introduction creative writing has always been...
TRANSCRIPT
Introduction
Creative writing has always been influenced by socio-political changes.
These changes could be envisaged in the subjective perspective of ‘home,’
‘space,’ and gender, and in the broader sphere of political impact of events that
mark the various phases of a nation’s history. The chequered history of
colonialism in India has engendered a postcolonial re-vision of ‘home,’ and
‘place’ / ‘space’ in the writing that has been popularly bisected as the regional
and English by scholars like K.R.S.Iyengar (12), Meenakshi Mukherjee (78),
K.Ayyappa Paniker, (11), and K.Satchidanandan (19). The social mobility of
the post-Independence population abetted by the fast pace of technology in the
various spheres of postcolonial life has recast ‘space’ beyond physical or
geographical boundaries. Tradition and hierarchical values have loosened their
grip on creative writing in the ‘melting pot’ of cultures and values. Ideologies
fashioned by race, caste, and sex are being critiqued by the liberating forces of
cultural hybridity and feminism. Caught between the interface of the past and
the present is a new generation of writers who attempt to re-set the social
system in new perspectives.
Indian English writing is a colourful spectrum of poetry, drama and
prose fiction, which spans the transition of India from the colonial to the
postcolonial. It is a complex interweaving of the Indian experience, with its
regional involvements and international affiliations made possible through
English, and enriched by the diasporic experiences of writers not confined
geographically to India. Modern Indian poetry finds one of its authentic voices
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in English. The new poets write in English, aware of the powerful oral presence
of their mother tongues. Yet, deep down resides the knowledge of a past
filtering into the present, a persistent ache that resolves into a creative dialogue
between the ‘self’ and the ‘other.’ Experience and language criss-cross into a
pattern of voice and silence. Charismatic figures like Tagore, Aurobindo and
Sarojini Naidu dominated the literary scene before the Independence and
experimented with the English language with vigour and patriotic zeal to
express not only their subjectivity but also the total aspiration of India. By the
turn of the sixties, a powerful surge of modernism swept aside the romantic and
spiritual poetry to re-form creative writing into the experimental terse verse of
Nissim Ezekiel, A.K.Ramanujan, Keki Daruwalla, and the vehement outburst
of female subjectivity of Kamala Das.
The writing of the seventies and the eighties reinforced this linguistic
concern, an almost obsessive preoccupation with the language, as revealed in
Meena Alexander’s anxiety of being caught between the “terror of babble” and
the “terror of nonsense” (“Exiled by a Dead Script” 1). K.R.S.Iyengar finds in
postcolonial poetry an overt lingering on the bi-cultural act of writing in
English rather than on the need to communicate any perception. Quoting
Meenakshi Mukherjee to underline his point, he adds that “… these poems owe
their origin to the poets’ response to the English language rather than to the
urgent need to communicate a perception” (709). Language becomes a crucial
matter in woman writing as it boils down to its very existence as an authentic
literature. Kamala Das’s “An Introduction” is a remarkable challenge thrown to
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literary convention, and the first powerful female voice to sound the hitherto
voiceless female subjectivity:
… Why not let me speak in
Any language I like? The language I speak.
Becomes mine, its distortions, its queernesses.
All mine, mine alone. (6-9)
English becomes her language, identity and space, and the strident call for
linguistic experimentation matures into an intuitive grasp of language.
‘Kerala’ as a discourse accommodates disparate voices, versions and re-
definitions in the ‘bhasha’ and English writing, thereby contesting a restrictive
categorization and a unified voice. ‘Keralam’ in Malayalam poetry fans out as
the poet’s sense of tradition and culture, an acute awareness of contemporary
issues like the Dalit and woman identity in the socio-economic and literary
spheres, the escalating ecological imbalances, the dwindling of familial ties in
the growing consumerist society, re-creation of myths and legends, and the
vibrant rhythm of her folk art. ‘Keralam,’ the palmyra fan with its undulating
surface, enfolds and releases the cool freshness of poetic sensibility in
Malayalam literature.
The diasporic experience is not new to Kerala, its heritage being
enriched by the confluence of many cultures, Hindu, Muslim, Jain, Christian,
Jewish, and Buddhist. The shift from the linguistic to the diasporic in creative
writing marks a pronounced tendency to ‘image’ Kerala, or the ‘home’ left
behind. The bi-cultural act of adopting English as the language of creative
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writing has engendered the issues of representation and authenticity.
