Word Count: 745. In ‘Middle Age’ there is a dormant consciousness of one's own irrelevance when' children are no longer / friends but critics, stern of face and severe with their tongue. We are told that the lover drew her to him with rude haste but, at this point, her “fragile” womanliness is abruptly transformed into an “armful / Of splinters, designed to hurt, and / Pregnant with pain”. She matters by being who she is. But instead she loses her freedom, and, dwarfed by his egotism, she is emptied of all her natural mirth and clarity of thinking: Yet there is a sense in which Kamala Das feels the need to find such a freedom imposed on her not by choice but by the circumstances which breed the fever of domesticity. I feel rooted in Kerala. 4 0 obj 1-4 (January-December 1992): 65-72. However, Kamala achieves a certain tone and interest by using several devices. There's Thakazhi Shivashankara Pillai's Cheemeen. Tragically, the old spirit revives at a time when Kamala's resources are exhausted. 42-52. I exaggerated a little bit. No. It is a “prose-poem', an unusual form for Kamal. This account appears rather palled in comparison with Kamala's version in My Story: Within a year she was married to the Raja of Chiralayman who was stout and had heavy sensual lips. In the latter, the husband is seen as ‘old fat spider’ who weaves ‘webs of bewilderment’ around the womanpersona and builds the dead, stony, dull wall of domesticity, smugness, passivity, and turns her into ‘a bird of stone, a granite dove’. It's a well-known poem which people memorize. “Planned” adds a touch of deliberation to the lover's acts, making them seem pre-conceived and far from spontaneous. I visited my grandmother during my summer vacations. Referring to Kamala's use of the word “trappings” to describe her lover's physical charms, he says: “Trapping is doubly significant. Romantic poetry, thus, moves in a circle from present to past and back to the present, imitating the structure of the speaker's thought. But some families went out to patriarchal areas and learnt bad habits. She is willing to grant them a certain peace of mind, but remains aloof from it herself. But until my husband died he kept me like a child. <>/Font<>/ProcSet[/PDF/Text/ImageB/ImageC/ImageI] >>/MediaBox[ 0 0 595.32 841.92] /Contents 4 0 R/Group<>/Tabs/S/StructParents 0>> %PDF-1.5 One has to move and grow due the flux of time. Finally, she wants us to accept the stark reality of life and to suffer consciously with a hope that one day we might discover “that we are immortal”. One of her chief strengths had been her ability to write of love honestly, not in order to romanticise or soften, but to describe even what had conventionally been hardly mentioned—the smell of the body, sprouting hair on chests and elsewhere, menstrual blood, uneven teeth, etc. In this poem the poet has expressed a freedom fighter as the speaker. I was so scared. Kamala Das, The Best of Kamala Das, Kozhikode: Bodhi, 1991, p. 81. Kamala Das was born on 31 March, 1934 in Malabar in Kerala. I liked Madame Bovary. "I am Indian, very brown, born in Malabar, I speak three languages, write in two,... What explanation could there be for the names of Kamala Das? The relationship, obviously with a powerful politician, is probably the source of poems like “The High Tide” and “Sunset, Blue Bird”. The reason for this is, I think, that Das seems to have a good deal of the conventional woman in her makeup, so that not only can she speak of the common woman and her basic need for love and security with inside knowledge, but cannot help, in addition, expressing an ambivalence proceeding from her own duality, proceeding from, that is, the combination in herself of a need for domestic security and the desire for an independence, an independence consistent with a non-domestic mode of living. SOURCE: Nabar, Vrinda. Dwivedi, S. C. “Kamala Das: My World Defleshed, Deblooded.” Creative Forum 5, nos. It is as if wanting to belong but too awkward to make the necessary gestures in front of a large number of people, she fulfils her need to be loved, to be accepted emotionally, in these intimate encounters. <> endobj Today the Nair community is slowly changing from its matrilineal moorings to nuclear family set-up where the father is dominant. %���� Clearly, the poem swings between the present and the past and finally settles in the present. The second poem is thematically an extension of the first. My marriage was dry toast. The last few lines of the poem describe the lover and her responses to him: Kohli, who also quotes these lines, is of the view that “At this point … the lines