Kamala Das A Confessional Poet: A Quest for Identity/Self
- - Elangbam Hemanta Singh, Department of English,
Ideal Girls College, Manipur University, Manipur.
Abstract: Confession is not at all a new genre in
literature. As it is the disclosure of some sort, a writer reveals private or
clinical matters about herself or himself of art. As a matter of fact,
confessional poetry has a very long tradition that begins from the poets like
Sappho and Catullus to Jean-Jacques Rousseau's The Confessions (1764-70) based
on religious confessions in the lineage of St. Augustine's Confessions (C. 400
AD) establishing the impression on the history of literature for the
psychological outlets of personal feelings. In fact the term “Confessional
Poetry” comes from “Confessional Properly” first coined by M.L. Rosenthal in
reviewing Robert Lowell's Life Studies (1959).
Confessional poetry is a type of narrative and lyric verse
dealing with the facts and intimate mental and physical experiences of the
poet's own life against the demand for “impersonality” by T.S. Eliot and the
New Critics. In such poetry, the self is a primary concern which is treated
with utmost frankness and lack of restraint, written in ordinary speech and
using open forms. In addition, there are no barriers between the reader and the
poet, or barriers of subject matters. It is important at this point what Robert
Phillips rightly observes: “Confessional art whether poetry or not, is a means
of killing the beasts which are within us, those dreadful dragons of dreams and
experiences that must be hunted down concerned and exposed in order to be
destroyed (2)”. Interestingly, the most intimate aspect of life, areas of
experience, which one would instinctively keep from public sight, are openly
expressed, and not presented as a mere history in poetry. However, the first
person singular 'I' of confessional poetry is not the factual 'I' of the poet,
but a projection of the poet's being into another person. It is because to
achieve a degree of objectivity and the self is used as a poetic symbol to
establish the identity/self. What Sylvia Plath, Adrienn Rich, Judith Wright,
Margaret Atwood, Anne Sexton, Phyllis Webb, Margaret Avison, Rosemary Sullivan
and Susan Griffins are doing in British, American, Canadian and Australian poetry
was begun by Kamala Das, A.K. Ramanujan, R. Parthasarathi, Nissim Ezekiel,
etc., in Indian English poetry. These women writer's gesture of defiance and
self-assertion snowballed into a movement first and later on a genre.
A group of poets who have become known as Confessional has
also engendered much debate. Some writers of a previous generation, for example
Robert Lowell, Theodore Roethke, John Berryman, W.D. Snodgrass, Delmore
Schwartz, and Randall Jarrell, are those who were clearly tangential and went
on to do different kind of works of various poets such as Maxine Kumin, Alan
Dugan, and James Merrill. Other poets, such as Amiri Baraka, Carolyn Kizer and
Adrienne Rich, are still labelled Confessional despite more direct associations
with other schools / movements. However, it is generally agreed that the core
of the movement begins within and among certain works from the late 1950s to
the late 1960s.
Kamala Das has mostly been assessed as a writer in this
genre of confessional poetry. Among the modern Indian poets writing in English
today, she has been ranked with such poetesses of dissatisfaction and
discontent as Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton, though the comparison is seen by
many as undeserving. As a matter of fact, the creative outlets of Sylvia Plath
and Kamala Das seem very much similar with opinion and subject matters and also
at the same time appear dissimilar to cause of affliction in a different social
set up. Though they remain separate in different cultural and social
background, their struggle for feminine longings is very much common. So, they
strongly display the autobiographical elements in their poetry. For example,
Kamala Das remembers her grandmother's house for the deep love and
understanding she received there. In “My Grandmother's House”,she expresses her
deep nostalgia, “There is a house now far away where once / I received love”.
Similarly, Sylvia Plath shows deep affection for her grandmother in “Point
Shirley”, “She collusion of mulish elements and / She wore her broom straws to
the hub”. As Kamala Das exploits the technique of confession in her poetry in
order to explore self, confirming the reality of the inner world while
interacting with male chauvinism, she feels isolated and sometimes remains
doubtful, obsessed and discontented with the corporal encounters.
There are essentially two sides to Kamala Das’s poetry. One
is that which is extraordinary centred around her own self, probing the malaise
and morbidity that seem to clamp on her poetic vision. In the poem, “An
Introduction” she expresses her self-assertive statement attacking on
conventionalism, advocating the rights of women and introducing herself as an
Indian of a very brown complexion, born in Malabar having the ability to speak
three languages:
I am Indian, very brown, born in
Malabar, I speak three languages, write in\
Two, dream in
one(4-6).
