A search for meaning

At a recent reading in London, Hyderabad-based poet and journalist, Saima Afreen described how she found herself lost in the rain in Helsinki in 2017. She was in Finland in autumn that year after being selected for the renowned Villa Sarkia Writers’ Residency. Unable to find a taxi, she was losing all hope when a stranger, Velma, saved Afreen and even gave her an umbrella. This curious encounter has inspired the poem, “A Polka Dot Umbrella”, dedicated to Afreen’s saviour, and included in the current volume under review: “You / Black Rose / Inverted / In war with the sky / Bloom above my body / My personal ceiling.” 

This random act of kindness is curiously poetic as well as journalistic. Afreen, like Kolatkar, writes with both ends of her pencil — one for the Muses, the other for the masses. “A Polka Dot Umbrella” reminded me of American-Palestinian poet Naomi Shihab Nye’s “Kindness”: “Before you know what kindness really is / you must lose things, / …What you held in your hand, / what you counted and carefully saved, / all this must go so you know / how desolate the landscape can be / between the regions of kindness.” The landscape of life is desolate; the textual endeavour — poetic or journalistic — creates oases of existence.

People and places tumble out of Afreen’s book, revealing a cosmopolitan consciousness. (This year, she was in the UK on a Charles Wallace India Trust Fellowship in Creative Writing at the University of Kent; full disclosure: I read with her in London.) A brief glance through the contents page reveals a list of names of different places: Kolkata and Delhi and Gaya and Kashmir, but also Helsinki and Sysmä. One wonders what negotiations between travelogue and poetry one might encounter within the covers of this slim volume.

Sin of Semantics; Author: Saima Afreen; Publisher: Copper Coin; Pages: 111; Price: Rs 299
 

Even with this global perspective, the book also looks inward. Two poems appealed to me particularly — “A Cup of Tea” and “A Poet Sitting Near a Café Window”. Both are specifically about acts of composition, and acts of consumption. In the first one, Afreen writes: “The liquid sun / Plays / In fragile china / honey-hued oceans / bring tiny boats—/ of history— / to dock / on the / harbour of arid lips.” This seems to hark back to the tradition of oral poetry and of poetry as prophecy: “No other Prophet will come. / You / Are / The / Prophecy / At the well of the teacup”. Tea had been notorious for inspiring destructive colonial projects; this time it inspires poetry, redeeming itself.

In the second poem, too, the poet is drinking tea, and not coffee. Here, the teacup is again the source of a prophecy. In a scene right out of a Harry Potter divinations class, the poet, “catches the drowning face / in the brown whirlpool / of her teacup… she collects all the tea scents with dew / before they mould / the earth’s axis or the heart of a poem.” Juxtaposition of the axis of the planet and the heart of a poem is startlingly crafty. 

Those sceptical of the power of poetry might find this a tad fanciful, but what’s the purpose of poetry if it can’t even introduce a willing suspension of disbelief?

Any classification of Indian English poetry is continuously challenged by its practitioners, who bring to it not only their multilingual/multicultural selves but also a global perspective and political consciousness as varied as the country they inhabit or the world they travel in. Hyderabad-based Afreen’s debut collection Sin of Semantics is yet another testimony to the impossibly complicated strains — local and global — that are inextricably entangled in English poetry written on the subcontinent. 

The title of the volume under review is more than justified, because the poetry is inspired by so many mindbogglingly different sources that any search for meaning is futile, even sinful.

The writer’s novel, Ritual, is forthcoming this year