Poetry: Protest, Dissent and Subversion

In our fairly complex world the pathways towards meaning are not too straight. With poetry things can at times become even more complex. Art and aesthetics can clutter up things further. They have their own dimensions, their own fads, fashions, even doctrines. For instance, I am told that if you rhyme the honchos of the avant garde will rip you into shreds. When we talk of subversion, the question that crops up is what is there to subvert? In fact after the media have done their bit, the sensational TV channels, the tabloids, the yellow press of the moffussil, what is there left to subvert?

Well firstly you subvert order. Now order itself has become a dirty word. We need order and we don't need anarchy. And a lot of poetry in the sixties and seventies was anarchic—they were the decades of LSD and Hash. I have somewhere defined order as "the corpse and the coffin-maker at their appointed places." You can subvert values, mythologies, dynastic rule, and sycophancy. —you could subvert history itself. And you can subvert pomposity, lies, totalitarianism and a host of other things.

Now you have poetry of protest, poetry of dissent, and one of subversion. We need to deal with these separately. Mixing the three would clutter things up. Needless to say they often blur and blend into each other. I start with a great poet, Anna Akhmatova. The poem Requiem, great as it is, does happen to be declaratory. It was written over many years. It would be correct to say she put in a lot of poems written earlier from 1935 to 1940. She starts with a declaratory statement (1961)

No, not under the vault of alien skies And not under the shelter of alien wings— I was with my people then, There , where my people unfortunately were.

Four years earlier, she writes "Instead of a Preface."

"In the terrible years of the Yezhov terror, I spent 17 months in the prison lines of

Leningrad. Once someone "recognized" me. Then a woman with bluish lips standing

behind me, who, of course, never heard me called by name before, woke up from the

stupor to which everyone had succumbed and whispered in my year (everyone spoke in

whispers there):

"Can you describe this?"

And I answered : "Yes, I can."

Then something that looked like a smile passed over what had once been her face." Then

starts the poems and the opening lines for me are disappointing.

Mountains bow down to this grief,

Mighty rivers cease to flow,

But the prison gates hold firm,

And behind them are the "prisoner's burrows"

And mortal woe.

She is writing in a frenzy of grief. Obviously the poem is 'secret' if that's the word, a poem under lock and key. No one would have dared to show a poem like that in 1940. She talks of "the rasp of the hateful key, / And the soldier's heavy tread." She asks a question in two searing lines: "Where now are my chance friends/ Of those two diabolical years"? and then mentions Siberian storms. This is protest poetry, breast-beating at its most aesthetic. It is a poetry which rails at the state and state power and fate. This is defiant poetry. But subversive, no? In the very next poem "Prologue" (1935) she says The stars of death stood above us And innocent Russia writhed Under bloody boots And under the tires of the black marias.

Then in Poem II she laments her own fate

Husband in the grave, son in prison, Say a prayer for me.

To go to a later poem "Lyrical Digression on the Seventh Elegy," which far from being lyrical is actually 'a blunt history of her life under the Soviet regime,' she talks of

.. .a frightening voice read the list of charges, And everyone thought it was a human being, But it was a black megaphone gone berserk, Repeating those same thirty phrases For all thirty years.

I defend not my voice But my silence.

It must be remembered that her personal agony and the agony of her people got commingled in her poetry. And she could do all this very delicately. A poem written a few days after her husband (divorced) Gumilyov was executed begins:

Terror, fingering things in the dark, Leads the moonbeam to an axe.

But the subversion comes in poems where she doesn't rail, condemn, or ostensibly agonize. The poems are "Dante" and "Cleopatra" where she uses the past insidiously to cast a shadow on the present:

Dante Even after his death he did not return To his ancient Florence. To the one, who leaving, did not look back, To him I sing this song.

A torch, the night, the last embrace,

Beyond the threshold the wild wail of fate.

From hell he sent her curses

And in paradise he could not forget her—

But barefoot in a hairshirt,

With a lighted candle he did not walk

Through his Florence—his beloved,

Perfidious, base, longed for...

(August 17, 1936)

Her own love for her country, and yet the hatred of the times she is living in and the regime she is surviving under, come through in this poem. In "Cleopatra" she talks of her children in chains—something which any Russian would associate with the arrests of Mandelstam and Akhmatova's own fate.

