‘The Mappila Verses’: Where do we go if our names are not in the list?

 ‘Where do coconut trees go when their roots are declared illegal?’

Following the Palestinian national poet Mahmoud Darwish’s Write me down, I am an Arab, Ajmal Khan wrote “Write me down, I am an Indian” in the wake of the CAA-NRC protests. It was translated into Hindi by lyricist Varun Grover, and into many other regional languages. The Mappila Verses is Khan’s new collection of poems.

Anonymous 16th-century Portuguese illustration from Códice Casanatense, depicting Kerala Muslims | Biblioteca Casanatense, Rome / Wikimedia Commons

Portrait of a Bastard

Your collar bone protrudes like a Somalian Child

and the arm muscles anaemic

but lungi, from the Malabar Coast.

Texture of your skin is the mixture of Pulaya and Cheruman

converted to Islam

sweat with a scent beyond Arabian sea from Dubai, Abu Dhabi or Saudi Arabia.

How do you speak English this well?
You guys rebelled against them
and boycotted even their language.

How did you get this resilient yet deep eyes

and rage? somewhat remotely similar to Palestinians and Kashmiris

You were never occupied.

Your chin remotely resembles

a clever north Indian Bania man

which disappear like a mirage.

They murmur, you are a bastard

in the confluence between the Arabian Coast

and the Malabar before Portuguese and Dutch mastered maritime.

Do bastards have documents?

Of the unholy nights

Or do they and their children and their children and their children remain bastards forever?

Where do we go?

Where should we go after the last frontiers?

Where should the birds fly after the last sky?

Where should the plants sleep after the last breath of air?

— Mahmoud Darwish

After the Isha Namaz

Chanting prayers sitting in her Musalla

Keeping her copy of Quran aside with the Thasbeeh, she asks

Where do we go if our names are not in the list?

Where do coconut trees go when their roots are declared illegal?

How does Hibiscus flower if you ask them go back where they come from?

Can you ask Tapioca to go back to Brazil?

Do you ask tea and coffee to go back where they come from?

Where do Great Pied Hornbills go when you tell monsoons are illegal to them?

Where do Mackerels and Sardines go when you inform them, they are illegal in the water?

Do Malabar elephant have identity card to enter Maasai Mara?

Where do Lion-tailed macaques go if they are asked to vacate the Silent Valley?

Can Mundakan and Puncha paddy be cultivated in Saudi Arabia?

Which water Giant Danio’s swim if rivers are made illegal to them?

Is there a list of snakes that are allowed only on the Western Ghats?

On which seas Hassinar fish if you ask him documents to enter the Arabian sea?

Where do we go?
The sword breaks my silence, she asks again

Where?
I reminded her

“For your father, Adam, was created with dirt from the surface of the earth.

You also will be returned to the earth”

We came from soil

We go to soil, until then

We live here.

Mappila Verse

The first step in liquidating a people is to erase its memory. Destroy its books, its culture, its history. Then have somebody write new books, manufacture a new culture, invent a new history. Before long that nation will begin to forget what it is and what it was... The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.

— Milan Kundera

Centuries ago

Even before Baba Sahib was born

My ancestors searched for caste annihilation – they became Mappila.

Malik Dinar came to my coast with light

Cheraman Perumal – lit Diya

Cheramaan Juma Mosque – first masjid on the subcontinent

Two lights merged between the Mecca and Ponnani.

Quadi Muhammed weaved songs when Portuguese arrived

Like Cannons on my disposal

Before anyone know anything about songs of resistance on my coast.

Kunjali Marakkar, Variyankunnath and Ali Musliyar

Might sound just Muslim names for you

– the light houses of self-respect and freedom for my land.

The brave children of Eranadu and Valluvanadu who poured their blood
The land that showed chest to the cannons in 1921
The brave children of Eranadu and Valluvanadu who poured their blood
The land that showed chest to the cannons in 1921

My lullaby

Anglo-Mappila war – My bedtime stories

When my ancestors fought against the sons of the empire

On which the sun never set

On another sunset Wagon massacre paintings were removed from Tirur railway station

How do you remove the wounds?

This land is built with the blood of my ancestors

The water we drink – their sweat

Their blood on my nerve

You – stand stable on their dead bodies.

Overnight

I have become an orphan in my own home

Or it wasn’t – home?

I now dig names graves and blood stains

Of my people to get all of us free – certificates of loyalty

I stand alone at the Ghat of this country

With all the documents and history

For my citizenship approval.

On the way back

Staring at stars, the cosmos and beyond

We went to colleges and universities like curious children following constellations.

Some of us – the only one of our kind

The rest had something similar – their surnames, parents’ jobs

Or the names of the cities they hailed

The kind of dress they wore, the way they spoke English

The brands of cigarettes they smoked and the scent of their sweat.

Some dropped out

Few missing

Others came home as dead bodies like – Shambuka

Those survived were picked up and

The remaining – untouchables in the job market.

On the way back to the village

The road is long with the heavy burden of degree certificates.

Excerpted with permission from The Mappila Verses, Ajmal Khan AT, Hawakal Publishers.

(Source: Scroll)

Death’s traffic light blinks red

Choi Seungja is one of the most influential feminist poets in South Korea. Born in 1952, Choi emerged as a poet during the eighties, a turbulent and violent decade that saw nationwide democracy movements against the authoritarian government. During that era, South Korean poets were predominantly populist, writing “people’s poetry” that protested authoritarian rule. These poets were also mostly men. But during that time, a new wave of feminist poets emerged, such as Kim Hyesoon, Ko Jung-hee, Kim Seung-hee, and Choi herself. When Choi first started publishing in 1979, her provocative poetry was dismissed by the male literary establishment who expected women to write quiet, domestic poems. As the translator and poet Don Mee Choi writes in the anthology Anxiety of Words, Choi’s language and content were “attacked for being too rough and vulgar for a female poet.”

Born in the small rural town of Yeonki, Choi Seungja attended Korea University, devoting her studies to German literature, and afterward made a living as a translator of German- and English-language books. In 1979, she was the first woman poet to publish in the prestigious journal Literature and Intellect. Despite her growing success as a poet over the following decades, Choi mostly lived alone in near poverty. In 2001, she experienced a mental illness that kept her in and out of hospitals. A community of poets came to her financial aid; the poet Kim Hyesoon, for instance, collected money each month to support Choi, and the press Munhakdongne gave her a writing space in their office so she had a place to write and translate.

