In Memoriam

 

Ma. Possibly in Agra in the late 1960s.

A birthday is a hollow sock

when the person’s gone,

stockings empty of the present,

no chats on the phone.

 

A birthday is flowers and vase,

and some photographs,

a looping back and touching base

and cupcakes on behalf.

 

A birthday is a cloudy mood

the weight of milestones,

a mixed up bit of pensive glad

and darker undertones.

 

Although the day's a mooring too - 

pinning the year in place,

a chance to dial the chaos down,

to renew and retrace.

 

A thumbing of old albums and

a rough-edged thankfulness

that we had what we had when they

lived at the same address. 

Inexplicit, 29th January

 

Your love wasn’t given in lunch box notes,

wasn’t nailed to the bed in a stocking.

It was in a firmly buttoned raincoat

a calm hand offered crossing the Ring road.

It didn’t really set much store by talking.

 

Your love wasn’t given in countable stuff,

in branded clothes and trainers, themed décor.

It was there in the knock when I had stayed up

late into the night, in the abrupt ‘enough’

at the thin line of light under my door.

 

It was given in ways so unobtrusive –

in the kneading of dough, in workaday hands

on the wheels - showing how to love and live

without words making it threadbare explicit –

unnoticed, but quite easy to understand.

Yesterday was my parents' wedding anniversary, so...My February and celebration of love starts end January and continues till 29th Feb which is my father's birthday (marked on 1st March on non-leap years). 

Though I have to confess that I am not much for Valentines and such myself, I am more into the idea that love is to be celebrated at every opportunity, 24/7. It's just that I don't like the Indian right wing going around brandishing their weird morality meter and thrusting it down everybody's throat. Valentine's Day is a western import like many other things and it's up to each individual how s/he will express their love, whether through western imports or eastern traditions or whatever. Get thee behind us pronto, the Indian Taliban! The erosion of women's rights in the last few years is truly unbelievable and being carried out in insidious ways. 

Anyways, I digress. One of the things that floated into my mind yesterday as I was thinking of my parents is that how memories of death tend to overshadow those of the life lived. I struggle to dissociate the isolated last few years and terribly painful, lonely deaths my parents went through, from the long years of happier, more pleasant times they had with each other, with me and with their wider families. 

Their deaths were marked by my physical absence but I was, due to technology, able to witness nearly all of their struggle right up to the very last, for which I am thankful and no mistake. Because from my pov, the alternative would have been even more unbearable. But from theirs, I was not present at the deathbed and not able to offer any comfort. That has skewed my grief with a whole heap of complex emotions and it is not an easy process to untangle this. But the untangling is necessary if I'm to stop defining their life only in terms of their deaths. My father grieved my mother alone in complete isolation for 11 months. He lived for 89 years, fully active for 85 till a stroke made him housebound. That's a good measure of happiness to offset against a year of difficult dying, terrible as it is. Each must be given its due weightage. I'm learning to do that and be thankful for this too. 

As a family, we didn't talk much about emotions, though we talked a lot about other things, my mother especially wasn't a silent person. My father, once he retired, talked and wrote about his childhood in his ancestral village, his life in towns and cities in India growing up and working. Overall, they weren't a touchy feely generation, they had seen too much hardship when young - the partition, the wars, the famine, the communal violence, their own uprooting and relocations forced by circumstances, the untimely, shocking losses in the family. It had squeezed the sentimentality out of them I think, but made them into quietly, deeply loving people. I celebrate them and their ways of loving and I'm determined that somewhere, someday, I'll be able to to do that without their deaths clouding my memories of their life. 

Would it be easier to process?

 

Detail from a famous Mughal tomb, Delhi.

Would grief be different if it had a headstone,

a slab of marble, an engraved epitaph,

would it be easier to process, move on

if it had more than just a photograph?

 

If the ashes weren’t dispersed, anonymous

part of the delta and onward to the bay

would it be simpler if there were a focus?

A tangible niche for a lamp or bouquet?