Self is the crucial point of her poems. Her quest for
freedom of expression and selfidentity refers to the “Spiritual Odyssey” (22)
as R.S. Pathak suggests. The following lines reflect:
Why not leave Me alone, critics, friends, visiting cousins,
Every one of you?
Why not let me speak in
Any language I like? (An Introduction : 7-10).
Though she does not get the love she longs for but instead
of it, she faces exploitation and humiliation in sex encounter with her
husband:
When I asked for love, not knowing what else to ask
For, he drew a youth of sixteen into the
Bedroom and closed the door.
He did not beat me
But my sad woman badly felt so beaten.
The weight of my breasts and womb crushed me.
I Shrank Pitifully (25-31).
The other side is a compelling expression of personal
experiences and a forceful subjective voice. However, this voice is so strong
that it extends beyond the personal world of anguished feelings and assumes
wider significance. In this context, one can find such tastes and expectations
in her poetry like, “The Sunshine Cat”, “The Old Playhouse”, etc. In her poem
“An Introduction”, Kamala Das revolts against the set of rules meant for women
breaking the conventional womanhood, compelling her to become a traditional
feminine role “Dress in sarees, be girl, / Be wife… Be Amy, or be Kamala. Or
better/ Still, be Madhavikutty”(33-39). On the hand, she searches for her own
identity, wishing to be autonomous in decisions. In the following lines, she
speaks herself in the strong voices :
I wore a shirt and my
Brother's trousers,
Cut my hair short and ignored /
My womanliness (31-33).
I am sinner,
I am saint,
I am the beloved and the
Betrayed.
I have no joys which are not yours, no
Aches which are not yours.
I too call myself I (56-59)
Apart from this, Kamala Das poetry embodies agonies or women
emerging from the state of subjugation and bondage and speaks about the
emancipation of women in a male-dominated society, and seeking to establish
their identity and/ or the self that mark in her poems like “A Relationship”,
“Summer in Calcutta”, “Marine Drive”, etc. In the poem “Afterwards”, she
expresses the secret hope and fear of womanhood:
Son of my womb,
Ugly in loneliness.
You walk the world's bleary eye
Like a grit-your cleverness
Shall not be your doom
As ours was. (1-6)
In this context, C.R. Nambiar shares his observation about
the essence of Kamala Das poetry, “She becomes a feminist writer by making her
women conscious and providing them wings to rise and flutter… The essence of
her poems is struggle about her own self and… is a cry for freedom” (122).
Along with this, her poetry shows a landmark in her female journey from
victimization to consciousness. Searching for the self / the identity as the
crucial point of her poems, Kamala Das says: “One's real world is not what is
outside him. It is the immeasurable world inside him that is real. Only the
one, who has decided to travel inward, will realize his route has no end”
(109). Her poems such as “The Freaks”, “My Grandmother's House”, “A Hot Noon in
Malabar”, “The Old Playhouse”, “The Conflagration”, etc. reflect her journey of
the self towards the ultimate. She, however, cannot escape from the inner world
that makes her the dilemma of personality.
In “The Looking Glass” Kamala Das explores her quest for
personal relationship wishing to develop with the lover through sex. Frankly
speaking, she searches her self-identity in the male-hegemonic view or the
man-dominant society. It is shocked to learn that the primary duty of a woman
is to satisfy the male ego by praising his masculinity and at the same time
accepting her own feminine weakness to play as a puppet whose only aim is to
gratify male lust: “Stand nude before the glass with him/So that he sees
himself the stronger one”.
Then, Kamala Das asks the woman to surrender her beauty to
the superior male, “Gift him all, /Give him what makes you woman, the scent of
… and all your /Endless female hungers”. She also shares a pain of humiliation
and frustration, “Oh yes, getting /Aman to love in easy, but living / Without
him afterwards I have to be faced”. So, she feels sad with her dream of
searching the self through love in this male supremacy. In this context, it is
fair to say that she is on the path of love, meets the lover and enjoys
pleasure through relation with eyes shut to relieve her but as soon as she
opens her eyes she finds her lover missing. She, therefore, calls her husband
the “ruthless one, clumsy with noise and movement”. In the scheme of man, a
woman cannot raise herself above the conventional image that deadens her
persona reflecting in “The Old Playhouse”:
You called me wife,
I was taught to break saccharine into your tea and
To offer at the right moment the vitamins…
I ate the magic loaf and
Because a dwarf.