Meenakshi Mukherjee observes “the anxiety of Indianness” haunting the Indian
writers in English (78). Yet, as K. Satchidanandan avers, “we are living at a
time when the idea of “Indianness” is being interrogated from different
perspectives,” the essentialist concept giving way to “a more federal
democratic perspective of a polyphonic India, a mosaic of cultures, languages,
literatures and world-views” (19). The post-Independence migrations within
and outside India have generated a particular kind of knowledge born of a
tension between the newness of what is being made and an older way that
resists its emergence. According to Ayyappa Paniker, “to be Indian, {the
writer} has to be rooted somewhere in India, geographically, historically,
socially or psychologically” (11).
The present thesis focuses on two poets from Tiruvalla, Kerala--Anna
Sujatha Mathai (b.1936), and Meena Alexander (b.1951). Belonging to the Mar
Thoma community of Tiruvalla, they have carved out a niche for themselves in
Indian writing in English. Anna Sujatha Mathai, an extensively travelled poet,
is settled in New Delhi. She has been publishing poetry for more than three
decades and has four volumes of poetry to her credit--Crucifixions (1970), We
The Unreconciled (1972), The Attic of Night (1991), and Life- On My Side of
the Street and Other Poems: Dialogue and Other Poems By Priya Sarukkai
Chabria (2005). Born outside Kerala, she studied at the Universities of Delhi,
Edinburgh, Bangalore and Minnesota. Her mother tongue is Malayalam, but
her writing is confined to English. She has taught at Delhi University and had
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been involved with the theatre. Her poems have been translated into several
European and Indian languages, and she has given poetry-reading sessions at
various places, including The House of Culture, Stockholm, and the Danish
Writers Union Copenhagen. She has also worked as professional social worker
in England and the United States. Her latest collections of poems, written over
the last decade reveal a “struggle to find meaning and illumination in dark and
difficult years” (“Introduction,” Daruwalla x). K.R.S. Iyengar includes her with
other poets like Sunita Jain, Rina Sodhi and Meena Alexander in his
comprehensive study of Indian Writing in English (728). In the Introduction to
her latest collection of poems (Life- On My Side of the Street and Other
Poems: Dialogue and Other Poems), Daruwalla calls her poems “lyrical and
meditative at the same time” and draws the reader’s attention to the fluency,
effortlessness and cadence in her poetry. Though Daruwalla calls her “a
painter of bleak landscapes,” he discovers an inner strength in her poems (ix-x).
The delicate shades of emotions that enhance her poems are tinged deeply with
the experience of life’s bitter moments. This curious blend of the light and dark
nuances of life creates a flow of visuals that derive their clarity from her
“imaginative reservoir” of her childhood spent in Tiruvalla with her maternal
grandparents. She refers to those years as “a precious and central part of my
imaginative reservoir” (Letter).
Her earliest collection of poems, Crucifixions, is a tentative search into
the ephemeral nature of human life beset by loneliness and suffering. The thirty
poems are thematically structured as subjective musings on the ruptures and the
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healing affected by the inherent note of sensitivity and spirituality in worldly
transactions. Love and compassion transmute her moments of aching loneliness
and desolateness into a glowing vision of humanism--“And all this because,
suddenly, / In a dead world / Love seems possible” (“The Heart’s Landscape”
11-13). The relentless flow of time invests each moment with pristine clarity
and significance. “Our Todays” is a clear explication of the relevance of the
present despite the teeming rush of memories that threaten to congeal Time.
“Each day carries all the reality / of our life” (1-2). Yet, the poet-mind,
unwilling to withstand the torrent of the memory of a lost love is willing to get
submerged in its “gray waves.” Love moves from the very intimate zone of
relationship to the wide terrain of understanding sympathy for all creatures.
Yet, even in such moments of deep fulfillment, the heart pulsates with the
knowledge of the transitoriness of joy. The bubble of passion bursts into
nothingness. The reader senses the tension between the instinctive surrender to
the vital memories of love and the philosophical detachment to the seething
flow of life- The poems pulsate with an acute understanding of “our common
womanhood,” the “tight-budded, anguish touched” that is denied “the relief of
falling petals.” The dominant mood of loneliness and pain is coloured by the
Christian faith in the purgative power of suffering is expressed in the following
lines: “Our common destiny of pain / Makes each of us part of the other”
(“Pain” 13-14). Worldliness rests heavy on the palpitating sensitivity of the ‘I’,
that awaits the “flame that purifies, / Melting away the dross” (“The Song of
the Crucible” 11-12). The poet- mind exults in the deep knowledge of spiritual
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tranquility, for “My spirit has its own clear streams it walks beside / I have
known creation of another kind”(“Creativity” 18-19). The protagonist traces
the path of the Crucifixion in the travails of daily life, for Christ is being
crucified everyday in every street. The first collection of poems carries the
strain of gentle melancholy and compassionate understanding of the spiritual
value of suffering. The strong Christian undertone in her poems, underline the
Mar Thoma faith in the Crucifix and the adherence to simplicity and directness
of prayers, without the intercession of saints.
