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”. @