suddenly come alive with the energy of questioning, and the theme of winning and losing and the underlying sense of exhaustion assert themselves.”13 I doubt whether one can demarcate the poem in this way, contrasting the “life” in these lines with, by implication, their lack of it earlier. The poem ends with the author pondering over the mysterious source of her lover's passion. My poem ‘Composition’ is politically incorrect because it contains the phrase ‘lesbians hiss’. Keralam, India: Bodhi Books, 1991. Obviously the house had fallen into neglect since the death of the old grandmother. Nalapat house with all its feudal associations, attractions and traditions is a central symbol in Kamala Das's poetry. Now she wishes to be indifferent and “uninvolved”: But her longing for ‘rest’ is neither possible nor desirable. So she sets her mind on her only “freedom to discompose”. Kamala Das has been essentially attached to her family and the conventional Nair modes. Though “cocooned” in the shelter of Gandharva's singing, her ears lose their peace in every little pause. It is difficult also to see how Kohli finds in “Blood” an “admirable restraint in tone and tautness of line.”5 The lines he quotes are hardly suggestive of what he describes as “the assured clarity of outline, the sombre control of nerve, and the poise of movement which is at once graceful and firm,” which he sees as showing “that the poet is in command of herself in a moment of personal reckoning.”6 I refer to the long passage which begins: Kohli in fact quotes the entire passage of 22 lines, all of which more or less follow the awkward rhythm of the ones quoted above. See P. P. Raveendran, “Introduction: The Ideology of Intimacy”, The Best of Kamala Das, op. ), Love and Lust: An Anthology, Parallel Press, 2011. You're an activist now? But you have stood for elections. In the two days I have been here, you've had so many requests to attend functions, give speeches about children's rights, pose with orphans. Furthermore, her decay and degeneration are metonymiolly indicated by the description of the old woman who died “lying for three months, paralyzed”. But “The Old Playhouse” used them to describe a deliberate attempt on the lover's part to ensnare her and hold her captive, while in the present poem the poet, already a prisoner, appears to be willingly so. Toast with a little jam! 2-3 (1976): 173-86. Pleasant summer over And all the summer flowers, The red fire blazes, The grey smoke towers. Anne Ranasinghe, born on October 2, 1925 as Anneliese Katz in Essen, Germany, is an internationally renowned poet from Sri Lanka. We were friends. You've read abroad many times. SOURCE: Kohli, Devindra. Frederick W. Hilles and Harold Bloom (New York: Oxford, 1965), pp. Memory enables her to learn “few lessons” and to face the present with equanimity. Some of her recently published Malayalam short story collections like Palayanam (The Flight, 1990) and Neypayasam (Rice Pudding in Ghee, 1991) and the collection of journalistic jottings Dayarikkurippukal (Notes from a Diary, 1992) will be found useful for this purpose. They told me to look at them if I was nervous. Others go to the extreme: Denise Levertov warns: ‘Don't lock me in wedlock, I want / marriage, an / encounter—’, and Sylvia Plath, though she was capable of tenderness, was concerned more than any other woman poet with just the unbearability of being a woman. This colloquy is in simple language. “The Old Playhouse and Other Poems.” In The Endless Female Hungers: A Study of Kamala Das, pp. The Anamalai Poems were written while Kamala Das was recuperating there. The decay of the “red house” and the death of the old woman help us understand this theme of the loss of innocence. In ‘Blood’ (The Old Playhouse and Other Poems) the ancestral home and the great grandmother are identified. It didn't mean I stopped loving my husband. Lalithambika. Only in a rather striking outburst towards the end (“O mother's mother's mother”) is our attention drawn to what is only dimly present in our consciousness: the matriarchal system of societal relationships to which Kamala belongs. As I said earlier, even the talk of escape does not really carry with it much more than the realisation, lightly stated, that the relationship will have to end one day. Following the path of contiguous relations, the realistic author metonymically digresses from the plot to the atmosphere and from the character to the setting in space and time.5. The title character of Lord Byron's dramatic poem 'Manfred' is pretty intense! She avoids farfetched images as she narrates. Murali, S. “Writhing in