 

Would grief be different if it didn’t have to

look up to stars and ease be reimagined,

to look for heaven in seas and skies of blue,

to dredge for peace the rain and the sweep of wind.

 

Would it dissolve quicker and so integrate

if there were a concrete spot to touch and weep,

could a grave contain its unbearable weight

and would that make it simpler to breathe and sleep?

Once upon a time that is now light years away, a Scottish friend and I were in a deep conversation about the disposal of the dead in various cultures. I told her about the Indian Hindu practice of cremating bodies on funeral pyres lit by the eldest son. She had shuddered and said two things that stayed with me - 

1) pretty traumatising for the son, especially if young

                     and 

2) where do you go to put flowers then?

Where, indeed?

Cremation was actually quite common in many cultures, the Ancient Greeks and Romans both certainly practiced it, as well as some Nordic folks. A little different from the current practice in India, because the ashes from the pyre (which consist of the bones, all else is consumed) weren't necessarily scattered or immersed in rivers, but given a ritual burial. Therefore, there was still something tangible for the family/loved ones to gather around and feel connected to. 

This the Indian practice does not encourage because holding onto any part of the body is believed to hold the departed soul back in its spiritual journey onward. Plus it is a forcible realisation for the family and helps them accept the finality of death. The process starts with the ritual cremation and immersion of ashes. And then progresses in stages till the 4th and 11th days, and then at monthly intervals up to the first anniversary of the death. This is what my mother had explained when I brought this topic up with her. Letting go in one fell swoop and then acclimatising to it over a year. At the time, I accepted it without much thinking, I mean, who even thinks at that age, right?

But now that I'm older and slower to accept things as given, plus I have lost several family members in quick succession over the last three years, I'm wondering... If letting the remains flow away to the oceans and become an unknown part of the planet is really the best way forward for the living. Certainly from the societal point of view, considering land scarcity in cities and saturated graveyards, yes that's so. But from the pov of individual trying to get used to the absence? Does it have to be this drastic and must they have no place to go to and draw breath? Would grief be different, made easier if there was something of the earthly body of the departed left, however minuscule, on the same plane as the living? 

The other, and massive, disadvantage of cremating the dead, is that a whole heap of historical records are lost. Also in one fell swoop. Not to mention the forensic evidence in dodgy circs.

Even after so many years, not quite at home...

 ...and probably never going to be... 

There’s a difference, slight, hard to pinpoint

between home and homeland – for a few,

along the axis, that see-through joint

of comfort zones with the love for new.

 

You turn the keys in familiar locks

and knock at doors you’ve knocked at before

but every room morphs into a clock

and points you back at that very door.

 

One tugs you back and one yanks you on

never mind how firm your hold or stand,

there are other rivers, banks, soil, stone –

the urgent calls of a different land.

 

You’ll never again quite settle down

because your home isn’t your hometown.

Hellow and happy happies to you. Hope your year has started well and continues to treat you kindly and fairly. 

This is not the poem I'd wanted to see the year in with, seriously. I thought this year I'll get something you know, a bit peppy and upbeat. But...here it is, this is the first poem that got written, what can one do? More importantly, should one want to do something? Nonpeppy can be happy too, can't it? It feels more honest right now. So let me say that again, a nonpeppy- honest, happy new year to you. 

I don't do resolutions for a long time now. Among my irresolute goals are, as always - be and breathe and stress less. Write it as it comes and stop trying to be peppy and sundry other things you know you can't be. Believe that other people know it too, no-one gets taken in by a false, shrill upbeat.  

The home leave was hectic and wonderful. Pocked a bit with horrible officialese and paperwork and medical issues - all got resolved, except some minor stuff. So no biggie. Didn't have much time to log on here though, will be making up for lost time now hopefully. 

Stay well. 

Year end 2K22 : Not Just a Christmas Thing

 

One year, many years ago when the blog was still a toddler unsteady on its legs, my father and I got into a discussion about Irene Rutherford's poem 'Is Love Then So Simple?' That spun off many responses in my head and one of them was this 'ereunder. Reposting it because it felt particularly appropriate just now.

