Guns with occasional music: Female poets from the Northeast

Poetry from the Northeast has focused primarily on reports of military violence and notions of nationhood.  The history of bloodshed (as a public spectacle) has often hidden the miniscule histories of female subjugation. Through the poetry of Uddipana Goswami, Irom Sharmila and Temsula Ao,  Rini Barman explores the domestic space which reeks of patriarchal domination and ‘sexual militancy.’

They were dreamers who thought poetry

was about nation, revolution, freedom.

They were dreaming in their sleep

Their dreams died as they slept

 Poetry became a casualty of armed skirmishes

(“Would I be a poet still?”)

I was acquainted with Uddipana Goswami’s poetry while studying in college. They opened new vistas of wisdom but most importantly, this is the kind of poetry that invites solidarity and action. People and their collective memories, the shared histories of pain and pleasure, form her corpus of study. An intense desire to see the future of Northeast change for the better is what she shares with most of the contemporary women poets in the region. Poetry for them belongs to the masses and this is the tragedy: somewhere down the line, the tragedy of this region is the tragedy of a nation trying to encumber its homogenised notion of nationhood.

Most of academic literature that is available on poetry from the Northeast isn’t plentiful as they are confined by the mainstream images of “conflict”. Recovering voices and imprints from the past through eidetic memory is a trope in writings from the NE. Patricia Mukhim writes, “For a person from the Northeast, the Indian identity is and has always been, a paradox”, which is why I feel it is essential to look into spheres of identity formations within the domestic space as well. Poetry by women writers of the Northeast frames and questions the compartments through the prism of identity divides, making it autobiographical while pruning roots that turn out to be baggage. Militancy as a theme has been discussed far too well, but we must ask ourselves: Is militancy restricted to the clatter of bullets or the stench of gunpowder? Can the instruments of the state and patriarchy also, on occasion, be termed “militant”?

Uddipana Goswami is a contemporary Assamese poet whose poems chart the progress of that kind of “domestic militancy”. So, what are the politics that shove militancy inside the house as something that doesn’t need to be articulated?  Our histories and mythologies are full of characters that have been silenced either by the rhetoric of the gun or the jacaranda. Uddipana Goswami suffered domestic abuse herself and her recent work Green Tin Trunk is a survivor’s testament. Her collection is a moving account of many kinds of militancy thrust upon generations in the Northeast and more specifically the Assamese society. She has long departed from musings on the poetics based on form and meter. Instead, the emotional in her verse moults to become an extremely political aesthetic. The textual arrangement of her two poems namely “Love has a way of happening” and “Love has a way of ending” is fascinating; it becomes a “public spectacle”. The shrivelling of ethnic identities, relationships, communities depict a form of illness, and her struggle is a struggle to distil it. It reminded me of the textual arrangement of Sunil Gangopadhyay’s poems “Illness” and “An Illness lies next to love” from You are Neera (translated by Arunava Sinha).

With respect to the political crusader Irom Sharmila, who writes poetry in her native language Meiteilon, one can draw parallels of turbulence and hope. Taken into custody and released every twelve months by the state, her poems are a craving for stability. It is interesting how Manipur, among other states of the NE and India as a whole, views women’s protests- they were thoroughly appalled by public disrobing- another account of the covers patriarchy compels women to carry and strips them violently for the sake of “peace”. For those insensitive reports that stated nudity is a savage way for seeking peace, I would like to ask this question- Is the act of state-sponsored rape of helpless women and children by AFSPA not savage?

Irom Sharmila thinks that the impulse to write is a weapon to mobilise people to fight against such savagery. In the poem “Mother will be ragged no more” she writes:

“What made you a killer?

Why rob someone of his vehicle

What gain you by torturing an effigy?

For a scrap of land you cannot take with you

Why fight like a brute

Is this your calling, my child?

A mother’s heart to shatter…”

A mother’s lament over her son taking up guns is an allegory for the younger generation’s males who associate manhood with brutal military strength and revenge. The history of Manipur and other states of the Northeast will point out very succinctly that revenge has only mutilated the already torn innocents. Sharmila’s fasting, a way of cleansing the corporeal, scorns such kinds of revenge. She has become a powerful symbol of a woman’s lone struggle for simple treasures- the simplest being the freedom of her strife torn homeland.

