When words and visuals weave magic together

Recently, I saw a Dodo in my friend Nandini’s porch — an old man cutting and pasting her scholar father’s articles on sheets of paper, sewing and binding the pages stained with sepia pictures. I didn’t ask Nandini why she did not scan and store those writings in her laptop because the scene triggered a flashback to childhood — an old binder on our verandah, assembling chapters of many novels serialized in magazines (collected by patient family elders through months and years), and making them into hardcover books. Those pages were splashed with illustrations, pictorial subtexts really, where the brush told stories of its own. Many of those novels were subsequently published as books, with illustrations intact.  

As an adult, I had once seen words and visuals coming together in a unique partnership — beat poet Allen Ginsberg writing verses on celebrity artist Francesco Clemente’s paintings. To me, this collaboration seemed to involve as much craftsmanship as creativity. Why not? The Greeks did not separate the two. Plato and Aristotle saw art as “making”, a skill as physical as it is mental. The poet was a “maker” whose craftsmanship followed the processes of nature, and “making art” was to understand the workings of the universe.

However, meeting US-based Soma Roy last month was to discover that “making” art can take a different avatar. An electrical engineer who has worked in the defence industry, pharmaceutical, oil and industrial manufacturing companies, Roy is passionate about saving cranes and Baobab trees. In order to explain to her two school-going children that “Hurting anyone or anything is really hurting the self, because the same energy courses through the universe”, she came up with her own kind of book.

She wrote a story, drew its animal characters, turned them into computer graphics, printed the segments on canvas squares, sewed the squares on her sari (folded into a long scroll), rolled it up and bound the “book” with her grandmother’s rudraksha beads. Micro family and macro universe blend into the narrative, until the last page sums up the advaitic ideal: aham brahmosmi — I am everything.

But Roy could not discount duality. Her Book Two is crafted with wooden coins, their two sides making them perfect for her tales of yin-yang, stored as “mohurs of wisdom” in a velvet pouch. “My children also play with them,” she smiles.

“Since you can’t love life unless you revere death” Book Three deals with the final exit. The protagonist is the family dog who despised Roy and her children, but taught them their first lesson of death. “I tried to write with gunpowder on flax paper so that holding a match to the powder would start a trail of fire and etch out the letters.” The idea did not work. So Roy “burnt” the letters with a laser beam on a copper sheet, rolled the sheet into an open-ended cylinder, placed a candle within. Voila! The words sprang to life! Dark became light, cremation and regeneration became visible together.

Books where visuals partner words have always been my favourites. So it was sheer joy to savour Imtiaz Dharker’s poems and drawings in “Luck is the Hook” (Bloodaxe Books, April 2018) released in London. How exciting to go into a subterranean crypt in St Paul’s to hear the poet read her own verse! Especially as each poem made ambiguities ricochet through the mind – shadows chasing light.

When I opened the book, a three-liner caught my eye, “Afterwards they said/there were snags in the liver/that spelt out a name.” The picture beside it had crows on a line, clouds floating above. The temptation was to work out the connections between word and visual, but I resisted this hankering for specificities, and accepted the drawings as having a life of their own. Parallel and circular, tangled and twisted, convoluted and spiralled, Dharker’s strokes shape the unseen and the half heard. Planes trapped in a web, fish curled under water looking at the crescent in the sky, an open palm trying to catch flowers through a net, a mehndi-drawn hand peeping through a spangled dupatta to pick up a letter, a girl with the headscarf under a moon-silvered tree…

As she melds art and craft, Imtiaz Dharker turns every drawing into a poem, every poem into an image, and fulfils her desire to “wire the reader alive”. In “Luck is the Hook”, the creative process is not only lucent revelation, it can also be the dark forbidden fruit. Making art can unleash explosive and implosive forces. But Dharker as the maker must grapple with these forces of the universe. And she declares, “Even knowing what it means/I would do it again.”

The author is a playwright, theatre director, musician and journalist