Love Is Not Just a Christmas Thing

I’ll love you with the dance in my bones

and the pigeon calls in my veins

with the soil of my flesh and its stones,

the bungled belly laugh in my brains.

I’ll love you when the dances get dim

when the anklets draw hooks and blood

when pirouette is brimstone and grim

the last thrash of fish on the mud.

I’ll love you when the tinsel’s trash

when the tree’s just needles on the floor

all festive is only one flash,

and the dark is the maw of the door.

I’ll love you still when the music thins

under the amber songs of dawnskins.

It's been an extraordinary year - the good, the bad and the ugly. The challenges have been many - some earth shattering, some just a pinprick, but then so have the high points.

But...at this time, every year end, the bad and the ugly somehow drain away and only the residues of the good remain, like the faint smear of sand on fingers that have been building sandcastles on the beach for too long. That can't be dusted away no matter how hard I try. Has to be properly scrubbed off under the shower, now that it's dark and play must be taken indoors. 

However, I have to confess I'm not taking that shower yet. As I am content to go around with the grit under my nails and inside my shoes, ever so slightly uncomfortable but welcome still because it originates from a place of happiness.  Thankful for everything the year has brought me, the learning that has happened, the castles that have been built and those that fell and/or never got finished. Everything has its place in the wider scheme of things and nothing is ever wasted, not even a grain...my mother, Arundhati, used to say that often.

The advantage of having a mother who was named after a star is that I just have to look up at the night sky and there she is....still twinkling down at me with all her wisdom and laughter and life lessons and love and constancy, still steadfastly beside her partner star in the heavens. Both my parents have been with me all through this year - the farther I travel out from the centre, the closer they watch over me and my family, the deeper and broader their presence feels in my life, both present and past. And hopefully in the future too. 

Wishing you all the joys of this festive season. Happiness, peace and plenty of sandcastles to build in 2023. See you in the New Year!

What does this need a title for?

Everyday's a pasted famous quote -
Al Prufrock or Tagore's Paper Boat
on it's timeline, just in case you think
it's a dead end, dead pen pushing ink,
not a solace, just a flimsy dream
the escape hatch of a digital scream
before it burrows back into the day
and ponders if anything gold will stay
and are there any rare metals at all
in the million, billion plastic dolls,
in the slow pulse of chronology,
in the cell walls of soliloquy.
A sudden buzz on the telephone -
just alive, but also a dead zone.

In my apron

Poppy field by van Gogh, 1890. Image credit

I will not let this snow cover

of violence deaden my world

into breathless radio silence.

I will not let sandpaper words,

the hard, wind-tossed hearts of vandals,

swamp out the daisies and poppies

when and where it’s spring. I’ll let drifts

of leaves fall wherever they want,

weave against this doorsill in autumn.

I’ll pluck huge bouquets of hope,

keep them massed in my apron

like secret talismans. From the red

wildfires of poppies I’ll pick them,

and from the red, dead leaf banks.

I’ll walk miles of cheerful wildflowers

and the sky’ll sew its own linings

overhead in gold and silvershine.

And the sharp-spiralled razor wires

won’t stop a single leaf. Or stop me

from holding the flaming bunches

in the crook of my torn elbows.

***

In praise of some violence

Malfuf wa Malik: Collaborations, Displacements, Exiles, and Fleas*

Talking about collaborations, take a listen to an uber famous one – in the Arab world, and right round the globe -

Marcel Khalife is a Lebanese musician, composer and oud-maestro who in the 1960's set to music and sang this hugely popular rendition of Rita...whose love story is cut short by the political exigencies of her times. "Between Rita and my eyes there is a rifle...Rita's name was a feast in my mouth, her body was a wedding in my blood" - some of the most exquisite use of language I have had the good fortune to come across, even after whatever must have been lost in translation! Written by Mahmoud Darwish, who else?

