Bertolt Brecht provided new models. The campuses became vibrant with poetry readings and campus plays.This was the time that I also adapted some plays of W.B.Yeats, Lady Gregory and Bertolt Brecht. My play on Gandhi’s last days was written later on the request of the Secular Artists’ Forum that I had also helped found along with a lot of artists and writers at a time when communalism was beginning to malign even Kerala’s body politic. I had by the time also become a regular invitee to the literary events at Bharat Bhavan, Bhopal, thanks to Ashok Vajpeyi, the cultural visionary. These readings and workshops acquainted me with a lot of major Indian writers, especially poets, including the likes of Navkant Barua, Neelmoni Phookan, Subhash Mukhopadhyay, Sunil Gangopadhyay, Kunwar Narayan, Kedarnath Singh, Sitakant Mahapatra, Ramakanta Rath, Jayanata Mahapatra, Dilip Chitre, Arun Kolatkar, Namdeo Dhasal, Sitanshu Yashaschandra, and Ali Sardar Jaffri besides poets from abroad like Derek Walcott, Tomas Transtromer and Phillippe Jaccottet, though I did meet a lot of other poets from Kim Chi-hai and Tasos Denegris to Mahmoud Darwish, David Diop and Bei Dao during my readings outside India.

The Seventies’ movement ended tragically, producing several young martyrs who were killed by the police or committed suicide out of disillusionment. I escaped their fate only as I had always kept a critical distance from the political formation and its closed ideological stance and managed to honestly articulate even this moment of retreat, isolation and fragmentation in my poetry. I also used this interval for introspection and fresh theoretical enquiries as whose mouthpiece I launched the journal, Uttharam ( The Answer).( Later I edited a third journal , Pacchakkutira (The Green Horse), for arts, creative writing, translation and social and literary theory) There were too new social movements centred round human rights, consumer rights, issues of environment and tribals’, dalits’ and women’s emancipation which gave hope. I could see a new politics of ‘microstruggles’ or ‘transversal struggles’- as Michel Foucault calls them- emerging in Kerala sharing their ethical concerns with the 70’s movement. It was around this time that Ayyappa Paniker prompted me to move to Delhi and take up the editorship of Indian Literature at the Sahitya Akedemi. Leaving my job in the college and my presence in the cultural scene of my state was not at all easy; but the adventurer in me got the better of the sober soul and to the surprise and even the chagrin of many I decided to take the plunge. Frankly I do not regret the decision when I compare what I lost with what Delhi gave me: fresh exposures to all art forms, a deeper interest in Indian literature that led to many fresh explorations some of which are collected in my three books in English on the subject, the advantage of distance form my native state that helped me look at it at times nostalgically and at times critically, the many poems on Kerala and Malayalam, the series on the Saint and Sufi poets,a large circle of writer-friends across the country and abroad, the new directions I could give to the Akademi’s journal as its editor and later, as its Executive head, to its activities, travels in three continents that often inspired a lot of my poems and also won my poetry a lot of friends and translators abroad. My readings across the globe have helped reaffirm my faith in the power of poetry to speak to people across nations, languages and communities; it is the shared mother tongue of human beings that survived the Babel. No wonder it has survived Plato’s Republic, Hitler’s Auschwitz and Stalin’s Gulag, and still whispers its uneasy truths into the human ear trained through centuries to capture the most nuanced of voices.