Her second collection of poems We The Unreconciled contain an insight
born of life experience and philosophic musings. The thirty-three poems carry
the burden of loneliness, pain and death, unrelieved by human understanding
and compassion. The sombre mood persists in all the poems, with the poet
trying to unravel the enigma of human nature. The title poem juxtaposes the
response of Nature and the human world to the evanescent life. Nature, in all
her glory, partakes of joy and pain, the light and the dark of our brief existence.
Flowers struggle “from the dark under ground roots” to fade petal by petal.
Yet, we remain “unreconciled” to the harsh terrain of life. The poet prays for a
glimmer of grace to touch the human race, struggling on its life-journey. The
poet mind takes unpredictable detours into the core of human existence,
aspiring for a glimpse of total understanding that can pierce through the rubble
of desolateness and suffering.
Mathai’s poems are “quiet questionings” trickling into the poetic
sensibility of contemporary times. They ‘converse’ with the reader in non –
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intrusive, smoothly flowing narratives and short lyrical flights. Gopal Gandhi
observes a strain of genetic memory in her third collection of poems, The Attic
of Night. The poems, according to him underscore “unself-consciously” the
Syrian Christian personality of Kerala, which is very important segment of
Kerala (3). The Attic of Night also claims attention for its restraint that comes
from a preference for stillness and contemplation. The book of thirty-nine
poems opens the door to a variety of experiences tinged by the darkness of
night and the tender glow of love. They are the ‘night- visions’ of life, bathed
in the soft waves of darkness, piercing the lurid brightness of the day with the
steady faith in the gift of life and love.
Night, an envelope the lover seals.
Blotting out all evil presences.
Laughter, gifted by gods, cuts through darkness.
Silence, white nights, …
………………………………………………..
Lost night, draw over your quilt of compassion.
Woman, in the attic of night,
Burn your dead.
(“Night and the Children of the Slums” 7-10, 18-20)
The stirrings of primal beauty and strength erode and vanquish the pale
sophistry of civilization. The visions of beauty and terror haunting both the
poet and the reader are suggested subtly in: “Silent we stood / trapped by an
unknown magic” (“Night of Karthika Poornima” 1–2). The book is a journey
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into the “jungle / in my own heart” (“The lost centuries” 24 – 25), observing
and enacting the heat and cold of life experiences. The luminous night, “a
flower of great beauty” is also a witness to the throbbing pain of desolateness
that follows stolen moments of ardour, and the cruel estrangement from the
warmth of love.
Meena Alexander born in Allahabad, educated in Sudan and Britain, and
settled in New York with her family, works both at Hunter College and the
Graduate Center of the City University of New York as the Professor of
English and Creative Writing. Her work has featured widely in India, the
United States and England and has been translated into several languages
including Italian and German. She has many collections of poetry, fiction and
non-fictional works to her credit. Her literary career began early at the tender
age of ten, when she began writing poetry. Her writing spans a variety of
literary genres, though her poetry might be considered her best known work.
Her first book, a single lengthy poem, entitled The Bird’s Bright Ring was
published in 1976 in Calcutta. Since then, Alexander has published more than
ten collections of poems, including prose pieces, two novels, a memoir and a
critical work on Romanticism.
Alexander has established herself as a well-known Asian American poet
in the United States, creatively involved in the postcolonial discourse of
identity, language and gender. Her writing also contributes to the continuity of
Indian writing in English. Deeply interested in a phenomenological study of
poetry, she identifies the in-explicable relation of self and the world at large, as
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one of her major concerns in her creative writing. Situating her as a woman
poet of south Kerala and an Asian immigrant in America, one encounters issues
relevant to both Indian writing in English and postcolonial writing. She brings
to her writing a vast range of experiences. Her poetry and fiction are born out
of this multiplicity, and is the product of the tension resulting from the variety
of environments in which she has lived and about which she writes. In her
writing, powerful images wrought out of her memories of Kerala, interweave
themselves with evocative pictures of the Hudson River, the roaring subways
and the noisy bus traffic of New York City. She moves back and forth in her
writing between these disparate places using material offered by the fragments
of her experience. The tension arising out of this variety, along with the
pressure of the present, combine to mould her expression.
