Tattooed with taboos
is an anthology of 77 poems by three women poets who try to understand what it
means to be a young Manipuri woman. Like most of the recent literature from
India’s Northeast, the answer is struggle. The poems are divided into three
categories – ‘Tattooed with Taboos’, ‘Angst for Homeland’ and ‘Love and
Longingness’ (sic). The first set deals with the woman question – the problem
of female sexuality and the possibility of and need for emancipation. However,
it is a very political and essentially Manipuri question. The second set moves
slightly away from this theme to the wider political condition in a Manipur
torn between tradition and change. Again, this is not an un-gendered condition
as the problem of politics is strongly embedded in the femininity of the women
poets. The third set is a collection of ‘love poems’. However, the love and
longing is only sometimes about romantic or sexual love. Mostly, the tone is
severely sarcastic and the style one of parody.
 |
Tattooed with Taboos
Chaoba Phuritshabam,
Shreema Ningombam,
Soibam Haripriya
Siroi Publlications
and
Loktakleima Publications, 2011
`200, 133 pages
Paperback/Poetry
|
The book is, however, an example of how a great deal of
talent is lost for the want of a good editor. Atrocious grammatical errors and
a generous amount of clichés make some of the better poems almost unreadable.
For a very long time, Indian English Literature, especially the literature
produced from non-metropolitan areas has been criticised for exhibiting a
ruggedness of translation. Sadly, many of the poems in this collection suffer
from that drawback. The translation of thought from the languages of Manipur to
English is not very smooth and betrays the process. Some of the phrases are out
of place and in a few places the idiom seems to be borrowed directly from the
mother language. Confusion of tenses is another hindrance to smooth reading.
The third poem in the first set, Soibam’s ‘I Died a Little’
deals with the three stages of a woman’s life – puberty, loss of virginity and
marriage. It is through these rites of passage that the persona is introduced
to the patriarchal codes set for a woman and her individuality dies a little
while passing through the three steps. A few common images run through the
poems. One is the Swiftian technique of using the image of clothes as an
extended metaphor. In Soibam’s ‘Of Clothes and Robes’, a sash represents
individualism and femininity and the persona’s act of replacing it with another
sash under the influence of other voices that speak of ‘freedom’ and ‘culture’
represents the polarised political situation of Manipur. The sexual politics of
women’s clothing, especially the traditional phanek, surfaces heavily in the
poems of Shreema Ningombam. In ‘Unburdening Dead Spirits’, ‘To the Ema
Lairembi’ and others, the ‘uncleanliness’ and inauspiciousness of the phanek
are celebrated. Shreema’s poems are red-eyed and restless. The female personas
are charged with the energy of protest and are unwilling to adjust within
patriarchal norms. In the poem ‘One Last Time’, a phrase of which forms the
title of the anthology, the woman seeks emancipation through the pursuit of
prohibited pleasures and the reversal of societal codes. However, the frenzy is
interspersed with absolutely delicate gems like ‘In Red’ where the surrealism
shifts from gloom to mellowness and the magical concluding line: ‘No, you must
go before the night turns red’ is filled with yearning.
Chaoba Phuritshabam’s poems are less energetic and unlike
Shreema’s personas, the voices here are more universal. The language of the
poems, however, is simple and unassuming. It is this property that gives a
sharp edge to their meaning. Sample the business-like tone adopted in the poem
‘Fruits of Your Taste’ where varieties of female bodies are put on display for
the male gaze:
Welcome to the market
of fruits
Some are like your
favourite apple
Some looks (sic) like
your juicy orange…
Chaoba’s ‘Questions on her’ is placed strategically at the
end of the ‘Tattooed with Taboos’ section. In its analogy between the
prostitution of a woman and the prostitution of the Loktak Lake, it anticipates
the next section, ‘Angst for Homeland.’ This section deals basically with the
identity crisis of the average Manipuri women. ‘Between two flags’ depicts the
problem of a state caught between its monarchical past and its current status
as a state of the Indian Union. ‘Patriot of My Land’ shows how power corrupts
the self-proclaimed liberator. For Shreema, home and mother are
indistinguishable from homeland and the angst arises from the feeling of
strangeness on revisiting the primeval stage after a period of experience. The
phanek ‘stained with primeval blood’ returns to remind us that the angst is,
again, very gendered and personalised. The conflict between the new and the
memory of the old is summarised in the first stanza of ‘Broken’:
I am home and they are
still here
The streets still
scarred
These hills still in
reverie
Which one is more
sore?
The broken strings of
your guitar
Or the broken notes of
their Pena
The analogy between the guitar and the Pena resonates with
the guitar/balalaika pair in The Scorpions’ ‘Wings of Change’, though in an
exactly opposite context. The home gives the persona everything except, like
the tragic Mughal prince,
… a tiny corner
To rest at long last
Broken bones of our
hearts.
Soibam’s poems in this section are vitriolic attacks on
various aspects of the Indian democracy, especially ‘India whining’ as opposed
to ‘India shining.’ In ‘Another Polish for My Nails’, my favourite poem from
this set, an ordinary voter pines after the politician like a beloved waiting
for her lover to fulfil his ‘promises.’ The electoral ink is satirised as a
lover’s gift of nail polish for his beloved. The poem concludes in a
mock-pining note
Yet I believed
Like a love struck
luckless lover
I wish I have (sic)
chosen
Another polish for my
nails.
The final section, ‘Love and Longingness’ (sic) is the weakest
link in the anthology. The metaphors are stale and the language is stiff and
prosaic. Shreema’s ‘Becoming of You in Me’ is heavy on metaphysical conceit but
the selection of words and syntactic errors make the poem almost unbearable.
Only Soibam delivers in this set. In her pleasantly caustic love-letter-like
‘To the Researcher,’ the relationship between the government survey analyst and
a villager is parodied as a romantic relationship. The language shifts between
a lover’s rebuke and a song of yearning.
