Basudhara Roy
How does poetry engage with a fractured world? One way to do it would be to itself splinter upon the world’s incorrigible hardness, to carry its fidelity of betrayal from word to form, and to protest against the vulnerability of the self and the world by breaking out into chaos. Another way would be to stare the fractures in the face and to treat the fragments as if they were whole. Yashodhara Raychaudhuri’s The Poem, In Pieces published by The Antonym Collections in 2023, effectively does both. Translated from the original Bengali into English by five different translators—Chirayata Chakrabarty, Jharna Sanyal, Mamata Nanda, Trinanjan Chakraborty, and the poet herself, The Poem, In Pieces offers an interesting take on the idea of fragmentation, both thematically and aesthetically. Here are poems that illuminate numerous aspects of life—companionship, loneliness, doubt, introspection, gender inequality, patriotism, the value of relationships, cultural interrogations of myth and folklore, and above all, the rationale and process of writing itself.
While the poems consistently probe layers of convention and complacency to arrive at the violence that the social body/nation-state consistently inflicts upon the individual and vice-versa—”My motherland is like a leather flask/Water and blood oozes from her thousand wounds”(‘The Viral Video’), the translations that they undergo in the different emotional crucibles of different translators intensifies the sense of fracture by the random laying bare of the rawness of pain—”This is how they turn Fear into bricks,/ Turn bricks into walls/ Then wall it up to build/ A great big Silence.” (‘Now’) The inadequacy of language to express, reflect, and survive the world is an important theme in this collection. While the power of words is repeatedly acknowledged, there is an equally sharp and ironic awareness of their inefficacy to bring about change: “Words have broken down like car-battery./ I don’t know how to repair them.” (‘Words’) In the poem ‘Bhisma’ from The Mahabharata Series, Bhisma is “that gentleman with thick glasses”, educated and enlightened, who reads The Statesman all day and “understand(s) everything but could do/nothing about anything”, ceaselessly writing, in his ineffectual clarity, letters to the Editor that beget neither solution nor response.
In fact, in all the four Mahabharata poems of the collection, Raychaudhuri adopts an interesting series of perspectives to draw lines between well-known characters from the great epic and our ordinary roles in the workaday world. If Bhisma is unable to translate his wisdom and theoretical enlightenment into coherent and concrete action, Krsna, the “seasoned diplomat” who initiates dialogue in the middle of every crisis, is unable to “ever stall any war”. Kunti in the poem ‘Kunti Aunty,’ was “quite accomplished, had a degree in Rabindra sangeet” but she “never managed/the school job for she got married.” Gandhari in the poem ‘Gandhari’ blindfolds herself when her pregnancy test kit gives her a positive result for she does not wish to see her hundred sons “forge the Kaurava gang”, “romp in the city on their Hero Honda” and “set ablaze one fragile shelter after another”.
The domestic space/home that shapes, frames, nurtures and often also destroys its inhabitants is the chief setting of Raychaudhuri’s poems. It is here that all confrontations with the self and the world are enacted and all resolutions or rejections arrived at. It is here that love and dependence are taught and here that the need to break free from them is felt. A sense of exhaustion with the world fuels these poems and yet, the world cannot be relinquished for it is only in the theatre of the world that meaning can be found. There is an understanding of love as bond, as bondage, and compliance to norms as an act of slavery amounting to betrayal of the self. But such betrayals of the self are needed to keep the show going. Raychaudhuri’s understanding of home, as the reader will note, is not that of a fertile space or a refuge but like the Bodhi tree, home emerges as a site of reflection and enlightenment, of pain and epiphany, of negotiation and decision. Inhabiting the marrow of these poems is the sensibility of the woman-speaker-onlooker who is keenly conscious of the ramifications of choice in a gendered world. A large number of poems in this collection conscientiously deconstruct women’s lives and histories to clarify their place in the home and the world. In Raychaudhuri’s poems, the body poetic is also representative of women’s selfhood that experiences and learns to survive multiple fractures.
Threading these poems is a sharp ache to ride over the by-laws of culture to find a place for respect and co-existence, a desire to flow within a larger compass of liberty, and to free oneself of attachment in a bid to secure absolute peace. The complexity of love and freedom, however, prove difficult to negotiate and what makes these poems deeply poignant is the realization that there is no release, no place beyond release. A release would demand not just the dissolution of the home but also the self for it is the self’s existential desire to build homes and to love. “A thinking woman sleeps with monsters/ The beak that grips her, she becomes,” writes Adrienne Rich in ‘Snapshots of a Daughter-in-law.’ In their final image of incarceration, Raychaudhuri’s poems also realize that there is no shaking off this grip: “Whose hand will it be on your back, little caged bird?/ Only your history hangs above your head like an invisible glass jar…” (‘Woman Troubles’) An alternate release or consolation is to be found in poetry, in the invitation of the white page to confess all that lies within, and to this release the poet and her poems succumb.
A poem is read as much by the ear as by the eye. It establishes a relationship with the reader as much by defying as by conforming to poetic norms. Raychaudhuri’s poems stimulate both vision and sound and are as tight in their construction as in the solidity of their images. The acute awareness and clear exposition of emotional fracture remains pivotal to the collection through each individual poem. The translations convey the sense of jaggedness that the poems seem to embody and evince a strong urge to not iron themselves out in the heat of approximation. The jerk of images as they shift from the cultural context of the Bengali to that of English remains sharply perceptible, offering a grainy texture to the language of the collection that complements the spirit of the poems. For instance, in the poem, ‘The Meal of Rice and Sag’ from The Food Series, the reader would need some kind of cultural acquaintance with the Bengali language to know that rice and sag is a metaphor for the minimum nourishment to keep body and soul together. In this poem, it becomes a metaphor for love received in beggarly/abject doses from the world. In all the poems of The Food Series, for that matter, food becomes a trope of love, care and emotional sustenance in a world otherwise “parched and diminished”. Through linguistic usages such as this, these translations bring alive an emotional world that has been little represented in the English language with such intensity before. This collection, on the whole, makes for a brilliant read in being the architecture of not just a single mind but of an entire civilization that has been learning to survive like the poem, in pieces.
The book can be purchased here.
Basudhara Roy teaches English at Karim City College and is the author of four collections of poems, the latest being A Blur of a Woman (Red River, 2024). Drawn to themes of gender, ecology, and mythology, she writes, edits, reviews, and sporadically curates and translates poetry from Jamshedpur, Jharkhand.