More than a journey back ‘home’, writing offers a legitimate space for
the immigrant writer to encounter and come to terms with ‘otherness.’ Cast into
a strange, new setting, the creative self has to respond to the query ‘who am I?’
juxtaposed with ‘who are they?’ She raises a cardinal question: “What I be to
myself, in a simpler, clearer time, in my mother’s house in Tiruvalla, in a small
town in central Travancore? Was there a sense in which this question could be
anything more than merely nostalgic?” in her prose piece “The Poem’s Second
life: Writing and Self-Identity” (80). One cannot take this as a mere musing and
wishful thought of the poet. On the other hand, it suggests a new perspective
and reading of her writing. She calls herself “a woman cracked by multiple
migrations” in her memoir Fault Lines (3). Naming and structuring the
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complex migrant experience, the poet undergoes a journey into herself. She
enters the realm of a larger shared truth in her encounter with the other Euro -
Asian immigrants. The hyphenated self finds moorings in the multiple
anchorages experiencing a rich and vivid sense of space that cannot be named
by a single language. It amounts to reading the past against the grain. Her
memoir not only unravels her past but also highlights the themes that occur in
her poetry. Alexander attempts to forge a sense of identity, despite the
overpowering impact of dislocation. Thus, her writing revolves round the
theme of establishing an identity independent of the surroundings. The title of
her memoir, Fault Lines, contests boundaries and self-definition. She tries to
define herself, realizing that the making of identity is a process that cannot be
categorized rigidly: “I am a poet writing in America. But American poet?… An
Asian American poet then?… A woman poet, a woman poet of colour, a South
Indian woman who makes up lines in English. A Third World woman poet...?”
(Fault Lines 193). Alexander searches for her own identity in a world that
strives to define, identify, and label people. These definitions of race and
nationality prove difficult to define. Some of the images used in Fault Lines
surface in her poetry. “No man’s land” is a particularly poignant image that
stems from growing up in more than two places, whereby boundaries get
blurred. In her long poem Night- Scene, The Garden these images are very
strong:
No man’s land
No woman’s either
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I stand in the middle of my life… (“Night-Scene” 5-8)
Alexander’s poetry emerges as a consciousness moving between two
worlds, between memory and present day experience, lit by multiple languages.
Drawing on the fascinating images and languages that her dual life has given
her, Alexander deftly joins together contradictory geographies, thoughts and
feelings. Her wanderings between her adult life and the territory of her
childhood are unusual in that they offer a fresh approach to the autographical
element in her poetry. Alexander’s migratory memory is unceasingly inventive:
she looks back upon the landscapes, languages and the events of her childhood
weaving them together with her experiences of present day life in her verse.
The present thesis titled “Configuration of Space in the Poetry of
Meena Alexander and Anna Sujatha Mathai” branches out into three chapters--
Making up Memory: The Spacing of Time, Writing Identity, and The Poetics
of Return--as a tentative search into the dynamics of spatial configurations in
their writing. The study charts the creative course through the labyrinth of
memory, the lifeline along which the dissociated individual could be pulled
back to her real self. Memories play truant, and new space is created in the
interstices of forgetfulness. The re-forming of new space involves the dialectics
of language and representation. Though Mathai and Alexander belong to the
Mar Thoma community of Tiruvalla in south Kerala, they represent realities
that are part of their awareness of the contemporary world. This awareness is
sequential to their distinctive experiences relating to ‘place,’ ‘family,’ and
‘selfhood.’ The question of uprootedness and dislocation, along with the
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growing estrangement experienced in contemporary society by the individual
affect their poetic sensibility and writing. It is also marked by the generational
difference, in relation to a growing contemporary awareness of postcoloniality
and the uprootedness of the diaspora. Alexander represents the post-
Independence generation of immigrant academics settled in the U.S. Her
writing blends with her teaching career in the New York University; and her
poetry and prose pieces reflect her ‘postcolonial’ subjectivity, replenished by
her vast reading, doctoral research in the Romantics, and a keen awareness of
theoretical concerns.
Her writing stems from the complex site of diasporic experience, and
develops through an incessant unmaking and remaking of new space-time.
