HYSTERIA by Sujatha Mathai

CommentShare

Yes, for centuries we've 

been mute.
Not that we're dumb, or our
tongues had been cut out. Not
quite. We could prattle alright:
about recipes, about dust,
about our neighbour's daughter,
about our clothes, secrets about
how to stay beautiful, how to
stay young. We knew nursery
rhymes which we lisped to our
children, but never the dark
interiors of those stories, those
lay shrouded in sleep like the
Sleeping Beauty. Yes, we were
sleeping beauties, baby dolls,
we slept while our children
were branded with seals of ownership,
our names taken from us, we smiled
while others filled in forms for us,
others made laws which ruled our
lives.
Yes. We were dumb,
except when we cried, which
was often; when we were ravished
as young girls, by strange, brutal men,
when we bore children, and delivered
them
in the agony of childbirth. When our
husbands
our fathers, our brothers and our sons,
and even our lovers, if we dared have
them,
struck us and betrayed us,
and sold us and wounded us.
We dreamed of gentle hands and
loving words,
for were we not the soil filled with
the ache
of longing for the seed, but instead we
were
coarsely used, our bodies brutalised,
our souls numbed.
And even our mothers denied us.
In the hour of darkness, they
cut off our hair, shaved our heads,
burnt us on the funeral pyre,
burnt us in our homes.
Our brothers inherited the earth.
We were disinherited of even our
smallest
shreds of humanity, the day we were
born.
Our parents cursed us. They educated
our brothers, gave them the land
and the houses, and the future,
and the power and the glory.
We were married off, we were mere
pieces of property, passed from one
family
to another, to work and bear children,
or. if we didn't bear children,
to be cursed for our barenneas.
No one looked into our eyes with love.
If they had, they'd have heard our souls
talk.
Instead, all they said was
She's hysterical. Women are like that,
especially when they menstruate,
especially
when they stop menstruating,
especially as they approach death.

*****

Copyright. Anna Sujatha Mathai
(First pub in Life - on my Side of the Street.
Sahitya Akademi. 2005.)

The Silence of the Stars by David Wagoner

When Laurens van der Post one night
In the Kalahari Desert told the Bushmen
He couldn't hear the stars
Singing, they didn't believe him. They looked at him,
half-smiling. They examined his face
To see whether he was joking
Or deceiving them. Then two of those small men
Who plant nothing, who have almost
Nothing to hunt, who live
On almost nothing, and with no one
But themselves, led him away
From the crackling thorn-scrub fire
And stood with him under the night sky
And listened. One of them whispered,
Do you not hear them now?
And van der Post listened, not wanting
To disbelieve, but had to answer,
No. They walked him slowly
Like a sick man to the small dim
Circle of firelight and told him
They were terribly sorry,
And he felt even sorrier
For himself and blamed his ancestors
For their strange loss of hearing,
Which was his loss now. On some clear night
When nearby houses have turned off their visions,
When the traffic dwindles, when through streets
Are between sirens and the jets overhead
Are between crossings, when the wind
Is hanging fire in the fir trees,
And the long-eared owl in the neighboring grove
Between calls is regarding his own darkness,
I look at the stars again as I first did
To school myself in the names of constellations
And remember my first sense of their terrible distance,
I can still hear what I thought
At the edge of silence were the inside jokes
Of my heartbeat, my arterial traffic,
The C above high C of my inner ear, myself
Tunelessly humming, but now I know what they are:
My fair share of the music of the spheres
And clusters of ripening stars,
Of the songs from the throats of the old gods
Still tending ever tone-deaf creatures
Through their exiles in the desert.

Excerpt from 'Cruelty' by Namdeo Dhasal, the Dalit Poet

I am a venereal sore in the private part of language.


The living spirit looking out


of hundreds of thousands of sad, pitiful eyes


Has shaken me. I am broken by the revolt exploding inside me.


There's no moonlight anywhere;


There's no water anywhere.


A rabid fox is tearing off my flesh with its teeth;


And a terrible venom-like cruelty


Spreads out from my monkey-bone


....

KEEPING QUIET by Pablo Neruda

Now we will count to twelve
and we will all keep still.

For once on the face of the earth,
let’s not speak in any language;
let’s stop for one second,
and not move our arms so much.

It would be an exotic moment
without rush, without engines;
we would all be together
in a sudden strangeness.

Fisherman in the cold sea
would not harm whales
and the man gathering salt
would look at his hurt hands.

Those who prepare green wars,
wars with gas, wars with fire,
victories with no survivors,
would put on clean clothes
and walk about with their brothers
in the shade, doing nothing.

What I want should not be confused
with total inactivity.
Life is what it is about;
I want no truck with death.

If we were not so single-minded
about keeping our lives moving,
and for once could do nothing,
perhaps a huge silence
might interrupt this sadness
of never understanding ourselves
and of threatening ourselves with death.
Perhaps the earth can teach us
as when everything seems dead
and later proves to be alive.