The poet of resistance

Now what can I tell you about Mahmoud Darwish? He was born in 1941, the same year incidentally, that Rabindranath Tagore, an iconic Bengali poet, died. Darwish was a much-awarded, much beloved and revered and studied poet throughout the Arab world and way beyond. He was in himself a voice for the Palestinian struggle, the exiles, the dispossessed, his "Record! I am an Arab!" practically became an anthem for the Palestinians. He was identified with the resistance to such a degree by everyone that he once famously complained it would be nice to be able to write a poem about a woman, without the readers immediately loading it with all sorts of political meanings. But these are well-known facts, his work and his life have been studied and presented in much greater depth than I can do in a blogpost. 


Maybe I should start with my journeys -. My first exposure to poetry was early, the first poems I remember were Tagore's, chanted to me at around 4 years old. My mum had many of his long, ballad-like poems perfectly memorised, stanza after stanza, and I got a lot of them all through toddlerhood onwards. The first foreign language poems were obviously in English, there was a Palgrave's Golden Treasury at home, and I read - Spring, the sweet spring, is the years' pleasant king :) and badgered my father's secretary till she typed it out on a sheet I could carry around everywhere because that hardcover book was too uncomfortable for my 7-year-old fingers. The first translated poem I read was from French - Noliwe by Leopold Sedar Senghor, at school as a teenager. Somewhere along the line I remember picking up Neruda's poetry and being mesmerised by him too. What I'm trying to say in my usual waffly way is that I was no stranger to translated poetry. Yet when I came to Bahrain 20 years ago, I knew nil about Arabic poetry or the poets. Zilch. Totally blank. But that has changed, slowly and steadily, though I have a long way to go still...

  "If I were another I would have belonged to the road,

neither you nor I would return. Awaken the guitar

and we might sense the unknown and the route that tempts

the traveler to test gravity. I am only

my steps, and you are both my compass and my chasm..."

There is a lightness, a radiance in Darwish's language that uplifts even as the messages of sorrow and anger and homelessness and dispossession move deeply. The yearning to belong, the longing to stand where your roots are, to feel the earth your forefathers have tilled - these are at once universal and very individual. The bone-deep nostalgia for places lost - hiraeth, the Welsh call it, and Bengalis and Palestinians could probably be the silver and gold medallists in that department! :) 

"I am a woman. No more and no less

I live my life as it is 

thread by thread 

and I spin my wool to wear, not 

to complete Homer’s story, or his sun. 

And I see what I see 

as it is, in its shape,

though I stare every once

in a while in its shade

to sense the pulse of defeat, 

and I write tomorrow

on yesterday’s sheets: there’s no sound

other than echo."

The best poems are those, when you read them for the first time, you feel you've waited forever for those very words to throw a mantle of enchantment around you and make your senses swim. For this one poet, and only him/her, to sum your entire life up, to shake up and reassemble your feelings in wondrous configurations. To lead your heart into a place where it kneels and almost forgets to beat. Beyond magical!

Homecoming


Like many young Palestinians, poet Mourid Barghouti didn't know when he left his hometown Ramallah in 1966 for Cairo, that it would be a while before he saw it again. The following year the Six-day War broke out as he sat his final year exams, and Mourid was denied entry back into Palestine. For 30 years. He travelled back to it in 1996, and I Saw Ramallah is an account of that homecoming. It has won awards, and it is an evocative, lyrical and powerful narrative of the Palestinian displacement, and of the literature of exile generally.

Displacement is like death. One thinks it only happens to other people. From the summer of '67 I became that displaced stranger whom I had always thought was someone else.

The stranger is the person who renews his Residence Permit. He fills out forms and buys stamps for them. He has to constantly come up with evidence and proofs. He is the one who is always asked: "And where are you from, brother?" Or he is asked: "Are summers hot in your country?" He does not care for the details that concern the people of that country where he finds himself, or for their 'domestic' policy. But he is the first to feel its consequences. He may not rejoice in what makes them happy but he is always afraid when they are afraid. He is always the 'infiltrating element' in demonstrations, even if he never left home that day...

