Our Body is Geography

This collection contains the poems of five poets from Kerala, five voices whose references and images question the very act of writing. The poetry of Palakkad- based translator, critic and activist Ra Sh (Ravi Shanker) on social network sites has recently attracted a number of readers and generated a variety of discourse concerned with the mode of writing, thematic choice and the politics of writing, in particular. Ra Sh builds his verse from a series of negations. He never wants to be party to a fixed pattern of writing or to any fixed ideological agenda. His poems in this collection generate a peculiar understanding of the woman—one that needs to be appreciated in the light of recent atrocities perpetrated upon her. If a poem like Nemesis: Re-visited gives us the contemporary occlusion of woman as ‘banished as an evil star on sun’s orbit’, Some Merry Thoughts on Love and Romance approaches the plenitude of love, romance and death by making an anti-romantic plea: ‘If I were meat, not a chewed bone!’. Ra Sh’s examination of man- woman relationships in poetry is fraught with notions of violence, his verse filled with internal turbulence. A poem such as Sunset Rape-Official Trailer, inspired by watching a Japanese porn film, is undoubtedly a testimony to the visceral and visual anti-reality of our time; the poet inculcates in it cinematic, deeply drenched mental images of the body. Ultimately, this body of violence, the core of Ra Sh’s poetry, extends to the micro-politics of our time.

The poetic world of Bini BS is similarly political, though the poet never shrinks into the set codes of liberation or women’s empowerment. ‘I love my men/ Oh! Just love them! /Guinea pigs with no notion of tomorrow’, writes the poet. Articulating the desire for a new kingdom, Bini re-examines the contemporary quest of the sexes in May the Kiss Kingdom Come, which deepens the contemporary struggle towards articulating love as from ‘primordial memory’, its awareness of the deeply divided chasm of the body. The poem Hibiscus is a deconstructive one—of the so-called beauty and resplendence attributed to the flower, while its colour also signifies the raped vagina of a woman, the daily drab blood that has become a part and parcel of our lives.

Binu Karunakaran, a very different poet, sustains a sharp reader-poet distance, in poems such as Amazing Feats and The Goddess of Cats. At other times, we are positioned close to an encounter of breathless movement: ‘her arm stretching/ below the train door/ towards the beating wings / of a sparrow/ scavenging / the nether space between/ the platform/ and the wheels/ of a train/ that now/ begins to move’. Modelled on the famous poem The Red Wheelbarrow by American poet William Carlos Williams, this poem tries to resurrect the immediate image. For, sight, in Karunakaran’s poetry, is the crucial moment that one tends to forget or self-consciously evade. The world Mikkim Bizzi (Jeena Mary Chacko) constructs is also one of indifferent situations and images, but her images occupy centre stage. The ‘other’ is someone who inhabits the verse, as Bizzi writes: ‘No, don’t muddy the water/ let it remain borderline/ let me remain too/ in the end, everything turns to poems/ to dust, rust and oblivion’. The tussle of the body, the discourse of the inner being, the unspeakable breaks of thoughts—all combine in Womb Discourses when Bizzi says, ‘Womb talks dissolve reason’. The womb is the space of all geographies.

Finally, Sreelatha’s poems offer the desperate plea of women for alternate liberation or existence—a theme that unites this collection. In Ship Wrecked on Isles of Your Eyes, she poses the alterity of the second person in the much- awaited hope of the poetic self; the fantasy that she will be shipwrecked soon. The chilling image of dismemberment, of the journey metamorphosed into the ‘act of being seen/ witnessed’, occupies the sense of womanhood. The poet asks, ‘Are we comfortable in our skins/ Living and dreaming as if for eternity?’ in Plastic Surgery; a definite voice against the way our bodies are modelled is evident. The clash between being ‘in’ and ‘beyond’ the body is the nucleus of Sreelatha’s poetry.

These five poets sustain a sense of interventionist occupation. The meticulous grafting of lines and images (in the work of Ra Sh, Sreelatha and Bini, particularly) register the never-ending insanity of the poetic discourse on the body and space. But is this space a radical one in Indian English poetry? In some sense, yes, though these poets never claim to be seekers of any particular radical ideology of our times. As Sreelatha says, ‘Every wrinkle in my body is a truth’, further testifying to the expression of a new geography, encompassing body, surroundings, recesses of the mind, region and above all, the ever-remaining question of nationhood. n

(Krishnan Unni P is an associate professor of English at Deshbandhu College, Delhi University)

About The Author

Krishnan Unni P

Krishnan Unni P is a professor in English at Deshbandhu College, Delhi University

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