Since
nothing is left to accomplish
Nothing
to build or to destroy
Nothing
has already become; Never.’
Ananda Devi’s When the Night Agrees to Speak to Me, translated from the French by Kazim Ali, is published by Harper Perennial.
It is cold outside. There is darkness shimmering on my room’s window. I just finished last pages of this poetry book. I have been trying to recollect the moments for this piece and come up with a single word ‘fierce’.
Here, I am borrowing the words from Emily Dickinson, ‘If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can warm me, I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only ways I know it. Is there any other way?’
‘Women of sand, the wind erase us/ We will dance no more upon thorns.’ While reading her, I could feel what poetry can do to our sensibilities. The book explores the very idea of silences, woman carries around all her life. ‘Of a woman erased/ By her bruises’
Basically,
this book consists of three sections, poetry, prose, and an insightful
interview between Ananda Devi and Kazim Ali. Each page carries the facet of
prism that depicts emotional element of womanhood, intimate and messier
experiences of her body, witnessing the violence and condition of tender minds
on some island,
She
transforms the rage and power into common landscape where one could sense the myriad
revelations of woman’s life with lines like these ‘I only speak of it/ To
believe I have lived a little../ And we live in the invisible/ Free but
crippled, crippled but free.’
Poetry
of Ananda Devi, gets us to ponder over consciousness and rituals of a women
body that normally, we don’t even consider to be think of. She weaves these
verses in a poem ‘Blood amniotic fluid slickness from your core/ All that’s
made you women/ But is that all.'
The
title poem of ‘When the Night Agrees to Speak to Me’ is serene yet terrific as sharp
as double-edged sword, ‘When the night agrees to speak to me/ It is with a
blade/ That slices/ Into the places of certainty/ That carves/ Love into loneliness.’
Besides
that a series of prose talks about the power of words, Just these few lines of
first prose, which is masterfully put the strength of Devi’s writing “Words
erect the wall of lies and icy danger of shame without poetry you would have
under your fingers only the skeleton of silence a mummified skin that could
have neither flesh nor sensuality every glance an empty orbit lips furled
around uselessness.’
Also,
Devi examines the situation of tender hands. A place exists amidst us all where
they had to hold guns in place of toys and notebooks. Grief is smallness of dreams, and human survival
in an inhuman world. Just look at the imagery, Devi created here ‘The killing
blow you do not see coming but from your exploded mouth hangs the mud of your
dreams and with this in your hands you will know nothing of the others but
their fear you will bend by your rage but no other body will have ever offered
you love. ‘
I
felt her each free-verse sonorous and stone-cold, Vulnerability travels through
one page to other, As if someone touches the wounded reality of life with soft
feather.
Add
to that, this book contains the original poems as well; if you speak French then
it is treat for your senses.
In
sensible translation of Kazim Ali, this book defies boundaries of language and form;
it also shows how our souls interlaced with pain and love, dreams and
self-identity, curiosity to know oneself and that internal fight being
alienated.
I
think one must read marvelous body of work of Ananda Devi. There is fierceness in
her writing that makes you numb and then alive. That’s the only way she knows
to exist on pages and in readers’ hearts. READ!
(Can’t
thank you enough Vivek Tejuja and HarpercollinsIndia for the review copy.)