“I have come, yes, with hunger, with faith and/A secret language, /All ready to be used.”(11-13). Going by these lines from the poem “A New City” the realm of poetry is given a new take by Kamala Das. It seems as if a poem is willed into existence merely by catching the many thoughts that cross the mind and fusing together all those different waves. Summer in Calcutta is such an oeuvre of poems that gushes forth from the deep abyss of her feminity. It is unconventional, as, at times, it seems like an outpouring, at other times, a child’s babble that is unfathomable. It is Das’s first collection of poetry, and the question that rises is whether she is simply playing with words. However, she is not at a loss as far as words are concerned as is evident from her poems and she even says in the poem “Words”:
All around me are words, and words and words,
They grow on me like leaves, they never
Seem to stop their slow growing
From within. . .
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
They never seem to stop their coming
From a silence, somewhere deep within. . . (1-4, 13-14)
These 50 odd poems seem to gush forth like water, taking any shape a reader might concoct, a reason why these poems are difficult to place. They seem to be born out of a silence, but reverberating with many voices. The poems are not chiseled out as far as the structure and form are concerned - redefining the contours of poetry. A lack of revision is a charge that is often levelled against her. But, as a writer, diving head on into a new domain, she bails out with these lines from the poem “An Introduction”:
Why not leave
Me alone, critics, friends, visiting cousins,
Every one of you? Why not let me speak in
Any language I like? The language I speak
Becomes mine, its distortions, its queerness
All mine, mine alone. It is half English, half
Indian, funny perhaps, but it is honest,
It is as human as I am human, don’t
You see? It voices my joys, my longings, my
Hopes, and it is useful to me as cawing
Is to crows or roaring to the lions, (7-17)
Is this stance deliberate is another question. Could she be raising her reservations as to being a writer as this is her first foray into the realm of poetry? She was searching for an area where she could belong and she found her cocoon in her writing, especially poetry - donning the role to shift the gaze - to shift the contours of subject and object. It is as if taking a risk of losing the self, only to get an extent of self-realization. There are poems that seem to question the role of a writer and the process itself. For instance in the poem “Loud Posters”, she says:
I’ve put
My private voice away, adopted the
Typewriter’s click as my only speech; I
Click-click, click-click tiresomely into your
Ears, stranger, though you may have no need of
Me, I go on and on, not knowing why . . . (11 - 16)
It seems to be a kind of therapy. It is not a quest but an attempt at understanding life. It as if by putting her thoughts down she is gaining an objectivity that is not possible otherwise. It seems as if poetry puts her at ease, giving her the much-needed liberty to give vent to her emotions. A few lines from “Without a Pause” go thus, “Write without/A pause, don’t search for pretty words which/Dilute the truth, but write in haste, of/Everything perceived, and known, and loved . . .” (14-17)
It is not exactly a search for herself even though ‘I’ is something that she is preoccupied with. The issues of being a woman as constructed by certain notions, of being given identities, and the way ‘I’ becomes just a name, are her concerns. “Be Amy, or be Kamala.Or, better/ Still,be Madhavikutty. It is time to/Choose a name, a role.”(38-40). When she writes so in “An Introduction” she seems to allude to the idea that everyone is a proper name with a set of significations or roles attached to it. However, it comes out as an attempt at trying to place her somewhere within its many folds, out of her urge to belong, to carve out a niche for herself, as; in “An Introduction”, she says, “I too call myself I.”(59)
There are no visible centres holding her poems together. Almost all the poems start somewhere, meander through many thoughts and reach somewhere else. There seems to be a recurrence of themes in her poems (love, desire, loss, loneliness, and the many nuances of man-woman relationships) but trying to find a common thread to her deluge would defeat the purpose and the essence of her poems. Her insight into the depths of relationships and the nuances of love is laudable. Love in its many forms making and breaking people. She says in the poem “The Freaks”:
. . . Can this man with
Nimble finger-tips unleash
Nothing more alive than the
Skin’s lazy hungers? Who can
Help us who have lived so long
And have failed in love? (9-14).
Love becomes the other, as something that is not there, elusive. Love as something postponed.
She inadvertently grabs all the pictures from life. It has all the shades of life – the happy, the sad, the clear and the blurred. It is a panoramic view that she captures. The images she tear out of life are powerful and striking. Most often on the brink of sarcasm, it is a cry for life and sometimes it is a cry against it. In the poem “The Testing of the Sirens”, her reply to her lover’s concern goes like this, “You look pale, he said. Not pale, not really/pale. It’s the lipstick’s/anaemia.”(15-17). Most of the poems come out as a testimony to the life that she has lived. The image of the city recurs throughout giving the idea that city becomes a witness to all her activities.
Even when her themes seem to be endless, the depth of her vision lies in the way she uses language. She evokes an array of images using plain words. In the poem “Pigeons”, she writes, “The sun swells; then/Swollen like a fruit/It runs harsh silver threads/Lengthwise, my afternoon/Dream.”(8-12). Her poems are verbal collages born out of her keen sense of observation.
The words she uses are simple but poignant. All the same, there are some poems that come out to be complex, some poems where the real is dovetailed with the fantastic or the bizarre. Some are almost obscure –vague thoughts on the verge of being philosophical. They are like flashes of lucidity merging into chaos. A good example would be “The Fear of the Year” where she starts with “This is no age for slow desires,” but goes off in a tangent after that ending with the lines:
so that we
Perceive the flying steel hands sow
Over mellow cities those dark,
Malevolent seeds and the red,
Red, mushrooms hotly sprout and grow
On an earth illogically
Stilled, and silenced, and dead,dead,dead. (12-18)
Some poems begin in a colourful, active, lively note only to end up in the many subtleties of love lost, and loneliness gained, like “The Dance of the Eunuchs”. Love, lust and longing all coalesce into this sense of not belonging. It is as if there are many strangers inside her and the longing inside is many.
She becomes a subject of the truth merging gradually into an object. In “Someone else’s Song” she says, “I am a million, million silences/Strung like crystal beads/ Onto someone else’s/ Song.” (13-16). She opens out a whole world yet there are some things that allude us. Most often in trying to say about the things she talks about, one ends up missing out most of it. This depth could be the strength of her poetry. On top of that, she might have chosen poetry as her vehicle as it gives her the flexibility, the fluidity and the elusiveness that she craves for. Nevertheless, she has the upper hand even in all these unanswered questions as she says in her autobiography, “But poetry does not grow ripe for us, we have to grow ripe enough for poetry.” (My Story, viii)
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