2 poems | Akhu Chingangbam

On Independence Day, we have two poems for you today by Akhu Chingangbam: India, I See Blood in Your Hands and Lullaby. They are also sung and performed by Akhu and his band, Imphal Talkies.

1. India, I see blood in your hands


India, have you ever crawled down enough to smell the soil of Kashmir?
India, have you ever heard of a lady named Sharmila?
India, can you explain to me what happened in the land of Gandhi, in Gujarat?
India, what are the charges against Dr Binayak Sen?

India, I see blood in your hands
India I see blood in your flag

India, are you waiting for the stone pelters to become suicide bombers?
India, Why are your farmers so fucking suicidal?
India, why the Poets in South are mourning for the Tamils killed in Sri Lanka?
India, why did you let Narendra Modi walk free preaching genocide?
India, what have you done to the villagers after salwa judum?

Is there a dream that we share from east to west?
Is there a song that echoes from north to south?


 Click to listen to the song in Soundcloud.



2. Lullaby

( First published in Northeast Review)

Blood soaked streets
That’s my ground
That’s where i play around
Sound of gunshots
That’s my song
That’s my lulla- lullaby

Your revolution has snatched away
My right to education

Te te tenouwa
Kangleipakki tenouwa
angang na mullaga
tenouwa na haraoiwi
oooooh ooooooohhhh
Uhdei saba nongmeini
mana pangba makhoini

Blood soaked body
That’s my daddy
You just shot him
You just killed him…………………
We dont need your guns and bombs
We just need songs of love

Your constitution has nothing for me
All you do is kill my innocence

Te te tenouwa
Kangleipakki tenouwa
angang na mullaga
tenouwa na haraoiwi
oooooh ooooooohhhh
Uhdei saba nongmeini
mana pangba makhoini

Fallen bodies like
Fallen leaves of October
But you don’t care
You bomb a town
That’s my town
That’s where i play around

Don’t fill our lives with throes of pain
Share a smile so we can bloom again.


Here is the official video of the song.

A Calcutta Story | Deborah Baker

In a moving tribute to Calcutta and Ginsberg, Deborah Baker writes about her early days in the city, having married one of the best writers of Indian English literature, who belonged to the place. The lack of a sense of belonging informs her early days while she accompanies her husband on his evening visits to the house of a Calcutta poet who knew Ginsberg. Here she writes about feeling a sense of affinity with Ginsberg whom she imagines to have undergone the same set of suspicions that she had faced and like him,she also ended up disarming her local interlocutors.This is followed up with a description of meeting Allen in New York city where she felt like an outsider once again.She tells us how even the young and irreverent who thought nothing of mocking other senior writers were respectful towards Ginsberg. Read the original English version of Baker's piece first published exclusively by The Sunflower Collective.

Allen Ginsberg in Calcutta circa 1960
Source: https://artcritique.files.wordpress.com/

In February 1990 I married my husband before a crowd of strangers on the rooftop of his parents house in Calcutta.  That first year I worked on a book in the back room of a borrowed apartment in Ballygunge while he worked on his book a few kilometers away in his childhood bedroom in Jodhpur Park. Every month or so we would go to the home of a popular and prolific Bengali writer named Tarapada Ray. He lived with his wife on the second floor of a big house near the Astor Hotel closer to the city center.

It seemed we always arrived at Tarapada babu’s in the midst of  loadshedding. We would creep up the large stairway that wound round the inner walls of the house in complete darkness, my husband carrying a bottle of Old Monk while I tried not to trip on my sari. Fluorescent tubes lit up the flat while ceiling fans rotated weakly, both powered by a contraption referred to as an inverter. Unlike a generator that makes a loud roar and can operate as long as it has petrol, the inverter is made from an assemblage of car batteries, wired to switch on when the current failed. If load shedding lasted long enough or returned often enough, the batteries would run down completely.  Every household had one. There was nothing more dispiriting during loadshedding than the sound of a ceiling fan over your bed stopping in the middle of the night.The mosquito net would heave a final sigh before settling on you like a collapsed lung. When the swish of the fan returned, an hour or two or more later, it felt like the wings of angels.

Tarapada babu cut a striking figure. His bloodshot eyes were banded in a darker pigment of skin lending him a distinct raccoon-like appearance. Most prominent was his belly. This preceded him by some distance, particularly when his dhoti’s knot rested atop it, giving his figure a senatorial fullness. He had a bullet head set upon prominent jowls and no discernable neck. Unexpectedly, he vibrated with energy and would periodically explode in barrel chested laughter. In his wild younger days the American poet Allen Ginsberg had christened him Torpedo.

