Uncommon chirping

After reading “Sorting Winter Days” by Sohini Basak, I started moving around the sparse furniture in my flat, pushing the futon forward, pulling the fridge back. In the third poem of her stunning debut collection, we live in the newness of small differences (London: Eyewear Publishing, 2018), Basak describes moving around furniture from one floor to another in a house, changing the purpose of rooms: “we bring the dining table upstairs... we turn the living room into a bedroom.” Then, in a characteristic leap of narrative between the real and surreal, she writes: “we crowd old pillowcases with embroidery so our / dreams enter our sleep again”.

Lovers of Bengali poetry might detect an influence of Joy Goswami. Or, perhaps, I am imagining it after reading the brief biographical note that tells me Basak is from Barrackpore, a small town in West Bengal. But there is in fact a dusk-after-rain quality to her poems. The book, which won the International Beverly Prize for Literature, begins mid-dream, mid-sentence, indicated by the first lower-case word of the inaugural poem, “An Enclosure”: “not in language, but something more / private”. By inviting a reader into her dream, Basak chooses an uncommon vulnerability that makes her poems so empathetic. Then, she picks a metaphor from fishing to comment on how poetry happens: “a line drops into my head / which I save for later.”

Another one “Why Did You Stop Writing?” is addressed to the poet’s father, who was an amateur poet in his college days. It traverses comfortably between English and Bengali. The text is a commentary of a daughter, “trying to talk to... [her] father before he was a father.” It is mostly in English, but interpolated with Bengali texts, extracts from the father’s poetry notebook. There is a bit of pathos: “Chaff needs from wants”; the poems in the father’s notebook dissolve into medical notes, into a list of money owed to friends. But there is also humour: “that young poet, at nineteen, asks a lot of questions”.

We live in the newness of small differences
Author: Sohini Basak
Publisher: Eyewear Publishing (2018)
Pages: 90
Price: Rs 838 

The linguistic versatility becomes more prominent in the second part of the book, titled, perhaps nonchalantly, “And Other Stories”. Most of the poems are about birds, drawing heavily on Bengali folktales and myths. Their titles are the names of these birds, but in the poet’s mother tongue. So the weaver bird become a babui, the crow a kaak, and the sparrow a chorui. Anyone familiar with these folktales, or even a semi-rural setting in Bengal, will hear the chirping of these winged creatures on these pages. The arrangement of the text in many of these poems is unconventional, challenging the hegemony of left- or right-aligned texts we are familiar with. This is throwing the gauntlet to the reader: challenging them to take flight with the poet and her birds and her poetry.

Wings or not, creatures populated these poems in plenty: you will meet a mongoose, a coral, a seahorse, more sparrows with “heads of gold”, tiger cubs tumbling out of a refrigerator or a dream, cats, frogs, wolves. At times, the animals that Basak describes are like Beatrix Potter characters. In “The Brightest Thing I Saw Today Was a Dead Kingfisher on the Road...”, Basak writes: “i want to say i love animals, / ...i want love, want animals”. There is a collapsing of conventional meaning in these lines; it is almost as if love and animals are synonyms. This is not merely linguistic callisthenics but also an ethical choice.

According to a recent World Wildlife Fund report, humanity has wiped out 60 per cent of wildlife since 1970. This “is now an emergency that threatens civilisation,” reported The Guardian on October 30. The crisis is being described by environmental scientists as the sixth mass extinction, the cause of which is Homo sapiens; it would take about 5-7 million years for the natural world to recover. Basak’s book is infused with ecological consciousness, a sort of nostalgia for all the animals and birds on the edge, creatures that might have once been common to us, but will soon disappear. Perhaps in the not-too-distant future, we will encounter a kaak, a bok, a chorai only in folktales or in poetry like Basak’s.  
 

The writer’s debut collection of poetry, Visceral Metropolis, was published last year and his novel, Ritual, is forthcoming next year