POETRY
Hard-won humanity
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`Different Faces reminds us yet again that the intensely particular frequently has more charge and resonance than ponderous abstraction and sweeping generality.'
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CERTAIN charges recur time and again in reviews of women's poetry all over the world. The poetry is either criticised for being too personal (read not universal) or too impersonal (which entails a lament over the absence of "raw emotion" in the work). Of course, raw emotion is a quality rarely sought in poetry by men. It is a virtue prized only in women's poetry, until it is actually found. After that, the "too personal" argument swings into action once again, and the work is dismissed with the customary barrage of epithets: shrieky, snivelling, self-absorbed.
Somewhere in these knee-jerk responses, a crucial point is overlooked: the fact that the "I" in poetry of any merit is employed as a conscious aesthetic strategy, not as the inevitable mode of self-revelation, as a matter of artistic choice rather than psychological compulsion. Different Faces, Marilyn Noronha's first book of poems, reminds us yet again that the intensely particular frequently has more charge and resonance than ponderous abstraction and sweeping generality.
A quiet and accomplished debut, the book is divided into three sections: "Staying Alive", "Being Woman" and "It Will Be Different". As the section titles suggest, the poems segue between the individual and collective voice, the personal and the social landscape. In the best poems, the personal pronoun is invoked unapologetically and effectively. These are poems that seem to draw not so much on the resources of image as of tone to create a variety of emotional ragas. The "I" speaks in different tones, ranging from the muted to the celebratory, from the ironic to the elegiac, from the reflective to the exultant, the poignant to the irreverent.
The recurrent trope is negotiation and survival in a dysfunctional, far from innocent world. There is the recognition of a self that gets abraded, even wounded in the process, but the poetry is always rescued from self-pity by generous doses of humour, directed as much at the self as at the other. However, this is not poetry of bluff good cheer either. The humanity is hard-won. The poet can write of a seemingly simple, almost prelapsarian world where a hug from "my fat aunt" is all it takes to find "answers/ to so many things/ that other grown-up people have forgotten". But the vitiated reality in which she now finds herself is also acknowledged. There is a penetrating discernment of deceit and humbug of all kinds — of "all counterfeit attempts at comfort", of "gloating" that "tries to masquerade as counsel". And for all its conscious adoption of humour as a survival mechanism, there are moments of unbridled rage: "You surge forward, frightening/ in your fury, till camouflage is chased/ out of the temple./ The anger makes the difference".
There is a certain envy of what seems like the uncomplicated life of the other: the self-containment of beautiful people who inherit the world, the instinctual life of the worms "never yearning/ never striving". But there also remains a stout awareness that life at the margins brings its own rewards: "being a black sheep/ could be fortunate". And even the lemming, programmed to perform that last ritual of collective suicide, knows that if all living beings are born to die, "we lemmings are born/ more chosen than others".
The first section contains some of my favourite poems. These are poems that look an inhospitable world in the face, attempting to confront adversity while retaining a certain sanity and good sense. In "Different Faces", the title poem, a chance encounter with an old acquaintance on a railway platform uncorks nostalgic memories of the past — of being "punch-drunk on youth" at a fancy-dress party. One is not surprised by the lurch of the train that interrupts the reminiscences in a poem that is so obviously about the fleeting intersection of life-stories. But the strength of the poem lies in the dignity and acceptance of the last line: "Our masks are intact,/ grown into faces/ and we will alight/ at different places". "Our Marriage" is another short poem that seems to start out saying the predictable things: "We had invented,/ between a man and woman,/ a strangely balanced mixture/ of roots and wings/ and wheels of laughter to help us glide along". But then you discover the economy of the last line, poignant in its aching awareness of the evanescence of its reality when compared with the loftiness of its aspiration: "For one short/ shining second/ we had even contrived to fly."
There are times in this book when you ask yourself whether this poetry is much too simple. Is it accessible to the point of being obvious, deficient in the mystery that makes poetry the charged utterance that prose can never hope to be? But the suspicion is quickly dismissed as you realise that Noronha's work is precisely about employing the singsong cadence, the seemingly jejune quality of the nursery rhyme to make its point. The resources of children's verse are used consciously and to great effect, leading you through innocent narratives that are suddenly fractured to give you a terrifying glimpse into a hinterland of grief, throbbing rage and darkness. Consider "Jambul Tree", a poem that deals at some length with the life history of a tenacious tree in a church compound — one that grew tall and offered shelter to birds, but refused to bear fruit or to be felled, until brought down by a storm. After that the tree is the focus of attention on the street, and "everybody comes to see/ what they can get". It is a "once upon a time" story, complete in itself and nothing prepares you for the last line that inflects the poem with an altogether new resonance: "I had an aunt, once, like that."
The nursery rhyme strategy is at its most overt and successful in a poem that starts out as a wry appraisal of the self in the mirror: "Mirror, mirror on the shelf/ tells ghoulish tales about myself... / Points out wrinkles near my eyes,/ shows I've grown to twice my size... " Colleagues and acquaintances, self-righteously frank, are also mirrors that point out "that my front tooth's chipped, I've a double chin,/ my glossy mane's now listless and thin". You read with progressive unease about the boss who believes "removing a gall bladder's routine... and the same with the uterus". And you finally realise how deluded you were to believe this was a poem of facile wit: "Till the mind struggles free, flees to my silent space/ where I call up my names, look each one in the face — I am Warrior, Healer, Siren ... .mirror, mirror on the shelf... / Daughter, Mother, Sister, Lover, Friend — / I have embraced myself."
Noronha's poetry works precisely because it doesn't strain for profundity or humanity. It is to my mind at its least successful when it underscores its moral or its "universal significance", as it does in a poem like "It Will Be Different". There is compassion in this poetry, but it is not of a jingoistic kind. Its finest moments are those when Noronha rediscovers the magic of the quiet uninflected statement, the poetic craft lying in the refusal to strive for effect: "When my fat aunt/ sits me on her lap/ it's better than my water mattress... / When we laugh together,/ she and I,/ everything feels perfect."
Different Faces, Marilyn Noronha, Allied Publishers, 2003, p.75, Rs.150.
ARUNDHATHI SUBRAMANIAM
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