Evenings at Tarapada babu’s were spent smoking Gold Flake cigarettes, and throwing back large tumblers of rum. Both fueled an uninterrupted flow of Bengali stories. From the evidence of my husband’s good humor, these stories were very funny. Tarapada’s wife spoke no English, and Tarapada wasn’t terribly keen on it. My husband would occasionally try to translate for me but it was like trying to describe an orchestra to a deaf person. When Tarapada spoke English, it came out in short, hoarse bursts of glottal noise, not unlike gunfire. The last words were nearly always unintelligible and I would have to ask him to repeat himself which naturally exasperated him. Similarly, if I risked a question I could never tell if Tarapada understood a word of what I was saying. His glare signaled blank incomprehension, if not actual hostility. I really couldn’t tell.  Mostly I just sat there counting my mosquito bites and making minute adjustments to the folds in my sari. At about 11 or 12 at night, Tarapada would send out for kathi rolls from the Astor Hotel. The cylindrical rolls, filled with spiced chicken and tiny green rings of hot peppers, arrived warm, with grease lightly flecking the waxy paper they were wrapped in. Their arrival signaled the close of Tarapada’s evening and the highlight of mine.  

Young Indian students had only recently begun to apply for undergraduate admission to American colleges and universities in significant numbers. Where once upon a time an aspiring Bengali academic might choose to pursue advanced studies in the Soviet Union or even Oxford or Cambridge, if they chose an America university they would have to answer for it. In Calcutta there was still something vaguely disloyal about anyone who chose to go to America instead.

A year before the first Gulf war, I felt that the pro Soviet/anti Americanism of the Bengalis was more of a salutary practice than a firm conviction, not unlike choosing low fat milk over whole. To someone’s proposition that the CIA had orchestrated the rise of Solidarity and the more recent fall of the Berlin wall, I once replied “you can’t be serious.” This was a mistake. On occasion some inane remark of mine at what I imagined was a friendly dinner party would end up in the society pages accompanied by a snarky comment. This happened more than once. It took me awhile to catch on that I was a subject of suspicion.

During one of these evenings at Tarapada’s house, he suddenly turned and spoke directly to me. He told me that he had known the American poet Allen Ginsberg, that he and his fellow poets had met him in the famed College Street coffeehouse in North Calcutta. Again, the tail end of the thought was lost in an explosion of incomprehensible and fearful sounds finishing in a deadly quiet. I smiled and Tarapada glared.   

           

I had met Allen Ginsberg just once, several years before. He was smaller than I had imagined; his stature further undermined by the folds and cushions of an off white sectional sofa at an upper west side cocktail party. The once rabbinical beard was then trim and graying and there were suede patches on the elbows of his jacket befitting his new position as a professor at Brooklyn College.  He carried the weight of his legend lightly, with none of the affectations the young are so quick to discover and disparage. He had kind eyes--one slightly drooping from an illness we had all heard about--behind thick spectacles.

Nearly everyone at the party had a claim on him but any direct approach was made somewhat awkward by the arrangement of furniture. The party took place in one of those storied pre-war classic six apartments, with a book lined hallway running its length, the kitchen at one end and a living room and its sofa at the other. Just being in an owner occupied apartment back then gave me an outsider’s sense of belonging, a sense of having cracked New York City in some essential way.

I came with several friends, all in our mid twenties, freelancers and journeyman editors with inchoate aspirations. One, the son of a much married father who had edited a prominent literary magazine, was a beautiful and haunted young poet, with a voice so fast and low you were obliged to lean closer to hear him. As a sulky adolescent he had known writers and intellectuals I had admired for years and he took pleasure in disabusing me of their immortal stature. Yet, even for him, Allen Ginsberg commanded attention. He approached the couch with the same confidence, I recall thinking, a pretty young woman displays in the presence of an older but moneyed man.

Yet what I remember most about that evening was noting that Ginsberg only had eyes for a young man from India who had accompanied us. Unlike my other friends, the man was a relative newcomer to the city and a stranger to the literary lions in the room. Ginsberg’s eyes and voice found him trapped in the doorway and, patting the sofa, drew him in. Knowing from his name that he was a Bengali, he wanted to know which writers he knew in Calcutta.