CHOI SEUNGJA. PHOTO: SINYONG KIM. COURTESY OF ACTION BOOKS.

Choi’s stripped-down poetry is breathtaking and frightening. Her poems are uncompromising because she will stare into the infinite dark tunnel of her solitude and not break that stare. She writes, with terrifying alacrity, the existential despair of living in a hierarchical society where free will is a joke. While it has been changing, South Korea was a paternalistic and Confucian society, where the individual was subsumed by their family unit, especially for a woman, whose worth was measured by her husband and children. When a woman marries, her name is no longer used. She is called “so-and-so’s wife” or “so-and-so’s mother.” Because Choi was a single woman, she was an aberration. The I in her poems is often abjectly alone. The phone in her home is so silent day after day that when it finally rings, she is frightened. Instead of the timeline of a traditional Korean woman who measures her milestones by marriage and children, she has only death to shadow her as she ages. In her poem “Thirty Years Old,” Choi writes, “Death’s traffic light blinks red / in my two eye sockets / my blood is jelly, my fingernails sawdust, / and my hair wire.” In the poem “Already I,” Choi contends:

Already I was nothing:

mold formed on stale bread,

trail of piss stains on the wall,

a maggot-covered corpse

a thousand years old.

Nobody raised me.

I was nothing from the beginning,

sleeping in a rat’s hole,

nibbling on the flea’s liver,

dying absentmindedly. in any old place.

So don’t say you know me

when we cross paths

like falling stars.

Idon’tknowyou, Idon’tknowyou,

You, thou, there, Happiness,

You, thou, there, Love.

That I am alive

is no more than an endless

rumor.

Metonyms of the body as waste pervade her poetry: the piss, shit, and vomit that the body rejects and that we recoil from because the emissions remind us of our own mortality. The barren womb is also a central motif, evoking the disgrace she feels as a childless woman in a society where a woman is the sum of her children. It is also a metaphor of the motherland whose soul has become corrupted by capitalism. Capitalism has become the only logic that rules her nation, where all human relationships are mediated by money. The citizen does not act but is acted upon. In the poem “The Portrait of Mr. Pon Kagya,” the salaryman Mr. Pon Kagya does not sit on the chair but the chair sits on him; the pen grips him; the pay envelope thrusts him in his pocket. Objects have become subjects who have their way with this salaryman, who is powerless. While Choi’s poems may be despairing, they are simultaneously liberating because she writes in a language both ruthlessly direct and strangely surreal. She does not obfuscate her despair with elegant metaphors but confronts it with nightmarishly strange imagery. In her brutal investigation of her own pain and agony, she cries out for an alternate way of life.

Choi took a hiatus from poetry in 2001 because of her mental illness, but her reputation as a formidable poet in South Korea has only grown. She has published eight books of poetry: Love in This Age (1981), A Happy Diary (1984), The House of Memory (1989), My Grave Is Green (1993), Lovers (1999), Alone and Away (2010), Written on the Water (2011), and Empty Like an Empty Boat (2016). Choi has also translated many books into Korean, including Friedrich Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra, Max Picard’s The World of Silence, Paul Auster’s The Art of Hunger, and Erich Fromm’s The Art of Being. In 1994 she participated in the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa. She has received the Daesan Literary Award (2010) and Jirisan Literary Award (2010) and is now regarded as one of the most important poets in Korea.

(Source: The Paris Review)

Out of the cradle endlessly revising

There are poets who find their strength in brevity, who use as few words as possible, arranged in the minimum number of lines, to evoke sense perception, emotion, and idea. Walt Whitman, it goes without saying, is not one of those. He is most comfortable on a broader scale. His great poems—“Song of Myself,” “The Sleepers,” “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking,” and “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomed”—straddle hundreds of lines, providing the poet with room to catalogue particulars (The glories strung like beads on my smallest sights and hearings, he calls them), to stack up parallel statements, to address his reader, to depart from and return to his argument, and to construct a kind of poetic architecture designed to be mimetic of the process of thinking, and thus draw us more intimately near. This is why his shorter poems often feel like parts of a larger, more encompassing one; even satisfyingly complete shorter pieces such as “To You” and “This Compost” might be seen as outtakes, or gestures in the direction of some overarching intention.

One reason for this is perhaps the speed at which Whitman composed. He said he’d been simmering, before Emerson’s New York lecture of 1848, then Emerson’s passionate call for a distinctly American poet had set him to boil. Nonetheless, it was seven years before the first edition of Leaves of Grass appeared, containing twelve poems. Fired by the book’s publication, Whitman began to work faster; his second edition, only a year later, contained twenty new poems. One of them, “Sun-Down Poem,” later to be retitled “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” is one of the great poems written in English in its century or any other.

WALT WHITMAN IN 1891. PHOTO: SAMUEL MURRAY. PUBLIC DOMAIN, VIA WIKIMEDIA COMMONS.

The new look of the second edition is telling. The oversize production of the first, destined for the parlor, its intricately wrought title stamped in gold, gave way to a more streamlined look, perhaps because he was no longer bound to use the large paper his first printer had provided. But I suspect he had recalibrated his sense of audience in a way more suited to his mission; the green book was now sized to fit in a pocket of one of those work jackets Whitman liked to wear, meant to be carried everywhere, and read in the open air every season of every year of your life. Hefty, encyclopedic in its proportions, the book came more to resemble the new gospel that Whitman intended, a book that would convince us that the known universe has one complete lover and that is the greatest poet.

The third edition, of 1860, included 146 new poems—a nearly unbelievable number! Some sixty-eight of these were written between the appearance of the second edition, in 1856, and June 1857, when the poet was clearly in a kind of creative fever, one that essentially did not subside until the 456-page third collection was headed for the press. This third volume was produced by a commercial publisher, and is indeed more traditional in design. Dropping the models of coffee-table book and portable testament, it looks more like most mid-nineteenth-century books of poems, with small line drawings and ornamental flourishes around the poems’ titles. The frontispiece presents the poet in an engraving taken from an oil portrait, Walt Whitman with lush but not yet prophetic locks and a stylish cravat, more Romantic spirit than one of the roughs. Somewhere between two thousand and five thousand copies were printed, and the book was largely well reviewed, and fared better in the marketplace than the earlier editions.