Poetry as I conceive it is no mere combinatorial game; It rises up from the ocean of the unsayable, tries to say what it cannot stay , to name the nameless and to give a voice to the voiceless. It is no mere reproduction of established values and recognised truths; it is, as Italo Calvino says, an eye that sees beyond the colour spectrum of everyday politics and an ear that goes beyond the frequencies of sociology. It upturns the virgin soil, advances on the blank page , to use Nicanor Parra’s famous phrase.The truths it discovers may not often be of immediate use; but it will gradually become part of social consciousness.I also share Neruda’s concept of impure poetry, poetry that bears the dust of distances and smells of lilies and urine, a poetry that is often created out of words salvaged from the wreck of languages and nations. Poetry differs from prose not by following a metre or rhythm; there are many metrical poems that are worse than prose. The difference lies in its power to dissolve paradoxes and its way of imagining things into being and connecting words and memories; rhyme and rhythm may, of course, help to invoke an atmosphere. Its attraction is in what lies beyond the dictionary; it recovers words and experiences exiled from memory. Lorca used to speak of duende, a common term in Andalusin popular discourse: that sudden vision of godhead in Arabic music and dance that makes the audience cry, Allah, Allah. It is the intangible mystery Goethe found in Paganini’s art, the divine persuasion that the Gypsy dancer La Malena felt in Bach’s music played by Brailovsky. The search for it is a solitary trip without maps. Poetry too has those moments of revelation when like a whirlwind it subverts all logic and pulls down all preconceived projects. Every poet worth his/her salt must have felt the thrill and the terror of such moments of epiphany at least in the best moments of their inspiration. I too have experienced this not only while writing some poems which seemed to have been dictated to me but while istening to Girijadevi singing her tumris perched between the sun and the moon in Ayodhya leaving her voice to Sarayu’s breeze to rock the cradle of little Rama or in the ecstatic moments of Kumar Gandharv, Mallikarjun Mansoor or Kishori Amonkar singing in Bhopal and Delhi where the real world ceases to be and you float back to the times of Amir Khan or Fayyas Khan and beyond. M.D.Ramanathan’s hindol has given me this feeling as also some rare moments of Mahalia Jackson and Arita Franklin. And I have found this elevation while reading Dostoevsky’s Karamazov Brothers or Kazantsakis’s God’s Pauper. Tadeuz Rosewicz, the Polish poet said poetry should lay its eggs not on the chaff of half and a quarter words but directly in the abyss, and J.Swaminathan while speaking of the geometry of colours remarked that the triangle, the rectangle and the circle are coloured windows that open into the inexpressible and the ambiguos. He saw how in the tribal art nature and its creation enveop each other. This reciprocity is vital to any art today to liberate ourselves from the anthropocentric Western thought that speaks of nature in the language of war and rape and leads to the annihilation of man and earth.

I have often been asked what the central themes of my poetry are. It is difficult to reduce poetry to themes as any complex-enough poem works at many levels. As Umberto Eco says in a recent interview, works are more intelligent than their authors; they may contain possibilities that the author might never have known or imagined. But Rizio Raj,the writer-friend who edited my collected works has divided my work into three parts, Akam, poems of love , domesticity and interiority, Puram, poems of social concern and Mozhi, poems where language itself becomes the main theme. Gauded into a response, I will say justice, freedom, love, nature, language and death are the central concerns of my poetry as perhaps of all poetry. And the chief elements that helped shape me as a poet have perhaps been the traditions of poetry, local, national as well as global, experience, observation- of nature and of human beings, travel, interaction with other arts like music, painting and cinema, reading and translation, all turning into the fibres of my imagination.And I have been open-minded when it comes to forms having employed several verbal registers in Malyalam,from street talk to the language of legal documents and a diversity of metrical and non-metrical devices, folk, classical and modern.

The responsiveness of the Seventies is still alive in my poetry though I have distanced myself from all dogma. My commitment is largely ethical- to certain values, like justice, equality, freedom , love, respect for all forms of life.These have become all the more significant in a world governed by the values of the market and increasingly and violently being colonised by the forces of globalisation. While I have continuously raised the issues of women’s emancipation, the rights of the marginalised, ecological harmony and a world without wars, and kept responding to the tragic turns of social events, from the Emergency to the rise of communalism in our society, I have not ceased asking the deeper existential questions, of being, freedom, instincts, nature, relationships, death. I find no contradiction between the sacred and the secular; I can well be spiritual without being religious.This is something I have learnt from our Saint and Sufi poets and reformers like Kabir and Gandhi who battled against hierarchies of every kind , challenged Power in its diverse manifestations and interrogated the superfluous externals of practised religion. A poet does not need any religion other than poetry itself. Nothing can scare poetry except perhaps the empty white paper where, as Wislawa Szymborsca says, the poet has to await the incarnation of his/her essence in total solitude behind put-on masks and closed doors. I fear only the suffocating silence of a world where the soul has ceased to speak and man cannot decipher the language of leaves and waterfalls. I hope not to survive to see that day when the universe is deprived of its sacredness and evil prevails unquestioned.

My Concept of Poetry

FOR A POETRY OF CONCERN


Thedore Adorno, the well- known thinker from Frankfurt once said that poetry is impossible after Auschwitz.The statement, clearly, was not meant to be literal;it was an intense comment on the violence of our times that works against creativity of every kind.Indeed the Holocaust produced its own variety of great poetry: remember Nelly Sachs,Abba Kovner,Paul Celan and several others who still remind us of those days of the genocidal mania.It was about such poetry that the Polish poet Tadeuz Rozevicz had said in his introduction to the anthology of post-War Polish poetry: “…a poetry for the horror-stricken, for those abandoned to butchery, for survivors,created out of a remnant of words,salvaged words, out of uninteresting words from the great rubbish dump.”