Informed by migrant sensibility, she envisages an Asian-American aesthetic, an
oppositional stance that can also easily accommodate the complexity of the
Asian-American experience. Drawing on the fascinating images and languages
that her dual life has given her, Alexander deftly joins together contradictory
geographies, thoughts and feelings. Her migratory memory is unceasingly
inventive: she looks back upon the landscapes, languages and events of her
childhood and youth, weaving them together with her American life in the
fierce, beautiful music of her verse. Steering clear of chaos of memory, she
creates poems that are powerful in both their grief and their celebration, and in
which speech and silence coexist as she searches for a clearer perspective of the
past and the present. She threshes out issues of language, identity and creativity
in her poems and prose pieces with the confidence of a brilliant academician
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and teacher. Open to the post- structuralist notions of language and reality, and
the feminist concept of identity, Alexander’s writing flows steadily,
accumulating new graces to culminate in the ‘poetics of return.’ Memory plays
a vital role in creating the past and rewriting personal history, to cushion the
cultural shock of “multiple leave takings” (Fault Lines 191). Memory becomes
the framework to relocate space and time on imagined realities. The issues of
identity and language are knit into the postcolonial fabric of her American
present.
Mathai’s poems are subtle and indirect articulations - a palimpsest of
memories and new spaces. Her forte lies in her acute sensitivity to the veiled
mystery of human nature and the magic of words. She writes of the layering
effects of memories with traces of earlier inscriptions / memories as the text of
life, giving it its particular density and character. Memory becomes her
invaluable aid in perceiving the meaning of her own personal experiences.
Constantly conscious of the power of memory on her creative outpouring, the
varied experience of pain, joy and loss surface as new space-time in her poems.
The postcolonial rewriting of history, both personal and social, is evident in her
poems as subtle and discerning interventions that transform her life
perspectives. Her poems gravitate towards the sombre shades of life; yet, they
radiate tender beams of humanism and Christian faith that can alleviate the
darkness of desolation. The inner landscape of the mind becomes her sight of
memory. But in some poems like “The Little Madammas” and “In Tiruvella”
she explicitly contextualises memory, drenched in Kerala flavour. The “Tight-
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Rope Walkers” and “Mother’s Stories” recreate the richness of a past, that open
the magic casement of “a lost generation” to the contemporary “wasteland.”
Stories are also memories of the real and the imagined, the warp and the weft
of the fabric of life.
The rewriting of space and time by the transforming power of memory
also implies the writing of identity. The notion of identity has been
problematised in an unprecedented manner in the multicultural modern society.
The increasing interest in the personal voice and the lyric speaker, along with
the feminist assertion of women’s experiences in women literature have greatly
revolutionized the concept of identity. The woman writer has to reposition
herself through a restructuring of language that has hitherto been the whole
monopoly of the male. She has to redefine the language structure, empowering
it with the intense awareness of her physicality. Her words stem from the day-
to-day common chores and multiple roles as wife, mother, and member of
society. Space, a contested element in every creative act, becomes a crucial
matter for women writing. Not merely a geographical entity, space becomes a
whole system of ideas, and the freedom to express them. It also involves the
making of home / homeland as an affirmation of a history that is both personal
and collective. Woman writes herself, her identity in the space of her words
that form the text to be read by the world.
Set against the Mar Thoma space of Tiruvalla and Kozhencheri, and the
multi-cultural metropolitan New York, Meena Alexander attempts to discover
her self-hood in her present postcolonial situation. Anna Sujatha Mathai does
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not project the image of a postcolonial writer hurled into the swirling issues of
ethnicity and language. Firmly rooted in India, she probes into the deep,
inexplicable regions of human mind and the changes of tone and colour of
daily life. She has also to contend with the regional writing and the growing
indifference to poetry, especially in Indian English writing. Both the poets
encounter the dialectics of language and femaleness in their quest for identity
through their creative writing. To Mathai, space is the interiority of personal
experience, the attic of creativity. The border lines shift constantly and walking
on their edge can be both thrilling and hazardous to the border crosser.
To poets like Alexander and Mathai, language is also the question of
using a colonial language. Set against their mother tongue, Malayalam, they
have to carve out their thoughts and feelings in English that is still considered
to be the language of the privileged. In her essay, “Exiled by a Dead Script,”
Alexander with great verve and passion, analyses the predicament of making
poems in English in India, for “ … to make poems in India with English, is to
be condemned to the use of a language that in its very being cringes from
actuality” (1). Keenly aware of this limitation of English, Alexander suggests
the rupturing of its syntax to subvert “the invisible ideology of Indian English”
(3). Her writing spans many a space and time: India, Sudan, Britain, and
America. Her poetry unfolds the tension of inhabiting these multiple worlds
through a passage of time. She tries to resolve the conflict between her
illiteracy in her mother tongue and her command of the colonial language by
maintaining an immediacy of sound and sense in the languages of her
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childhood. She mentions in her memoir that “a curious species of linguistic
decolonization took place … in which {her} unspoken sense of femaleness
played a great part” (Fault Lines 119). Tracing this preoccupation with
language and identity through her poems, one can easily detect a consistent
thematic development hitched to her use of poetic devices.