I can’t help but wonder what would have happened if Whitman had abandoned his practice of expanding and rearranging his book. Why not write one collection, set it aside, and write another? This is one of the primary ways poets progress; looking at a book you’ve finished, you don’t want to pursue exactly that same path again. A new collection invites us to vary form and tone, try on a new stance, strike out in a new direction and thus view familiar territory from another vantage point. In truth, our obsessions, our ways of making meaning, even our signature vocabulary and syntax often stay remarkably close to where we began; if we’re lucky, we just get better at using them. But, as we move from book to book, serious attention to the matters at hand can help to widen the embrace of our work a bit, and just a bit can prove plenty. Suppose Whitman had decided to bring a thread that had been recessive in one book—the abject self-doubt he reveals in the chilling final section of “As I Ebb’d with the Ocean of Life,” for instance—and bring it more into the foreground in the next? What unexpected, potentially rich poems we might have had!

Or maybe not. I can see reasons why Whitman would have wanted to go on cultivating the singular field of “leaves” that comprised his book. In a way that is true of no other great poet, his poems were a tool to make something happen; the change he wished to effect, and sometimes believed he could, was more important to him than art. This is why he could later say he wished he’d been an orator instead, when he’d written at least two of the greatest poems in the language. Of course poets themselves don’t get to know if they have written anything that will last, but Whitman tells us, in no uncertain terms, that he will be read after his death, by men and women of a generation, or ever so many generations hence. I can confidently say that, had I written “Song of Myself” or “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” I would not be wishing I’d chosen another career.

It’s in the 1860 edition that the poet first begins to arrange his poems in clusters, making thematic clumps, breaking one off here and adding another there. He would go on remixing the order for the rest of his life.

This was largely a mistake. It results, at the worst, in sections of poems about the sea, or winter, and this kind of organization inevitably diminishes the work. “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking” takes place on a beach, but it is not “about” the sea, because great poems are not “about” in this way; they are profound reaches into that “furnace of meaning,” and they use whatever is at hand—the sea, a ferryboat ride, an unruly field of grass—to get to where they need to go. The “subject” matters until the furnace is lit, and then the poem almost seems to burn its ostensible occasion clean away.

It may be that Whitman arranged and fiddled because he came to understand, over time, that he was losing the capacity to create the magnificent, visionary odes that had launched his career. He would suffer from poverty, and from anxiety over his reception and reputation; as an outsider who both wanted and did not want to be on the inside, he was in a position of near-constant instability. He saw the boys he adored, the ones he hoped might base a newly energized democratic order on their affection for each other, tear one another apart on the battlefield instead, in a war of mind-bending brutality. He wandered from bed to bed for five years in makeshift hospitals, in appalling conditions, offering what comfort and witness he could, and destabilized his own health in the process. He suffered a massive stroke and required help for the rest of his life. How could I expect him to go on writing great poems when he’d already created ones that no one had known how to write in the first place, poems that sail right past what we thought a poem could do?

(Source: The Paris Review)

In a quiet corner, an old Afghan poet polishes ‘the heart’s mirror’

For more than 50 years, Haidari Wujodi’s desk in a Kabul library has been a stop for those seeking escape from the violence outside.

For more than 50 years now, a mystic poet has kept a quiet window desk at the Kabul Public Library. His seat overlooks the hustle and bustle of the Afghan capital city, all but unrecognizable from the day he arrived as a young library clerk — one with a dreamy mind and stammering speech, but fine calligraphic handwriting that helped land him his day job.

Haidari Wujodi’s library desk is a place of pilgrimage for musicians, poets and students, among others.Credit...Kiana Hayeri for The New York Times

As governments toppled around him, Afghanistan sank deeper into flames of war that still burn. But Haidari Wujodi, 80, maintained his daily routine, switching his shoes for comfortable sandals that he wears with socks as he arrives at his desk behind stacks of fraying periodicals. His flask of tea fills and empties.

Until his official retirement a few years ago, Mr. Wujodi was in charge of the periodicals section. But his life is so intertwined with the third floor corner of the library that the Afghan government continues to pay him a small stipend and Mr. Wujodi continues to show up every day, often the last to leave as the sound of evening prayer echoes in the dusk.

He no longer shelves magazines and newspapers; his assistants take care of that. Over the years, his desk has become an address for all kinds of visitors — musicians who need lyrics for a new composition, young poets who bring their latest publication for encouragement and feedback, university students who need references for a paper or a dissertation, and street vendors who just want some wise words to get them through troubled times.

Participants at a Rumi reading. Mr. Wujodi has hosted such readings twice a week for 30 years.Credit...Kiana Hayeri for The New York Times

The 80-year-old — tall, with broad shoulders and a long white beard — receives all of them the same, minister or beggar. He insists on walking each visitor to the door when they leave, despite their insistence that the ustad — “master” in Persian, as he is often called — not embarrass them by paying them such an honor.

“There’s a saying of the Prophet,” Mr. Wujodi told a young poet one recent morning as he was leaving, having dropped off several collections of his recently published work. “If your friends are visiting you, try to go out seven steps to receive them. And when they are leaving, go out with them at least seven steps.”

Mondays and Wednesdays have been special in Mr. Wujodi’s routine. Twice a week for 30 years now, he has hosted a two-hour reading of the works of the Mawlana Jalaluddin Balkhi — the 13th-century Persian poet, philosopher and Sufi mystic known in the West as Rumi. The lessons typically end up being less about poetry and more about spirituality and philosophy. He calls Rumi’s body of work “a factory of human making.”

About 15 men and women, members of a group called “The Society of Lovers of Mawlana,” arrive and quietly take their seats. Mr. Wujodi looks out of the window as the room fills with the warm afternoon sun and a peaceful silence. One of the members, a middle-aged man with a narrow beard and a beautiful melodic voice, sings several verses as the rest follow along in their copies of the book. Then, in a soft but shaky voice, his head trembling, Mr. Wujodi begins explaining the verses.

Mr. Wujodi no longer shelves magazines and newspapers. His younger assistants, like Sohaila Nazar, take care of that.Credit...Kiana Hayeri for The New York Times

On a recent Monday, lesson 415, on page 333 of one of Mawlana’s collections, focused on a conversation between a mystic and an interlocutor, with the mystic trying to explain to the man that the beauties in the outside world are simply reflections of what is inside.

The fruits and the gardens are inside the heart
What’s in this mud and water is the reflection of their grace.

Mr. Wujodi, spending an hour on these two lines, spoke of the heart as the physical “plasma on the left side of the chest,” and of the divine and spiritual capacity that he said could not be exactly defined. The way of reaching the divine is by focusing inward, he said.

“The heart is like a mirror,” Mr. Wujodi said. “If it is cleansed of the dust and fog, whichever way or object you aim it at the reflection of it would be reflected in the mirror.”

