Let me stretch
out my hands
Beloved friends
Welcome me in
your midst
So unquenched
that I am
Unable to voice
in words
I desire to tear
open my chest
and show the
bland empty smile within
I desire a voice
of that laughter
be struck by
shrapnel of bombs
for the
aftermath cheap tears
to reduce all
filth to cinders
Let every face
be radiant
with the hope of
a new era!
This one weak
step
Wants to leave a
hundred footprints
And become
chants of courage
Come, open your
door
For born with
lips
For endowed with
thoughts
How can I leave
without
protesting?
The Untitled
Poem, (translated from Irom Sharmila’s Maming Thondaba Seireng, Translation
mine)
The idea of
poetry is not an unchanging one but a continuum or rather a contestation of
meanings. I look at the ‘poetic’ as an element whether it be in a dramatic
text, performance or poetry (i.e. I look at words - spoken, written or sung,
chanted, performed according to a pattern). The above poem translated from Irom
Sharmila’s Maming Thondaba Seireng
reflects a certain resistance to the ‘times’. This suggest a certain condition
of the triangular nature of the existence of poetry — a triad consisting of the
poet, the audience and reality/truth/environment/context as the third point[1].
The lines which connect and form this triad is what I want to analyse. That
poetry as witnessing a certain reality may either reveal a situation where both
are almost coinciding at a point whereas the audience seems far removed from
both. I am afraid that the poets and poetry that I wish to discuss here might
all fall in the category of distorted triangles. The reality that the poets speak
of seems far removed from the insulated politics of the metropolitan cities.
However, this reality is growing in various parts of the country. There is,
therefore, a disjuncture in our interaction with the state in its most visual
and ironically camouflaged form. In the disjuncture itself, there are many
islands of disjuncture in spite of the interconnectedness of the infliction,
there is a disconnect in the perception of the state. Thus, women and poetry
for peace or women as peace brokers might, as I see fall, in the narrow limits
of looking at women as tools towards a political end, the vision of which she
does not form a part. Arambam Ongbi Memchoubi had written in her “Goddess of
Lightning[2]”
–
Even if your soul listens or not
Even if you agree or not
I am
The answer to your age old questions
The poem
construes women as the Goddess of Lightning about to strike the rotten arms of
men who preserves the old world. The Goddess burns the old and creates anew.
I have not
quoted Memchoubi to club women’s work together but to contradict and point at
the wide and varied nature of the work of women. One can but discuss the work
together for reason of interconnectedness in the landscape of their poetry and not
the ways of expression. Firstly, the attempt to look at Irom Sharmila’s poetry
is the elements that separate her struggle and the consequent expression of
that in her poetry. In Irom’s writing, it is a woman writing but it is a woman
who is no longer a woman but rather a deified or “iconified” woman. A woman who
is not depicted now without the nose feeding tube; wherein her struggle has
become an organic part of her being and thus the attempt to “give her life”
through the force intrusion of tubes, creating them also as parts of her being.
She and her work occupy a space that no other can occupy because of the nature
of her struggle. There is no doubt the struggle to appropriate her as a freedom
fighter, as a poet, a feminist, a champion, woman leader and so on thus
embedding in her a symbolic sisterhood which is strategically evoked.
Secondly that
she must have and she has written poems since the beginning but it is the
nature of her struggle that elevates her poetry to being a witness of her
times. There is no doubt that the above two are inextricably linked together.
For the fact that she is living her poetry and her ideals it is difficult to
look at her poetry apart from her struggle and vice versa. And it is important
to view both together because there is an inherent vulgarity in knowing or
reading a poem as separate from the landscape that informs the poems. For this
reason one can also explore the works of other poets like Thangjam Ibopishak
and Robin Ngangom to point out how certain landscape colours the poetry in
spite of the range and variety in the work. There is an interconnectedness
between poetry as witness and poetry as resistance but for both then is the
necessity for poetry to come out from within the confines of the poets’ thought
and be read, be seen and talked about.
