‘A Poetry of Masks and Games and Laughter’

18 januari 2006 If one had to find a single metaphor to describe Rukmini Bhaya Nair’s poetry, it would have to do with translation. Poetry is both the language into which history, mythology, philosophy and everyday experience are translated, as well as the form that is the end result of such translation. This act of translation, this claiming of territory for poetry, is a way of consistently legitimising it. So in a curious way, writing poetry becomes a way of making poetry relevant. At its best, her poetry is a mode of critical inquiry in lyric form. Her tendency to translate or re-interpret takes a dialogic mode, and this dialogue is usually between her and metaphysics, as it were – between her and the intangible qualities of the tangible world.

When Nair revisits Sappho or Prometheus or Walt Whitman or Alfred Tarski, when she sees Sita in a cleaning woman, or portrays the ordinary, almost incidental manner of Ganesha’s birth, she is trying to make contemporary and personal meaning out of these figures, and the results usually manage to be both open-ended and satisfying. The most striking thing about Nair’s poems is her way of striking up intellectually complex (and yet in their ‘irrationality’, very poetic) connections between things, an aspect of her penchant for translation. So the dead are re-discovered in art, Sappho is a hijra on a Delhi street, Kali is a paan-chewing woman, longing for a worldly love, love must be experienced through spice, age is an aquarium, the shapes of children sleeping under sheets become a Roman frieze of death, poetry is a yellow hibiscus, and, in what is probably the most wonderful and odd analogy in the book, she sees in the contorted, floral-like postures of a leper girl, the gardens that the famous Nek Chand of Chandigarh creates out of waste materials: both speak to the idea of “Mortal forms redone in lovelier ways”.

Yet where does it lead, this attempt – Krishna-like – to swallow the world and then regurgitate it? I think it leads first of all to a fluid self, to an indeterminate self. Czeslaw Milosz speaks in a recently published interview about how invaluable it was for his poetry that he was rooted in, what he calls quite simply, his tradition. “My force came from being rooted in the small district in Lithuania where I was born,” he says, and even though he does not say it, one realises that this was a moral force. It was a moral force in an essentially mysterious way, able to provide a centre, to make for moral clarity, dignity and consistency, without being binding. Nair’s poetry is at the other end from Milosz’s – it does not emerge from rootedness but from the rather febrile thing that is its absence. Nevertheless, one wonders about the ethic of such poetry. If there is one in Nair’s poetry, it is elusive. Her poetry is fundamentally playful – it is a poetry of masks and games and laughter. Many of the poems that are ‘about’ herself rather than those where she is an actor in a dialogue, are weak because she tends in such poems to take a somewhat vacuous feminist line.

“Wehavewrungpoemsfromhouseholdtasks/ Carryingwaterchildsorrowcanyoudoasmuch?” she asks the philosopher Shankara. “A woman is a thing apart./ She is bracketed off, a/ Comma, semi-colon, at most/ A lower-case letter, lost” she says in ‘Five Uneasy Pieces’. Or the disingenuous ‘. . . when the vagrant/ Winds of autumn sweep/ Into a woman’s mind/ She writes/ To surrender, she wants/ To be met . . .’ Or, in another poem, “All said and done, a poem/ Is water in a woman’s hands”. All said and done, none of this is very convincing.

There are poems (one titled ‘Love Songs’ which begins – “Home, about to land/ I knew I did not want to see you”) where we sense a more private sadness and discontent, but on the whole such poems do not work as well as those where she gives in to the more cerebral and I daresay ‘detached’ side of her passion – the philosophical explorations of the world and particularly of language. So a poem like ‘Sardinian Encounter’ seems so uniquely her own, a delightful portrayal of a Sardarji she meets on a flight who complains about them all being packed in the plane ‘like Sardinians’! Instead of finding this merely amusing, Nair takes off her on her own metaphysical flight – seeing in this an enchanting instance of how language seems to have an in-built capacity for wickedly subverting itself, for undoing its own established meanings. This is quintessential Nair and she does this sort of thing brilliantly. She is really concerned, like I said earlier, with playing one thing against another, and for this her audience does not really need to know who the conjurer is, or even to see her. It is possible to just sit back and enjoy the sleights of hand, the fantastic conjunctions that she effects. And if we sometimes feel of her poems that they are verging on the artful, then we at least know that she is aware of this herself. The title poem – about flowers that are grown not for the biological reason of pollination but for the aesthetic reason of the contemplation of beauty – captures a sentiment that finds echoes in her own work. She draws things into the frame of a poem for no reason other than that she wants to.

And perhaps this is the only ethic there is left for poetry – its capacity to propose newer and newer relationships between ways of representing the world and the world itself. This is liberating and enjoyable, and for a secular intellectual poet in her inter-textual, multi-culti world, probably the next best thing to being a moral force. Nair dedicates her book to poets who are aware that poetry no longer matters and who yet know that it must. To me it seems regretful not that poetry does not matter in general, but that it does not mean more to those to whom it means anything at all. Even to flourish as a marginal art it requires more zealots and Nair is one such zealot. It would be a real pity if her book were not given the serious attention it deserves.