William Carlos Williams once referred to poems as machines made up of words. Of course, there is more to poems than merely an assembly of words, like an intrinsic energy that drives them. However, it is more a spiritual energy, for if we disassemble the proverbial machine, we may not be able to lay hands on it.
Indeed, whenever a poet writes, an energy is created from the mass of her experiences engaging with language. Another intriguing aspect of this metaphorical machine is that though it has movement in terms of flow, it tends to move far strongly its engaged readers than itself.
While reading Jonaki Ray’s first poetry collection Firefly Memories (Copper Coin), I felt like surveying a broken landscape of homes left behind, loss of dear ones, good old times and gender violence and injustices, where only consolation lies in articulating what one has lost or witnessed. In fact, this seems the energy driving her poetry, reaffirming if one can express the loss, something of essence can be retrieved. This is akin to isolating traces of eternity from the garbled collection of the times we inhabit. This sense of purpose informs her poems in the collection, which are written in vivid details.
As in her poem Home, she writes:
Back to what was once home,
pigeons nest in match-box buildings.
Roads cram with fruit and veggie vendors,
gleaming cars block the road potholing
the status of suburbia. The Bougainvillea purples
the haze and the 50C fever in the air. The Madhobilota
shields from the neighbour’s eyes that judges.
Loneliness mantles the shelves of mind until
its practice eases into homecoming.
Firefly Memories, Jonaki Ray, Copper Coin, 2023.
Here we notice the poet has put an image after an image of what are present but quite paradoxically one encounters in rich details about what is missing – her home. This kind of associative leaps in her poems provide the necessary meat to the collection.
In another of her poem, Eating Water and Living Tales centred on the theme of displacement, we witness a resolve of someone who has lost her home that comes not from any action, but in acceptance, suggesting just as while leaving one’s home one was choiceless against the mass of the cascading time, similarly in making a home elsewhere one needs a stoic resignation, and some mysterious hand of time would recompense by granting the home in a new setting. It also seems that home is never lost if one has carried it well within oneself.
Parboti Ma, refugee from Bihar,
worker in Kolkata, resident of Delhi
saying, ‘Stay still, just like the teeter-totter
in the playground,
and one day,
balance will come in your life.
Similar sense of homelessness pervades in many of the poems in the collection. All of them written in a gloomy voice.
Brick by brick by brick, dust by dust by dust, the walls we build climb up,
piercing the grey of the sky and clambering into the back of our throats,
until mornings erupt in khoon pinkened by the white of the thook
like the sherbet ma made for us back home.
I tell her that our tomorrow, kal, will not be the same as the kal of yesterday.
That one day we will have our own ghar-
home is not this broken shanty (from Tomorrow Is a Many-Eyed Goddess)
I personally envision home as a place where there are no obstacles, you stay on your own terms, in your own way without harming others. Perhaps that is a shared vision captured in the poem What Remains where homecoming is essentially same as inhabiting one’s home:
coming home
is nothing but the current
and the tide
aligned
just right
When we witness immigration, we also invariably come to know of things immigrants carry as a symbol of their lost home and heritage. Though they convince themselves that one day they would return but, in their hearts, they know that they would have to make their space elsewhere, where the things would help them achieve some semblance of their lost home. Many of Ray’s poems are strewn with the stuffs an immigrant carries when she moves out of her home. In some poems they assume the shape of language, spoken as words that peek through the everyday language of the world outside, like blades of grass in a snowy field, providing the greenery and life to an immigrants’ conversations.
In Exile, a phrase similar in sound with what the poet had heard at her place, makes her feel at home in a foreign land
Pausing at the cobblestone crossing opposite Case Dante in Rome,
I hear, ‘Kothay tui?’
‘Where are you?’
the familiar words, spoken by a man
with a ridged face framed by a Lincoln beard.
……..The rolling words,
parallel to the Italian streaming around me,
feel cousinly to the language
I speak, back home.
I wait for the stranger to finish the call,
tied invisibly by the sudden homesickness that engulfs me.
The immigrant-like characteristic of carrying an essence is not merely confined for a place or an object, but also finds reflection in many of the poems about relationships. This affirms the premise that if one can haul back something from a scenario resembling loss, one has distilled the essential spiritual aspects of their physical existence, independent of spatial and temporal constraints. It is akin to sublimating memories of a person into experiences of a lifetime, which would remain ever present without leaving behind any residue, so much so that one even need not to remember them.
In This Is a Country for Old Women, Ray recalls, with profound gentleness, her poet aunt who suffers from dementia, her existence in an active state of decay still bears those traces which the ailment has been unable to dilute.
What remains is her smile:
‘Don’t tell anyone.
I want to come home.’
This could very well be the smile speaking, involuntarily expressing what manner of speech is no longer adequate to do. Similarly in Fireflies, one witnesses the essential self of the poet’s father that remains preserved despite the many difficulties he faced described in the poem.
