Teesta Review: A
Journal of Poetry, Volume 9, Number 1. May 2026. ISSN: 2581-7094
The lived folklore of
ageing in Monalisa Changkija’s This Silence
--- S. Elika Assumi
Death
in many Naga homes, arrives not only as an event but as a disturbance, more of
an interruption in the moral and spiritual order of the family. It is prayed
against, sung away in psalms of longevity, or absorbed in ritual acts of
protection and propitiation, when death comes calling. Old age, when invoked,
is imagined as a blessing, something that is bestowed and not lived. Yet
conversations about decline, frailty or the nearness of death often falter.
They are gently rebuked, chided, softened or silenced as though naming them
might hasten their arrival. In this grounded deflection lies an absence; the
everyday language of ageing and dying. Not its rituals, nor its theology but
its lived texture. A slow negotiation with time and memory shrouded by body and
solitude. It is in that absence that the poetry of This Silence by
Monalisa Changkija strikes gently. Her poems do not inherit folklore, rather
they make it. Through a voice that is immediately intimate and unsparing,
ageing emerges not as an abstraction or blessing but as an experience, one that
is layered, contradictory but also deeply embodied. In these poems, the ageing
woman becomes an archive, carrying with and within her the marks of time, of
desires lost and defiance met. What emerges is a form of lived folklore, not
preserved in ritual or narrative but produced in the act of speaking,
remembering and enduring.
Poetry
as lived folklore
Folklore
is not a dead artifact but an ongoing act, what Henry Glassie describes as a
“volitional, temporal action...spanning from the routine to the inventive.” It
lives not in preservation alone but in repetition, variation and use. Memory is
its hearth but it becomes folklore when lived, when carried in gesture, voice
and the rhythms of everyday life. In such moments, the body itself becomes the
medium of transmission. To live is to perform memory and to hold the past even
as one move through the present. The ageing body in this sense, is not merely
biological, it is mnemonic. It gathers, stores and releases experiences such
that what appears as fatigue, habit or change is also history sedimented in the
flesh. Margaret Lock has shown how bodily experiences of ageing are inseparable
from cultural and historical memory. In her work on Japanese women, menopause is
not simply a physiological change, but shaped by memories of post-war scarcity,
labour and shifting familial roles. The body remembers what the archive does
not.
It
is this embodied memory that Changkija also brings into view. Her poetry does
not describe ageing from a distance rather it inhabits it. When her speakers
talk about sagging skin, wrinkles or the slow recalibration of desire, they are
not merely documenting decline. They are articulating a lived continuity where
the body becomes an archive and ageing as a form of narrative. In this way,
Changkija’s poetry produces folklore in the present tense, not inherited, but
enacted through the intimate and unadorned labour of living with time.
The
ageing body as archive
I
turn to Changkija’s Marks of Time where the speaker reclaims the
physical signs of ageing through “Grey hair and wrinkles” presented as an
“indefeasible” truth rather than a marker of decline. In her rendering of the
ageing body, it is an archive that bears the irreversibility of time without
apology. The speaker does resist the cultural impulse to mourn these
transformations, insisting that the “Marks of Time...don’t hurt --- or
devastate and devalue.” In the questioning of “why do you deny, / as you do, /
the Marks of Time on me?”, the poem turns outward, confronting the social gaze
that refuses to acknowledge the ageing female body in its present form. As such
the wrinkles here are not deficiencies but inscriptions like evidence of a
lived life and of a truth that “has willed out” inevitably and irreversibly.
Similarly,
in Sunset, the body is a site of memory and endurance converging where
the body becomes a measure of time lived. The speaker must measure her present
against her past through an acceptance that she has “lost my college-girl body,
/ as also my college-girl naivety.” This loss is not a simple nostalgia, but a
reckoning inscribed on the body itself. Fatigue in its accumulation is also
recorded in the living and recalling of years spent “trying to be a woman of
substance / shouldering whatever social responsibilities” and “surviving to the
best of my ability.” In this affirmation, the ageing body is not diminished but
emerges as burdened with the weight of continuity shrouded by labour,
responsibility and time itself. It carries the memory but also the cost of
having endured it.
Yet,
even as the speaker acknowledges that she is “staring unambiguously / at the
sunset of my life”, desire persists with a striking clarity:
I
still feel the need to say
how
much I crave for you...