And because I was born into a Partition family, and heard the stories growing up - of refugees, forced displacement and dispossession due to cataclysmic political events - Bengalis of my generation, born several years after the Partition have also been shaped by their missing homelands and homes somehow.  Therefore I related to Barghouti's story on several levels even without having to get into the ins and outs of the Arab-Israeli conflict. I Saw Ramallah gave me a context for understanding both these poets who write so eloquently and so poignantly.

I will leave you with this reading of "Nothing pleases me" by Darwish. All I am going to say is - his poetry pleases, pleases? what an inadequate word! no, it thrills me exceedingly. 

*According to one interpretation by the author of his family name, Barghouti comes from the word 'flea.'

Tell me, where is poetry bred?

This is where poetry comes from -

the textured silk of the sea.

The sunset hitting a window frame

quiet iridescence of beauty.

The abrupt blinking of small screens.

Spider webs of unused rooms.

The stab that makes the silence scream.

Empty bottles of perfume.

The yellow ribbons of the road,

the white ribbons of contrails,

the silver shined parallel ropes

of long-distance vanishing rails.

The mists quivery with early light,

a lone boat returning late.

The scattered shrapnel of a life,

the shudder of a mangled gate.

The strange geometry of geodes.

Comfort zones of shaggy mundane.

The footwork of slow dancing blood

in the long corridors of veins.

'It' is flexible and quiet and sometimes not flexible at all

It’s a distant single file of women

trudging through the scorching morning deserts  -

It’s a single winding line of silence.

A flower blooming, ignoring the fence.

A rash of lights on the dark of nightskin -

It’s always more in silence than in words.

It mostly needs no further embellishments,

a trade-off between this silence and that.

It stops too at the rank and the rotten

and tries to see nothing is forgotten.

The blanks of pauses make their quiet difference

the truth and the toothcomb, concise and exact.

Today this blog completes five years, and I was looking through the posts and here is the very first poem I posted called Pixellate.  A lot of water under the bridge since then, and I am rubbish at marking the individual waves, but I do notice how amidst all the changes, some things don't budge at all.  

What are you celebrating this weekend? Have a happy one!

A Celebration of Blogs and Life, which is a Woman Breaking Eggs : 300th blog entry

Hello folks, all who stop by here.  Today I am celebrating my 300th blog entry with a very special guest post from  a very special poet and blogger - Adura Ojo.  I came across her poetry/writing about two years ago, from the Romantic Friday Writers website and her own blog. Her writing spoke to me because I too, like her, straddle different cultures and continents, and because I did a bit of my growing up in Nigeria, where her roots lie. She has a unique and forthright voice, with the characteristic lyrical lilt of West Africa.  

Here she talks about life as an immigrant and 'minority other', the identity issues we struggle with, and her debut poetry collection - Life is a Woman Breaking Eggs.

Over to you Adura, the page is yours. 

What ‘Life*’ Taught Me about Identity & the Immigrant Experience

First I’d like to say thank you, Nilanjana for giving me the opportunity to guest post on your blog and to meet your readers. My name is Adura Ojo. I am a blogger, poet and writer. Recently I published my poetry book:  Life is a Woman Breaking Eggs.  I’m British-Nigerian. I wanted ‘Life*’ to reflect my identity and how I see the world.  This was important to me because of life events that helped shape the individual I had become. One of these is the immigrant experience – my main focus in this post.

Life in Nigeria

My parents took me back to Nigeria when I was three. I lived in Nigeria for eighteen years, so a major part of my formative years was spent there up to my first degree and graduation.  Identity was never an issue. It was a given. My ethnic group – Yoruba – is one of the three major ethnic groups in Nigeria.  I doubt that most of us ever question the ease with which we live in our various countries of origin. Whether you are Indian or Nigerian, you go about your daily business with relative ease. A conversation with the customer service assistant at the post office is not a hassle because you understand each other’s language, local names and use of English.