Two university students whose thesis project is on Mr. Wujodi’s life and poetry reading on the first floor of the library before a visit with him.Credit...Kiana Hayeri for The New York Times

Haidari Wujodi was born in 1939, in a small village in Panjshir Province in northern Afghanistan, one of five children of a cleric. In those days the Islam practiced in Afghanistan was deeply tied into Sufi traditions of poetry. His father kept about 200 books at home, many of poetry and handwritten. It was there that the young Haidari learned to read.

Mr. Wujodi has only a sixth-grade formal education. When he was completing his fifth-grade exams, he had a dream one night that he says sent him “tumbling between sanity and insanity.” Mr. Wujodi says he is unable to describe the state, but for several years he could not regain his balance. When he did, he was transformed.

At 15, Mr. Wujodi moved to Kabul, and found his way to the bookbinding shop of one of the most renowned mystic poets of the time, Sufi Ashqari. While he was just a teenager and Mr. Ashqari in his 60s, their relationship shaped his life. The teenager was admitted to the small group of poets who gathered at Mr. Ashqari’s shop in old Kabul, exchanging verses as Mr. Ashqari continued to bind books.

Years later, when Mr. Ashqari was 90 and on his deathbed, he entrusted his unfinished work — the last chapters barely legible, because his hand had started trembling — to Mr. Wujodi, who spent eight months working after hours at the public library to prepare it for publication.

As his own poetry drew attention, Mr. Wujodi made sure he stuck to his quiet corner at the library — a dream job that allowed him space for his poetic endeavors and an income to support his wife, a son who is now an artist and two daughters who are both teachers.

He repeatedly rejected offers of higher positions. In the early 1990s, when the Islamic government that followed the Soviet withdrawal insisted that Mr. Haidari lead an educational foundation, he agreed to a compromise: He would continue his day job at the library, and for one hour at the end of every day he would go to the foundation’s office.

Mr. Wujodi signed one of his books for a member of the Rumi poetry circle.Credit...Kiana Hayeri for The New York Times

Mr. Wujodi still does not own his own home, living in a house owned by his wife’s family. One time, in the waning days of the monarchy, he refused even to meet with a member of the royal family who wanted to set him up with his own place.

“I apologized,” Mr. Wujodi recalled. “I said ‘I know, my decision is beyond logic.’”

Every morning on his way to work, Mr. Wujodi would circle the park at the heart of the city. At 80 he is still fit — “these mystics eat very little,” one member of the society said — climbing the three stories to his desk without holding the railing. But in recent years, age has cut his walk in the park in half.

Most days, Mr. Wujodi’s desk feels like an oasis at the center of chaos. One Monday last November, a suicide bomber killed a traffic cop at the roundabout just outside. From a library window, the scene was framed in a picture that went viral. The officer’s body, separated from his white cap, was sprawled under a billboard that read: “The nation that doesn’t read books will have to experience the whole of history.”

The shrapnel from the explosion flew through Mr. Wujodi’s window, where he had just finished his afternoon prayer. Had he still been standing, he might have been killed.

“What is happening in our world — is this really humane?” Mr. Wujodi asked during a recent lesson, lamenting how far the world stands from the humanist teachings of mystics like Rumi. “We don’t need philosophy for this — even a kid knows that we haven’t reached that common sense worthy of humanity.”

“The world is still blacked out on the wine of the grape — all this human killing, all this destruction, this ruin” he added. “What is worthy of the dignity of a human, we haven’t reached that yet.”

(Source: NYT)

What poetry can predict

My first book, a poetry collection, was published in 1991. I wrote it when you were a baby. I wrote it as I nursed you, as I rocked you, as I got to know you, as you learned to crawl and walk. There’s a poem in the book in which I describe a dream I had when you were a year old. A dream about you. In this poem:

I woke
and the dream will not leave me
my son is about to drown
and I can’t save him
his brand-new self
soft as a bear’s snout
sinks in the clear water

Here was my anxiety over losing you. Here was the powerlessness—not being able to save you from death. An anxiety so overwhelming. The worst that could happen: that you’d vanish.

When you were sixteen years old, I wrote two poems about death:

When death takes something from you
give it back
give back what you got
from the dead one
when he was alive
when he was your heart
give it back to a rose,
a continent, a winter day,
a boy regarding you
from the darkness of his hood



When death takes something from you
give it back
give back what you got
from the dead one
when you stood in the rain in the snow
in the sun and he was alive
and turned his face toward you
as if wanting to ask something
you no longer remember and he
has also forgotten and it’s
an eternity
an eternity ago now

You are the one hiding in the hood’s darkness. I thought intensely about you as I wrote those two poems. I saw you before me as I wrote them. I didn’t know why, I didn’t ask myself why, the poems came to me as something from you, something I could not understand. All I understood was that I obviously had written two poems about death, and that you in a way gave me the images—or that something associated with your being got me to write them. The sun, the rain, the snow. Your face turning questioningly toward mine.

PHOTO: AMANDA HILL. CREDIT: THE NOAA WEATHER IN FOCUS PHOTO CONTEST 2015.

I read the two poems out loud at your funeral. I realized that as early as when you were a year old, I received a sign in my dream that you would vanish from me. As early as when you were sixteen years old, I saw you hiding in death’s dark hood. That I had already predicted the eternity that would replace your life, the eternity I now live with, and which you are absorbed by. Just as I dreamed that you fell and hurt yourself shortly before you fell to your death from the fifth floor.

But images and signs cannot be interpreted before they’re played out in concrete events. You understand them only in retrospect. That’s why omens can only be expressed. As language, as poetry. It becomes an experience that belongs to the future, which can express, though they are not yet experienced in reality. That’s what poetry does sometimes. And it’s one of its most beautiful qualities. It’s also what makes poetry dangerous and portentous. The feeling of knowing something that you can’t understand yet or connect to anything in reality. As if poetry makes it possible to move freely in time, as if linear time is suspended while you write and a corner of the future becomes visible in a brief and mystical moment.

But poems also say something about giving back what the dead gave us when they were alive. That the dead’s being in a way still needs a place in life, and we should pass on the love they gave us. Here lies the hope. A hope that what you gave me will grow in others, if I am able to share it. And that my love is strengthened and made more beautiful because now it contains your love. This must not be destroyed by sorrow. It says in the poem, “give it back.” As if giving goes back and forth all the time. From the living to the living. From the dead to the living. And from the living to the dead. A circular movement, not linear.

