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| Chandramohan Sathyanathan |
Love, and more
Love after Babel
"Jim Crow segregated hostel
rooms
Ceiling fans bear strange fruit,
Blood on books and blood on papers,
A black body swinging in mute
silence,
Strange fruit hanging from
tridents."
-
Killing the Shambukas, Love After Babel
Chandramohan S (CS hereafter)'s third book of poems, Love After Babel, won the prestigious
Nicolas Cristobal Guillen Outstanding Book Award, in January this year. This
review attempts to shed fresh light on CS's work, and analyse CS's highly charged
political treatise as an expression, not only of resistance to Caste-based
oppression, but also that of radical solidarity to other marginalised
identities in contemporary Indian society.
CS identifies himself as a Dalit, Indian poet writing in English. I remember first coming across CS's poetry via his second collection of poems, Letters to Namdeo Dhasal in 2016. (We had briefly corresponded via Social Media, and he was generous enough to have sent me a copy).
One distinctly
remembers the poems of that collection and the fiery emotions they aroused. They
were by turns angry, visceral, and poignant meditations, not only on the nature
and texture of Caste-based historical injustice/violence in a specific context,
but also on injustice of any kind in general. However, CS's main focus in that
collection had been Caste, and Caste-based violence. In this regard, Ajay
Sekhar locates CS's poetry in the Sahodaranist tradition "of subversive
and iconoclastic poetry that aims at social critique and cultural change",
inspired by Sahodaran Ayyappan, a social revolutionary and rationalist who
staunchly advocated democratic ideals in Kerala in the early 20th century. I
would go a step further and say that CS and his oeuvre falls in the greater tradition
of political/protest poetry, championed by the likes of Argentine poet Juan
Gelman, American poet Claudia Rankine and closer home, Meena Kandasamy.
What CS
had started in Letters... only expands
in scale, scope, tone and depth in his latest collection of poems, Love After Babel (2020). By this, I
refer to CS's myriad forays into the geographies of injustice foraged in the
crucible of gender, caste, class, and religion. I also refer to the startling
efficacy of the poems in capturing and articulating the many psychological after-effects
of violence, be they gender-based,
caste-based, religion-based, or identity-based; and how dominant narratives of
identity suppress, coerce, and attempt to obliterate, or worse, re-shape narratives
of 'the other' in their shadow. CS's latest collection is an act of profound
resistance to such cultural hegemony.
The
first section of the collection, 'Call me Ishmail Tonight', with its four very
politically-charged, evocative poems, sets the tone for the rest of the poems.
In 'Thirteen ways of looking at a black burkini' (p3-p4) age-old, patriarchal fear, and the control it
exerts on feminine sexuality and the female body is sharply articulated and
critiqued, when the poet writes, "cops patrol her tan lines/ like dams
patrol/ rivers flowing above danger marks." The female body becomes both, a
site of interrogation and resistance. What are these "danger marks",
who are "the cops", what are these "rivers" that flow above
those danger marks, needs no telling, given that the metaphor is so apt, it expands
in the mind long after one has put down the book. Likewise, Plus-sized poem
(p.47) simultaneously examines and resists prevalent gendered (read: women-related)
notions and expectations when it announces to the reader, "this poem
refuses to be/ the world's wife"
[emphasis mine]. That is because "this poem is not pimple-free/ is printed
on rough paper", neither does it need "introduction from
veterans".
Why loiter? (p.25), inspired by Shilpa Phadke's
seminal book, Why loiter?: Women and risk
on Mumbai Streets, charts how market capitalism has somewhat distorted
prevalent gender dynamics because "the era of open markets/ added colour
to the stale world of white-only lingerie". However, the colour pink (the
deliberate use of a colour with strong gendered connotations to simultaneously
upend such connotations is both brave and noteworthy) spills "over white/
to scrounge for a rump-sized perch/ on the lingerie clothesline." The position
of the poem is clear - while open markets may have distorted gender dynamics,
the struggle to "scrounge for a rump-sized perch" is still on!
