Teesta Review: A Journal of Poetry, Volume 4, Number 2. November 2021. ISSN: 2581-7094
Witness: The Red River book of Poetry of
Dissent
Witness: The Red River book of Poetry of
Dissent: Ed. Nabina Das, Red
River, ISBN: 978-8194816478, Price: INR 499
Since its independence in 1947, India has held together as a
unified entity against massive odds throughout the years. Given the sheer size
and diversity of the country, it has lived through a considerable number of
unrests, movements, migrations, revolts, economic challenges, wars, elections
and still resisted complete collapse of political order. In the case of India,
the centre does not hold, but things do not fall apart either. Ironically, it
is dissent, that plays a crucial role in ensuring this. It is the extremely
costly struggle of expressing disagreement, questioning hegemony, opposing
oppression, fighting against the centre and creating avenues for this
expression, that makes unified India a political as well as cultural reality.
At the same time, within this imagined community, a million Indias exist and
struggle to exist. As we struggle to define the country, its history, questions
of identity and questions of survival, we need constantly evolving idioms.
Dissent becomes necessary; it becomes a language in itself inviting equal
representation from the length, breadth and depth of the population and ever
changing forms of expression. Witness, the Red River Poetry of
Dissent captures this essence in an unparalleled way. It is a poetic venture
that brings together voices from every geographical, social, psychological and
cultural nook of the country and redefines dissent through their lenses. It
uses literature as the vehicle of protest that brings together real life
experiences in the form of fearless, uncensored utterances. By bringing
together poets from all walks of life, translated from different languages, the
anthology has been able to create an amazing platform for dialogue. As the
variegated experiences come to life through words, the importance of dissent is
reemphasized at every page.
The anthology brings to the reader what news channels don’t-
i.e, authentic, lived experiences that get diluted in headlines. It covers
areas like migration, wars, farmers’ protests, student suicides, CAA, religious
conflicts, mental illnesses, rape and patriarchy. It reaches areas like
Dimapur, Tikri Border, JNU and Khajuraho. It translates from Kokborok,
Santhali, Assamese, Gujarati, Marathi, Hindi and several other languages. It
brings together protest songs, art, performance poetry and spoken word poetry
all uttered with the finesse of bona fide artistic sensibilities. The book has
therefore aptly been titled Witness. 250 poets that bear witness
and have the power to translate that into words are far better than the cameras
of a thousand media channels.
The poems cover several takes on dissent, such as, empathy
and sisterhood against ideas of animosity between women; limitations of poetry;
questioning writing as well as hegemony of writers; freely expressing violent
anger as opposed to a muffled and censored response; redefining limits of
poetry as a form by fusing art into it (as seen in Maaz Bin Bilal’s poem in
which the words beautifully take on the shape of a mosque); and using swear words,
graphic imagery and sexual tropes as opposed to seeing language as a pristine
arena. The cover of the book itself is in perfect harmony with the content
inside. The front cover displays a freckled, big red dot, representing a
scattered whole. The back cover consists of 250 words that capture the variety
of definitions of dissent that the book has to offer.
Questions around identity form a recurring motif throughout
the poems. There is a struggle to define the term ‘Indian’. The term
becomes a contested space as the poets struggle to establish their national
identities. AJ Thomas in his poem, Blood-lines speaks of the
importance of a name. His Christian name made him vulnerable to possible
execution in Libya and when he returned to India, it seemed to “shut out, in
most minds, the several millennia of ‘Bharatiyasanskriti’” (35) making him feel
alienated in both lands, constantly struggling to reconcile his religious
identity with a national one. This angst of being caught in a metaphorical no
man’s land recurs in a number of other poems in the anthology periodically
evoking references to Toba Tek Singh and perhaps takes the most powerful shape
in Asiya Zahoor’s poem, Gifts to a Daughter not yet Conceived,
which blurs the distinction between personal and political and speaks of the
fears, lacks and confused identities the future Kashmiri unborn children will
inherit from their parents.