I could quote a lot from Ritsos, but I will only quote a few lines from Monochords. As the title shows they are single lines. He too was hounded by the Colonel's regime in Greece and incarcerated. Louis Aragon considered him the finest poet in the world. He was nominated ten times for the Nobel Prize.

Dark glasses for the sun, still darker for the night.

The boat that left at dusk took me aboard.

Perhaps only silence can speak the whole truth.

Up there where they hoist silence on the mast.

Tight in his mouth he holds the laurel leaf. How can he sing?

Once handsome, slim, elegant—now fattened by applause.

I am going to quote a few lines from a poem of Emmanuel Moses, "The Year of the

Dragon". He starts by saying "the world is changing" and that "Sometimes history cuts

across your path through life" tell you how he was a postman during Yom Kippur war

"and brought to worried mothers news of their boys." Then

I didn't even see my grandmother die.

I thought that she was still breathing under the sheet,

And her coffin was like a suitcase

Where someone hides to cross the border

Without being seen."

(A Salt Reader ed. John Kinsella) This is as subtly subversive as a poem can be—Israel, Palestine, borders -the works.

Jews with their horrendous history can be very subtly subversive. Take Adrienne Rich, Poem XIX from ' Sources', a section in her book Your Native Land, Your Life. She says

I think of women who sailed to Palestine years before I was born...

halutzot, pioneers believing in a new life

socialists, anarchists, jeered as excitable, sharp of tongue

too filled with life

wanting equality in the promised land

carrying the broken promises of Zionism in their hearts...

Then Adrienne deals with their hopes—these women expected

that the life she gives her life to shall not be cheap...

that the life she gives her life to shall want an end to suffering

Zion by itself is not enough

It must have required courage to say this—Zion was not enough, she and the mothers of

Israel want peace—an end to wars. This is a veto against Israeli aggression. In her poem

XXI she says her dreams

cry out for explication

as the night pales and one more day

breaks on this Zion of hope and fear

and broken promises.

It is easier for poets living in Israel to write poetry which is subversive. I am sure from the late forties to the mid seventies people must have written a lot of patriotic verses in the Kibbutz. But after 1982, things obviously changed and poets would be the ones who would strike against war. Take Yehuda Amichai. His poem "National Thoughts" starts with the line," You: trapped in the homeland of the Chosen People" Then he talks about "this tired language/ torn from its sleep in the Bible" and how it lurches.

The language which described God and the Miracles,

Says:

Motor car, bomb, God."

In "Two songs of Peace" he says: My son smells of peace. His mother's womb Promised him that Which God can't promise.

In another poem "Mayor" he speaks against the construction going on in Jerusalem.

And at night

The stones of the hills round about

Will crawl down

Towards the stone houses,

Like wolves coming

To howl at the dogs

Who have become men's slaves.

One is still taking extreme cases. It is like quoting a Pakistani poet against terrorism or theocracy. I suppose it could be argued that each poem has an angle of its own and should throw some new light on a subject. If it does, it is subverting some order or the other. In this respect a change in literary trends is also subversion. Let's take English poetry of the eighteenth century—the age of rationalism, Descartes. The French priest Bossuet expressed the current attitude of the Church towards nature:

"May the earth be cursed, may the earth be cursed, a thousand times be cursed because from it that heavy fog and those black vapours continually rise that ascend from the dark passions and hide heaven and its light from us and draw down the lightning of God's justice against the corruption of the human race."

Pope said "The proper study of mankind is man". In "An Essay on Man" he says: The bliss of man (could pride that blessing find) Is not to act or think beyond mankind. Later he says: Lo, the poor Indian! Whose untutor'd mind

Sees God in clouds, or hears him in the wind 1 am not sure that he is talking of the American Indian here. For he later says: 'He asks no angel's wing , no seraph's fire;/But thinks, admitted to that equal sky,/ His faithful dog shall bear him company.' (Yudhishtir)

Dryden's "Indian Emperor" has the lines

All things are hush'd as Nature's self lay dead;

The mountains seem to nod their drowsy head...

What is worse, there was a terrible bias against women. Swift has a horrible poem "A

Gentle Echo on Woman."

