When Language Becomes Country and Poetry the Only Home

In our times when the world is being shaped by post-truth politics, poetry that dares call attention to this troubling reality has been driven to the margins. The very act of writing such poetry is an act of courage, often inviting repression, exile, and imprisonment. However, when many such poets come together in one place, they redraw the contours of the world by voicing every nuance of the human condition that lies buried under an opaque blanket of a politics of lies and hatred.

The international poetry festival Sansaar (The World) being organised by the Raza Foundation at the India International Centre in Delhi from February 27 to March 1 promises to be one such event. The participants include 13 poets from Lithuania, Slovenia, Italy, Argentina, Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Algeria, Sudan, and Ukraine, and well-known Indian poets who have translated some of the poems of the international participants into Hindi.  The poetry festival will be marked by the publication of an anthology and the display of drawings inspired by the participants’ poetry, created by noted Indian painters including Atul Dodiya, Manu Parekh, S. Harshavardhana, Mithu Sen, G.R. Iranna, Manjunath Kamath, and Gopi Gajwani. A large number of young writers from across the country will be coming to Delhi to listen to these remarkable poets, most of whom are visiting India for the first time.

In the article below, Delhi-based Hindi poet-critic, and managing and life trustee of the Raza Foundation, Ashok Vajpeyi, sketches the ’other world’ of humanity that the forthcoming event promises to illumine. 

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In the beginning of the 20th century, Ezra Pound claimed that 'poetry is news that stays news'; later Bertolt Brecht felt poetry brings 'the terrible news'. But in our deeply troubled and fragmented times in the 21st century, poetry hardly ever makes news or comes in the news. It remains on the margins of our 'post-truth' era. In the vast and ever-increasing empire of lies and hatred, poetry from the margin dares to retain, insist upon and speak truth not only to power but also to people and self-critically to itself and language. 

As lies annex more and more territory in politics, religion, media, markets, social discourse and conduct, the margins for poetry to reside and survive in tend to become narrow, engulfed and vulnerable. Today, many poets in the world live in exile, either driven out by despotic regimes and oppressive ethos or wilfully escaping from internment and moral subjugation. For such poets, language becomes country and poetry their only home. 

While the Syrian poet Akram Alkatreb believes that ‘Poetry exists everywhere, throughout all ages, it bears witness to our conditions, our pain, our happiness and our defeats', Daniel Lipara from Argentina, asserts that ‘Poetry is a verbal ecology against indifference. It is an effort of the imagination to make meaning – provisional and fictional as any meaning is, in order to glimpse the unity of the living’. Escaping censorship and oppression, Iraqi poet Dunya Mikhail (now living and teaching in the USA) writes, ‘Poetry is the margin where the world can breathe. It doesn't govern or command; it listens. In an age of noise, the poem becomes a pause where meaning gathers. It carries exiles across language and time, smuggling what checkpoints cannot siege: grief, tenderness, names.’ And, from war-torn Ukraine comes the sagacious voice of Kateryna Kalytko: 'Poetry lets me remain attentive – to the world's wonder, to its beauty, to its fragile truth – and to answer them with my honest voice. ‘

These are voices from 'the other world'; they exist in the known world but are hardly or rarely heeded by it. Sansaar aims to be an occasion to hear upfront voices steeped in pain and grief but still adoring the world, indicating it in many different ways, gathering small truths and showing us that even in impossible circumstances, the human persists. Also, there can be a feast of poetry featuring the poetry of pain and suffering, of joy and elation, of lament and prayer. Poetry that affirms us in our humanity, empathy and sensitivity. Poetry that is human, full of warmth and glow, and humanising, exploring and celebrating experiences in different languages, plural and vital but moving at all times. 

For instance, Indre Valantinaite from Lithuania approaches the world in a weird but revealing way when in a poem she says:

Adorned with a veil of webs,

a basket of mushrooms under my arm,

my fingers stained by rubies of berries,

my feet wearing emeralds of moss

I go to wed this world

The Egyptian Yahia Lababidi reminds us: 

Truth, and conscience, can be like large bothersome flies

--brush them away and they return, buzzing louder.

Glorjana Veber from Slovenia makes the cosmic homely and poetic when she writes:

Through the moment, the world turns off its light.

The universe flows into bottle of my body.

I swallow the planets without telescope.

Now I am hanging on the axis of the Earth.

Now I squeeze poems into a nameless droplet.

And watch the sea.

Yet another Slovenian, Gregor Podlogar, disturbingly asks:

Is the sky there still blue?

The smell of grass still grass?

Can we get excited over something?

Possibility of hope – still there?

For the Iraqi poet Sinan Antoon, the reality is full of horror:

The grave is a mirror.

Into which the child looks

and dreams:

when will I grow up

and be like my father

dead.

The Italian poet Andre Naffis Sahely queries:

….. how far do you think

will we travel before we discover

our bond? How many

rocks and stars shall we visit

until we remember we’re human?

Ausra Kaziliunaite, a poet from Lithuania, takes us to the eternal human dilemma vis-à-vis times:

now everything is alright

time has arranged us like stencils, like migrating herons

like underage teens returning much too late from a party

arranged on a giant sheet of silence

For the Algerian poet Samira Negrouche:

The town is a tongue the sea takes by storm

the town is an overburdened tongue at the story’s border

At the border of the border

the town overflows

its tongue is swollen.

And the Syrian Akram Alkatreb finds our sense of ‘enoughness’ problematic:

Everything is still as it is:

The force of thirst,

The shining of noon and coldness,

The caves from which bats fly in darkness,

And the black silk shawl that wraps the two shoulders,

Love alone was not enough.

An interesting feature of the poetry festival is that all the poems will be heard in two or three languages – the original, English and Hindi. It would be sensuously evident that written in many different languages in all parts of the world, poetry is truly and interminably the mother tongue of reality, truth, justice, conscience, courage, and irrepressible humanity.

Ashok Vajpeyi is a well-known Hindi poet-critic and art lover.

Sansaar will be held at the India International Centre in Delhi from February 27 to March 1. The event is open to all.

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