But the
interesting thing about CS's gender politics is that his political and
aesthetic preoccupations take in its fold (and attempts to uplift through an
empath's eye for details), not only women, but men and masculinities which find
themselves at the receiving end of various injustices and hegemonies. In the
ironically titled, 'Make in India' (p.34), while the brow sweat of the "lumpen
proletariat" condenses on the bottles of the beverage corporation,
"the frail frame of his wife/ is his daily punching bag". In a matter
of two lines, we feel our sympathies 'for him' ebb away, and suddenly we aren't
sure what to make of the poem. Finally, swallowing the poem with its ironically
positioned title and uncertain morality leaves an acidic taste on our tongues. This
unsettling, acidic aftertaste is the characteristic hallmark of much of CS's
work.
In
the same vein, 'Thirteen ways of looking at a black beard' (p5), illuminates
the uneasy correlation between keeping a beard (presumably by a Muslim man),
and being stopped for frisking "at the immigration office". The poet
tells us, "all you need is in that bag:/ trim your surname,/ make it
palatable for tongues/ at the immigration office". He further elaborates
on the nature of such exchanges by saying, "frisking is not intrusive/ but
very intimate like/ claws gloved with caresses/ patrol the nerve endings of my
civilisation." The penultimate line, "claws gloved with caresses" [emphasis mine] is, one feels, a superbly
evocative image capturing the inexplicable, but very real, prejudice lying at
the heart of Islamophobia in specific, and any kind of prejudicial behaviour in
general, masking itself as pedantic benevolence.
The
range of CS's poetry also manifests in refashioning problematic history to represent,
examine and critique the problematic present. The 'news' in William Carlos
Williams lines, "It is difficult/ to get news from poems/ yet men die
miserably everyday/ for lack/ of what is found there", grimly resonates
with the terrifying image of "a black body swinging in mute silence"
in Killing the shambhuka (p.13) {one of his most famous poems}, reminiscent of
the suicide (or killing) of Dalit student, Rohith Vermula. In a more slanted
way, in addition to protest, resistance and 'writing back to societal hegemony
and oppression', what is found in these poems is empathy, affection and a need
for dignity - the lack of which, at the hands of society governed by
upper-class privilege and prejudice, kills vulnerable men (and women) every day.
Likewise,
the village-legend of Nangeli is resurrected in Nangeli (p.41), about an
"intermediate caste" woman who supposedly cut-off her breasts to
protest against caste-based breast-tax. "The streams [of blood] flowed
unabated"...the streams did not coagulate", the poem tells us,
"the cartographers always miss it".
CS's
poems are some of the strongest poems of protest and resistance one can come
across in the landscape of contemporary Indian poetry. Suraj Yengde, in his
Introduction, aptly posits that at the core of CS's "stoic, rebellious,
confrontational, revolutionary, feminist, humanistic, romantic" poems, sits the notion of "Dalitality", which is,
"an essence of embracing the vulnerability of others".
Indeed,
one is tempted to reflect on the title of the collection itself - Love After Babel . One can read
'Babel' in its colloquial sense, as a mythic enterprise which fails owing to our
inability to effectively speak to, communicate with, and thus understand each
other, thereby giving rise to a sort of universalised 'otherness'.
CS's
poems attempts to map such mythic (but very real) otherness, borne from antagonisms and differences of Caste,
religion and gender. However, it is unique in that it fashions an original
aesthetic founded in the mould of startling imagery fused with an
understanding, empathy and courage to reach out and touch the other, not through "gloved claws", but through love.
That CS invents a completely original poetic idiom in doing so, simultaneously enriches
and deepens the scope his project.
As an
endnote, Eduardo Galeano had once written of Juan Gelman, that "Juan has
committed the crime of marrying justice to beauty".
I'd hazard and say, so has CS!
■■
Author : Chandramohan
S
Book : Love
After Babel
Publisher : Daraja
Press, Ottawa, Canada
Year : 2020
ISBN-13 : 978-1988832371
Pages : 90
pages
Price : INR 695.00
(Ankush is a mental health professional and poet based in Delhi. His first collection of poetry, An Essence of Eternity (Sahitya Akademi, New Delhi) was published in 2016. His poetry has appeared in Indian Literature, Eclectica, Cha: An Asian Literary Journal and Linden Avenue Literary Journal. He is currently pursuing his PhD in Masculinity Studies from BITS, Pilani. )
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