Rooting for Neruda's Images

A brief review of “The Desire of Roots”, Robin Ngangom, Chandrabhaga Publications, Cuttack, 2006

There are many ways of exploring belongingness. Some do it by seeking the desire of roots. Others do it by identifying the 'otherness' in the desire. Robin Ngangom's The Desire of Roots still remains just a desire, a longing for the labyrinth terrain of the 'known' by the same roots. This desire of roots does not find the roots but creates new ones. Like the auxiliary roots descending from a canopy of branches belonging to an aged banyan tree. The roots in the air seek to unite with the mother roots beneath the earth, their home. These auxiliary roots become trunks which will again sprout roots from above. Reading Ngangom's collection of forty-eight poems, I am left thinking about these auxiliary roots and how they have been nurtured and fostered. In these poems, I find the familiarity of an aura and the scent I experienced when I first read Neruda in college.

as if suddenly the roots I had left behind
cried out to me, the land I had lost with my childhood---
and I stopped, wounded by the wandering scent

The poems in The Desire of Roots have uncanny affiliation to roots, both in terms of “the form and the essence”. More specifically with the Chilean poet's Sonnet VI: Lost in the forest, of Pablo Neruda's 'One Hundred Love Sonnets' or perhaps even the section from his collection 'Memorials of Isla Negra' (Memorial De Isla Negra), entitled, 'The Hunter after Roots'. One could perhaps see in Neruda and his poems a situation of being in touch with blood, in touch with the despair experienced by his country. It might not be preposterous to see if Ngangom sees in Neruda a mentor, both being in turbulent times of history of their respective places.

The desire of roots as the name suggest indeed tries to seek the roots, whether in remembering Pacha and his lonely end or evoking the imageries of places like Tura (Garo Hills), Laitumkhrah (Shillong) in Meghalaya. The collection of poetry under two headings- ‘The book of lusts’ and ‘Subjects and objects’ is based on an imagery of friends, revolutions and “goodbyes” as distinct from farewells. A poem in the first section immediately reminded me of Neruda’s La Poesía (Poetry, translated by Alastair Reid) not only because both share the same title but also because of a continuity in the ideas expressed in both. In Neruda’s ‘La Poesía’ poetry comes searching for the poet “And it was that age …poetry arrived/in search of me” whereas in Ngangom’s ‘Poetry’ the character in the poem stands out like a protagonist in a play. As poetry resides within, he/she wishes to express and let the ‘gnarled men and wrinkled women....” know “...what matters if I can’t explain to them’. Other titles also could be seen as belonging to a spectrum of ideas that can be seen as either “continuity or an inspiration”. Neruda’s ‘I explain a few things’ from his Residence on earth, (Residencia en la tierra, 1925-1945) can be interestingly juxtaposed with ‘I am unable to explain’. In the former, Neruda explains or seeks to do so the reasons his poetry talks neither of lilacs nor of dreams but rather of bonfires devouring humans and the latter where Ngangom tries to explain to his daughter about ‘war of freedom or liberation’. One cannot help but also compare Ngangom with Neruda, wherein both not only gives a slice of pastoral life but also refer to the cyclical chronology of events; of history. Neruda talks about history that “passes in its carriage, collecting its shrouds and medals, and passes” and Ngangom’s “ossuaries of natives and masters as the old herald a new history/ not knowing why they merely repeat themselves”. One may also find resonances of themes and ideas as in Neruda's, “I explain a few things”,where the lines..

“You will ask why doesn’t his poetry
Speak to us of dreams, of leaves
Of the great volcanoes of his native land

Come and see the blood in the streets
Come and see the blood in the streets”,

The last poem in the Ngangom’s collection ‘Last words’ where lines that seem to emanate the same idea appears as...

“They whispered among themselves
How come his poetry is riddled with bullets then?
So I said:
I wanted my poem to exude a heady odour
But only the sweet taint of blood or burning flesh emanates from my poem.”

It is not surprising then that the second and last section of the collection -‘subject and objects’ quotes from Neruda ‘When the rice withdraws from the earth/the grains of its flour/ when the wheat hardens its little hip joints and lift its face/ of a thousand hands/I make my way to the grove where the woman and the man embrace…’
Akin to Neruda who sought inspiration from the everyday things like artichoke and his green heart, it is heartening to read Ngamgom drawing another tangent from oils and lentils evoking the political situation in the uncertainty of its availability in the stores which he effortlessly does so in a poem in this section, “The strange affair of Robin S Ngamgom”. He did have his last words in the last poem of the book, “Last words”, when he wanted his poem “to fall like pebbles into a pool” but ended up breaking his “words on hostile surfaces”. However his last words too seem to be heavily influenced by poet/s from whom he sought his inspiration like Neruda who wishes for the rain to repeatedly splatter its words and hence his last words end not as his own but the words of many others who had wrote of their times and turmoil.

Coffee and something

Sleep walking
through roads
dust were clouds
timeless were dreams
Each fabric
judged
by textures
and touch
We eye
closely
each bare
embellished
gaudy sequins
Envy green
the coffee table books
not read
but to be kept;
To be shown
possessed
Through dark wood
they weep
to be loved
once, for its soul


Blue tasseled curtains
someone’s dream
took wings
We were
seeking
burnt scent of coffee
and something
A store,
with books loved
for its soul
where evening flings
its net of music
We will
conceive
on a blue night
We will
wake
clenching
our fistful of dreams


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Evening at the book shop

Together,
we inhaled
the still air
of the mouldy book shop
weighing every book
that passed
Through pathways
his star eyes
sees
through words
shun between two covers
Each persisting scent
come seeking
our fingertips
some words
galloped into our palms
Each cramped corner
neighbour to words and dust
follow his eyes
Ivory of paper
yearns to live
in our lips, fingertips
Those left behind
we wouldn't know
their whereabouts


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Medusa enchantress

My medusa enchantress
brought flowers
crimson red
Poetry wrapped
in music
her laughter of bells
deepen the evening blue
Swift flight
sure
as an arrow
She rescues
me
a mouthful of those mouths
her skin of earth
she came clad
in smoky evening sand
lead me to your mazes
lead me through your riddles
leave me
unclothed
in your goblet

Where should the birds fly after the last sky?

