UNQUIET WATERS
Poems. With Ketaki Kushari Dyson’s In That Sense You Touched It, (New Delhi, Sahitya Akademi, 2012, c2005)
“The Later Poetry of Lakshmi Kannan: Remaking Woman’s Language” By C T Indra
The more recent poems of Lakshmi have gained a sharper edge to the feminist, while remaking the language. There is an impish delight in the woman who eludes science in the brilliant poem “An Autopsy”. The language is that of neutral scientific study, a post-mortem being performed on a woman. But the body on the table enjoys the bafflement of the surgeons who could find everything about her
‘identifiable, teachable,
in short under control.
That is, everything except her brains’.
Lakshmi Kannan
There is a teasing delight in these lines which stems from defeating man’s cocksureness about his knowledge of women. But here the men are confronted by some occult presence. We all know that for centuries, woman was not credited with brains. The male world even tried to prove scientifically, using craniology that woman’s brain is less endowed. (Remember Virginia Woolf’s sarcastic comment on Bertrand Russell’s opinion on woman’s brains as discussed by craniologists?) The poet says the brains surprised the surgeons, for instead of a brain, they found a ‘honeycomb’. One can see how neutral scientific terminology is supplanted by a new visualisation. The surgeons are baffled to see ‘tiny hexagonal boxes’ storing ‘viscous honey’ which they could scoop with their ‘gloved, probing fingers.’ “An Autopsy” is thus a brilliant metaphysical poem.
The poem “Tinctures” castigates patriarchy. The poem uses the traditional poetical technique of refrain and its variation. What a stark change from the rather plangent, pliant use of it in Epithalamion to suit a male celebration of female chastity in his bride! In Lakshmi’s poem, pigment or colour is the dominant metaphor, as in the title “Tinctures”. Blood is biologically red. But its valuation in patriarchal society changes, which is what the variations in the refrain in the first three stanzas depict.
Blood, stanza one depicts, had never looked so right and so blue. Here, ‘blue’ suggests pedigree, purity, because it proves her virginity as a bride. The imagery in this stanza certainly recall to me Spenser’s cloying way of describing female purity – ‘vernal air’, ‘vestal freshness’. In Lakshmi’s poem, the world watches her bodily reaction and she obediently lets the blood “sparkling like claret” prove her bloodline “by the wine of her blood.’ The paradox is brilliantly employed in the affirmation that her blood ‘on the white/left a crimson stain of purity.’ Stain here is a testimony to her virginity.
Stanza two rebukes blood as something that had ‘never looked so wrong and red. The context is women’s menstruation in Hindu society when rituals become a taboo. She is ‘ineligible for prayers and ceremonies.’ The natural process is required and precludes her from being sacralised.
Stanza three avows, ‘Blood had never looked so honest and red.’ The birth of a male infant wins approval, although it is her ‘fluids’ which are in his arteries.
“The Later Poetry of Lakshmi Kannan: Remaking Woman’s Language”. Journal of Literature & Aesthetics, Jan-Dec, 2010.
“The Later Poetry of Lakshmi Kannan: Remaking Woman’s Language” By C T Indra
The more recent poems of Lakshmi have gained a sharper edge to the feminist, while remaking the language. There is an impish delight in the woman who eludes science in the brilliant poem “An Autopsy”. The language is that of neutral scientific study, a post-mortem being performed on a woman. But the body on the table enjoys the bafflement of the surgeons who could find everything about her
‘identifiable,teachable,
in short under control.
That is, everything except her brains’.
There is a teasing delight in these lines which stems from defeating man’s cocksureness about his knowledge of women. But here the men are confronted by some occult presence. We all know that for centuries, woman was not credited with brains. The male world even tried to prove scientifically, using craniology that woman’s brain is less endowed. (Remember Virginia Woolf’s sarcastic comment on Bertrand Russell’s opinion on woman’s brains as discussed by craniologists?) The poet says the brains surprised the surgeons, for instead of a brain, they found a ‘honeycomb’. One can see how neutral scientific terminology is supplanted by a new visualisation. A honeycomb is a piece of creative shaping, an organic structure meant for storing an organic product – the honey. The surgeons are baffled to see ‘tiny hexagonal boxes’ storing ‘viscous honey’ which they could scoop with their ‘gloved, probing fingers.’ “An Autopsy” is thus a brilliant metaphysical poem.
What is it that disarms the certitude of the surgeons? The last stanza explains with sheer delight. There is even a cleverness in the imagery reminding us of the ‘metaphysical wit’ which produced conceits in male poetry. Lakshmi says the dead woman had ‘stashed away her private moments’. They are precious as honey; they have brought meaning to her existence in an ‘otherwise clumsy life.’ There is a strange aesthetics of self-creation. Does it suggest a far-sightedness which prompted her to keep some precious things for herself and not give away everything to others? (Remember Virginia Woolf’s lament in A Room of One’s Own on how whatever a woman makes, is taken away and she is made an ‘Angel in the House’?)
Here, the dead body of a woman acquires a mysterious existence, for her brains contain some precious stuff, not ‘grey cells’. And she has sheltered them from the ‘dour, censoring’ eyes of the world. There is no lament but a delectable sleight of hand in cheating man’s scientific endeavour to master all knowledge and classify data.
What suggests liberation is the phrase ‘a wild-grown honeycomb’ that can’t be domesticated or handled. Hence the last line says, ‘the honeycomb glistened defiantly under their questioning eyes.’
The poem “Tinctures” castigates patriarchy. The poem uses the traditional poetical technique of refrain and its variation. What a stark change from the rather plangent, pliant use of it in Epithalamion to suit a male celebration of female chastity in his bride!