Even still, these poems fill me with rage and a violent hatred for the predictions they contain. It’s an impotent rage. A rage that reminds me of what I experienced as a child. Just as children do not understand the forces they’re up against (the adults and their incomprehensible actions and refusals), the bereaved do not understand death. But there’s nothing to do about it. You can rage as much as you want, nothing will ever come of it. The adults decide and death decides. You can’t escape the loss of love from the adults, from the dead. Hard and furious and despairing, children and the bereaved must struggle on through life, and hope that the love underlying the feeling of loss is larger than the loss itself, and that this love creates love and compassion.

A heart, a rose, a winter day. A boy who drowns in the clear water.

The world’s beauty and cruelty. Love’s power.

—Translated from the Danish by Denise Newman

(Source: The Paris Review)

Auden’s grumpy moon landing poem

Shortly after Apollo 11 put men on the moon and brought them safely back to earth, W. H. Auden, widely regarded as the greatest living English poet of the age, wrote a poem about it. It’s called “Moon Landing,” and from start to finish, it’s one long grumble.

Untouched by the sublime romance of the moon mission, Auden’s poem opens:

It’s natural the Boys should whoop it up for
so huge a phallic triumph, an adventure
it would not have occurred to women
to think worth while, made possible only

because we like huddling in gangs and knowing
the exact time

Auden’s prolific career is divided into Early Auden (his years in England) and Later Auden (his American years). “Moon Landing” falls in the latter category. But it works better as a funny, peevish, poignant example of an important subgroup: Grumpy Auden.

After making the lunar landing sound like American football—comically apt, given the balletic lightness of the astronauts’ bulky armor—he goes on to condemn the motives behind this “grand gesture” as “somewhat less than menschlich.” He complains about the pointlessness of it all, demanding, as we seem to still be wondering, fifty years later:

But what does it period?
What does it osse?

Moreover, he shrugs, it was bound to happen:

from the moment the first flint was flaked this landing was merely
a matter of time.

Yes, it’s a shrug, but what an eloquent shrug, one that evokes with breathtaking economy the epic arc of human progress from man’s first tryst with fire to his bouncing among lunar craters a quarter of a million miles away. In other stanzas, too, admiration surfaces through the cynicism. “Homer’s heroes were certainly no braver than our Trio,” he writes, acknowledging the mythical dimension of their quest—but mostly he’s determined to be aggrieved.

Worth going to see? I can well believe it.
Worth seeing? Mneh! I once rode through a desert
and was not charmed: give me a watered
lively garden, remote from blatherers

about the New, the von Brauns and their ilk, where
on August mornings I can count the morning
glories where to die has a meaning,
and no engine can shift my perspective.

Nothing in this poem is more petty, more comically wounding than that childish “Menh!” Untouched by the moon’s “lonely beauty”—to quote the otherwise unlyrical Neil Armstrong—Auden quotes instead his hero Dr. Johnson, who, when asked whether or not the Giant’s Causeway in Northern Ireland was worth seeing, responded: “Worth seeing, yes; but not worth going to see.” Auden perversely inverts the quote.

And yet it is striking that he compares, even if indirectly, the cratered moonscape to the Giant Causeway, another geological wonder comprising a vast volcanic expanse of thousands of interlocking hexagonal basalt columns. The invocation of that honeycombed wasteland, however backhanded, reminds us that even when he is being obstinately contrarian, Auden can illuminate a subject in ways few others can.

After dissing the whole enterprise and predicting that no good will come of it, Auden tells us that for him, his moon will remain her virginal self. Unsoiled by big fat boots and human hubris, she will continue to grace his Austrian cottage in the village of Kirchstetten. The poem ends:

Our apparatniks will continue making
the usual squalid mess called History:
all we can pray for is that artists,
chefs and saints may still appear to blithe it.

“Moon Landing” is not considered to be one of Auden’s better poems; it is set aside as trite and artificial. And yet it is one of my favorites because it is so quintessentially Auden, showcasing his literary tics and touchstones. From the fond nursery description of the “Old Man” in the moon, which harks back to his beloved English boyhood, to his pedantic use of an obscure dictionary word (osse); from the gleeful use of yiddish (menschlich) that he had no doubt picked up from his Jewish lover Chester Kallman, and the ritual nods to his heroes, Homer and Johnson; from his pointed mention of his hatred of fascism (“von Brauns and their ilk” refers to the Nazi aerospace engineer Wernher von Braun) and the loving, if prosy, ode to his cottage at Kirchstetten, “Moon Landing” reads like a potted biography of Auden’s life. It is a joy to watch Auden recite it from memory in this video, sitting serenely in a faded old suit, his large face as lined and remote as the moon.

The other reason I like this poem is that Auden’s peevishness comes as a surprise. Auden was scarcely antiscience. On the contrary, this son of a doctor grew up fascinated by mines, machinery, and microbes, often stating how grateful he was that he had grown up in a home where science and religion flourished in harmony. He grew up listening to his father tell him stories of Norse myths and the great Nordic explorers. He was inordinately proud of his Scandinavian heritage and deeply drawn to Iceland. One would think he would have been enthralled by the moon mission.

But he wasn’t. To him the act was hubristic, an irreverent invasion of his “Mother, Virgin, Muse,” as he addressed the moon in an earlier poem. In another poem, “This Lunar Beauty,” he hailed the moon as an entity that “Has no history.” Now it had a flag on it and had been exploited for television. Perhaps one can put his hostility down to his general mood at the time. In 1969, Auden was sixty-two years old, which is not old at all, but his reliance on Benzedrine had gone up, his drinking had become heavier, he had begun to feel terribly lonely, and had got into the habit of repeating his witticisms—among them, “The moon is a desert. I have seen deserts.” The grim new frontier Auden was contemplating was not the moon, but death. With Chester spending more and more time in Europe, Auden was afraid of the prospect of dying alone in his squalid New York apartment and lying undiscovered for days. In a poem he wrote at about this same time, he described himself as, “An American? No, a New Yorker who opens his Times at the obit page.”

Because perhaps that’s what the moon landing stirs in all of us: a reminder of how small we all are, and how mortal.

(Source: The Paris Review)

Object worlds and inner states

“Look! Look! If you look really hard at things, you’ll forget you’re going to die,” an American actor is supposed to have once said. In a writing class I occasionally teach, this injunction to just look—out of the window or down the street—is sometimes met with boredom, not a seasoned ennui necessarily, just impatience with what one presumably already knows. We are prone to treat the outer world as a source of information, new and old, when it is actually a font of emotion. We describe things not because they are there but because our life depends on it.