...yearn
for you to hold me
the
way you used to.
Desire
is neither displaced or diminished, it accompanies ageing, unsettling the older
body thought to be physically and emotionally spent. In this articulation, the
body remains present and responsive. The ageing body is also a space reclaimed
and deliberate, seamlessly voiced in At my age, where the speaker
refuses sentimentality and the emotional labour imposed upon older women. With
quiet clarity, she asserts her autonomy:
At
my age,
I
don’t need excuses and alibis,
also
wouldn’t expand any energy
to
make them.
Her
embrace of solitude further reinforces this autonomy, where even small acts “to
play the Classic Solitaire / on the Computer. / To stall for time, / really,
for what?” requires no justification. What emerges is not isolation but
self-possession culminating in a striking declaration:
After
a certain point,
I
refuse to be nice.
I
don’t need to be,
no,
not at my age.
Ageing
becomes the threshold beyond which social compliance is no longer obligatory.
The body becomes a site of defiance, freed from expectation oriented towards
sustaining the self. This autonomy is further extended to the speaker’s
articulation of her own death in When I die. Death is not
sentimentalised or feared, rather it is approached as an act of release. The
“fear / of conformity and confinement” motivates the speaker to explicitly
resist the ritual structures that seek to contain the body after death
insisting, “do not conform and confine me / to a grave.” The material excesses
of mourning is also unsettled and with a note of irony cautioning against any
attempt “to outdo Taj Mahal” given that “sound economics should / persuade
otherwise.” This also exposes the performative weight of ritual, where memory
risks monumental rather than lived. And as such, the speaker chooses dispersal
over buried permanence. She asks that her body be cremated and her ashes
released “into the paths of the wind...on its wings / wherever it wills, /
whenever it wills.” Death is, therefore, not an anchoring but free, a true
extension of the autonomy claimed in life.
These
are the verses that truly articulate a form of counter-folklore, because, if
customary practices rely on repetition, continuity and collective forms of
remembrance, then Changkija’s speaker unsettles these expectations by refusing
fixity. And instead, she re-authors the terms of her own inscription into
memory. The refusal to be “nice” and the rejection of “annual pilgrimages”
beacons her departure from inherited scripts of ageing and mourning. What
remains is a fluid yet self-determined mode of existence privileging movement
over monument, dispersal over containment. In this sense, the ageing body
continues to generate meaning. It is the site where folklore is not preserved
but remade through the acts of rearticulation and release.
Ageing
as lived folklore
Changkija’s
This Silence narrates ageing not as a quiet decline nor a symbolic
closure. If in many Naga homes, death enters as a disturbance where the
interruption ought to be contained through ritual and deflection, then
Changkija reframes this moment entirely. She invites ageing and death into her
verse rejecting the muted evasions that surround them. What is silent in
everyday speech finds a voice in poetry. The ageing body marked by fatigue and
defiance embodies the vocabulary that resists sanctification. What emerges is
ageing as a sustained act and this is the contemporary Naga feminine folklore of
ageing; one that is made in the present through lived experience. Folklore here
persists in the articulation and reimagining. Ageing is the site of cultural
production where the self negotiates time and memory. Death is dispersed
thriving in motion, and even in that moment folklore endures, not as an
inheritance but as an ongoing practice making sense of this life and its
inevitable end.
References
Changkija, M. (2025). This
silence. Tajung Publications.
Glassie, H. (1995). Tradition.
The Journal of American Folklore, 108(430), 395–412.
Glassie, H., & Truesdell,
B. (2008). A life in the field: Henry Glassie and the study of material
culture. The Public Historian, 30(4), 59–87.
Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, B.
(1998). Folklore’s crisis. The Journal of American Folklore, 111(441),
281–327.
Lock, M. (1986). Ambiguities
of aging: Japanese experience and perceptions of menopause. Culture,
Medicine and Psychiatry, 10, 23–46.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Bio:
Dr S. Elika Assumi is a scholar of language and cultural studies and
teaches at the National Law University Meghalaya. Her research focuses on
Indigenous knowledge systems, oral traditions and cultural politics in
Northeast India. She works on Naga cultural histories and engages in
interdisciplinary research on performance, memory and narrative practices.
****************