Vacant Ecstasy: Reading Kamala Das.” In Perspectives on Kamala Das's Poetry, pp. Married at the age of fifteen, and finding, herself tied, as she tells us time and time again, to a hollow relationship which she could not untie, Kamala Das's story, despite its sensationalism which is sometimes heightened by the directness of her manner, makes poignant reading and in essence strikes one as representative of a not so uncommon social phenomenon in India. Last Updated on May 5, 2015, by eNotes Editorial. Kamala Das is at her best as a poet of private sensibility. I should never have written poetry in any language but Sanskrit. Although primarily a poet, she has also published short stories, essays, and translations. Her poems are the gestures that counter the luridness of the world. I've been through so many avatars. She was immediately and widely noticed and soon recognized as a poet of promise, for her poems were, and still continue to be, characterised by a striking vitality of metaphor and an originality of voice which cannot be missed: the authenticity of both demonstrated to the Indian poet in English that one could write well without parading Eliot and Auden in one's pocket and that one could be a distinctly Indian poet without striving to be one and without leaning on the crutch of transcendental philosophy. Besides these poems with Nalapat house and the grandmother as their central symbols, there are a few others in which delicate domestic sentiments are evoked. No edifice can contain God. This end comes about when those who have the answers do not give them to those who ask. The poem is out of your control once it is published. These poems mark a vigorous but sentimental search for mental peace and emotional tranquillity away from the horrid artificiality of urban family life. He has all the deviousness of a snake, is “armed with cunning and violent hates and mistrust”, but he sheds them all in bed with her. This can also be read as an instance of a text's unconscious projection of itself into history, indeed the supreme moment of its historicity. Like “Sunset, Blue Bird”, the prose form conceals a host of technical limitations. A theme which Kamala uses with increasing tedium is her childhood, and the old ancestral house with all its intrigues, its rituals, its nobly-born inhabitants. Presents a critique of Das's feminist writings in postcolonial India. My Story uses it repeatedly or, at any rate, obtrusively assumes the reader's awareness of it. “Revolt: ‘The Self’ in the Poetry of Kamala Das.” In Contemporary Indian Poetry in English. An oil-wick lamp is lit in every Nair home at the fall of dusk and its absence indicates that the house has fallen on evil days. 2 (1985): 307-12. Comparison between the works of Das and Australian poet Judith Wright. You don't know their feelings. Why does Kamala Das confess what her husband said and what she did. I've become very strong. Her responses are usually spontaneous and most often dominated by emotion. “Kamala Das.” In Talking Poems: Conversations with Poets, pp. There are a number of archaic phrases such as ‘Wherefore rock they?’ l.2 and ‘multitudinous murders’ l.12, together with convoluted syntax such as ‘like skull’s teeth wicked’ l.4 which … Another unsatisfactory short poem is the one dedicated to “Kumar Gandharva”. Detailed reading of Das's poems in relation to Indian tradition. The editor of a book of your short stories mentions that you did not want your grandmother to know about the kind of things you wrote about in Malayalam, adultery, for instance. They are the relations of similarity and of contiguity. I used to think old age would be a terrible time. The claustrophobic imagery of ‘the barred doors’, the wild animal and bird symbols and the grotesque metaphor of ‘roots like truncated necks’ evoke the ravage Time has brought on the ancient house. Kamala was in Calcutta during the years of Partition. The death of the house need not be interpreted literally in terms of its physical decay. But James Merrill asserts that ‘prose’ is the remarkable poetic style: “You hear a voice talking in prose, often a very delightful voice which can say all kinds of odd things. The second poem in the series is also marked by a similar movement, this time from darkness to daylight, from the world of dreams to that of “rude awakening”: The dialectic of the movement in this poem is such that even as the poet remains part of the dream world, her voice turns out to be its opposite, its other. I believed that until ten years ago, until I realized Krishna too could be a myth. 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