Take Raymond Carver’s story “The Cabin.” A man called Mr. Harrold drives to a lodge in winter for a couple of days of river fishing. His wife has recently left him and he is suffering her absence, but this we know only through the occasional flashback. Most of Mr. Harrold’s feelings are expressed subliminally, through the delineation of things—furniture and furnishings in a room, the interplay of clouds and hills on the horizon, what people wear and how they look. Mr. Harrold is intent on enjoying himself, but it’s somewhat hard going, and he tries to keep himself together through acts of exact naming and deliberate doing. He takes a pint of Scotch out from the glove compartment, spreads out his weights and hooks on a table, smokes a cigarette with his tackle box open.

Eventually his grip on this material universe collapses. “He shook his head. Then he went up the steps to his cabin. He stopped on the porch. He didn’t want to go inside. But he understood he had to open the door and enter the room. He didn’t know if he could do that.”

MUGHAL DYNASTY, JAHANGIR AND PRINCE KHURRAM ENTERTAINED BY NUR JAHAN, CA. 1645, OPAQUE WATERCOLOR, INK AND GOLD ON PAPER. VIA WIKIMEDIA COMMONS.

Carver once said that “a writer sometimes needs to be able to just stand and gape at this or that thing—a sunset or an old shoe—in absolute and simple amazement.” Everything is grasped with a fine precision in his stories—the ordinary but distinctive texture of the world. Often it is as if things have a life that people draw from, rather than they endowing things with meaning. “Ideally, perhaps, the animate and the inanimate should swap places,” said Joseph Brodsky. Michael Hofmann, who quoted that remark in an essay on the poet, pointed out that this is exactly what happens in Brodsky’s poems. “The person, the poet, is atomized, centrifuged, dispersed, while his inanimate surroundings are spun into an increasingly concrete aura, a genie, that comes to stand in for him.”

This holding fast to the concrete world can be a way of anchoring oneself in the aftermath of tragedy—the departure of a wife in Mr. Harrold’s case, exile from Russia in Brodsky’s, which he describes rather as “tragicomedy.” His fellow exile Vladimir Nabokov clearly saw the tragicomedy of exile, too. In, say, the painful novelty of the everyday American products that arrest Humbert Humbert on one of his cross-country runs with Lolita (“Not for the first time, and not for the last, had I stared in such dull discomfort of mind at those stationary trivialities that look almost surprised, like staring rustics, to find themselves in the stranded traveller’s field of vision: that green garbage can, those very black, very whitewalled tires for sale, those bright cans of motor oil … ”).

The tragicomedy of Nabokov’s most tragicomic hero, the also exiled Timofey Pnin, is heightened by his comic flailing, his inability to get a hold on America. All sorts of everyday objects—from train timetables to washing machines—trip up this out-of-place Russian professor, but what endears him to us is his passionate ardor for these very things, his besotted attentiveness to them. His son gifts him an antique glass bowl that reflects “with such emblematic force the sweet nature of the donor that the tangible attributes of the thing are dissolved, as it were, in this pure inner blaze.” The object is transfigured through love. At the end of the novel, when Pnin is washing the bowl after a party at which he has received some bad news, he drops a nutcracker into it. The “excruciating crack” he hears sounds to us very much like the breaking of his heart.

While Nabokov and Carver’s characters seem as committed as their authors to the hard-edged glow of the uniquely common, in the fiction of R. K. Narayan, the Indian writer widely celebrated for his evocation of ordinary life, things are described clearly by the author but are not always seen for what they are by his characters. In the story “The Astrologer,” a seller of fried groundnuts “gives his ware a fancy name each day, calling it Bombay Ice-Cream one day, and on the next Delhi Almond, and on the third Raja’s Delicacy.” No one objects to these misnomers. The astrologer himself has eyes with an abnormal gleam that is really an expression of canniness but that customers mistake for sagacity, and the story is about a life-saving sleight of hand. In “The Doctor’s Word,” a brutally honest doctor is compelled to try a white lie to save a friend. Misunderstandings, trickery, surprises, exaggerations, the unseen hand of destiny—this is the stuff of Narayan’s stories, together with a persistent otherworldliness, seen in the famous singer in one story who travels the world giving concerts but is “habitually oblivious of her surroundings … She seemed to exist without noticing anything or anyone, rapt in some secret melody or thought of her own.”

The poet Arun Kolatkar once said, “There are a lot of mythical birds and beasts in Indian poetry but not ordinary things. Sparrows and crows have rarely appeared.” The writer able to most effectively combine the ordinary and the mythical was the poet, linguist, and translator A. K. Ramanujan. Yet again, it was the condition of displacement that created this possibility of seeing afresh, of noticing on a Chicago street what was first experienced in a South Indian home, but in Ramanujan’s vision things are animate in a different way: they become imbued with metaphorical meaning. Every poem of his could be read as an act of transmutation, and what is transmuted most often is the human body. The body is the locus and the body is returned to its formative elements; the body is pushing against its limits while the imagination tries to supply what the bodily senses cannot apprehend.

There is a thin line between concrete things and abstract ideas in these poems. In one, the poet thinks himself into a walnut tree that both goes into making a writing desk and is pulped for paper. He sees himself at that desk, writing on that paper, “a firm imagined body / working with the transience / of breathless / real bodies.” Ramanujan’s poems constantly “strain against the present tense,” as he remarks in another poem, while Carver’s stories are tributes to that very tense.

*

All this could suggest an easy dichotomy between the Western outlook—particular, present, individuated—and the Eastern—metaphysical, relative, fluid. The dichotomy is easily undone however by looking to Indian history. The Mughals, for instance, were acute observers and painstaking documenters of everything—their own lifestyles, the smallest details of the natural world, the complexities of kingship, the spoils of war. They were intent not just on identifying things but also on exercising the imperial right to label them. “As Adam named the birds and beasts of the Garden of Eden, so Akbar, supreme lord of his lands, rechristened a particular variety of Kabul cherry ‘shah-alu,’ king-cherry, or gave the pashmina shawl the nicely alliterative name parm-narm, most-soft,” writes Parvati Sharma in Jahangir, her recent biography of Akbar’s son. This fourth Mughal, perhaps the greatest aesthete of the line, had a “visceral appreciation of beauty” and “excelled in describing the strange.”