Deep within, the lonely, frightened,
wistful, hopeful boy remained.
A love of poetry, of theatre endured.
Perhaps that is why he dreamed
of fireflies lighting the night,
and named me one.
It feels that there is something about humans or objects, places imbued with humanity that no one can take, perhaps that is also something one cannot share, even if one would want to. Some of these similar poems are like love letters written to poet’s dear ones, the ones who experienced losses and were thus lost in the maze of the world, searching for their homes.
Food is another recurring presence in many of the poems in the collection. In these poems, food recipes are part of the family heritage carried by the displaced. Like in Kaemon Accho, Shob Thik? we witness a snapshot of everyday life which contains within its stream something of eternal essence, surviving geography and generations.
I buy my usual Sunday stock –
250 grams of Rohu and 250 grams
of the silverfish-resembling Morella
and nod at Dulal’s grandson – ‘Ashi’ –
There is no word for goodbye in Bangla;
instead, I tell him I will visit, again.
I am already dreaming of marinating
the fish pieces in salt and turmeric,
and frying them crisp in smoky mustard oil –
the simplest of recipes that has travelled down
from grandfather to me –
the same way that he did –
from Burma
to Bangladesh to India –
just like these fish.
Food therefore not only serves the nutrition of the body but also a thread tying past and geographies.
I reverse the trajectory.
The past is like dough twirling in a sizzling pan,
the strands circling and closing (from Time is both a Wave and a Line)
In The Secret to a Good Biryani we see that food has been depicted as a metaphor for integrating in a foreign land.
You wait for the spices to mix and the chicken to infuse the rice.
You hope to mix with the people here.
You source friends amongst the locals unsuccessfully.
You integrate with the Desis instead.
On a deeper level, the poet suggests that food we carry from our homeland helps us to settle down in a foreign land. I think taste serves another purpose, that it allows us to inherit an experience, particularly when meaning has lost its value. It is dopamine for a troubled heart. But functionally, language, food, object or even memories an immigrant carries, serves a broader purpose, they become metaphorical anchors of their lives in an unknown land.
Though most poems are personal in nature centred around homelessness and learning to live in a foreign land, there are poems that deal with the issue of gender inequality, violence and power imbalance in our society. Here the poet takes a witness’ role, and rightly so, for when one is writing about others’ experiences of injustice, one should at least put forth the details as accurately as possible, to begin with.
The evening sky blazes tangerine as sister and I walk home
My brother (by law) and his three friends fence us off
on the lone pukka road. How dare you
talk to outsiders about ghar ke maamle?
The village watches as they hold aloft
a bag-ful of treacherous ‘water’, and stays silent
as I wrestle and twist to stave off the drops/
Each drop clings. And shreds.
And eviscerates – tissue, blood, web-like nerves
bares to the bone as my face melts (From Burn (for Reshma Qureshi)).
There are similar poems of description of violence against women, told as a witness. They are evocative as their context is such, but to move in terms of poetry on a deeper level and not merely sensory, the poet provides a commonality to the readers, so that they find in the description of violence something that brings the experience home, closer to them, so that they can identify it within their spaces, thus name it and speak about it. Also from Burn (for Reshma Qureshi):
The delicate hair-pin irritates my scalp.
Yet, I smile. And pose. And pout.
I pirouette and span my hips with my fists
as the cream gown – my first ever – clings
to every curve of me.
In Homes Locked Away, we witness two citizens’ losses juxtaposed with each other, and a sense of bonding developing between them, affirming what Aristotle describes citizenry as a civic friendship between citizens.
I lost my living when everything was locked down.
I sued to clean homes and live in a room that
is now taken by my landlord!’, she cries.
The guard, originally from the opposite side of the country,
shakes his head; he doesn’t speak the same language as her,
though they are fellow citizens. If he could, he would tell
the woman about his lost land, sold to a new-age guru,
which made him leave his home and his wife and his son.
But…he has learnt that some losses cannot be measured by words.
So he says nothing. Instead, he gives her some water, and waves her on.
She limps forward, on a road lined by placards
and the flags of a godman-turned-politician proclaiming,
‘The way to be happy and attain one’s desires is to believe.’
When systemic failure is treated like a natural disaster since we act like its helpless victims, we have essentially made system a God and the people working for it, demi-gods, angelic beings or some other theological creatures who are beyond reproach. This does not portend well for a democracy even if there exists civic friendship among the citizenry.
Moreover, there is a catch in writing poetry in this genre, which has been referred to as poetry of witnessing by poet Carolyn Forsche, that one may, instead of inhabiting the subject fully, get rhetorical or preachy. This tension, the poet deftly resolves by the power of her prose-like narrative in the poems, where the mass of description adds up to a level that it can only be possibly further moved by the emotion of imagery, and that makes Ray’s poems a moving force for our times.
Tabish Nawaz teaches Environmental Science and Engineering at IIT Bombay.
