IN CONVERSATION
`Writing is a technique in concealment'
MITA KAPUR
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Mamang Dai's poems reflect her bond with her land and her people.
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Intense: Mamang Dai
WHILE strolling around in Delhi, a stranger on a scooter stopped to offer Mamang a lift. She happily accepted and zoomed off with him. When alarmed friends later asked why she'd done so, she sweetly said she was sure she'd heard the man declare, "I am a poet", when in reality he'd actually announced, "I'm from Kuwait"! Her reply to the laughter that ensued, "Perhaps we should all find the poet in ourselves."
Mamang Dai, an intense poet from Arunachal Pradesh, has the recently published River Poems to her credit. Mamang reads her poetry in a breathless, tremulous voice, as if she were reliving each word.
Her poems are extensions of herself; when they are revealed to the world, "they no longer remain mine".
"People believe there is a lot of violence in the North East because of so many groups demanding segregation. When I write I cannot convey images of guns, bloodshed and bullet wounds. Instead I write about the stillness of the land, the changing landscape due to war and the strife ... I never use local terms, names, places though sometimes I feel I should but I want my writing to be for everyone. Writing is a technique in concealment. The art of writing changes everything. It functions at two levels — you write about reality but it takes on another colour."
Homecoming
Having spent a few years away from her home state, coming back was a rediscovery of folk literature, oral traditions, practices, customs, rituals and the people. Her bond with her land is evident in her poems. Even though she quit the IAS to be a writer, her ties took her back to Arunachal.
"It was an impulsive decision, I didn't think much about it. I did not want to get tied down, I wanted to travel, to see things before I got trapped in a routine."
As a journalist in Arunachal, "it's an uphill task. Journalists face a number of attacks instigated by the politicians. Despite the insecurity, news is trickling out now. They can't hit my pieces when I write for The Statesman and The Telegraph. Arunachal is a soft target for the insurgents. The villages are remote; the terrain is rough so it all seems peaceful over the ground. That's because people have surrendered, they have fallen silent."
No small wonder then that she pens poems like "No Dream". The tone is poignant but not blatantly sad. "I'm always searching and half the time I don't know for what, but it's important to search. I draw from the basics of existence; take my life force from my land. Even if I sit for six hours and get only one line, that's a great joy."
In "Stone Breaks the Sleeping Water", the use of fruit and flowering trees reflects her desire to have inherited flowering trees. "This poem came when we were planting saplings, I'll be dead when they begin to flower..."
Varied reading
For someone who has varied reading interests, from travelogues of Morris to Chinese poetry and Charles Allen, "I am re-reading Wuthering Heights and Anna Karenina. Simone de Beauvoir and Marquez offset her wish to learn Urdu to be able to read Faiz. "I keep journals, some of the best things I put down are the immediate ones."
"Nothing is more complicated than simplicity. Simple questions are the most difficult ones to answer. Sometimes the confusions of the mind border on despondency, as they did in `Broken Verse'."
Tribal life comes through as a pattern in her River poems. "I will remember then the great river that turned, turning with the fire of the first sun... " "There are no records. The river was the green and white vein of our lives linking the new terrain, in a lust for land brother and brother claiming the sunrise and the sunset, in a dispute settled by the rocks engraved in a vanished land."
She is now working on a short story collection, "which are all connected, and will read like a novel. They are about love, triumph, set in contemporary surroundings". "Literature from the North East needs to come out into an open forum. The North Eastern Writer's Forum has taken productive steps along with Zubaan, Katha, Penguin and the Sahitya Akademi.
Mamang paints a picture, not just writes a poem, the colours fusing with the emotions.
"Attachment is a gift of time, I know, the evening's potion provides heaven's alchemy in chromosomes of light, lighting cloud fires in thumbprints of the sky."
Mamang captivated her audience at the Jaipur Literature Festival. She spoke a language that was poetic in itself — delicate, sensitive and yet sublime.
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