Three years later, newly married to this young writer, and settled in a city I never once imagined I would even visit, I realized that it was comforting to be reminded by Tarapada that Allen Ginsberg had been here before me. That he had braved the worst suspicions of an entire cadre of skeptical, wary, and fierce Bengali poets and had disarmed them and learned from them. That he was able to prove he was not, as they first imagined, a CIA agent out to destabilize their young country. In the end they decided he was one of them: a poet in a city full of poets. Tarapada babu wouldn’t have said so, but I could tell that even after thirty years, he still considered Allen Ginsberg his friend.  It occurred to me that perhaps he was telling me of this friendship as a way of declaring a truce with me, a suspect American married to a Bengali writer. Perhaps, resigning himself to the fact that I wasn’t scared off, this was his way of being hospitable.

That, at least, was how I chose to see it. It wasn’t exactly a warm welcome, but it was the start of something. Years later, still married and outfitted with two children, seven years after the death of Allen Ginsberg, I was fired from my job as a book editor. Rather than look for another job I decided I wanted to write a book about the place of India in the American imagination. I began my research with the Transcendentalists, proceeding through Walt Whitman’s “A Passage to India” and Martin Luther King’s embrace of Gandhi’s thought, and Hollywood’s discovery of yoga. When it finally occurred to me that Allen Ginsberg 1962 and 1963 travels would be the perfect vehicle to explore this subject, I couldn’t believe it had taken me so long to think of it. Tarapada’s mention of Ginsberg on that long ago evening I now decided had granted me permission to write about Allen and the Bengali poets he had come to love.  It was only then, in the course of researching the book, that I heard all the stories of Allen’s stay in Calcutta.

Five days before he died Allen wrote a poem entitled “Things I’ll Not Do (Nostalgia)” which included memories of his days in Calcutta and Benares and his travels in India with his lover, Peter Orlovsky.

Nor ever return to Kashi "oldest continuously habited city in the world"

bathe in Ganges & sit again at Manikarnika ghat with Peter,

visit Lord Jagganath again in Puri, never back to Birbhum take

notes tales of Khaki B Baba

Or enter to have Chai with older Sunil & Young coffeehouse poets,

Tie my head on a block in the Chinatown opium den, pass by Moslem

Hotel, its rooftop Tinsmith Street Choudui Chowh Nimtallah

Burning ground nor smoke ganja on the Hooghly.

He meant the poem as a goodbye but for the poets he left behind, like Tarapada, it was more than that. Calcutta is Kolkata now and there are fancy malls and a lot less loadshedding.  But Tarapada is gone and the city is emptier without him.  

1 poem | Charles Bane Jr

Thunder, Lightning

Thunder, lightning appear
on the sea and we slip to
Lesbos to be islanded and
enclosed.

Thunder, lightning. You roar
as I strike between your sandy
legs and we weep for the
banishment of emptiness
on the returning ship to
Athens streets.

Shall I lay my legs on
yours as we impregnate
the other eternally,
and birth from our lips
as we destroy our single
being, a crying child?

Thunder, lightning. I flash
behind your steps, unable
to describe on papyrus
the instance you slipped
into my menstrual flow
to heal small cuts and make my
heart beat longer for you
or your baths in the
sea that stirred me to compose
in the dark. Thunder

and lightning. I do not hate
men but how can I be tender
when every animal seeks out its
kind? Shall a bird love
shells or make nests for
hawks designed for doves?

Thunder, lightning are hammer
and necklace and we will never
return to any avenues but
their skies.

1 poem | Mark Antony Rossi

Thanks For the Memories

I used to be right
until I met
a girl poet
plunging
rhyme,
reason,
religion
and
roll-on deodorant
out my bathroom window.
 
The dog got sick
The landlord got serious.
The neighbors got eyes.
I got quiet;
wrote the scene
in my fiction
a comedy
to remember her by.

1 Poem | Djelloul Marbrook

The woven world 

                 *

Unattainable inaccessible one

we cast you out from within

only to feed on you like hummingbirds.

                **

So he took a shit around noon;

where did he take it, why

are we always taking things?

               ***

Is acquisition scatological?

What’s a thing worth but how

it’s tagged? Tags are our obsession.

              ****

Fisheye, on your slab of ice,

is this about entertaining angels unawares,

or not?

             *****

Stroke my face with rosemary,

soak my feet in sage; I will become

a thread of the woven world, a non-compliant.