The Bird’s Bright Ring (1976), I Root My Name (1977), With Out Place
(1978), and Stone Roots (1980) follow a pattern that is woven into her quest for
a personal space carved out by words. She experiments ceaselessly with
English, her language of poetic imagination, acutely aware of the subterranean
flow of other languages she had come across in her childhood and college
years. The House of a Thousand Doors (1988) is a collection of powerful
poems and prose pieces that underline the figure of the ‘grandmother’ as an
anchor to the migrant sensibility of dislocation and loss of identity. Alexander
marvels at the uniqueness of her female ancestors and discovers her fractured
self in them, stating that “in my quest for an imaginative source sufficient to
withstand the pressures of life in a new world, I made up a grandmother figure”
(“Tangled Roots” The Shock of Arrival 35). In an interview, Alexander
identifies the kernel of her poetry as the ‘making of a house’ / habitation (Tharu
11). Her long poem, Night-Scene, The Garden (1992) and The Storm: A Poem
in Five Parts (1989) are lyrical renderings of the loneliness and stillness of life
moments centered on the making and unmaking of home. The introductory
poem “Provenance” sets the tone for the new book of poems, Illiterate Heart
(2000) dedicated to her father. Relationship and memory jostle each other to
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resolve into the tranquillity of self-knowledge. Her preoccupation with
language, and the infinite possibilities of writing her identity develop into a
‘poetics of return.’
Anna Sujatha Mathai’s poems, in general, oscillate towards the interiors
of the mind. More than valorizing the postcolonial angst of a hyphenated self
with multiple anchorages, the poet undertakes a tortuous journey into the dark
interiors of the self in order to substantiate the inextricable link between the
inner and the outer space. The collection of poems in Crucifixions marks an
introspective journey into the dislocation suffered by the ‘lyric self’ in a
personal space where love is hard to find. The poet strives to achieve
wholeness and harmony with the world outside and within her. She speculates
on the varieties of human freedom and the bonds across space and time to
explore personal relationships. She tries to create an identity, despite the
growing desolation. The poem “Creativity” is a sensitive study of the umbilical
cord of creativity that nourishes the poetic persona, sans motherhood. A
woman’s identity is closely linked with her body and her motherhood. “Not for
me the wonder filled / recognition of mother by child / any woman could pity
me / and I flinched from pity’s wounding stare” (8-11). Her identity is based on
how she is viewed by society and how she views herself. Her body makes her
‘visible’ to the world, and indents her personality. Her ‘barrenness’ is
transmuted into the fecundity of poetic imagination, the power to recognize
‘other miracles’ in “Life”: “But I have known other miracles / and have drunk
deep from joy’s cup” (12-13). To the poet, identity is her sense of self,
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characterized by an emphasis on the inner voice and the ability to find a way of
being that is authenticated by that self. Identity is also associated with family,
community, language and religion. The private space of her home and family is
expunged by the patriarchal norms of society. To Mathai, space is the
interiority of personal experience, the ‘attic’ of creativity. She learns to use
words and silence, and adopts the defensive strategy of speaking from more
than one point of view. Her ‘I’ is never definite nor singular and it eludes both
the writer and the reader. Her poems, in general, can be taken as a long
narrative of the ‘I,’--the female, the daughter, the wife and the adult--each
relating in its distinctive way to the patriarchal society, at the same time
forming and re-forming an identity that eludes definition.
Yet, this penchant to withdraw into the stillness of interiority is almost
totally absent in her other poems--“ In Tiruvella,” “Mother’s Stories,” “Tight
Rope Walkers”--that focus on familial ties. Culture forms beliefs and shapes
identity of a community. It focuses on kinship and relationship and very often,
the welfare of the family, the community and the tribe is more important than
the welfare of the individual. The individual exists first as kin and last as self.
In the poem “Families,” Mathai examines the dialectic relationship of the
individual with the collective. The elemental strength of familial bonds
overcomes the individual. Kinship becomes a dead albatross to be thrown aside
for freedom. But old age, infirmity, and loneliness create an urge to enter the
web of relationship.