Of course the Mughals were exiles, too, in a manner of speaking. Babur, the first of them, who was born in Central Asia, famously lamented in his autobiography how Indians “have no good horses, no good flesh, no grapes or musk-melons, no good fruits, no ice or cold water, no good food or bread in their bazars, no baths or colleges, no candles, no torches, not a candlestick.” A couple of hundred years down the line, Jahangir, though completely at home in India and half-Rajput, is nevertheless still looking at it with the eyes of a discerning visitor, zestfully describing the habits of the natives and, unlike his great-grandfather, comparing favorably the fruits of India with those of Kabul. Thus the formerly native slowly becomes foreign and the foreign is made native; the Persian word vilayat once meant the land of one’s ancestors but over time came to mean “abroad.”

If exile produces one ideal condition for observing and naming, power produces another, and these two came together in the case of the Mughals. In Jahangir’s time, for instance, and that of his father, Akbar—the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries—the country they ruled was one of the richest in the world; the catalogue of these riches—cloths, spices, minerals, fruit, grains, livestock—needed a comparable richness of vocabulary to describe, as they often were by awestruck visitors, notably those historic emissaries from Europe. Soon all these many things would become the envy of the Occident and thereby impetus for colonization. The relationship between covetousness for things and their depiction in art has been described admirably by John Berger. In his classic relook at Western art, Ways of Seeing, he shows us how European oil painting from the sixteenth to the twentieth century, commissioned by rich patrons, came to embody the aesthetic for re-creating material objects and reinforcing aristocratic ownership of them. The dominant styles of oil painting “conveyed a vision of total exteriority.” This possessive stance toward the world was at the heart of the colonial enterprise, he argues.

What Kolatkar describes as lack of everyday detail in Indian poetry could be read as a comfortable taking for granted of things, a doing away with the need to describe what one has an obvious claim on. In the colonial era, Indian writers seem to lose that sure hold on experience, perhaps because of our reading about one set of things in English literature, inside the classroom, and experiencing another outside. The most weather-beaten example is Wordsworth’s daffodils. Every second postcolonial writer, from V. S. Naipaul down, has found reason to complain about those daffodils of the school textbook—definitely not ours and yet ours already. For a later generation, the exotic teas devoured by children in Enid Blyton’s adventure stories—scones with clotted cream and tongue sandwiches, gallons of ginger beer and lashings of lemonade—came to stand in for this embarrassment. We liked stuff vicariously and often grew up to dislike ourselves for that reason. But what is missed by this now all-too-familiar critique is the fact that we are responding not merely to things but the words in which they have been incarnated. What excites the imagination is the description; what alienates—but thereby also inspires—is the feeling of not ourselves having a language compelling enough to bring things to life. The response, when it comes, is a literary one, and a literary response can never be wholly antagonistic to its impetus.

But whether writing out of a need to dispense with those daffodils and recover what is close at hand, or writing out of an assumed ownership of the world, the mere ambition to get things down, to conquer them with human names and fix them in human images, can become, if taken too seriously, a hubris, as Berger points out. Even writers must stop playing god at some point—the deity that Flaubert, master of noticing, famously gave license to all writers to emulate when he said they “must be like God in the universe, present everywhere and visible nowhere.” Carver seemed to know that. A poem called “The Blue Stones,” addressed to Flaubert, has an epigraph from the French writer: “If I call stones blue it is because blue is the precise word, believe me.” The poem itself however seems to gesture at something else—the inner life of things, perhaps unreachable by the words a writer dreams up for them. Those stones on the beach look blue in the moon’s light. And “Next morning when you pull them / from your trouser pocket, they are still blue.”

(Source: The Paris Review)

Notes nearing ninety: Learning to write less

Donald Hall, who died in June this year at the age of eighty-nine, was a prolific poet, essayist, and editor whose work has had an enormous impact on American letters. He was The Paris Review’s first poetry editor, and he served as the U.S. poet laureate. Before his death, he compiled one final book of essays, A Carnival of Losses: Notes Nearing Ninety, an excerpt from which is below:

When I was sixteen, I read ten books a week: E. E. Cummings, William Faulkner, Henry James, Hart Crane, John Steinbeck. I thought I progressed in literature by reading faster and faster—but reading more is reading less. I learned to slow down. Thirty years later, in New Hampshire with Jane, I made a living by freelance writing all day, so I read books only at night. Jane went to sleep quickly and didn’t mind the light on my side of the bed. I read The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and six huge volumes of Henry Adams’s letters. I read the late novels of Henry James over and over again. After Jane died, I kept reading books, at first only murderous or violent writers like Cormac McCarthy. Today I am forty years older than Jane ever got to be, and I realize I haven’t finished reading a book in a year.

DONALD HALL, 1977

An athlete goes professional at twenty. At thirty, he is slower but more canny. At forty, he leaves behind the identity that he was born to and that sustained him. He diminishes into fifty, sixty, seventy. Anyone ambitious who lives to be old or even old endures the inevitable loss of ambition’s fulfillment. In a Hollywood retirement home to meet a friend, I watched a handsome old woman in a wheelchair, unrecognizable, leap up in ecstasy when I walked toward her. “An interview!” she said. “An interview!” A writer usually works until late in life. When I was eighty, still doing frequent poetry readings, audiences stood and clapped when I concluded, and kept on clapping until I shushed them. Of course I stayed to sign book after book and returned to my hotel understanding that they applauded so much because they would never see me again.

Suppose I am the hundred-fifty-year-old maple outside my porch. When winter budges toward spring, I push out tiny leaves, which gradually curl yellowish green, then enlarge, turning darker green and flourishing through summer. In September, flecks of orange seep into green, and October turns the leaves gorgeously orange and red. Leaves fall, emptying the branches, and in December, only a few remain. In January, the last survivors flutter down onto snow. These black leaves are the words I write.

Back then, I wrote all day, getting up at five. By this time, I rise scratchy at six or twitch in bed until seven. I drink coffee before I pick up a pen. I look through the newspaper. I try to write all morning, but exhaustion shuts me down by ten o’clock. I dictate a letter. I nap. I rise to a lunch of crackers and peanut butter, followed by further exhaustion. At night I watch baseball on television, and between innings run through the New York Times Book Review. I roll over all night. Breakfast. Coffee.

When Jane was alive, our dog Gus needed walking every day. Jane walked him when she woke, feeling sleepy before breakfast. When they left, I lifted my hand from the page, waving goodbye. Midday, we had lunch and a nap, and then I walked Gus. In my car, I drove him up New Canada, the dirt road near our house, and parked where the single lane widened. We walked the flat earth, not for long because I wanted to get back to the manuscript again. Now when someone brings a dog to the house, I barricade myself in a big chair. An attentive dog would break my hip.