Arundhathi Subramanaiam’s poem, To the Welsh Critic
Who Doesn't Find Me Identifiably Indian, boldly rejects having to conform
to lingual codes or arbitrarily created labels in order to be identified as
Indian. It says:
Arbitrer of identity,
remake me as you will…
Stamp my papers,
lease me a new anxiety,
Grant me a visa
to the country of my
birth.
Teach me how to belong,
the way you do
on every page of world
history (68)
Ajmal Khan’s Write
me Down, I am Indian deals with the anxiety of having to prove one’s
nationality. It uses these words as refrain to drive across the point that
genealogy and struggles of one’s ancestors cannot be confined to or
defined by documents and that he is equally Indian with or without documental
evidence. Biswamit Dwibedy’s A Poem Without, speaks of the western
stereotypes into which poems about India and Indians fall. It calls for an
objective approach to India as well as to poetry and stands against
preconceived identities being thrust upon people.
There is also a similar struggle around definitions of
identities based on gender. Nirupama Dutt’s The Dark Woman and The
Wicked Woman , Basudhara Roy’s Rules for a Rape Republic and
Anna Sujatha Mathai’s Hysteria are a few of the very powerful
poems that deal with the experiences of being a woman. They bear witness to the
changing times and capture the various ways in which women engage with
adversities and redefine their own identities. Sukrita’s poem What am I
to Her and She to Me revisits the outward differences between the
privileged and unprivileged and speaks of her interaction with a woman from the ‘ghumantu’
dwarf community who reminds her that they share the same ancestors beyond
class, caste and creed and that they call out to them on moonlit nights.
Finding essential similarities in ancestry in the face of glaring outward
differences is how her poem explores dissent.
Another theme, the contours of which, have been thoroughly
explored, is that of memory. Crucial moments in time and various important
events and people in history have been revisited. As Nirupama Dutt points out
in her introduction to the book, “Memory indeed fights forgetting in Witness through
poetic testimonies”. Vinita Agarwal protects Rohith Vermula’s memory from
fading in her poem which includes lines from his suicide letter, verbatim.
Preeti Vangani’s poem on the historical struggle of the Sindhis in India
attempts to revisit partition and appreciates the use of folk songs to prevent
their history from being forgotten. There are No Poems by
Devashish Makhija is a tribute to Naxalite poet Alok Dhanwa’s works which he
attempts to keep alive, along with the memories of those who struggled and
suffered in the Naxalite Movement. It aims to keep memories alive when peoples’
struggles are forgotten and erased with changing boundaries:
I carry your poem
in my hand
it was carved here like a
road
it was to take us
somewhere (109)…
but yet another
unsuspecting
geographical boundary
somewhere
shivered, and changed
shape,
including a new poem on
one side,
excluding a familiar one
on the other.
there are no poems
for those who cease to
belong
when boundaries change
this way (110)
Another poem that
artistically deals with the theme of memory is At Falaknuma by
Ranu Uniyal. It speaks of the glories of a lost past, juxtaposing it with a
colourless present. It tells the inner thoughts of a woman who witnesses the
hollowness of contemporary interactions and longs to return to the art and
poetry in dialogue which she once used to appreciate. What remains in the
present is a struggle to find meaning, symbolized by an exotic drink being
served at the table, even the name of which, she does not know. The poem uses
memory as a tool and fearlessly criticizes the new social norm in the present
or the new ‘normal’. In the poems in Witness, memory therefore
fights against forgetting, erasing and diluting history and people at larger as
well as personal levels. Memory acts as dissent to the dominant ideas of the
present.
The candid, multidimensional lenses that the book has to offer bear testimony to the talent of the poets, the dexterity of the editor and the spirit of the publisher. Going through The Red River Book of Poetry of Dissent: Witness, takes the reader through an emotional as well as starkly real journey across the country, reacquainting the reader with its history, people and their minds through the refreshing lens of dissent. Experiences get embedded onto one’s mind like a collage of photographs taken from all angles and it alters one’s sensibility to see that bearing ‘witness’ to multiplicities is actually our best bet at knowing the whole, real truth. The anthology therefore brings the ‘whole’ and ‘fragments’ together on multiple levels, thus reasserting the importance of dissent in defining and sustaining a diverse democracy like India.