Exile and homelessness in the worlds we inhabit

What does it mean to be truly, truly alive? Is it being able to feel with frightening intensity the tangibility of the world, its attendant cruelty, beauty and violence? Is it recognising the generational memories of inhabiting known and unknown worlds as you gaze at your home — the one you left behind and the one you’re building? Is it speaking in the language of your foremothers, remembering their inflections and the arches of their expressions? If being alive is all these, here are two very different yet very similar books of poems that lay bare the very nucleus of human existence in the age of modernity.

‘Exile is Not a Foreign Word’ by Pramila Venkateswaran is an intense book that binds lived histories of people, places, animals and things to the geopolitics of geographies. She examines the ways that people cordon countries off with walls and enshrine walls with distinct personalities. In ‘Berlin Wall, 1989’, she talks of how she dusts her fingers off the debris of the Berlin Wall. ‘I know why/walls rise wickedly from the earth’. The poems ask that we do not shrug our shoulders and walk away. She trains an incisive eye over the aftermath of the pandemic, the various partitions the world has witnessed, the cycles of violence that we are complicit in. Her turn of phrase for satire is remarkable as she places the rhyme ‘Humpty-Dumpty’ alongside a naughty limerick as she speaks of a certain politician.

Venkateswaran’s poems are often prefaced by quotes, Facebook posts, notes or remarks, which lend a sense of a testimonio being delivered. She creates fresh paradigms of reading exile, displacement and dealing with the nitty-gritty of everyday life while not losing sight of the politics that makes us who we are. The biting sarcasm with which she says, ‘I brace myself,/for when I do achieve your fucking pure Tamil,/I will wrap my tongue around zh to release my reviled l’ (Pure/Impure), speaks back to all those who ‘castesplain’ discrimination.

‘Nostalgic for a Place Never Seen’ by Bhaswati Ghosh is a work that brings the political to the personal and shares the feeling of being unhomed everywhere. The migrant, like the exiled, is searching for a home that once was, is no more and now, never will be. She creates a beautiful arc of experience as she archives the memories of her homeland as gathered from the collective unconscious of her grandmother and other journeymen. ‘Remembered heat is a dangerous thing./My mother remembers it from her childhood’. She creates whole milieus of life in poems such as ‘Sunday Mornings in Lajpat Nagar’, where busy markets meld memories with sights and smells and bring to life unforgettable experiences.

Ghosh’s poetic genius is apparent as she presents a narrative that stars silently, almost reverentially, and then surges forth in a torrential plosive of light, colour and sound. ‘It is impossible to trap sunshine into a body/so you emerged, as if by some mysterious/evolutionary trick’. (Orange) The worlds she has travelled become apparent in how she observes people and customs — the views on the hijab and headscarves, the mentions of places, their peculiarities... Ghosh intertwines ragas and the ebb and flow of our lives — ‘Hem Bihag merges/shadows’. Elsewhere, she says, ‘Bageshree becomes the night’. And yet again, ‘Ahir Bhairav takes you to a place/so empty, it’s full’.

The two poets make deep engagements with languages like Tamil and Bengali, creating homelands of their own amid crumbling edifices and chaotic rhetoric. Venkateswaran, in particular, experiments spectacularly with form, bringing startling variety in her pages.

For all those people who wonder at the need for poetry or who ask about its relevance in this age of prose and Instagram reels, I request them to read Venkateswaran and Ghosh. It will be impossible not to bow in reverence and stop for a while to look around at the shards of the worlds we have been birthed out of.

Speaking of an injured elephant receiving treatment after years of abuse, after years of being perceived as giving blessings when all the while chains kept cutting into the flesh of her feet, Venkateswaran narrates: ‘Her knees are reverse L-shaped as she offers herself to treatment./Heavy with grief, you kneel, your palms pressed together. (‘Pachyderm Refugee’)

Ghosh speaks of the river Sugandha: ‘When she left home,/my grandma smuggled a river in her eyelids./Sugandha, it was called. … She stole the river so that whenever/she shed a tear, she could smell/the river in the air around her.’ (‘Nostalgic for a Place Never Seen’)

I feel, therefore I am alive.

— The writer teaches at All Saints’ College, Thiruvananthapuram