Teesta Review: A Journal of Poetry, Volume 1, Number 1. May 2018. ISSN: 2581-7094
Four Gardens and other poems, Malsawmi Jacob, Authorspress, New Delhi,
2017, ISBN 978-9352075898, Pp 124.
Malsawmi
Jacob, the author of first Mizo novel in English, “Zorami”, is a member of that
rare and wealthy heritage. Ranging from the lyrical
and sensual to the harsh and plucky, from the
personal to the political, to poems about nature, the poems in Four Gardens and other poems are infused with rich mosaic of imagery,
cultural nuances, social ethos, group laments, angst and reconciliation that
confront both particular and imaginary circumstances in the daily acts of
life. Her
earliest exposure to poetry was in Mizo language, her mother tongue. The fact
that Indian English literature is a product of a multilingual, multicultural
and philosophical mélange cannot be overlooked. Today Indian literature reached
at the apex of creation with the contribution of regional and national writers.
Later, studying English literature, some of Malsawmi’s favourite poets were
Blake, Keats, Shelley, Yeats and T.S. Eliot.As an adult she grew to like Emily
Bronte, G. M. Hopkins, Dylan Thomas, Sylvia Plath and Pablo Neruda.
Like Pablo Neruda and his counterparts, Malsawmi
Jacob’s poems shimmer with an atypical sweet touch of
simplicity, openness and lucidity that mark her poetic idioms subtle, specific and razor-sharp where the poetic corpus retains
as an inviting discourse. A couple of months ago I had an opportunity to read Malsawmi’s novel Zorami, set in the peak of the Mizo
National Front (MNF) movement that began in the mid 60s and ended in mid 80s. The insurgency affected every Mizo, whether in
or out of Mizoram. They call it ‘ram buai,’
which means ‘disturbance of the land.’ Violence erases our shared humanity.
“The flowers appear on the earth;
The time of singing has come(,)”
Spiritual epiphany is the key factor in the protagonist’s inner healing. Malaswami has a poem entitled, ‘Zorami’ in this collection where the link is
established. In the poem, ‘Zorami’ she vigorously asks,
“Waiting for
another thim zing?”
Thim zing
is a time of total darkness in Mizo
myth.
Themes connect genres. There are seven sections
in this ‘moments of passion’; all parts are planned and organized so well that
the entire corpus looks like a well-knit exotic fabric. Titles of sections are
loaded with meaning. Malsawmi’s
poems address
the crisis of identity and the continental trials and tensions that are an
integral part of contemporary living in cultural spaces irrespective of
physical geography and cultural positions. Her musings range from identity crisis to peace in the land;
dislocation to rehabilitation; death to life, and life’s small acts to roadside
roses. She doesn’t give up dreaming, even when
she accounts for the river of life passing through a gutter. She blurs
territorial engagements with the state and looks at the stars.
A writer is a global citizen these days. Experience of a
writer determines her range of subjectivity. If the experience is varied, it
helps. We cannot deny the intermingling of thoughts, contexts, engagements and concepts of these writers, which make
them unique. They are aware selves who can think beyond a definite territory
and geographical plane.
Malsawmi
is an avid lover of territorial peace and in-group fraternity:
“No hurting no killing in this country
the
place only for lovers of peace.”
In
Section 5, “Angst” some poems read functional:
“Why have you gone political?”
they ask, “Why
don’t you just do
your thing?”
Poetry benefits societies. Malsawmi Jacob
is aware of her literary and cultural roots. She is a socially committed artist
,and she refers to her land and people, trauma her people experienced
during the days when vultures had full
meal to ‘keep up continuity’.
Love is a companion of the
poetic soul. The poet wants to
sign in the ‘peace accord’ of minds:
“Ah,
wonder of wonders!
He’s
here among us standing with us!
Saying
“Peace to you, I am
with
you always.””
Bullied at school and
expelled from Oxford, P.B. Shelley’s personal life was distorted but the poetry
he wrote was a mirror which beautified the his distorted life. Similarly, Malsawmi aims at a beautiful nation-state
where people can live safely celebrating life’s feast together."We contain multitudes," wrote Walt Whitman,
Malsawmi has poems on ‘identities’,
‘home’ and ‘roots’. Identity of a person is
a marker for the part of one's overarching self-concept and
identification. It is an affiliative construct. The image of self we develop
from membership of social groups. Many poems in the collection are rich
in aesthetic responsibility towards life, contexts and manners of the time.
Malsawmi’s conscious leap into the pool of nostalgic
past creates a sense of ‘presence’ through the poetic metaphors of ‘absence’.
The haunting presence of the metaphor of ‘death’ invests his poems with a sense
of mystery, a sense that is indefinable, and non-negotiable by biological
experience.
The river has a soul. Malsawmi,like
many other poets from the North East India
digs out magic in Nature, verdant with myth and dense with longing. Her
poetic sensibility navigates on hearts
that comes out of
the rains to the sunshine, in search of poetry of the world:
“Cleansing
river will wash her wounds
healing
balm will soothe her sores
she
will be renewed restored.”
Mamang Dai, a fellow poetess from Itanagar in the North-east
Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh in ‘Small Towns and the
River’ expresses:
“Small towns always remind me of death.
My
hometown lies calmly amidst the trees(.)”
For
Mamang, each small rain drop sings. For Malsawmi, ‘tiny flowers I bring
adorn
your crown’.
Rain
and rivers give the vital dose to Pablo Neruda to overcome all kinds of solitude and
anxiety. Both Bibhu Padhi and Malsawmi are
ardent lovers of rain and rivers
which bring a promise of renewed vitality in life. Their aim is to achieve cleansing of the
minds by purgation of pent-up emotions.
Malsawmi registers
her faith, hope, dreams, and cultural memories again and again by subtle
imagery, metaphors and folk myths of her homeland. Nothing charges the
imagination more actively than poems on beauty what poets of all ages haunt in
the purlieu of thoughts on banks of the ‘river of no coasts’:
“Gem of rarest beauty
calls
in waking dreams
morning
sunset moonlight
still
black night
so
I must set out in quest
leaving all I own.”
There is an inward pull that invites a
sensitive mind to these poems. Malsawmi
is all set to blaze the trail of splendour and majesty of her ethereal poems, which
turn the keys of human hearts.
References:
Zorami, Malsawmi Jacob, Morph Books, 2015