Life in the UK

One of the things that exasperated me the most when I came back to live in the UK was the need to always have to spell my name. It was a never ending ritual. It was a constant reminder that I was the other. Other experiences included being ignored, not being served, people twisting what you said, pretending to misunderstand what you said, being given an instruction repeatedly though you’ve done nothing that clearly shows that you misunderstood the instruction, - and the one that’s really hard to stomach - people taking your idea as theirs. (Presumably their ears took a vacation when you spoke!) Dealing with one’s experience as the ‘minority other’ can be traumatic. It can leave the individual feeling alienated, unappreciated, frustrated and angry. I experienced all of these emotions as portrayed in ‘The Museum’, ‘Say My Name’, ‘Eggs Crack Easy’ and ‘Zebra Crossing*.’ Racism compounds the diaspora experience because it gives the oppressor power to stigmatize a group of people who are already feeling alienated. 

What ‘Life’* Taught Me

Identity is one of those fundamental needs that define humanity. It can also produce conflicts within the individual. The diaspora experience is one of those conflicts, in particular the immigrant experience. Having lived in Nigeria until I was 21, I found myself declared an ‘immigrant’ in my land of birth. British institutions and way of life were strange to me. It seemed like the system was designed to keep me out rather than welcome me in. It took years of grit and determination to not drown in a sea of frustration and alienation. Holding on to my core identity sustained me and provided a shield against the trauma of being a minority other.

As I held on to my Nigerian identity, I also opened up to what I liked about British-ness. The poem ‘French’ was a revelation to me. It was a reflection on my experiences while on holiday in Morocco. I was so irate, so righteously indignant and arrogant that no one in the Moroccan restaurant spoke English! It made me realize how proud I was of my British identity. – That I am as fiercely proud to be British as I am to be Nigerian; and though the winter months alienate my soul and racism still rears its ugly head occasionally, nothing changes the fact I am British. A lot of my humour is British and I share the dark humour that comes with being British. I am Nigerian because it is my soul. It is how I breathe, eat, stand with my hands on my waist and form the words out of my mouth. The biggest lesson from my experience of being ‘the minority other’ is the importance of holding on to one’s core. No matter what happens in the dominant wider society, what keeps a human being sane is their core. Not recognizing or appreciating one’s core identity can be traumatic and in extreme cases contribute to a mental breakdown.  What keeps me whole is my identity – all of it. My identity is the sum total of what I accept and what I reject. It is a source of comfort.  More than two decades later, I don’t mind spelling my name. I would like it though if people would just say my name before asking me to spell it.

*The book, Life is a Woman breaking eggs is also referred to as ‘Life.’

*The Museum, Say My Name, Eggs Crack Easy, Zebra Crossing and French are all poems in the book: Life is a Woman Breaking Eggs.

Life is a Woman Breaking Eggs is available on Amazon Kindle in most countries.

Adura Ojo is a British-Nigerian author, poet, blogger and a mother of two. She is the author of Life is a Woman Breaking Eggs, her debut poetry collection. She graduated in English Studies at the University of Ibadan. She later bagged degrees in Law and Social Work in the UK. She has professional experience in varied employment roles as lecturer, trainer and mental health practitioner. Her poems have been published in Sentinel Champions, Sentinel Nigeria, The Poetic Pinup Revue, and a number of websites. She lives in the UK where she is currently working on her debut novel and a second poetry collection.

Follow Adura Ojo:

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Blogger: http://adura-ojo.blogspot.co.uk/

My thanks to Adura for that very interesting and insightful post. (And boy, does spelling out names resonate with me or what?!)  My own feeling is that as the planet becomes smaller and rounder, learning to integrate, assimilate and let diverse 'others' enrich not just the minorities but also the majority will continue to be relevant. 

If you have travelled or lived in cultures other than your own, then I/we would love to hear your take.