The history of poetry in our time has also been a history of censorship, exile and martyrdom.We have the examples of Lorca and Neruda,Nazim Hikmet and Ossip Mandelstam,Mayakovsky and Ai-Ching,Shamsur Rahman and Tasleema Nasrin, Benjamin Molois and Kensaro Wiwa, Cherabandaraju and Saroj Dutta, Subbarao Panigrahi and Safdar Hashmi who had all raised their voice against some form of dictatorship, discrimination and injustice for which they had to suffer insult,imprisonment,life in a labour camp,banishment or death.Plato who had kept poets out of his ideal republic has had several followers in our time:Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, Franco,Pinochet,Id-i -Ameen, Sani Abacha, Ayatolla Khomeini, Saddam Husain and many other champions of totalitarianism and fundamentlism of diverse hues, even avowed democrats who were eager to defend the status-quo. James Joyce once said of writers,”Squeeze us, we are olives”, meaning the writers yield their best under oppressive environments. While it is true that various forms of oppression have produced some of the most passionate poetic works of our times, it is equally true that they have also silenced a lot of real and potential poets.Brecht was right when he asked, “Will there be poetry in dark times?”, and answered, “Yes, poetry about dark times”.

It is impossible for the genuine writer today to ignore the viloence, injustice and social inequality of our times.Blood floods our bedrooms and our drawing rooms are strewn with corpses and that is often the blood and corpses of those who have neither drawing rooms nor bedrooms.Even the ivory towers of pure aesthetes are being swept by the winds of violence and change.Poets can no more be comfortable with ahistoricity.It is impossible for a sensitive poet to be indifferent to the big and small wars often engineered by divisive forces and imperialist agencies, ecological devastation, the growth of an insensitive technocracy, the speed of the new career-oriented life in the commercial cities that marks the end of creative leisure,the criminalisation of politics and the communalisation of society,the starvation of children, the solitude of the old,the discrimination on the basis of class, caste, gender and race, the growing inequality between classes and nations, the cancerous growth of the market turning everything it touches-including culture- into commodity,the depletion of inner life, the death of languages and of the local knowledges and regional cultures expedited by the cultural amnesia imposed upon its victims by the process of globalisation - that according to Baudrillard is the greatest form of violence in our times-, and the consequent threat to cultural diversity, democratic pluralism and positive internationalism.

This is not an argument for a narrow ideological commitment, for, we know how the diverse forms of prescriptive and normative poetics have sounded the death-knell of art and encouraged new forms of fascism, especially the kind that Umberto Eco calls ‘ur-fascism’ in his Five Moral Pieces- a Fascism that sees dissent as betrayal,defines nation negatively to the exclusion of minorities thus promoting xenophobia,fears difference,advocates action for the sake of action,rejects all rational thinking, looks at pacifism as collusion with the enemy, scorns the weak, encourages the cult of death, upholds machismo as a value and opposes all non-conformist sexual behaviour, treats people as a monolith, fears critical thinking , avoids any kind of intellectual complexity and creates a cult of tradition taking truth to be already known.What I am arguing for is a literature of concern, that even while not subscribing to mega-ideologies and Utopias, is deeply aware of human suffering and dreams of a world of justice, a more humane and egalitarian- less patriarchal, racist, communalist, cateist and exploitative- dispensation, peace and amity among nations and communities, and a deeper understanding of the realtionship between man and nature.

Poetry, even with its element of play, is no mere combinatorial game that a machine can play.It is more than a mere permutation of a restricted number of elements and functions.It always tries to say what it cannot say and its power comes from its willingnes to give a voice to what is voiceless and a name to what is nameless.Poetry becomes important, as Italo Calvino says, not when it reproduces establishd values, given truths or ready-made slogans.It is an ear that hears beyond the understanding of common sociology, an eye that sees beyond the colour spectrum of everyday politics.It promotes self-awareness through a criticism of the staus quo and the cultural and material violence it perpetrates.It is the mission of poetry today to retrieve the past without being atavistic, to disentangle the effects of power from representations, to reestablish the almost-lost connections between man and nature, to redefine the boundaries between the self and the other and the self and nature in the context of man’s species- arrogance that cripples the environment as well as his own moral and spiritual life, to resensitise man to suffering, alienation and solitude and to give love and justice the central place it ought to have in all human discourse.May be it requires an alternative poetics,like the aesthetics of resistance Peter Weiss constructed from Dante’s hell-fires that he rediscoverd in the Nazi concentration camps. @