Now I’ll count up to twelve
and you keep quiet and I will go.

KINDNESS by Sampurna Chattarji

four commandments and a caution

I
To be kind you must turn into a tree,
and live very long. Allow your roots to
hang down into the air, allow pecking
and nesting and the tying of prayer strings
and the dying of paper kites in your branches.
Allow women to hug you, men to piss on you,
lovers to carve their initials on your skin.
You must bear every act of insult, love or injury
with the same unruffled expression. You must
have a hollow inside for those who need a place
to keep their secrets safe. And you must grow
and grow and grow until you are a book that
anyone can tear a leaf from and turn into a boat.

II
There must not be premeditation.
You cannot hunt down the proposed
victims of your act. You cannot unfurl
a map. There must not be a ‘must’
behind your act. But there must be
an act. A thought won’t do. You must
act, kindly, without premeditation,
or artifice or hauteur, without the
consciousness of kindness, you must be
spacious and natural as a meadow
hidden behind a high-rise. No asbestos
sheets must shut out the trespassers on
your time. Every claimant must be
a trespasser and you must be guilty of love.

III
You must understand kindness.
Not confuse it with courtesy or charity,
self-righteousness or vanity. You must
see kindness for what it is: abstract
until committed, pure unseeable surge
of interior light. You must leave it
naked, not clothe it in your cast-offs
nor seal it in a box. You must face its
terrible demands, watch the face it puts on
in a crowd. You must accept that it is
mute, and eloquent, and unarmed. Having
seen its defencelessness in the face of greed
you must make your body its armour. You
must not reserve it only for the stranger.
You must let a gnarled and familiar hand
take it between her claws and clasp it tight,
as if squeezing blood, or honey, from a stone.

IV
You must remember: It is not an art.
Not performance poetry or stand-up comedy,
open-mic or rap. It’s a series of can’ts.
Can’t be hyper-linked, can’t be video-installed,
curated, exhibited, animated, projected
or auctioned for brutal sums of cash.
You can but you mustn’t construct it
with your consummate incandescent skill.
You mustn’t turn it into an artefact
best seen in a certain light in a heat-controlled
corollary where the priceless things are stored.
It is priceless, yes, but for all the inflammable
reasons. Neither edgy nor immoral nor decadent,
neither amoral nor minimal nor surreal, neither
modern nor post-modern, neither colonial nor
post-colonial, neither Marxist nor feminist,
neither consumerist nor capitalist, all it is … is …
unlearnable, expressible, impossible, doable, each time
a different animal, alive and muscular and warm.

You must beware:

Kindness may be mistaken for pity, may be rudely
rebuffed, an old man refusing a stranger’s umbrella
out of pride. Suspicion: what does she really want?
Fear: you might pinch the lady’s purse as you help
her dodge the cars. Prepare: you may be punished.
There may be tears, extortions, retractions,
accusations. Who does she think she is? Mother
Teresa? All the world’s ignominy may be yours.
How then will you keep the kindness growing?
You won’t. You’ll break, you’ll stutter, retreat.
You won’t you must you may you will. You will
return, with another bowl filled to the brim
and you will wait for another passer-by to give you
the grace of receiving, and so, repay your debt.

© Sampurna Chattarji

I AM NOT OLD~ Samantha Reynolds

‘I am not old… she said
I am rare.

I am the standing ovation
At the end of the play.

I am the retrospective
Of my life as art

I am the hours
Connected like dots
Into good sense

I am the fullness
Of existing.

You think I am waiting to die…
But I am waiting to be found

I am a treasure.
I am a map.

And these wrinkles are
Imprints of my journey

Ask me
anything.’

~ Samantha Reynolds

Good Bones BY MAGGIE SMITH

Life is short, though I keep this from my children.

Life is short, and I’ve shortened mine

in a thousand delicious, ill-advised ways,

a thousand deliciously ill-advised ways

I’ll keep from my children. The world is at least

fifty percent terrible, and that’s a conservative

estimate, though I keep this from my children.

For every bird there is a stone thrown at a bird.

For every loved child, a child broken, bagged,

sunk in a lake. Life is short and the world

is at least half terrible, and for every kind

stranger, there is one who would break you,

though I keep this from my children. I am trying

to sell them the world. Any decent realtor,

walking you through a real shithole, chirps on

about good bones: This place could be beautiful,

right? You could make this place beautiful.

 

Maggie Smith, "Good Bones" from Waxwing.  Copyright © 2016 by Maggie Smith.  Reprinted by permission of Waxwing magazine
 

Keeping Things Whole

BY MARK STRAND

In a field

I am the absence

of field.

This is

always the case.

Wherever I am

I am what is missing.

When I walk

I part the air

and always

the air moves in   

to fill the spaces

where my body’s been.

We all have reasons

for moving.

I move

to keep things whole.

Mark Strand, "Keeping Things Whole" from Selected Poems. Copyright © 1979, 1980 by Mark Strand.  Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Random House LLC. All rights reserved.