New | Book Review | Crowbite | Nitoo Das | by Shaiq Ali

The Raven, Japanese artist, Wikimedia C.

 

Disentangling Roots: A Review of Nitoo Das’s Crowbite

 

Nitoo Das’s new poetry collection Crowbite opens with Mawphlang which is as much a visual experience as it is a poetic one. Here, the forest is much more human and its landscape is not violent, not ominous but indecisive, restless, quivering. There are breaks and gaps but the closeness with this restless ‘nature’ seems from the past and relevant. It gives the narrator the ground on which to stand, the touch she longs for, the touch of moth and seeds. It feels worthy of telling a secret.

Mawphlang begins a series of new beginnings and endings in the collection where the innate space of the mind in an existential world reacts, and turns, to the other side of modern geography: the trees, birds, rivers, forests, and much more. Their separateness is blurred and Das melds this with a deep sense of opposition, of transcendence and reflection in her verses. Each poem stands in a whirlwind of temporal, spatial and emotional outcry and adaptation. In The Elephant at Ka Kshaid Lai Pateng Khohsiew, for instance, the Elephant is not a towering, rampaging creature but is, rather:

burdened with his own incongruity

in the hills

 

Here, the first verse can easily be reversed and seen through the eyes of the narrator, living in surroundings that she has no control over, where she doesn’t belong. Das’s metaphors, like the one above, are strongly placed in the geographical sense but incompatibility with her inside world brings about a continued struggle for harmony and at the same time, dissonance. In the poem My Mother Clicks a Selfie, the face of her mother and the river Dihing are likened to the withdrawing of roots from the grass. Then, the sparrows sink in grief in spring.

The Dihing is nowhere

near her face, except perhaps

as an absent blur a turned device

cannot present. A root

withdrawing into grass.

 

In spring, a sparrow sinks

dragging a sudden grief.

 

Roots are no longer a symbol of birth and spring is no longer a season of union and new blossomings. Das overturns common conceptions of meanings whose cultural contexts are now constantly being buried. This state of flux is portrayed through visible means (visually), through language (words) and more vividly, through images which create new arcs, both physically and in her mind.

 

Not only the poems, but the collection itself battles with this displaced-ness gradually as we move on. Midway through the collection, in Root Bridge, Mawlynnong we are in the midst of a reworking process, a remaking.

 

They manipulate

definitions of what remains below everything. These

roots are parallel lines of real and reflection.

 

By the end, the poem Bus to Sohra encapsulates somewhat the process coming to an end.

I am a creature that cannot leave the pines alone.

The title poem Crowbite draws a striking parallel with Premchand’s Sadgati (Salvation). While in Premchand’s short story, Dukhi, a Dalit, succumbs at the hands of a Brahmin, in Das’s poem, the tradition of structural opposition she creates throughout the collection is given shape through Bhobai, a “lower caste” painter, and his metaphysical leap and changing himself into a crow. The poem Crowbite transcends death through transformation. Bhobai has realized that it is his body itself which is used as a chain by the “upper caste” Sharma Master and release from it is the only solution. In the realm of the humans, his existence is through his caste which chains him to his body, and therefore breaking away implies, transformation in bodily terms but salvation in metaphysical terms.

But it ends hinting at a somewhat paradoxical shift.

I sang songs with the fishermen. I bathed in the sacred river and flew away from their temples before they could throw stones at me.

Bhobai the crow cannot escape from his form altogether; while he can sing songs with the fisherman, at temples he would be at the receiving end of thrown stones. The temple, although not explicitly shown in the poem, the instrument and place of origination of such caste alienation is still out of his reach, and ostracizes him. It does not spare, ultimately, Bhobai, the man as well as Bhobai the crow.

In the physical sense, the body is the locale where the forces of separation, belonging, alteration takes place. The poem Crowbite also brings to the fore, the question of the body of a “lower caste” as the subject which draws on the image of the body. Perhaps, it is in the background of the invoking of this abstraction by Das that we can imagine the transformation of Bhobai.

Furthermore, the body is at the centre of many poems such as The Cat’s Daughters, The Game, My Face and Three Weeks. All probe into what the body is commonly taken to be, from a birth vessel to a sacred embodiment and claim instead that it is like anything that decays, an entropy. Knowing about the body is a learning process in itself, it has its own language, unique and its own time trajectories:

I see my body through cracks in glass. [Bus To Sohra]

***

I carry my face

in my hands

looking

for the marks that made it [My Face]

The essence of the title poem extends the already refined strength of the collection Crowbite in defining the nature, modes, possibilities and limitations of opposition to the hegemony of caste and many other forms of oppression. The crow as a metaphor and image, becomes its centre-piece. It is a means of salvation, it cries for the forgiven and the damned, it remains at the end, the only connection that the poet feels has withstood the test of time. Or else, all of the past was nothing more than a:

Day [that] had vanished like the whims of a feather.