day 2: the palimpsest of exile, by dipika mukherjee

The Palimpsest of Exile, by my sis Molly, a.k.a. Dipika Mukherjee, is being launched at the Waterstones on June 4, 2009. I read this preview copy at her house on May 8, my second day here.

Mukherjee, Dipika
The palimpest of Exile
Rubicon Press, Edmonton, 2009
ISBN 9780980927894

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Review

Of the fifteen poems in this thin volume, a surprisingly high number work for
me, but that may be because these poems by my sister cover familiar ground - a grandmother we shared, the hybrid tastes of peripatetic life.

Here is a friend, Molly's age, tall, imperious, chic, full of life - all the boys had a crush on her. And how shell-shocked we all were when she committed suicide during her high school exams:

 The easy sunset evenings on rooftops
 while the skies filled with the clamor of conch shells 
 were gone.  ... 
            Gone the afternoons
 for you had taken the child in me
 without goodbye. 

All successful poetry must presents an alternate view of life, but it must do so without seeming to. Sometimes in these poems, it weighs down a bit heavily - e.g.

 Sometimes a mongrel breed living half a life,
 sometimes pickled, sometimes preserved. 
 the palimpsest of exile is an afflicted volume,
 pages filled with erasures...

For me the word palimpsest was most memorable for a speech by Jawaharlal Nehru:

India was like some ancient palimpsest on which layer upon layer of thought and reverie had been inscribed, and yet no succeeding layer had completely hidden or erased what had been written previously.

I had looked it up once, while reading Alain de Botton's On love - palin is Greek for "again", and psEn is "to scrape, rub smooth"; that which is scraped smooth again and again.

The alternate view is much more lucid in Writing Xanadu , lamenting interruptions in the process of writing - just "when words trip over themselves to get / down on the page" (a rare occurrence), the handyman comes. He rambles about cafes on distant highways. In the end, the laptop trumpets into hibernation.

I write the memories I hope to have broods about death; at her own cremation,

 They will rake in my bones, stir my shattered skull
 and find a way to live.  My spirit will hover
 over sons with shaven heads,

"Foreign passport", where her son (my neph Arush) is detained at the US immigration, fugues into a emotional lament over the poet Reetika Vazirani's death:

 Standing at the serrated edge
 of a Goghian field,
 the stalks, like jagged fingers,
 stabbing obscenely at the sky

Most of all, I could relate to the piece Thakuma; perhaps this image will resonate in many of us who have connections with the migration from what became East Pakistan and now Bangladesh:

  Widowed, you were
 shorn of hair, arms bracelet bare, vermilion scraped. 
 your color pale white as your widowhood. 
 Those were desperate years.  You lost a child
 to illness; another, seeking heat on 
 a chill night, crawled into the open fire.      

Other poems of note include the autobiographical These words once danced
in red jooties,

 These words would once burst through that door
 in flaming silk, rustling aquamarine,
 they would raise one hand, thick with silver tinkling
 swish the air and tilt the chin
 to demand attention.  These words once knew the power
 of insousicance. 
 
 These words once danced in red jooties. 

Possibly the most powerful poem here is Scarecrow, which
captures the adrenalin of a near-death moment. Although it is I
who am the uncle (the child is my other neph, Arohan), I myself don't
remember the episode, which could well be a part-imagined reconstruction,
certainly for Arohan who was too small to really remember it, yet he says he
does...

Of course, I am far from a neutral observer, but I think this review itself is fairly impersonal in how it records my feelings... On the whole, it is indeed an excellent read, on my "where-the-page-falls-open-quotient", where the percentage of good poems on a random page is quite high.

Excerpts

On an Ohioan autumn, remembering Reetika

(in memory of Reetika Vazirani, 1962-2003)

Standing at the serrated edge

of a Goghian field,
the stalks, like jagged fingers,
stabbing obscenely at the sky
I think of another woman.
A poet
a mother
she killed her child and then herself.

There is the dull gold of decay
corn husks and dying light of day
and one lone blackbird.

I who have traveled
from a place of excess fecundity,
a land so pregnant
that the undergrowth teems.
I stand in this aridity
a dark desiccation,
a foreigner.