Another interesting poem from her collection Fragrance of Peace, (an anthology published by Zubaan-translated into English by a few translators including Longiam Jayachandra and Waikhom Romesh) is “The fish were fighting in the aquarium”. The corporeal functions of common people like eating, living and festivity (something that is overlooked by the national media in the craze for finding terror-ridden stories) find reverberation in Sharmila’s poems. What’s more, she seeks lesson from something as commonplace as Nganoi (Olive barb), a variety of fish found in Manipur to comment upon a larger political scene.

“In the water inside the man made aquarium

Fishes, the lord’s creation

Unable to taste life in the sea

Were feeding on a thin aquatic weed

In the fight for a morsel of feed

Powerful Nganoi had won

The life inside the glass enclosure

Was all they knew about ‘life?’

They had no knowledge of ‘life’

How were they able to stay alive?

Beyond the glass enclosure is

He who is controlling their souls

Unable to know the might of the lord

Not worried about death

Like the immortals they were enticing enmity only.”

The mental enclosure inside an aquarium resembles the confinement to which women are supposed to adhere. Patriarchy and militancy have gendered ways of scarring the psyche. Psychological forms of militancy affect deep crooks of the mind, the awakening of which are presented in images of horror. Uddipana, in a conversation with her mother (who is nostalgic about the 80s in Assam) asks “If violence made us cry then, why do we laugh now?” From the poem “Laughing and bombing”, these lines are a stark irony of the daily bomb-blasts in the city and the public amnesia surrounding it. People (of Assam as much the rest of India), are responsible for the paradoxes of this kind of laughter.

“How does a river die, a river like Rangi?

Do you have to dam her, drain her, dig her

In order to kill her?

Do you need to tell her she is no more

Your mother, lover, sister, friend?

Or do you like the ancient king choke her

With the blood of a thousand foes?”

These lines personify the river as a feminine spokesperson in a very unique manner. She subverts a trope frequently used by earlier modern poets of Assam–that of romanticising the rivers and making them carry the burden of ethnic clashes. Uddipana’s narrative imagination gives region-specific incidents a universal appeal. In her poem about Nellie, a place afflicted with the worst form of genocide in 1983, she again brings to the fore how the nation and its people failed to understand the gravity of such ethnic cleansing incidents. She says “If Nellie was the name of a woman/ she would not cry/because you cut off her tongue/ If Nellie was the name of a woman/you would still have her blood/ on your hands”.

Sanjoy Hazarika explains further about Nellie in his essay “In times of conflict the real victims are women”.

“The centre’s reactions to the Nellie massacre (IMDT was passed by Parliament at the height of the anti-foreigner agitation) and the Manorama case may appear different but they reflect the uniformity of the State. In both cases women were the worst sufferers. The state is more concerned about its strength and not appearing to give way or acceding to public demands under pressure than about meeting just demands. It is more concerned about image than substance. It felt that the bad image it got from Nellie and the Manorama killing would abate as the issues disappeared from the public mind…”

Is the public mind (regional and national) also complicit in patriarchy and its unleashed draconian dictums? When we enter the carving of domesticity in Uddipana’s new poems, we get a very gloomy picture. The bridal trousseau- that inspired its title “Green Tin Trunk” is evoked in all its cruelties. Ali the artist who painted its dented places is someone the poet cannot forget, for the pink flowers and creepers that he added once now lie bruised.

“The creeper has crept all the way

Up to my head now, or are they just

The cobwebs that cover the top

Of my green tin trunk?

Do cobwebs grow pink flowers?

Do pink flowers bleed?

Will Ali the artist smile at me again?”

Uddipana’s earlier poems from We called the river red takes a subversive stand against the traditionally victimised heroines of Assamese folktales. Moving to a domain that takes her to grandmothers and feasting, she challenges the male-dominated doctrines that guide folktales. Immortality, enmity, bickering step-wives and sexual politics are some of the salient features she shares with Naga poet Temsula Ao. Recently a winner of the Sahitya Academi award, Temsula Ao is critical of the ‘benevolent subordination’ of the old given a new avatar which passes off as a version of empowering women. As the economy transforms from a rural agrarian to an urban one, she feels, “in the devolution of power envisaged under the democratic dispensation of the country, it is indeed a clever way of seemingly granting equality to women in Naga society. What one must not forget is that it still leaves the real power- structure intact where the domination of the male is absolute”.

It would be simplistic to say that drawing from the repository of one’s oral lineage is a biased chauvinism of sorts. For these women poets, understanding the paradigm of folklore and women’s attribution are keys to challenging orthodox models of oppression. So while one may feel going back to nature is escapism, one is bound to focus on how that world too isn’t devoid of power hierarchies. To write fiction straddling with such contraries, Ao’s meditation on orality remains till date, a telling account of Naga society. Her poem “Stone people from Lungeterok” problematises notions of the savage. Lungeterok literally means Six stones. According to the Aos – a Naga tribe, their first forefathers emerged out of the earth at a place called Lungeterok. There were three men and three women.

