“Poetry is a political action undertaken for the sake of information, the faith, the exorcism, and the lyrical invention, that telling the truth makes possible. Poetry makes taking control of the language of your life. Good poems can interdict a suicide, rescue a love affair, and build a revolution in which speaking and listening to somebody becomes the first and last purpose to every social encounter,” noted the celebrated poet of the Black Arts Movement, June Jordon (1936–2002).
Her poems not only expressed inherent racist violence that she had witnessed but also helped exhume histories that were buried deep by the ignorant culture of the United States, which excluded everything that helped any person of colour belong. In her words, poems were a tool to tell the truth. The form helped her process grief. While they may not have brought any hope, they did suggest change with the fight she was putting up against the powerful. She wouldn’t back down. Her message was clear.
Fact and fiction
In a contextual way, the simmering, inventive, and significant poems in Jeet Thayil’s latest poetry collection I’ll Have It Here conflate fact and fiction, blending grieving both the dead and alive, achieving a similar milestone that, in my view, Jordan’s poems did.
This is Thayil’s first poetry collection since These Errors Are Correct (2008), which won him the Sahitya Akademi award in 2012. In I’ll Have It Here, the Booker Prize-shortlisted author divides the fifty poems in this book into three parts, each one a bouquet of striking imagery.
The first one, “Diminishing Marginal Utility”, signals the eclectic turn he lends to his train of thought as he formulates the setup and concludes the poem. He is not only laughing at the concept of economics but is also attempting to encapsulate the breadth and scale of experiences both familiar and incomprehensible. Then, there’s “I’m Grieving, Aren’t You?” which looks at you in the face, reminding you of the joke that democracy has become. From gun violence in America to abortion, it also makes one rethink the confidence one has placed in their leaders with an unshakeable faith, which is inherently a result of privilege and power. However, people rarely realise that when megalomaniacs get to rule, then everything and everyone is at risk.
In “Blut Unh Ehre”, a Nazi political slogan that translates to “Blood and Honor”, Thayil seems to be recollecting the past to help readers realise what’s transpiring in the modern-day world is clearly a mistake that had already been made previously. It explores how one chooses to consider their ideas as pure, treating others as undesirable, unwanted, and hence, unconstitutional in the eyes of the majority.
There’s this acute longing in “Seven-Year Season” with Pascalle Burton – a Meanjin-based experimental poet – whose opening line one can sample for its simple yet powerful construction: I whisper your name and the day turns warm. The economy of words is a significant characteristic of The Dead in which Thayil writes, “Better not to be heard / than misheard”.
Shaking things up
The poet, who had earlier noted that he may not produce another collection, appears at the height of his craft in the way he takes liberty into selecting his subject matters, news, and feelings that suggest a politics that’s at first at the service of his art. He seems to be amused by caressing his verses, helping them perform this quintessential duty to delight the reader. Be it the ghazals or the way he concludes the first poem in the second part of this collection. In this part, once more, one finds how hyperaware Thayil is regarding the capacity of laughter to shake things up. It’s something that the powerful hate, for rarely can they take a joke on themselves. Furthermore, Thayil’s verses also culminate in a jocular manner as if nothing matters but taking a satisfying drag of a cigarette. For example, here’s how a seemingly serious poem – which poem isn’t serious anyway? – “A Kind of Anthem” ends: Got a light? Something similar is reflected in “Mind If I Smoke?”.
Sample this:
You were gone in a blink,
gone too soon,
like smoke from a shared cigarette.
Inhale, try not to think.
At the same time, both these poems deliver a hint of grief, unprocessed loss. Then, there’s “The Ghost of Mr Greatsoul” in which he lays bare the intergenerational trauma of the Partition of India in a way that matters to a layperson. There are complaints not only about what helps the mechanics of everyday living but there’s also an allusion towards how Mahatma Gandhi’s image is being proffered in the name of divisive politics. However, it isn’t the case, per my reading, that Gandhi was any better. Why shouldn’t one question the masses’ ideals? This is something that Jordan championed in her poetry, and reflects in Thayil’s works, too. “Wapsi” is perhaps one of the most overtly political poems in this collection. Thayil verbalises the violence, expressing the grammar of hate that the majoritarian Hindu right leverages to silence the people whose country India very much is. There’s one arresting sentence in this poem: Why measure time with words when words are met with violence?
“February 2020” captures the climate of terror that gripped the nation when the naturalised, democratic, women-led protests against the CAA-NRC law propositions seemed to threaten the government, which retaliated in a predictable way, cracking down on its conscience-keeping citizens. Then, “December 2020” invokes an incident on which the late Ismail Kadare weaved a whole novel A Dictator Calls, which was translated into English by John Hodgson, and helps highlight the state the country is in:
Where did conscience go in India’s new gulag?
To the alley, to sell itself for fame in the plague.
Thayil’s poems remembering Dom Moraes and Eunice de Souza also reminded me of Anne Michaels’ Giller Prize-winning novel Held’s opening sentence: “We know life is finite. Why should we believe death lasts forever?” In these poems, Thayil seems to be submitting the fact that these poets’ works continue to inform and guide him and his craft, giving him company on a lonely trek that wordsmithing tends to be. For the complex emotions that poems in this collection help process, the truth-telling it champions, and the lightness it preserves despite the dark alleys Thayil takes his readers to, I’ll Have It Here possesses everything that will charm, dazzle, and question the reader.
I’ll Have It Here: Poems, Jeet Thayil, HarperCollins India.