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Mathai and Alexander carve out new spaces of meaning in their writing,
working with relationships in the wider sense of the term, relationships
between a word, sentence, idea, between one’s voice and other women’s voices
and finally, between oneself and the ‘other.’ To Alexander, the question of
home is bound with “a migrant memory and the way that poetry … permits a
dwelling at the edge of the world” (“Poem out of Place…”1). It has also to do
with the kind of shelter that poets can make with words. Anna Sujatha Mathai
writes about the poem “mysteriously taking shape within, whereby one
becomes the home” (Letter to the author). Both the poets affirm in their
distinctive manner, the possibility of a return to the ‘self’ and ‘ home,’ routed
in the unpredictable detours of words and in the labour of poetic composition.
Alexander names the creative space as the “zone of radical illiteracy, the
curious place beneath the hold of a given syntax, … a zone to which words do
not attach, a realm where syntax flees” (“Poem out of Place…” 6). It is a zone
that will recognize neither the moorings of place, nor the sensuous densities of
location.
Alexander has evolved a ‘poetics of return’ out of her vast repertoire of
experience as an immigrant poet and an academic. Her ‘aesthetics’ springs
from her intuitive grasp of the unpredictable and incalculable layers of
creativity. In her powerful essays-“Poem out of Place-Zone of Radical
Illiteracy,” “Lyric in Time of Violence,” “The Poem’s Second Life: Writing
and Self- Identity,” and the “Poetics of Dislocation,” Alexander probes into the
whole gamut of creative writing with remarkable sensitivity and perspicacity.
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Her migrant sensitivity lends a sharpness and fragility to her poetic vision of
homeland. Alexander introduces a new concept called “the zone of radical
illiteracy” to explain the complex process of creativity. The zone is ‘radical,’
for it triggers unpredictable changes, its fiery muteness endowing it with a state
of wordlessness that spells ‘illiteracy.’ It is the space of emptiness out of which
new forms and meanings evolve. It is the storehouse of unformed thoughts and
emotions out of which are translated a new consciousness and space. She posits
the possibility of making shelter with words and a dwelling in a poem.
Alexander never fails to be intrigued and entranced by the tenuous gaps
between thought and word, in the silence that fills with meaning. Her childhood
fascination for the musty fragrance of her Tiruvalla garden, the sensuous hold
of its red soil takes shape into a literary and a poetic concept.
To Mathai, the poem validated her existence as a human being, helping
her to reinvent a new world for herself. Writing enabled her to ease out her
intense loneliness and disjunctions caused by her marital break down. “We
moved from house to house and I had no place … . So it [poem] was the only
thing that was accessible to me” (Kuortti 199). The intense pressure of
suppressed pain makes a poet like Mathai reach out for some light and to
“give a little space to a vision of justice, beauty, truth …” (Kuortti 209). The
internal landscapes, and the overwhelming power of hidden knowledge can be
made visible, and voiced in a subversive way in the little space of a lyric. To
Alexander, the lyric is a form, intensely alive, yet fragile. It is a place of
extreme silence permitting a crystallization of the realities, to offer a
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therapeutic release from the stultifying force of raw emotions to both poet and
the reader. Both the poets delve into the intricate and sometimes evasive
patterns of speech in order to “sort out a form that makes sense to others”
(“Almost Literally Making Ground: A Conversion with Meena Alexander” 14).
The resonance of an inner life breaks through the gaps of silence in their
poems. Bursting with vividness, Alexander’s poems become a taut string on
which she attempts to play the ‘migrant music.’ Mathai’s poetry is a
mellifluous flow of highly personalized moments, indented with graceful ease
and felicity. Life moments are scrutinized and neatly sketched with the keen
observation and detached concentration of an artist.
Alexander’s choice of the garden as her ‘primary space’ to interrogate
the vicissitudes of human life and its fine threads of relationship is deeply
entrenched in a ‘poetics of return.’ She identifies her creative zone in the
inextricable bonding with her Tiruvalla soil and home--“As a small child, how
did I attach myself to place? I shut my eyes and see a child in a tree” (“Poetics
of Dislocation” 3). She alludes to that tree of childhood in her poem “Black
River, Walled Garden”:
I swayed in a cradle hung in a tree
and all of the visible world-
walled garden
black river- flowed in me. (20-23)
Anna Sujatha Mathai’s poems flow unfettered by theoretical reasoning
and philosophical ruminations. She renders her total ‘self’ and vision of life in
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her poems that amaze the reader by their stark simplicity and lyrical beauty.
