Burning Embers

EVEN WHEN TISHANI Doshi writes of the strange gratitude of ‘not being in the nicer hotel,’ for the inspiration that comes ‘Because if it weren’t for this mouse-spiced/ air, this particular desire to be anywhere/ but here, how else to turn the howl/ into song?’, or when Ranjani Murali takes a recording-assisted tour of Alcatraz, the blood and body of their new books of poetry is quite literally just that. No matter what their other preoccupations or locations, both poets circle around and back to the subject of female fear. Doshi’s Girls Are Coming out of the Woods is underpinned by macabre newspaper headlines that cut close to home, manifesting in brutal crimes, and memories and dread that breathe down one’s own neck at all hours. In Murali’s debut, Blind Screens, she often employs as her canvas the cinematic screen, and in technicolour or off-camera, she situates several of her most politically loaded poems from a tangential gaze, always framing as her subjects women in relation to morality and society.

This is the most visceral of Doshi’s three books of poetry, reaching into the wounded places of the feminine psyche in ways that ache with how universally they are experienced. Some of the poems have direct triggers, cases that make the headlines, and the triggers open out onto traumas. Take this powerful description in the poem Disco Biscuits: ‘… most of us have known a man/ who arrived like Bill [Cosby] – sleek and proud as a July/ thunderstorm. How so many of us gave in to that sleekness/ because when you’re young you don’t know that your bones/ have been giving way the second you were born. So you give/ and your giving’s large and uncalculated. But then/ there’s the haunting.’

Throbbing through the collection are many hauntings, among them murdered women unknown or beloved. In Everyone Loves A Dead Girl, the poet says frankly, in the voice of such a ghost: ‘I would like to talk about what it means to suffocate on pillow/ feathers, to have your neck held like a cup of wine/ all delicate/ and beloved, before it is crushed.’ The poet does exactly this, pinning down images of death and decay unflinchingly. Even musings on aging relatives and crematoriums don’t come from nowhere: at the centre of them is something beyond idle morbidity. In The Leather Of Love, she writes: ‘And when we lie in bed and talk/ of the body’s failings, of the petulant dead, of / disenchantment and insufficient passion,/ we’re chewing through fears so thick our/ teeth are beginning to rust.’ An army of girls— girls ‘with panties tied around their lips,’ girls ‘found naked in ditches and wells,’ girls who didn’t survive or maybe did— emerges in the collection’s eponymous poem, dedicated posthumously to a murdered friend of the author’s. Rather than rouse, it chills. ‘Girls are coming/ out of the woods, clearing the ground/ to scatter their stories,’ she writes. You can almost hear her breathlessness in the last line—the poet passing the baton to the voices coming through her: ‘Girls are coming out of the woods./ They’re coming. They’re coming.’

In Blind Screens, Murali slips a cast of heroine characters, female actors and women in celluloid-stronghold cities like Bombay and Madras into poems in several registers, and just like all subtext cinematic and otherwise, they bind the collection together. Sometimes, we see them through the dehumanisation of the male gaze, as in Circa 1970’s Tamil Film Stalker’s Ghazal, which escalates quickly from admiration to physical violence. Murali’s voice changes deftly; in the very next poem, Mangaatha, or The Case of the Former Circus Artiste Now Distracted, she takes on the persona of a performer as she flees a gang of men, all whom have handled her, literally, in less that professional ways. She holds tightly to her trapeze bars and swings away— but straight into the gaze of ‘the young policeman…. his mouth blackening/ at the sight of my pooling silk’.

This deft interplay between stage illusion, misogynist delusion and the literal difficulty of being female in a society trained to perceive itself as entitled to putting its hands on all it rests its eyes on comes together most forcefully in Historical Movie Scene, in which a male audience member heckles the narrator as she gets up to leave a theatre. Onscreen, a woman dances, ‘a glitter-filled belly button zooming into our faces’, while the man screams, ‘Ey, figure da, looking, going’. She stumbles and keeps walking, while ‘The same heckler calls out, ‘Wait, ma, watch/ where you’re going!’ to me as the actress dances a stream of blood/ into an unfenced balcony, where a throng of snarling,/ cotton-stuffed, cross-eyed vultures claw into her mouth.’

