There is turquoise blue curtain fluttering from circulation of air by fan and it is September in my damn hot room. Due to threat from Aedes and Anopheles we have had to empty cooler. I slept wondering what is better: to be bitten by mosquitoes or getting no sleep in a miserable hot night of September? Very soon there is going to be one of those days, where, as soon as we get out of the room and feel the wind on our face, it will be a draught. We would balk at weather and its timing. We will smile at our friends coming out of their rooms, who will feel the same sudden nature of change in weather, look at us and shudder, sighing, finally saying, ‘It’s so cold all of a sudden!’.
I have shifted to a cooler floor as I am thinking about poems from Preeti Vangani’s, Mother Tongue Apologise. From sweltering heat to the cold of autumn, bodies marvel at a leaf lifting away from trees much before we see sidewalks covered with brown, crunching, old veins under our foot. Our bodies tend to figure out something that is going to arrive much before we actually see the change. That is my take away from the book.
In writing
these poems, Vangani marks an overwhelming and dominant
context--treatment of women, and moves it into another one. Her work
can, in fact, be seen as an attempt to write several concentric presences of
the female experience from a distinctively personal perspective. The subject of Mother Tongue Apologise is made by little nameless
acts of violence, memory and love.
Divided into two sections – Mother Toungue and Apologise – is headed by
a poem, “Unremember”, seeking to bring the ‘wasness’ of this loss of lover—Mother—to this body, by cajoling the 206 bones in one’s body to answer:
What do
volumes of elegies contain that I don’t?
Their
own inabilities to say the unsaid to the one who will
unsee
unhear untouch unmove un-understand, understand
I am
trying to backpack through the geography of a future
without
you, my compass, and no one has written a Lonely
Planet
Guide titled 100 Getaways Without Mother, or
let’s
produce a reality TV show for contestants to adventure
through
losses on a shoestring budget: Today you are
not
allowed to take the deceased’s name. Today you are
not to
remember the way she smiled when she said yours.
You
cannot hold faith as a torch light over reality’s head.
You will
be disqualified if you re-enter the symmetry
of this
world with longing as your wild card. For your last
challenge,
you must dump the vanishing remains into a glass
exhibit
and create an event of everything that is, label it was.
The 49 poems are brilliant pepper sprays, coming from a personal world,
speaking with honesty and grace about loss, regret, disdain and violence of life.
Her grief becomes my grief, her anger will become your anger. These poems, as
stated in her Introduction, are for her mother, and I am glad to write just
that. They will not become more than that in this review. I will show you why—because
Mothers are everything.
With “Every
Twenty Minutes”, “Autoposy Reports”, “Crime Scene Picture”, her poems represent
more than a singular landscape for a writer. A landscape that is in invitation
in how our body reads a poem as much as a poem becomes a vessel brimming with our
feelings.
And her aim
in mapping that landscape has been twofold. On the one hand, she has attempted
a specifically personal history: giving voice to a collective grief, pointing
to the culpability for it, of our society’s failure to apportion human rights
equally, as seen in “Dalit Sisters Gang-Raped, Hanged from Mango Tree” while
simultaneously celebrating her grief’s failure with “…what can one hold on to
when one has lost half of all their blood” in “House Red”.
On the
other, she maps out an achievement—a desire for exploration from the readjusted
perspective, the angle of women’s experience. Driving questions about violence
not just with words with but also usage of //\\ & >> along
with footnotes. Her poems see a lot. How can the reader not?!
For long, I
have been trying to understand some of the words like 'urgent', 'immediate', 'memory', 'every day'. Kausar Munir in one of her videos responds to Bollywood’s iconic
“Mai aur Meri tanhayi aksar ye baatein kartin hai” with “Sunn Ae Tanhai, tu
apne aap se koi nai baatein kiya kar. Javed Saab ki udhhari nahi, Apni kamai
kiya kar…”
Inspiration
isn’t just about repeating pop culture to create a sense of time. It is
also in reflection of our personal life. Bollywood may be a marker of latest
love songs but it doesn’t practise love in her poems. In fact, it becomes
impersonal – in spite of its intimate tones.
In “Saat
Samundar Paar Main Tere Peeche Peeche Aa Gayi” the speaker is ignored by her
cousins who are choreographing for the song. When she reminds us of Divya
Bharti, the reader begins to see how voice of a woman drowns in that ocean
which she is in fact trying to cross.
“Voiceover”
mentions “this poem: part ruin part construction site, rumble on the
other/side; I, my mouth open, encrypting the absent voice into a voice.”
These poems
are a very good exercise in making readers work with the poet in understanding
what they want out of these poems. For me, it demanded an immediate action. In
“Ma Sang Ghazals as She Oiled My Hair” there is an imminence when the speaker
could actually see what she has been trying to avoid by perhaps her jokes or
Jagjit Singh’s ghazal, as ‘hair’ brings us to the root of her loss—mother:
I
want to lean on you like the curl resting on your shoulder,
your
absence is a dark number equal to strands found in this hair.
“Chikoo,”
you’d warn “don’t laugh at my off-key singing
…you’ll
remember it abound once I’m out of your hair”.
With vivid descriptions, well thought out images, and a form which makes it collective as well as personal, at a time when violence is a new statistic every day, these poems even makes the puddles of Bombay revise with its own memory of mothers. They ask relevant questions – How is our identity rooted in loss, what does pop culture look like in our poems, ‘what about love’, how is life going to be? They ask these questions not just about loss of a loved one, but also while losing them every single day.
My body is a collage made with all my little toes, swollen
and
rough like ginger. I come from my mother’s mother:
last
seen falling off the edge of our balcony, or did she jump?
How
everything changes when a door is gone
“What of Love? No, What of It Really?” will question a memory of crisis—the way our parents’ relationships have shaped our projections on love. Philip Larkin will even come and hold your mind there.
I
learn up the words to the latest love song
This
is what I know of love, mostly
But
“Waterlogging” shows intimacy in spite of impersonal objects like hospital
reports, statistic and one abandoned shoe. Love is a shoe maybe.
Inside,
a water cooler sweating itself in the waiting
room,
the slow drip of glucose reaching mother’s veins, my hand
turning
another blotted page, as Kundera says, love is the longing
for
the half of ourselves we have lost. One abandoned shoe
floating
in the slight rainbows of puddles.
news
anchor lady asking the weatherman
for a
statistic on the level of water harvested thus far.
There is so
much still that I have not covered in this review like the theme of feminist struggle or “Visiting
Hours” being title of four poems or for that matter prose poems. This is
because while reading these poems, I was reading another book called The
Years by Annie Ernaux, a memoir that converses with time of 1940–1906 in France.
She rescued time from time by capturing it in her memoir.
In this sense, Vangani through her poems in Mother Tongue Apologise has rescued a grief from historical anonymity. They are also trying to rescue someone from assimilation of grief and separation of grief. These are difficult things, and poetry in all its difficult terrains allows such experience to be laid bare. It pivots around the central contradiction in our lives: living with impossible memories.
There is a need to remember and tell and the desire to forget; there are memories in these poems with an inexhaustible, genuine urgency to erupt and overwhelm the mind that must somehow be commemorated yet acted upon, if ‘girls dancing fearless in night’ is to be realised.