Writing Xanadu

The handyman always comes
in the middle of the zone
when words trip over themselves to get
down on the page; this rarely happens,
but when it does,
the handyman's at the door.

He sees a woman with a laptop
while something simmers, fresh, on the stove;
he probably thinks
you are downloading a recipe.

He ambles over and points out of the window.
See there, if you take the highway
past the medical centre and on to Haarlem,
the first exit, eh,
there's a wonderful cafe'
run by former clowns, you know, Pipo's?

You want to ask
if he has ever heard of Coleridge,
to say you are finishing your Xanadu right now,
but the conceit seems appalling.
Besides you don't want to hear
I'd write a book
If I had the time.

The handyman rattles on regardless.
He spreads some goo over
the leaky faucet and you think
the water's relentless drip
was infinitely preferable.

He talks about his duaghter's
Barbie fixation,
asks whether it's a phase.
You remember he's always there,
even on weekends.

The laptop trumbets
into hibernation.

Thakuma (Paternal Grandmother)

Gold anklets are sacriligeous, so your
infant feet tinkled silver. You were a
cherished child, only daughter. Coddled and
cocooned, you grew to womanhood, knowing
your worth in gold. Then shenai strains mingled
with fragrant sandalwood and rosewater,
and you shimmered in red brocade, your face
glowing with jewels, bracelets on glistening
arms. As you circled the sacred fire
seven times, your father muttered ancient
mantras, giving the gift of a virgin.

Warring nations forced you to flee the land
of your birth. You lost your husband in an
alien land, looked at seven infant mouths
and willed yourself to live. Widowed, you were
shorn of hair, arms bracelet bare, vermilion scraped.
your color pale white as your widowhood.

Those were desperate years. You lost a child
to illness; another, seeking heat on
a chill night, crawled into the open fire.
You sifted through the ashes of burnt hopes
and survived; like rice replanted on
alien fields, you gave your children a place
to grow, creating life out of chaos.
Your forthborn became my father.

Avanti

You strung a sari on the ceiling fan,
then kicked a chair to die.
A half-drunk glass of water
an open book rifled by the wind
that's all you left.

I did not go to see you.
I was sixteen, grief-dumb. I wept,
bartered with the Gods, and lost,
full of my guilt.

They dressed you in flaming red
to burn a hride, virgin garb,
and I remembered all the boys we'd eyed,
sitting on a rock at the Shiv temple,
looking at the world at our feet.

I had felt your magnetism,
for you broke a lot of hearts.

The easy sunset evenings on rooftops
while the skies filled with the clamor of conch shells
were gone. Gone the afternoons
of lime sherbet and gossip
and hating parents together.
I was full of grief, yet resentment, too,
for you had taken the child in me
without goodbye.

Scarecrow

You are stopped in the middle of the road, looking only to your left, and I hear the scream gurgle up inside my throat, but it is of no use, you stand in the middle of the Lucknow-Kanpur highway and I see your five years of life lifting a sneakered foot towards your uncle on the other side and I see the lorry trundling unstoppable in its aged speed, its wooden slats banging a warning and the garish "Love is God" sign and the driver leaning on the horn -- leaining onto it and not letting go -- and you are poised for a run, unsure of direction, both scary and scared, and I am screaming, STOP, STOP to you, to the driver, to time, too crazed to make a difference and then you are there, scooped up in your uncle's arms, a wriggling live miracle, as you were at birth. p. 26

I write the memories I hope to have

There must be fire, over the touch of sandalwood.

There will be a ghat with water, corrupted, floating
through mud-swirls, carrying bodies
too poor to be burnt.

There will be the outcastes,
ashes flying on bodies from the flickering
multitudes of corpses like mine;

the darkness will gleam through the moonless night
as they poke the cinders to retrieve a ring...
perhaps a tooth, still melting like honey.

They will rake in my bones, stir my shattered skull
and find a way to live. My spirit will hover
over sons with shaven heads,

chilly in cotton dhotis, sleeping on cement;
there will be thousands of pleas
on leaf boats floating,

lighting up the Ganges like a watery constellation. p. 28

- amitabha mukerjee (mukerjee [at] gmail.com)