Why is poetry emanating from Manipur so deeply
entrenched in images of the bullet and the gun? Preetika Venkatakrishnan tries
to find an answer
Why do the poetry anthologies edited by Ranjit Hoskote, Jeet
Thayil and Eunice de Souza, which have now come to showcase contemporary Indian
poetry in English, not feature even a single voice from Manipur? Have we
slighted regional writing in English while canonising mainstream poets who have
turned solipsistic and failed to unravel what it means to be human in radical
circumstances? Why was Irom Sharmila’s poetry from Manipur singled out by
publishers in New Delhi to be published as an individual collection? With these
uncomfortable questions in mind, when I travelled to Imphal in 2011 and met up
with a few writers, observations made by two poets summed up for me the essential
struggle taking place in the poetry of Manipur. Moreover, they dramatised an
experience quite alien to those writing from the mainland. On a drizzly, dank
January morning, while discussing the literature from the valley, poet
Yumlembam Ibomcha spoke of how his soul is in violence, morbidly suggesting
that he could be killed by any kind of bullet. When Robin S Ngangom added that
the people of the region were put to a loyalty test every day, that they had to
prove to the rest of the country they were Indians too, the anguish of the poet
provoked insights into the political and human needs for artistic expressions
about Manipur:
 |
| Poetry about Manipur shares its intent with Latin American ‘testimonios’ and Third World poetry of witness |
My home is a gun
pressed against both
temples
a knock on a night
that has not ended
a torch lit long after
the theft
a sonnet about body
counts
undoubtedly raped
definitely abandoned
in a tryst with
destiny.
(‘My Invented Land’)
The poets writing in precarious times seek for their art a
liberating role that is deeply sensitive to a land bloodied by secessionist
demands for territory, draconian counter-insurgent measures like the AFSPA,
which operates under a perverse principle that you are guilty until proven
innocent, and more recently, an intensification of communal intolerance that
has ironically overtaken resentment for GoI. The poet writing about Manipur
then, primarily gives testimonies for a trying period in history and
articulates the anxieties of a large, dispossessed population. What evolves in
the process is a poetics of violence that alternates between impressionistic images,
surreal crossings between the real and the unreal and a realism that reiterates
the stagnation of life albeit in unadventurous symbolism. In an article that
examines the recent history of poetry from the state, ‘Contemporary Manipuri
Poetry – An Overview’ (2007), Ngangom describes the dominant mode of writing as
‘a poetry of survival’.
In the much varied and substantial corpus of poetry from
Manipur that has been made available in English through the translations of T
Bijoykumar Singh and Ngangom, works of Laishram Samarendra written in the 1950s
ushered in a pioneering modernist venture. In what appears to be an economical
style speckled with a wry sense of humour, the poet searches for the humane in
society. For instance, in the poem ‘Baby-land,’ pointing up serious political
issues as petty childish squabbles, he defamiliarises ‘image’. Later, in the
hands of the two ‘angry young poets’ who began publishing in the 1970s,
Thangjam Ibopishak and Ibomcha, dissent and the avant-gardist undertones of the
surreal became tools to cope with the overbearing violence in Manipur. In an
interview with Ngangom, Ibomcha points out the inadequacy of traditional linear
forms to represent the realities of a people in crisis that compelled him to
stage a ‘huge mad laugh’ in his poetry. His poem ‘Story of a Dream’ opens with
nauseous images of mangled dead bodies of children oozing blood over which the
poet walks, followed by a bizarre profusion of gun muzzles. The poet-persona
quite dramatically gets shot, turns euphoric in a heightened state of frenzy
and likens bullets to ‘grapes, almonds and raisins’:
It’s hilarious!
It’s hilarious – the
sound of gunfire,
It’s the soothing
strain of the flute, the sitar, the violin.
It’s more hilarious
than I can tell –
Flowers of lovely
colours
Blossomed from the
barrels of the guns.
‘Derived from a Puppy,’ again delineates a defeated society
by using non sequitur, a common surreal technique of humour that results from a
disruption of logic. The speaker of the poem, helped by his wife, disguises
himself as a tiger. She disrobes him and sketches stripes on his body with
colour pens but that does not change his timidity, ‘my throat only emitted/ a
‘miaow, miaow’ like a cat.’ Ibopishak fastidiously builds the tragic-absurdist
tour de force in poems like ‘The Land of Half-humans’ and ‘I want to be killed
by an Indian bullet.’ In the latter, all five elements of nature that later
metamorphose into insurgents conspire to shoot the poet. The poet, however,
cashes in on the insurgents’ disdain for everything Indian and escapes unharmed
by entreating them to kill him using an Indian bullet. Shock-value, asperity
and levity that strengthen the poetics of these angry men give way to a realism
that seems to be the stance of Saratchand Thiyam, Ilabanta Yumnam, RK
Bhubonsana, Raghu Leisangthem and Arambam Ongbi Memchoubi. Written in elegiac
tones with a sincerity that is moving, Thiyam’s poems concern themselves with
expansive emotions evoked by a society in ruins that bears resemblance to a ‘mangarak
kanbi,’ the ravine where the Meiteis used to throw away the bodies of those who
had died unnatural deaths. Thiyam has a knack for depicting pathos in its
mostrun-down quotidian forms:
When that youth who
journeyed seeking light
Returns covered with a
white cloth
Who’d like to receive
him?
(‘Gun Muzzle’)
Though a Manipuri poet’s eloquent gift may be the capacity
to laugh at oneself to survive dark times, and give to lyric expressions a
political flavour, there is also, as observed by Ngangom, a cloying profusion
of images of gunpowder and bullets in a section of Manipuri poetry. In their
art of subtlety and quiet charm, Memchoubi’s poems make a striking contrast to
the hackneyed gunpowder symbolism. For instance, in the poem ‘My Beloved
Mother,’ the poet empathises with a hill woman, most likely a Naga, and avoids
predictable rhetorical flourishes about hill-valley fluidity.
Another face of Manipuri poetry belongs to poets who write
of Manipur in English or are bilingual and may live away from their home state.
Foremost among them is Robin S Ngangom, who lives in Shillong and writes about
his vexed relationship with his homeland.
Among the younger poets writing in English like Shreema
Ningombam and Poreinganba Thangjam, Ningombam is known for her bold feminist
poetics:
The wicked wind licks
lecherously
Her thighs along which
the phanek
slithers
Yielding to the wanton
wind
The phanek prostrate
on the wayside cried ‘Hey woman! You have
dropped me’
She deliberately did
not look back
She too is a revolutionary.
(‘The Other Revolutionary’)
Steeped in idioms of desertion and guilt, Ngangom’s poems
exude a strong sense of homelessness and a need to transcend territoriality.
This and his choice of the lyrical-confessional mode of writing and quite
significantly, a debunking of Meitei feudal history and narrow ethnic claims
set Ngangom apart from his contemporaries in Manipur. He intertwines sensuous
love poetry with history and politics in an inclusive human vision, documenting
as it were the violence of maps that create conflict-widows:
I’m the anguish of
slashed roots,
the fear of the
homeless,
and the desperation of
former kisses.
How much land does my
enemy need?
No comments:
Post a Comment