POETRY
Time for fables and lessons
UMA MAHADEVAN-DASGUPTA
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An assertion of identity and rights.
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Sycorax: New Fables and Poems; Suniti Namjoshi, Penguin India, Rs. 195
SYCORAX, a character mentioned but not seen in Shakespeare's play "The Tempest", is the mother of Caliban. Prospero refers her to as an evil witch banished from Algiers and left by sailors on the island where, when she was pregnant with Caliban, she enslaved the spirits to work for her. Among them was Ariel, whom she imprisoned inside a tree as a punishment for his disobedience.
Return to the island
In Shakespeare's play, Sycorax dies before the arrival of Prospero and Miranda on the island, and it was Prospero who frees Ariel from the tree. In Suniti Namjoshi's sequence of poems, Sycorax returns to the island after Prospero and the other humans have gone. Caliban too is gone, "went with the gods who were only men. It's/what he deserves. He wanted so much/to be like them."
Sycorax has come back to the island to try and understand what her role is now. She thinks of dreaming, reflects on physicality, and listens to the stories of her visitors. "The Sycorax in my poem is still alive . . . She is still defiant, still fierce, but she is old and knows that death is no longer so far away that it need not be thought of... I wanted to follow Sycorax, keep her company, as it were, up to the final moment," writes Namjoshi in her opening letter to the reader. The deaths of Namjoshi's close friends — Mary Meigs, the painter and writer, and Anna Mani, the physicist — also went into the making of this collection. Above all, Namjoshi's "Sycorax" is an assertion of identity and rights. "I LIVED ON THAT ISLAND," declares the old woman all in capitals. "It was my property (at least as much as it was anybody else's)."
It is a time for fables and lessons, and this collection is marked by the creativity, wisdom and sophistication of Namjoshi's language. A riddle is wrapped up in a poem — "Not loved enough, nor yet quite lost,/no longer fought for, nor yet forgot..." — the answer being National Health Service, Britain. A saint and a tiger enter into a partnership to kill "somebody else instead".
Retold stories
In homage to the great fabulist Aesop, Namjoshi offers us the stories of a foolhardy fawn and her brave mother. While the mother explains that courage without fear has no meaning, the fawn is already dreaming of a time when fear will have no meaning. In a retelling of the story of the wolf in sheep's clothing, a rabbit and a cow watch, as other wolves eat up the poor wolf-sheep. They wonder about the interpretation they should draw from the story: "What was the message? Wherein lay the truth? And what should they believe?"
Born in India in 1941, Suniti Namjoshi attended Woodstock and Rishi Valley, studied English Literature at the University of Pune and taught there for a year before joining the IAS in 1964. P. Lal of the Kolkata-based Writers Workshop published her first book of poems. After taking leave from the Government to study public administration at the University of Missouri, Namjoshi resigned in 1969 and began a career of teaching and writing in Canada and Britain. Some of her best works, including the feminist classic Feminist Fables, The Blue Donkey Fables, and The Mothers of Maya Diip and her themes of gender and sexual orientation, have been influenced by her politicisation in the gay and lesbian movement in Britain in the late 1970s. Her imagery draws from nature and fantasy to point to difficult contemporary issues related to race and gender.
Sycorax continues, in its wickedly humorous way, to ask insistent questions about the nature of good and evil, power and powerlessness, war and peace.
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