This accomplished collection contains many variegations that fill and colour its pages with all the elaborate textures of Indian cinema: among them, ‘Beggars’, with a fortune-telling parrot electrified with terror by a feline scent, which morphs beautifully through Murali’s phrasing into predators of another kind: ‘the director who recently/ celebrated the hundredth day jubilee,/ the local minister, the mayor, and even/ the child-star who likes to play with/ cheetah cubs in his spare time.’

In Female Lead Waits for the Kurinji, she juxtaposes two tropes: that of the flower that blooms once every 12 years, archetypal since ancient Tamil literature, and that of the modern heroine for whom a flower is but a metaphor. In the poem’s final lines, the narrator says to the kurinji, with or without self-consciousness: ‘Your own curse/ is not that of lack, but of being watched as you bloom.’

ONE IMAGINES THAT the girl who becomes a woman—who ‘blooms’ under watch—may often speak to herself in the rudimentary voice of Rupi Kaur’s poems. the sun and her flowers is a book that surprises: nothing of Kaur’s work online suggests it will be anything but craftless, but placed in context, in page after page rather than in pithy cropped Instagram lines, a different effect accrues. Not quite beautiful or original, but together, the poems carry a clarity that is convincing, a soft voice that soothingly intones the familiar. A few pages in, one is reminded of a specific multi-genre work of art, discussed below, and understands that a slow-release impact is intended. What is not achieved in craft is compensated for in fine emotional control, the tenor in which Kaur writes about topics as personal as rape and the poignance of knowing how little time she has left with the mother who she has finally begun to understand. Some of Doshi’s girls, too, along with Murali’s women, must have had these thoughts.

But this is not to suggest ingenuity. In interviews, Kaur deliberately presents the image of being a non-reader. A recent article on her sardonically points out her interest in a book of Kafka’s—not for the contents but for the cover design. It’s an image that those who love to loathe all writers of her ilk, and the Instapoetry fad itself, enjoy. But it is patently false. As even just the first pages of the sun and her flowers turn, there’s a clear debt to Beyonce’s Lemonade—which was scripted by the poet Warsan Shire. Again, in the sections that speak of immigrants and refugees, Kaur transparently aspires to resonate like Shire’s work does. It would be remiss to not bring up Nayyirah Waheed’s allegation that Kaur plagiarised her work, an allegation layered with an undertone of anti-blackness. So the poem legacy, which goes ‘i stand/ on the sacrifices/ of a million women before me/ thinking/ what can i do/ to make this mountain taller/ so the women after me/ can see farther’ begs the question: whose shoulders has Kaur chosen to stand on, unacknowledged? It is not enough that she labels two illustrations as tributes to two Punjabi visual artists, Amrita Sher- Gil and Sobha Singh—more problematic is how she devises the image of herself as a literary pioneer in her lineage, without credit to the many pools from which she sourced her syntax.

But here, another poet similar in background—female, Punjabi, raised in the West, famous through social media—bears mention. Read side by side with Nikita Gill’s new book, Wild Embers: Poems of Rebellion, Fire and Beauty—which attempts to revise fairytales without ever moving past the Disney versions and is replete with confusion about its emotional and political core. the sun and its flowers appears all the more sincere in its naïveté. It’s an uncanny contradiction: Kaur is clearly winning for she has studied how to be accessible, but the work somehow comes across as true. Which is why we can’t dismiss her on the basis of craft alone—not only is she better than her contemporaries who attempt depth, but the struggle and sentiment conveyed in her work is also the very pathos that moves stronger poets like Shire, Waheed, Murali and Doshi. Whatever their calibre, the girls are certainly coming out of the woods—bearing words, accusatory and revelatory.

booksfeminismpoetryrebellionsocietyTishani Doshi