By Soibam Haripriya
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. Poetry is further enriched by a contestation of meanings. The above poem translated from Irom Sharmila’s Maming Thondaba Seireng reflects a certain resistance to the ‘times’. Thus suggesting 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 as expounded by Staid in his book ‘The New Poetic’. The lines which connect and form this triangle need a deeper probe.. 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 today 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 metros. 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’ –
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.
Here, 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 the 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 I have also taken 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.
The era we belong to seem to be asking for poetry, however, this can be the misconception of a poet or a lover of poetry.
That poets as witnesses to certain realities may either reveal situations where both converge at a point whereas the audience/readers seem far removed from both. The poets and poetry under discussion may all fall into this category. Poets as ‘witnesses’ are certainly connected to poetry of ‘resistance’. When Thangjam Ibopishak writes ‘I want to be killed by an Indian Bullet’, it was censored out of an India International Centre publication. 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 from two senses, 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’ 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 genre of poems or poets 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 such as what I have discussed above. 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’. The collection depicts 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. 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.