Louise is my cat. Ten years ago, her vigorous sister Thelma squirmed out of the house and discovered Route 4. My assistant Kendel dug a hole, and we set a half-barrel over the grave to impede hungry animals from enjoying a Thelma snack. Louise is passive, too shy to scoot through an open door. At night, when I watch MSNBC, she annoys me by rubbing my knee, but she never knocks me over.

Striving to pay the mortgage in the late seventies and eighties, some years I published four books. Now it takes me a month to finish seven hundred words. Here they are.

p.s.: Donald Hall (1928–2018) served as the U.S. poet laureate from 2006 to 2007. He was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a recipient of the National Medal of the Arts.
“Seven Hundred Words” excerpted from A Carnival of Losses: Notes Nearing Ninety, by Donald Hall. Copyright © 2018 by Donald Hall. 

(Source: The Paris Review)

Radical biography of Akka Mahadevi takes her out of the traditional Bhakti narrative

Mukunda Rao’s ‘Sky-Clad’ daringly revisits the life of the spiritual icon in the context of feminism as well as Hinduism in today’s political climate.

“We never perceive the body, or any object for that matter, as it is, but through various filters and channels shaped and managed by culture. That is to say, the body is not a natural object, rather it is a social construct, a cultural representation, shaped through language and various media. We perceive the world, ourselves, our body, too, through language, and in terms of our own background, our culture.”

Mukunda Rao’s Sky-Clad presents a highly critical reading of the body through the figure of a spiritual icon of Indian, specifically Hindu, history – Akka Mahadevi. Rao challenges assumptions of phallogocentrism (a way of thinking that idolises the masculine when constructing meaning) that we take for granted by depicting Mahadevi as a figure straddling borders and challenging binaries in her very existence.

For Rao, the female body is not one that is sexualised (hard as that may be to imagine today) and seen as existing only within the patriarchal narrative. Instead, it is one that ruptures the narrative built around it and advocates for a restructuring of ideology.

So, Rao takes Mahadevi out of the bhakti narrative in which she is usually placed by depicting how such narratives are often patriarchal constructs. Instead, he locates her in a transcendental philosophy of the body and the mind.

Mahadevi’s journey from a daughter, through wife of Kaushika, to wife of Chennamallikarjuna, is mirrored metaphorically in her physical journey from the luxury of her father’s kingdom to the image of her walking naked, “breast to breast with the cosmos,” to the oneness that is finally presented to us through her tapas and hence her attainment of aikya (oneness with Chennamallikarjuna). She moves from a life within the binaries that imprison the bod, to one where the body has broken the binary mind. Her singular goal through her journey remains constant – “the attainment of a state of being where division has ended”

The image of the binary mind
“Like a snake that sheds its old skin, Mahadevi discarded her needless modesty and cumbersome sari.”

The division of gender, for Mahadevi – and, hence, for Rao – becomes a pressing concern as it seems to hark back to the division between the mind and the body, the divide between atman and brahman. “The body is seen as an enemy, a dangerous animal that needs to be controlled and disciplined.” The female body, specifically, becomes the space where this violence is imposed on it in attempting to curtail it (sound familiar?).

The body becomes a signifier for the female, while the mind becomes the realm of the male – that which governs all and is to be aspired towards. In discarding her clothes and moving “breast to breast with the cosmos,” Mahadevi breaks this division and advocates for a wholeness that has long been lost. She embraces her own body and celebrates her sexuality by shedding her garments, and refuses to allow it to be a hurdle in her quest to attain a union with her beloved.

Her refusal to cover herself and adopt modesty as a strategy represents a blatant overthrow of the structure that seeks to control her. She brings female sexuality to the limelight, and uses it in her quest rather than circumventing it in order to achieve her goal.

The world of poetry
I have Maya for mother-in-law
and world for father-in-law;
three brothers-in-law, like tigers;
and the husband’s thoughts are full of laughing women;
no god, this man.
And I cannot cross the sister-in-law.
But I will…

This vachana depicts a humorous representation of transcendental images in terms of the members of the husband’s family. One can almost picture the poor bride trembling at the centre with tigers crouching around her, ready to pounce. Marriage and its various henchmen act as representations of the binary mind that she needs to free herself from.

While Mahadevi does this literally by leaving Kaushika and her paternal house, she also does it through her vachanas. The poetry that this reading of her life points to possesses the extraordinary ability to convey the restrictions imposed upon us not only through the binary mind but also through language itself. The vachanas use powerful metaphors that refuse to be held captive by language, and signify a multiplicity and a oneness that seek to explode out of the web of meaning imposed on it.

Your Vedas are mere words,
Your shastras and puranas a gossip,
Your bhakti so much noise…
~
If there is no desire,
there is no imagination;
if there is no imagination,
there is no thinking;
if there is no thinking;
there is no Guheshvara,
there is no truth,
no void, either.

They signify a greater, transcendental truth of oneness that has come to be overshadowed, and thus depict the need to once more reach this state of being.

Mahadevi’s religion
In a world where strict caste rules and codes of conduct govern society, Mahadevi represents a break and a movement away from these structures. However, her use of religion itself in aiding her in this movement away from these restrictive systems becomes key to her portrayal as a figure of subversion. She refuses the role of an earthly wife by claiming the position of a heavenly one – that of Chennamallikarjuna’s. She uses her staunch religious sentiments as a means to refuse the “duties” of a daughter and of a wife that women were held to.

Further, her claim to these very religious sentiments in explaining her nakedness embodies her role in overthrowing the system by operating within it: “Prabhu, there is nothing I can call my own. Absolutely nothing, not even this body. Everything is his. And when everything is his, what is there to hide?”

Akka Mahadevi: a feminist figure?
Operating within the discourse of early traditions, Mahadevi’s tale depicts hilarious caution in its addressing of the narratives. She faces an agnipariksha when she is forced to withstand a trial in the presence of Allama Prabhu – a male devotee – and answer his questions. Rao has criticised the need for the classic agnipariksha where a male figure is required to grant his blessing and allow the passage of the female; however, her role as a feminist figure emerges when she uses the language of the male oppressor – in this case, religion – to support her actions. She subverts the system using the system, and hence earns her place as an early feminist icon by not seeking to reverse the binaries, but by breaking the binaries themselves.

(Source: Scroll)