Stark Electric Jesus - Malay Roychoudhury ( Translated by the Author)

We present to you a landmark poem from the Hungry Generation by it's founder, Malay Roychoudhury. Choudhury faced an obscenity trial for this poem and underwent quite an ordeal, which made his friend Allen Ginsberg (who had faced a similar trial) contact his poet friends like Nissim Ezekiel and political ones like Pupul Jayakar, a friend of Indira Gandhi's, to help the young poet The poem has been reprinted with the author's permission.

Malay in Palamau (1963), Source: kaurab.com 

Oh I'll die I'll die I'll die
My skin is in blazing furore
I do not know what I'll do where I'll go oh I am sick
I'll kick all Arts in the back and go away Shubha
Shubha let me go and live in your cloaked melon
In the unfastened shadow of dark destroyed saffron curtain
The last anchor is leaving me after I got other anchors lifted
I can't resist anymore, a million glasspanes are breaking in my cortex
I know, Shubha, spread out your matrix, give me peace
Each vein is carrying a stream of tears up to the heart
Brains contagious flints are decomposing out of eternal sickness
Mother why didn't you give me birth in the form of a skeleton
I'd have gone two billion light years and kissed God's arse
But nothing pleases me nothing sounds well
I feel nauseated with more than a single kiss
I've forgotten women during copulation and returned to the Muse
In to the sun coloured bladder
I do not know what these happenings are but they are occurring with me
I'll destroy and shatter everything
Draw and elevate Shubha into my hunger
Shubha will have to be given
Oh Malay
Calcutta seems to be a procession of wet and slippery organs today
But I do not know what I'll do now with my own self
My power of recollection is withering away
Let me ascend alone toward death
I haven't had to learn copulation and dying
I haven't had to learn the responsibility of shedding the last drops after urination
Haven't had to learn to go and lie beside Shubha in the darkness
Have not had to learn Usage of French leather while lying on Nandita's bosom
Though I wanted the healthy spirit of Aleya's fresh chinarose matrix
Yet I submitted to the refuge of my brain's cataclysm
I am failing to understand why I still want to live
I am thinking of my debauched Sabarna-Choudhury ancestors
I'll have to do something different and new
Let me sleep for the last time on a bed soft as the skin of Shubha's bosom
I remember now the sharp-edged radiance of the moment I was born
I want to see my own death before passing away
The world had nothing to do with Malay Roychoudhury
Shubha let me sleep for a few moments in your violent silvery uterus
Give me peace, Shubha, let me have peace
Let my sin-driven skeleton be washed anew in your seasonal bloodstream
Let me create myself in your womb with my own sperm
Would I have been like this if I had different parents
Was Malay alias me possible fron an absolutely different sperm
Would I have been Malay in the womb of other women of my father
Would I have made a professional gentleman of me like my dead brother without Shubha
Oh, answer, let somebody answer these
Shubha, ah Shubha
Let me see the earth through your cellophane hymen
Come back on the green mattress again
As the cathode rays are sucked up with warmth of a magnet's brilliance
I remember the letter of the final decision of 1956
The surroundings of your clitoris were being embellished with coon at that time
Fine rib-smashing roots were descending into your bosom
Stupid relationship inflated in the bypass of senseless neglect
Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah
I do not know whether I am going to die
Squandering was roaring within heart's exhaustive impatience
I'll disrupt and destroy
I'll split all inti pieces for the sake of arts
There isn't any other way out for poetry except suicide
Shubha
Let me enter into the immemorial incontinence of your labia majora
In to the absurdity of woeless effort
In the golden chlorophyll of the drunken heart
Why wasn't I lost in my mother's urethra
Why was I driven away in my father's urine after his self-coition
Why wasn't I mixed in the ovum-flux or in the phlegm
With her eyes shut supine beneath me
I felt terribly distressed when I saw comfort seize Shubha
Women could be treacherous even after unfolding a helpless appearance
Today it seems there is nothing treacherous as Women and Art
Now my ferocious heart is running towards an impossible death
Vertigo of water are coming up to my neck from the pierced earth
I will die
Oh what are these happenings within me
I am failing to fetch out my hand and my palm
From the dried sperms on my trousers spreading wings
300000 children gliding toward the district of Shubha's bosom
Millions of needles are now running from my blood into Poetry
Now the smuggling of my obstinate leg is trying to plunge
Into the death-killer sex-wig entangled in the hypnotic kingdom of words
In violent mirrors of each wall of the room I am observing
After letting loose a few naked Malay, his unestablished scramblings.