“Stone people

The potters and weavers

Planters and growers

Hunters and carvers

Singers of songs and takers of heads,

Gentle lovers and savage heroes.

Builders of homes and destroyers of villages…

Stone-people,

Savage and sage

Who sprang out of Lungterok,

Was the birth adult when the stone broke?

Or are the Stone-people yet to come of age?”

(From The Dancing Earth)

Mamang Dai a contemporary poet from the NE, on turning back to myths and orality, writes- “Myths and stories can be interpreted as an ancient religion of the world which, over a period of time developed into parables and a set of beliefs…This is the substance of faith – so many questions remain unanswered, the evidence available is never conclusive, yet the quest for a starting place to define and guide the rest of our journey continues” (“On Creation myths and oral narratives”)

Ao’s poetry collections- Songs that Tell (1988), Songs that Try to Say (1992), Songs of Many Moods (1995) , Songs from Here and There (2003), among others dwell in the quest for the elemental , maternal and earthy. Apart from that, her short-story collections also engage with similar poetics. One would never forget the character of Imdongla from her story “A Simple Question” whose fierce questions compel the army officer to release her husband Tekaba, kept in custody.

Imdongla had said –

“Look at them; aren’t they like your own fathers? How would you feel if your fathers were punished for acting out of fear? Fear of you Indian soldiers and fear of the mongrels of the jungle”. But what affected him most was one single question that Imdongla had repeatedly asked: ‘What do you want from us?’ (From Laburnum in my Head)

The way Imdongla alters her position from almost being a victim of violence to a survivor is a demonstration of the indomitable spirit of women crushed forever under the military boots.

On the surface, women poets abiding by traditions in which countless misogynist folktales been written would have been too conformist. Poets like Uddipana and Temsula Ao never felt the desire of repeating patterns. This doesn’t necessarily mean that young and politically conscious women poets from the Northeast have excluded traditional elements as compared to their counterparts in the past.

“Killing the ugly step-sister”, “Tejimola forever” and “Translation” among other poems allude to oral folktales followed by subversion of the gendered authoritarian voice. Champawati is a typical children’s folktale which decides the destiny of two stepsisters (one born of the desired and one born of the repugnant). Uddipana writes, from the perspective of the two stepsisters in the folktale in her poem –

“On her wedding night then,

We hear her voice for the first time in the story.

She is crying out loud to her mother

Who pushed her in with the beast

Aai mur bhori kute kutai

The mother is only too happy to think

The marriage is being consummated

Soaked in the venom of the beast that slowly devours her

Pushed her further into his dark belly

She realises in the end

She should have spoken

She should have fought

She should have had a happy ending”

(“Killing the ugly step-sister”)

One would agree that sexual militancy runs in this tale and Uddipana attempts an audacious reversal of roles in this societal set-up, where age and gender are implicit, unspoken markers of worth, and consequently, influence. On a larger paradigm, she is seeking answers from the people of her hometown and across India as to why sexual militancy is not even considered militancy at all. The incidents of Soni Sori (Chattisgarh) and Thangjam Manorama (Manipur) among numerous others pinpoint that again and again. People have not raised their voices loudly enough to repeal the use of women’s sexual organs to establish power.

“Lady

I shall not offer you coins and currencies

They shall not buy you

The respect or understanding

Of those that live

In a man’s world

I shall trade you instead

My own unseen tales

Of how I was burnt and battered

Humiliated

Out of love and devotion”

(“Debi”)

Uddipana’s poem “Debi” presents us an intensely disturbing tradition that has flourished over ages- a tradition that uplifts the female sex to divinity in the sacred space and subjects them to brutal militancy within the domestic space. Bear in mind, it is imperative to expand the meaning of violence- for tormenting the psyche is a violent torment nonetheless.

Women’s poetry of the kind discussed is an eye-opener .There is and can be no easy answer but instead of trying to “control” the region and its women (also sexuality), poets insist on alternate routes to understand the dynamics of violence perpetrated in the Northeast. A reader of women’s poetry from the Northeast cannot simply be an empathetic critic; he/she would have to leave the comforts of arm-chair criticism to truly grasp the musicality of writing under the ‘shadow of the gun’. Poetry cannot be the only saviour, as Uddipana says; people can.