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Literary Review
CONTEMPORARY POETRY
Simple and silent
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The new poetry being written in Malayalam today moves away from ideology towards experience, says THACHOM POYIL RAJEEVAN.
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P.P. Ramachandran
"IN Malayalam, the new poetry is almost repulsively pre-modern, and, but for a few exceptions, it is nothing more than imitation of the past models", said the Tamil-Malayalam writer, B. Jayamohan a few years ago. Definitely, this was an observation shared by many in Kerala until recently. But, by chance, it was his remark that provoked new poets to join issue with him.
But, Jayamohan, before the controversy over his statement had died out, in a period of less than four years, brought out two volumes of new Malayalam poetry in Tamil translation incorporating the poets he had pulled down. And, two leading publishing houses came up with anthologies of exclusively new poems. Also, by then, almost all the new poets had published their first collections, which were sold out in a few months, perhaps faster than the collections by the supposedly established poets of today.
A cultural priority
Some of these collections now have reached second and third editions, and some are prescribed for graduate and postgraduate level studies in the universities in the state. Furthermore, though awards are no indicators of the worth of a literary work, the State Sahithya Akademi award that went to P.P. Ramachandran's debut collection Kane Kane (Seeing, Seeing) last year was a public endorsement for the new poetry in the language.
All these said not to gainsay anybody's viewpoint. Nor to prove that all is well and good in contemporary Malayalam poetry. But, to suggest that poetry, like life, at all times disproves predictions and that, despite big publishers' snub, distributors' cold-shoulder and the antipathy of the mainstream, the new poetry in Malayalam has made a way into cultural priorities.
Objectivity of words
Certainly, what is meant by "new poetry" is the kind of poetry being written by a generation of poets whose initiation into poetry has been after the1980s, and, by "past models", what it was in the preceding decades, the 1960s and 70s — the period of high modernism in Malayalam. In that case, what is it that makes it "new" and distinguishes it from the "old"? Atoor Ravi Varma, poet and editor of one of the anthologies of new poetry, Puthumozhivazhikal (The Ways of the New Voices) identifies it in his foreword as: "The new poets do not rely on the habitual values of individual, family, nation, and tradition. They have no simple answers. And, they don't mix dreams, morals and ideologies in their poems. These are the poems of those who have lost their weapons and shields. Their way is rough with questions, arguments, negations and doubts. Now, maybe, this episode of disquiet is being written in all Indian languages."
At the outset, it will be incorrect to bring the new poets, from Kalpetta Narayanan to Shayam Sudhakar, under the one umbrella of a generation, for, their age ranges from late forties to mid-twenties. However, notwithstanding this divide, they are characterised by a sympathy for poetry that is peculiarly Kerala's in sensibility, which in aesthetical sense is a celebration of naturalness, as P. Raman writes in the poem, "Mullathara" (The Jasmine Mount): "Where is the way? / Where is the way? / Little climbers are restless on the jasmine mount / I didn't put up a pandal/ Nor did tame them to spread out/ But keep their restlessness intact."
Anitha Thampi
This naturalness, though it may appear like denial of the knowledge-systems of modernist culture, is not retrogression to pre-modernism. It is a way of coming to terms with one's immediate environs, doing away with the centred and schematized practices of modernism. Also an attempt at fine-tuning the language to reflect even delicate contours and shades of experience, which the poets of the 1960s and 70s either ignored or were incapable of doing because of their ideological preconditioning. Hence, manifestly, the thrust of the new poetry is on reclaiming the objectivity of words and, thus, the spontaneity of language. Now, for a poet, word is all that matters. His belief is: "Man is in a fortress/ that has no doors other than words. /Only the poet knows it. / He comes in making anything a door. / He goes out making anything a door" ("Kavi", Kalpetta Narayanan).
In women's poetry, the liberty of being uninhibited turns into a sort of deceptive naiveté. The entire range of experience is often resolved into parameters of the body. But, when V.M. Girija, Anitha Thampi, Rajani Mannadiyar and N.R. Anitha write about body or about a daily routine like sweeping, serving food at home or taking a shower, the marginal becomes the central. Writing, in Malayalam, Ezhuthu, happens as a total experience of the body as in: "As the water/ drains away / and the naked body / chills over / The shivering wind / stretched his fingers in / through the windows / I felt cold / for a moment / And the loincloth of / wetness flew away. / And wound in / crazy summer, / I forgot bashfulness. / Like the big drops / from the treetops / only the strands of hair / Write on the body / from memory / Two or three lines /with water." ("Ezhuthu", Anitha Thampi .)
Plural and eclectic
The replacement of ideology with experience enables the new poets to be plural and eclectic. Their attitudes concerning poetry and its function in life are different, sometimes even antagonistic to one another. While a poet like K.R. Tony or L. Thomas Kutty makes a reverse reading of social and cultural history through parodies and ironies, what one like Anwar Ali aims at is its rereading, eliciting the thus far unexpressed. Anwar's poem "Eakathathayude Ampathuvarshangal" (The Fifty Years of Solitude), which was published in 1997, the year the country celebrated the Golden Jubilee of the Independence, narrates the story of a freedom fighter who returns to his home in the village, dead beat, on the midnight of August 14, 1947, and falls into a sleep that continues for 50 years. The poem, structured in the form of a shooting report for a TV documentary and interposed with dialogue and real life situations, juxtaposes the concept and reality of freedom.
Social, political, historical or just personal, clarity, which always is mistaken for plainness, is the most outstanding feature of the new poetry. The new poets have no big claims for what they write. They know that poetry is no substitute for anything. As one expects of the new generation, they have a feeling that by the time they turned up, all the big shows were over. For them, it is as simple (lalitham) as: "A Sweet chirp is enough / to let it be known / `I am here.' / Just feather drop is enough/ to prove `I was here'. / Simply the warmth of hatching is enough/ to say / `I will be here.' / Birds! How could they articulate life/ much simpler!" ("Lalitham", P.P. Ramachandran.) It's this ease that the much younger poets like K. Veerankutty and Shayam Sudhakar take to further lucidity, making poetry an experience of language.
Thachom Poyil Rajeevan is an editor with Yeti Books.
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