EXPRESSIONS
Poetry of survival
THACHOM POYIL RAJEEVAN
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Taken as a whole, contemporary Eastern European poetry provides just the right models of poetry turning into an antithesis of power and authoritarianism.
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Irreplaceable role: Poets at the Zagreb Poetry Festival.
If a people/ have no poets/ and no poetry of their own/ for a national anthology/ then treachery and barking/ will do the trick.
Ali Podrimja, Albanian poet
WHEN Croatian poet Lana Derkac said, after the five-day biennial Zagreb Poetry Festival last autumn, that poetry would survive as long as suffering and dreams of emancipation haunt human consciousness, I thought it was nothing more than a genuine poet's optimistic enthusiasm; more than ever, at a time when the notion that poetry has become marginal is being widely circulated. But, as Lana began reading from collections by poets from Eastern Europe and the USSR, I realised that her remark pointed to some basics about poetry, about its irreplaceable role in individual as well as social life.
Importantly, poetry has some sort of a generic affability and expressional felicity that tempt one to think that one can not only read it but write it too. And, apart from the aesthetic and ideological propositions, poetry has a mediational function that makes it primarily an expression of what is immediate and emergent in life at moments of emotional outbreak or during personal or social predicaments, for which there is no other substitute among literary forms.
Fundamental aspect
Though written in different languages, in diverse contexts and on varied experiences, the poems now being written in Albania, Bosnia, Croatia, Hungary, Macedonia, or Ukraine vindicate this fundamental aspect of poetry that it is a medium that helps man regain his faith in himself and humanity and how it becomes the collective unconscious of a people.
Taken as a whole, what is common in contemporary Eastern European poetry is that it provides just the right models of poetry turning into an antithesis of power and authoritarianism. And, it doesn't demand mediation between the poet and the reader because words and images sprout from real life situations.
Irrespective of whether the poets are renowned or not, or their poetry fits into customary definitions of what poetry is, the ineffaceable remembrance of the past, concentration of suffering, spiritual indignation and moral disbelief prevalent in the poems make significant poets of them.
For the reason that the poems, besides being things of beauty, as Hilda Schiff says in the introduction to the anthology Holocaust Poetry, "allow us to understand historical events and experience better than the bare facts alone can do because they enable us to absorb them inwardly", we come as close as we can to entering psychologically into those unique events as they were actually felt by those individuals who experienced them."
Voice to emotional life
The Ukrainian poet Ihor Kalynets makes it unequivocal in his bio-note. He and his wife were arrested for the civil disobedience, which is expressed in his poetry. In 1972, they were sentenced to six years of strict-regime camps and three years of exile, which they served in the northern Urals and the trans-Baikal region, where he worked as a turner and stoker. "I suffered, but I did not repent and am pleased by that, for I feel that I have remained a human being. Poetry helped me to survive both the periods. I am not certain that this would please the readers," he says.
Oksana Zabuzko, another Ukrainian poet and novelist of international repute, expresses this sentiment more vehemently. Ukrainian poetry, she says, voices the sensibility and emotional life of a people condemned to party doctrine. But, from the time of Stalin until the dawn of glasnost, the minutest hint of Ukrainian cultural uniqueness was violently attacked as `bourgeois nationalism,' which, under Soviet law, was punishable — death under Stalin, and the notorious formula of `seven plus five' (seven years of prison camp and five years of exile) under Brezhnev.
Thus, everything that poetry did could be designated as `Nationalism'; be it using an archaic ornamental language, playing with Ukrainian mythological themes, or alluding to some figures and events in Ukrainian history — all tantamount to an overt political challenge.
Agonising history
The history of the Eastern European people has always been unbelievably agonising. Fighting with each other on ethic, religious, national, political and linguistic identities, they went on appearing and disappearing on the globe. The maps of their countries were many times drawn and redrawn. And, they were a people not allowed to love their country and languages for the most part of their historical existence.
So, it's quite natural that an immaculate sentiment for their nation, culture and language constitutes the ethos of their poetry, as the Bosnian poet Goran Samardzic writes: Whenever I leave Bosnia,/I feel I am guilty of something;/I feel time, not contentment,/And it's worse/Than the worst injection./I have several Bosnian friends/who fall ill when they leave the country./In Bosnia nothing disgusts me./ I could eat from the floor here in Bosnia.
Language issues
This doesn't mean that love for the country is just a `slogan of romantic nationalism'. But, as regards poetry, the language and culture one writes in is the most valuable thing on earth. An awareness without which writing is a play of apathetic spirit, a meaningless gesticulation that only pretends to possess significance. "How can you otherwise write in an endangered language? How can writing a poem be reconciled with the knowledge that in a few generations your message will become illegible?" Oksana asks.
Reading an Albanian or Bosnian poet is like travelling through a landscape tormented by blood and strife. An expression of the inmost and the intimate, of the incomprehensible and the unforeseeable. Poetry for them is: A blank sheet of paper— /this future./After me, words are left— /footprints in the white snow of the paper,/showing clearly/where I walked. ("Footprints" by Bulgarian poet Roman Kissiov, )
Thachom Poyil Rajeevan writes in Malayalam and English. E-mail: rthachompoyil@yahoo.com
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