In Lakshmi’s poem, pigment or colour is the dominant metaphor, as in the title “Tinctures”. Blood is biologically red. But its valuation in patriarchal society changes, which is what the variations in the refrain in the first three stanzas depict.
Blood, stanza one depicts, had never looked so right and so blue. Here, ‘blue’ suggest pedigree, purity, because it proves her virginity as a bride. The imagery in this stanza certainly recall to me Spenser’s cloying way of describing female purity – ‘vernal air’, ‘vestal freshness’. In Lakshmi’s poem, the world watches her bodily reaction and she obediently lets the blood “sparkling like claret” prove her bloodline “by the wine of her blood.’ The paradox is brilliantly employed in the affirmation that her blood ‘on the white/left a crimson stain of purity.’ Stain here is a testimony to her virginity.
Stanza two rebukes blood as something that had ‘never looked so wrong and red. The context is women’s menstruation in Hindu society when rituals become a taboo. She is ‘ineligible for prayers and ceremonies.’ The natural process is required and precludes her from being sacralised.
Stanza three avows, ‘Blood had never looked so honest and red.’ The iterative use of the word ‘blood’ ushers in another modification in the refrain. The mother ‘fattening the foetus’ by her vital blood, wins the approval of the society. The birth of a male infant wins approval, although it is her ‘fluids’ which are in his arteries.
Stanza four has no refrain, though the word ‘blood’ recurs in different phrasings: ‘blood-letting’ like in ‘weathering values in blood-letting.’ But her existence is caught in the phrase ‘the haemophilia of living,’ the good flowing with the bad.
“The Later Poetry of Lakshmi Kannan: Remaking Woman’s Language”. Journal of Literature & Aesthetics, Jan-Dec, 2010.
Review of Unquiet Waters By Shanta Acharya
As a writer, Lakshmi Kannan has held many positions: Writer in Residence at the University of Kent at Canterbury, U.K.; International Writing Program at Iowa, USA; Fellow of the Indian Institute of Advances Study, Shimla; Convenor of the Bhasha Committee, K.K. Birla Foundation and others.
Lakshmi’s new poems, in the words of the editor, are about ‘mortality, family relationships and their networks, rivers and river myths.’ One cannot miss the feminist edge in these poems, nor the symbolism of water as the title suggests. She sets the scene by quoting lines from both Agni Purana and the Old Testament.
‘He (Lord Swayambhu Brahma, the self-born) created waters first, and the waters are referred to as narah because they are the creation of the supreme spirit.’
Similarly, ‘the spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. (Genesis 1:2)
“Unquiet Waters”, also the title of the collection, offers a reality that is altogether more human, female and complex.
I take the shape of the receptacle that holds me
I take the contours of the earthen pitcher
tall, squat or lean
I take the form of the bottle
or the glass on the table
I even take on the colours of the utensils in which I dwell.
Women, like the water in the pitcher, are trapped by society or family, and lead unfulfilled, unhappy and unquiet lives. Hence the poem is in the voice of the water that must speak;
If you can but break the pitcher, just once
and set me free
I would flow into the stream, gurgling
I’ll catch the sun in a jewelled glitter.
The fifty poems in this collection cover a wide range of themes. “Don’t Wash” is a moving account of the struggle of Rasha Sundari Debi, the first woman to write her autobiography in Bangla. She lived in an era when literacy was denied to women. To educate herself, she tore a page of Chaitanya Bhagavata when her husband left a copy of the book briefly in the kitchen. She stole a palm leaf from her son for writing. The effect of such traditions on the life of women is exploited to great effect in “An Autopsy”.
Confluence: South Asian Perspectives, 2005
Review of Unquiet Waters By Shanta Acharya
Lakshmi conveys her ideas through startling images. In “Family Tree”, she describes how women
water their family tree everyday
with the rain of their sweat’.
Yet, when the woman gets old, she is unable to shelter in the tree’s cool shade. The trivialization of a woman’s role takes on an ironic, subversive role in “High and Dry”.
Gomti, it’s only when you swell in pride every few years, it’s when you rise in fury lashing at bridges, embankments shaking up the whole of Avadh till it trembles by the brick and mortar of its being, that’s when we see you in your element. It’s when you menace buildings, gobble up boats, cattle, huts, or a whole village and ask for more, that’s when the entire city wakes up to you. When you’re quiet and acquiescent, Gomti you’re left high and dry.
The collection is dedicated to her husband Arun who died after a long period of illness and hospitalization. The first poem “For Arun” poignantly captures the relationship between husband and wife. Though steeped in Indian thought, the poem stands on its own, its logic and metaphysics.
A droplet of water on a lotus leaf is said to symbolize detachment But see how the veins of the leaf are magnified through the pearl of water and how the droplet turns a radiant emerald on the leaf? Water and leaf jewelled together even in their separateness.
Hers is a world of positive sum games where beings, identities, things influence each other to greater effect, reminding one of Ketaki Dyson’s “Inclusionality” where everything influences the other and is influenced in turn while creating a new identity. Lakshmi writes movingly about her mother, inviting her to an open, honest relationship.
There’ll be no room here for subterfuges or sham only a clean interior washed every day with waters that carry the salt of my being, the floor patterned with kolam. Come, mother.
In “Aarti”, she in turn as a mother sets afloat green, leafy boats carrying the flames for her two sons and watches till Ganges became a river of hope, burning setting thousands of flames on a voyage to their distant destinies. This letting go, not only of her sons but of her own self, is striking.
I could not tell the boats I lowered from the ones set adrift by others. I could not even tell which was me from the rest. All I saw were tongues of wayfaring flames their luminous images trailing on the waters.
Her images too trail in our memory.
Confluence: South Asian Perspectives, 2005.