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Where should we go after the last frontiers?
Where should the birds fly after the last sky?-
Where should the plants sleep after the last breath of air?
- Mahmoud Darwish

My wayward sibling

My wayward sibling
Sudden in arrival
Abrupt in departure
Promptly came
on days hard as stone
Unwrapped
my fistful of woes
I survived lovers’
goodbyes
To eternity
he took me
for rainwashed walks
He opened the day
to the scent of frangipani
Now he leaves
His goodbye
gnaws the evening

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Of Memories, Melancholy and the Milieu

Memories can fade as fast as freak snow flakes in summer or they just refuse to disappear like the gigantic Himalayas. Durable memories can either make one’s engagement with realities worthwhile or mar the future with devastating consequence. It has been over a month since I attended the Fifth Arambam Somorendra Memorial Lecture as a discussant on the 10th June 2010 at the Gandhi Memorial (GM) Hall, Imphal. All this while I have not stopped pondering over a great lecture delivered by Dr. Xonzoi Barbora, titled ‘Friends, Familiar Places and Melancholy: Life and Death in Northeast India’. It was not just the late visionary’s reputation that drew me to the event but also the continuous discursive engagement of the Arambam Somorendra Trust to generate debates on the issue of contemporary life and politics in Manipur and the Northeast.


The 10th of June lecture indeed gave a clear picture as to how we situate ourselves amidst violence, death and silence. Dr. Barbora succinctly delineated our engagements with the everyday-ness of violence and death and the consequent feelings of guilt and melancholy that engulf us all. He recounts his experiences with friends who are no more. He said, “We have become adept at writing obituaries in Northeast India. We write them at times when we are choking in guilt, or drowning in sorrow”. Listening to Dr. Barbora’s lecture made me ask this question; Is it this feeling of guilt and melancholy that constantly produces and reproduces strange acts of silence? Barbora's lecture or for that matters the act of writing for the dead falls between what we understand as “silence and protest”. Recounting familiar narratives and remembering the dead is one way of negotiating with existing realities. Hence, there is the need for stories to be told and retold even though they may be repetitive while simultaneously unique.


Dr. Barbora specifically recounted the lives of the late - Nilikesh Gogoi, Kabiranjan Saikia, Thingnam Kishan, U A Shimray and publicly unknown yet familiar friends who are no more. There is a need to understand narratives like these in order to witness our lives as well as the lives of friends and acquaintances. There is also the possibility that death itself might be too encompassing for lives to be remembered and articulated into spoken language. Perhaps there also exists a language of silence which speaks louder than words quite distinct from the act of indifference. Death and silence then become ominous and begin to reflect in our literature, visual and performing arts and become inscribed in landscape.


It then could also be said that melancholy is the landscape where lives are acted out, recounted and narrated and felt deeply through the act of narration. This could be the reason why (to quote Dr. Barbora) “our poets have been marshaled into writing pamphlets and our sloganeers have become poets”. However, there seems to be no contradiction in one oscillating between two beings – the poetic and the political. A symptom of an ephemeral confusion that has continued to haunt us for long has been the inability to make a clear distinction between binaries that have ruled the progression of human civilization – like the civic and the political as in poems and pamphlets.


I was particularly drawn to Dr. Barbora’s invocation of the idea of “hüzn” or “hüzün” to describe melancholy. Those of us who are familiar with Orhan Pamuk’s Istanbul Memories of a City know that line by Ahmet Rahim – “The beauty of a landscape resides in its melancholy” writ on the page after the dedication. Dr.Barbora had perhaps got more from Pamuk’s description of “hüzün” or “huzn”, the Turkish synonym for melancholy. One of the descriptions Pamuk gave was: “…the spiritual anguish we feel because we cannot be close enough to Allah, because we cannot do enough for Allah in this world.” The reference to the “Almighty” here can be taken as a deeper “inability” by all of us to accomplish the set tasks before us. Interestingly, it can be the absence of “hüzün” which can cause even more distress. This seems to indicate that there can be another type of melancholy – the melancholy that one feels because one has not been melancholic enough.


Melancholy evokes memories. The trepidation with memories is that memories can go back a few thousand years which can veer towards an imagined presence of the past, be it either tragedy or glory. The question that haunts us in the present is: What kind of memories do we need to keep alive to make sense of the present? What has a “unique” vengeful memory or a “glorious civilizational” memory got to do with a collective “poetic and political” future? These are rather questions and not answers that we have to keep engaging with. Dr. Barbora said, “…all of us here know what food is cooked in the hills, just as surely as they know what is fermenting in our iromba. This is what makes us different from the rest of the world! ”. This is a good literary trope to examine “ourselves” vis-à-vis the idea of “collectivity” and “exclusivity”, between “the raw and the cooked”, and also between “the fresh and the fermented” over the hills and the valleys in the Northeast. Dr. Barbora gave us enough “cooked and uncooked” food for thought. Cooked, because he addressed the primacy of “feelings” over the meta-narrative of the “self”. Uncooked, because some of his ideas may be “raw” for many of us in the Northeast and the milieu we live in.


This review was published in The Imphal Free Press on 11th of July 2010
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