Acutely aware of the agony and ecstasy of creative writing, she cajoles her
words to gather grace and wholeness ‘inch by inch’ in her poem “Goddess
without Arms” (Life-On My Side of the Street and Other Poems: Dialogue and
Other Poems). It is a poem on the making of a poem, hinged on the binary
opposites of the ideal and the real. The opening line “My poetry didn’t come
full-blown,” implies the necessity of ruptures in the making of a work of beauty
and grace. The slow process of gaining a form is fraught with moments of
doubt and anxiety. The poem needs time to evolve into a full-fledged piece of
art, which is both graceful and complete. The poet cannot aspire for the perfect
beauty of a goddess, as she is painfully aware of the inadequacy of language to
‘word’ the world. The dire necessity to re-invent a new world for herself must
have made the poet in her dwell on the making of a poem. The regal splendor
of Venus and the divine grace of Saraswati are visually and specifically
identified in the lines:
It was never a goddess
Rising from the waters
………………………
A Canova Venus or Saraswati,
Resplendent in her plenitude,
Certain of her sovereignty. (4-5, 9-11)
Her life- experience has taught her otherwise:
No. It grew painfully,
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Armless
Limbless
Somewhat blind. (13-16)
The present thesis incorporates a fresh approach to the re-figuring of
‘place’ as ‘space’ in the poems of Mathai and Alexander, from the vantage
point of Kerala, their homeland. At the outset, what seemed a simplistic search
of “Kerala” as place, developed into a complex process of re-defining the
geographical fact as new spaces in their creative writing. The growing
realization of the generational gap between Mathai (1939-) and Alexander
(1951-), necessitated a re-thinking on postcolonial subjectivity, enhanced by
the incisive arguments and relevant musings on the issues of dislocation,
hyphenated identity and the subversive power in the usage of the English
language in Alexander’s powerful book, The Shock of Arrival: Reflections on
Postcolonial Experience. It is a deft interweaving of prose and poem, with each
segment intersecting the themes of language, writing and diaspora in the light
of the contemporary world of violence, racism, neocolonial interventions and
the female experience of the ‘body.’ In the “altered light” of migrant
experience, her poems bristle with a new sensibility and vibrate with the
ambivalent forces of subjective and experimental creativity. Her memoir Fault
Lines provides a subjective base for the postcolonial reflections on identity,
memory and space.
The focus is primarily on Alexander’s ten collections of poems and
prose-pieces ranging from The Bird’s Bright Ring (1976) to The Illiterate Heart
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(2002). The text flowers into new dimensions of meaning out of a close reading
of her memoir Fault Lines that not only unravels her past, but also highlights
themes that occur in her poetry. A thematic study of her poems, replenished
with her pungent prose- pieces, develops into a deeper understanding of spatial
configurations evolving in her poetry. Mathai’s poetry draws the reader gently
into the mindscape of the lyric speaker to unfold the nuance of relationship
with the world. Space is personalized, and borders are crossed effortlessly,
weaving an intricate pattern of timelessness and spacelessness. The angst of
dislocation framed by the migrant sensibility in Alexander’s poetry set against
the Asian-American aesthetics, enters the deep waters of interiority in Mathai’s
poetry, silhouetted by Indian writing in English.
The poems have been analysed with the focus on the distinctive
ambience of the two poets, avoiding as much as possible a comparative study.
The thesis develops as an enquiry into the use of memory as a strategy,
underscoring the migrant sensibility in Alexander, and the subtle interiorising
of dislocation in Mathai. The female perspective in their writing propels the
study to enter the dynamics of identities and diversities. The making of identity
is a process that is shaped and re-shaped by the use of language, to culminate in
the return to a space of selfhood in the poem itself. Creativity and identity
coexist in this ‘poetics of return,’ highlighting the multiple layers of meaning
embedded in the ‘word.’
There is a dearth of serious study on the writing of the two poets, though
their poems have been reviewed individually in Asian American Writing,
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World Literature Today, Kavya Bharathi and Poetry Chronicle by critics and
poets like Krishna Rayan, K. Ayyappa Paniker, Manju Jaidka, Oliver Perry,
Gopal Gandhi, and have been analyzed in scholarly articles by academic critics
like Anupam Jain, Aparajitha Nanda and Vijayasree. C. The present thesis
attempts to introduce the spatial dimension to the poetry of Mathai and
Alexander.