Book review: A poetic response to genocide

Book: Give Us This Day A Feast of Flesh
ND Rajkumar
Navayana
Rs180
110 pages

Book: Waking Is Another Dream: Poems On The Genocide In Eelam
Cheran, VIS Jayapalan, Yesurasa, Latha, Ravikumar
Navayana
Rs180
68 pages

ND Rajkumar’s Give Us This Day A Feast of Flesh, as the title indicates, is a violent and volatile collection of poems. As a member of the kaniyar caste among the Dalits in Tamil Nadu, Rajkumar uses the shamanistic, magical and supernatural, with which the kaniyars are associated, to fashion an aesthetic that can seem anarchic and is certainly destabilising in its effects on the reader.

The anarchism is not some mindless celebration of the irrational. It has a very clear politics, which is the recovery of a non-Hindu, pagan and disruptive pantheon and cosmology, and this politics is fraught with the risks of such an enterprise as much as infused with its power. Sexual violence and the erotic are the fulcrum of this world and Rajkumar’s employment of the feminine cuts both ways.

If the goddesses Kollangattu Amman, Isakki, Ayani Ottu Thamburan are, in his reading, manifestations of vengeance for sexual violence faced by the Dalit woman at the hands of upper caste men, he is not averse to poems that make capital out of the violation of upper caste women by lower caste men. If his Kali restores to her a wildness erased in her domestication by institutionalised Hinduism, his Mohini is not very different from the patriarchal construction of her as a seductress.

While many poems enact the invocation of spirits, ritual possession and trance-like states, the effects are similar. While on the one hand, they terrorise the upper caste world with the powers of malice and revenge, there is no form for the Dalit outside of these extreme shapes of reactive intensity.

Swirling, rolling in fire, poisoning, drum-beating, screaming, engaging in violent acts: this is the Dalit element for Rajkumar. While it may have the power in a poem to invert the docile lamb into a free spirit goring the good shepherd in a critique of Christianity, the repetitive invocation of avenging and revenging, dancing and howling seems to achieve the dismantling of hegemonic Hinduism and the assertion of Dalit identity too easily, often leaving other hegemonic formations (like patriarchy) intact.

While the reader may dwell upon the disorienting effects of these poems, she is advised to stay well clear of the Afterword by translator Anushiya Ramaswamy. Riddled with contradictions (Rajkumar’s goddesses are both pre-caste and responding to caste violation, he is both beyond and outside the system and yet overturning it, both a poet of Enlightenment reason and non-rational premodernity), bad analogies (with African Americans, Imre Kertesz, Greek daemons, the Furies), making impossible claims for the poet (that he offers a different epistemology altogether, that his is an amoral universe, that he is beyond identity) and dropping heavy-duty names (Lacan, Derrida, Paul de Man, Machiavelli, Hegel, Nietzsche) to justify those claims, it is the perfect example of why academia has a bad name.

Not that poets and activists do much better, as Ravikumar’s Introduction to Waking Is Another Dream: Poems On The Genocide In Eelam makes clear. Instead of exploring the possibilities in a poetic response to genocide, Ravikumar hopes to stun us with the report and with the graphic violence of personal testimony, apart from offensive proclamations of the loss of intensity in poetic voices from Eelam.

That such a sense of loss is highly misplaced is clear in the poetry of Cheran that opens the volume. Understated, settling for a quiet metaphor or image instead of the screaming headline, Cheran manages to say much while “Unruffled/never breaking his silence/he writes a poem.” Latha also makes the Tamils into stones and trees, uprooted from the landscape where now a fair Buddha has sprouted whose hair has a flower and the poet-protagonist’s vengeance “rages on in the flower’s flame.”

Houses take on weird shapes, the flags of banks reach out to the skies, the wind breaks an old man’s stick. These images evoke the ravaged world of the Sri Lankan Tamil even more than “the dead coming alive in your dreams” later. These two poets alone make this anthology worth it.

VI S Jayapalan’s eleven-part poetic sequence is able to achieve a particularity like Cheran’s or Latha’s only intermittently. Lines are often killed with the prosaic and the sloganeering, the dead weight of nationalism, even if a subordinated one. Hardly has one time to dwell upon the idea of ‘lime turning turmeric into kungumam,’ than the next line, “Self-criticism will turn defeat into medicine” kills it.

Yesurasa is the most disappointing poet in the volume, with some fairly meaningless poems, and Ravikumar does the Indian Tamil conscience bit, once again sacrificing the delicacy of a metaphor to the righteousness of the outraged.  

Elegantly produced as always by Navayana, and affordably priced, these books illustrate both the limits and the possibilities of the poetics of ressentiment.

Ashley Tellis is a Delhi-based academic and gay rights activist