I lost my will and reason (12-16).
The love and affection that Kamala Das received from her
father and grandmother remain an ideal that she searches the whole of her life
in others while exploring her identity / self, not for body but is shocked and
disillusioned. In the poem “The Looking Glass”, Kamala Das says, “… drew me to
him Rudely / With a lover's haste, an armful / Of splinters, …/ I went to him
for half an hour /As pure women, pure misery / Fragile glass, breaking /
Crumbling… In connection to the these lines, K.R. Srinivasa Iyengar, the noted
scholar of Indian writing in English, briefly sums up about Kamala Das and her
poetry and prose in his book: “Kamala Das finally appears to be a poet of
decadence […] a victim of the inadequacies of her life, failing even to gain
control over her art (712).”
Despite such an interpretation comes from the eminent
scholar, it is saved to say that her poetry is rather essentially a poetry of
protest, of defiance and of emphatic assertion, all other moods ranging from
weak feminine sense of helplessness and submission, to a restless search for
happiness and shelter are different expressions of this basic Promethean spirit
which is desire to break the rusted shackles and have its voice heard. This
voice is expressed in the following lines:
As the convict studies
His prison's geography
I study the trappings
Of your body, dear love,
For I must someday find
An escape from it snare. (“Prisoner”)
And, then, wailing into light
He came, so fair, a streak of light thrust
Into the faded light (“Jaisurya”)
…Ask me, everybody ask me
What he sees in me, ask me why he is called a lion,
A libertine, ask me the flavour of his
Mouth, ask me why his hand sways like a hooded snake
Before it clasps my pubis.
Ask me why like
A great tree, felled, he slumps against my breasts.
And sleeps, ask me why life is short and love is (“The Stone
Age”)
Kamala Das' search for ideal lover remains incomplete.
Finally, she worships her ideal Krishna. In the poem “Radha”, she deeply
expresses her inner feelings:
O Krishna, I am
melting
Melting, melting
Nothing remains but
You…
Along with an idea of melting, from the material to the
spiritual is the path that the female persona shows while exploring the Self /
Identity through love. Now, she, finally, merges herself into the Supreme-Self
of Ghanshyam. In the poem “Ghanashyam”, she expresses this act of being oneness
with Ghanashyam, the supreme:
Ghanashyam,
You have like a
Koel built your nest in the arbour of my heart.
My life, until now a sleeping jungle is at last astir with
music (1-3)
Kamala Das' poetry presents Indian woman in a way that has
outraged the usual male sense of decency and decorum. As she inaugurates a new
age for women poets, she constitutes a total rejection of the conventional
styles of poetic expression of the dominant culture or the male-oriented
universe. Her poetry is the acknowledgement and celebration of the beauty and
courage of being a woman, not celebrating unbridled sensuality, but projecting
the stereotype of a wronged woman and at once asserting the need to establish
her voice and identity. Finally, she is successful in her venture of searching
the ultimate self and the identity through the art of confession.
Before concluding my paper, it is pertinent to remember what
Kamala Das says in her book called My Story: “Poetry is not a continual
self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of the personality … I could not escape
from personality…”(109). Only one can say that her inner world has not remained
her personal domain, it has acquired profound symbolic significance for all
bruised and battered womankind.
REFERENCE:
Das, Kamala,1989. My Story. New Delhi : Sterling
Publishers, 109. 1984.
Collected Poems. Trivandrum: Kamala Das. 1979.
The Old
Playhouse and Other Poems. Bombay: Orient Longman, 1979. 1991.
The Best of
Kamala Das. Kerala: Bodhi Publishing House, 1991.
Iyengar, K.R.S.,1985.Indian Writing in English. New Delhi:
Sterling Publishers,
Nambiar, C.R.2000 “The Quiddity of Kamala Das”Modern
Indian Poetry in English:Critical Studies,(ed.) Nila Shah and Promod K. Nayar,
New Delhi : Creative Books, , 122.
Pathak, R.S., 2003. “Quest For Identity in
Indian English Poetry”. Indian English Literature: Marginalised Voice. (ed.)
Avadhesh K. Singh, New Delhi: Creative Books, 22.
Phillips, Robert, 1973.The
Confessional Poets. Carbondele and Edwarelsville : Souther Illionis University
Press, 1973.