‘what good is
poetry is destitute times’ (Heidegger, 1975). Heidegger refers to this question
of Hölderlin’s (in Bread and Wine) by talking first about time –That the time
is the era that we still belong to and that era seems to be asking to us the
need of poetry. The genre or rather the styles of the poetry that I choose to
discuss might be said to fall in the category of the poems/writing choosing to
express certain things. I refer to the act of writing (such) poetry as being
the witness. It is then here that the necessity of the creative work getting
read/ seen/ comes in. Stating the unsaid or unsayable is then the function of
such poetry. When Thangjam Ibopishak wrote “I want to be killed by an Indian
Bullet”, it was censored out of an India International Centre publication[3].
In the act of being a witness and testifying for the unsaid/ unsayable there
are indeed many who wants the unsaid to remain unsaid who believes that the
unsaid is left unsaid because of the presumed vulgarity of the unsaid. Thus,
closing one’s eye on the vulgarity of the act played out in the landscape means
that one is consenting to the continuity of the act of indifference. The vulgarity here
can be seen in two ways, one being what I have just mentioned above and second
the vulgarity of discussing only the poetry as removed from the landscape. Of
course the act of seeing poetry alone and not placing it in the context of the
landscape is what leads to the poetry being termed as unsayable or rather
unprintable (and therefore unreadable).
The introduction
to Irom Sharmila’s collection of twelve poems, “Fragrance of Peace”[4]
also refers to her as she who “speak out the unspeakable without losing the
essence of humanity”. Of course the act of witnessing and testifying requires
that the work comes out in the form of being said or read. The genres of poetry
or poet celebrated now have gone through the process of being obliterated not
only because of the language in which it is expressed but also through a
deliberate attempt at obliteration. There is a certain curiosity in the works
but it is only celebrated when it falls in the realm of the exotic whereas the
mundane banality of political violence finds no space.
The landscape
that evokes poetry of the ‘unsayable’ also evokes the mundane desire of
belongingness. Robin Ngangom had explored this in his collection, “The Desire
of Roots”[5].
The collection depicts a desire, a longing for the labyrinth terrain of the
'known' by the same roots. Irom’s collection “Fragrance of Peace” is also
engrafted with a desire, the desire of letting the roots seek its home of soil,
to foster and nurture not the idea of territorial belongingness but one that is
rooted in the crises of the ‘canes of policemen’ and yet as a mother exhorting
What gain you by torching an effigy?
for a scrap of land you cannot take with you
Irom’s
collection of twelve poems seems a conscious choice on the part of those who
has put in the collection. The poems reflect a certain role – that of a mother,
a sister. That the collection is a political act is beyond doubt however this
begets the question — “Is the gendering of women’s writing inherently problematic?
In the particular context of this collection is there an attempt to look at the
poet vis-à-vis her relation as a sister to a man / (or even in solidarity to
the idea of sisterhood); Is there an attempt to embed in her the ideals of a
universal mother in the choice of poems? It is indeed difficult to begin
analysing Sharmila’s poems given the self imposed overarching political
correctness of those who choose not only to read but also to publish which works
are to be read.
[2] Robin S. Ngangom; Kynpham S. Nongkynrih, “Dancing Earth” Penguin Books, India
[3] Tarun Bhartiya, “Liberal Nightmares: A Manual of Northeastern Dreams” http://www.sarai.net/publications/readers/06-turbulence/02_tarun_bhartiya.pdf
(accessed on 15th January 2011)
The
cover of the book and also the contents refers to Irom Sharmila as Irom
Sarmila. When the publisher was asked on the peculiar spelling I was told that
the pronunciation of ‘Sh’ does not exist in Meiteilon. This was in spite of the
poet signing her work as Irom Sharmila. Referring to Sharmila as Sarmila seemed
to be more due to the problem of translating of her work from the Bengali
script to Meitei Mayek and to English.
[5] Robin Ngangom, “The Desire
of Roots”, Chandrabhaga Publications, Cuttack, 2006
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