Say what can keep her chaste whom I adore?

A door... Then teach me, Echo, how shall I come by her?

Buy her... If she be wind, what stills her when she blows?

Blows

With the Romantic movement came feminine consciousness, night consciousness, nature consciousness.

Coming to modern and post modern times, let's take the lines from Eliot's Prufrock poem (Love song of Alfred J. Prufrock.) I have heard the mermaids singing each to each. I do not think that they will sing to me.

Robert Bly's comment on the lines is: "He says it in comedy, and yet with all the tragic

implications of the resignation." Just look at the return to nature in the post -Eliot era, the

poems on animals, birds that crowd the pages of anthologies and magazines. There's

Frost's poem on Apple Picking and Lorca's strident attack on urbanization in his poem

"New York".

1 attack the conspiring

of these empty offices

that will not broadcast the sufferings,

that rub out the plans of the forest,

and I offer myself to be eaten by the packed cattle

when their mooing fills the valley

where the Hudson is getting drunk on its oil.

There are poems on otters, fish, lynx, maples—hundreds and poems on rain. The False Start, begins with 'A Day of Rain': Once again it has been a day of rain./ And I hear the flutter of light feet/ on the warm earth, excited wings loosening from the dark."

Travelling in a Cage was Dilip Chitre's strident response to the Emergency.

"One day you wake up and find/ The whole country dead./So what do you do?

Bathe once again in the sacred sewer/ And start addressing/ Another hymn to the sun?"

And there are those mildly subversive poems like "The Felling of the Bunyan Tree". Gieve Patel has a similar poem 'The Killing of a Tree.' Eunice de Souza's poems are subversive of the Goan-Catholic milieu. In fact most poems by women are consciously or unconsciously subversive of order—the male order, and the patriarchal way of thinking. But going through Arlene Zide's "In Their Own Voice" I found the poems strident—the subtly subversive kind are hard to find. For instance in Ashwin Dhongde's "Small Ads: Matrimonials" the bride has to be 5 ft.3 and a half inches, very fair and delicate and slim, highly educated graduate, working woman (handing over all money to husband), able to adjust to Joint family. When it comes to the male:

Wanted a groom—No conditions (must be male) Adult, either

Marrying for the first time or A widower with children, anyone will do.

Similarly Shobha Bhagwat's poem "Husband" is very humorous: "This woman has a job/ so her husband is unhappy/ this one sits at home/ so her husband is upset/ this one is very thin/ so her husband is angry/ this one is very plump/so her husband snaps at her." Manjit Tiwana says "A husband is a hungry wolf/ who shields you from all other wolves/ But himself."

In its subtle subversion we have very little to beat Gauri Deshpande's "The Female of the Species": Sometimes you want to talk about love and despair and the ungratefulness of children. A man is no use whatever then. You want then your mother or sister

or the girl with whom you went through school, and your first love, and her first child—a girl and your second. You sit with them and talk. She sews and you sit and sip and speak of the rate of rice and the price of tea and the scarcity of cheese. You know both that you've spoken of love and despair and ungrateful children.

Denise Levertov may have had many anti war poems during the Vietnam War. But for subtle subversion 1 can think of no better poem than "She and the Muse". The poem starts with the "delightful hero" clattering away on his horse "raising/ a flurry of straw and scattering hens." He turns in his saddle and waves to her. She has packed his saddlebags with "talismans, mirrors, parchment histories." "He rides off in the dustcloud of his own/ story." She cleans the kitchen and clears the milk and bread and honey.

"Now the long desired visit is over. The heroine

is a scribe. Returned to solitude,

eagerly she enters the third room, the room hung with tapestries, scenes that change whenever she looks away. Here is her lectern, here her writing desk. She picks a quill, dips it, begins to write. But not of him."

In conclusion one has to say that the poet's primary job is to write poetry. He or she can write on love, exile, death, despair or any other subject under the sun. Subversion will come in naturally, if it has to come. When the occasion demands the poet can take a stance and be solidly political. Dalit poetry, given our history of injustice, has to be only political, but that is an exception. But if we only write strident political poetry we could get tiresome. Poets lay themselves open to the charge of hectoring didacticism, even insincerity . Poetry first, dissent and subversion afterwards.