Singing for troubled times

Towards the end of this book, the narrator of one of the poems is advised to “find the poets” when she wants to “find the truth” about how Greece — a place she describes as “where everything was born / and now / ...seems as if it could vanish”. She is, unfortunately, unable to find any poets. Even when she meets a sandal seller, whom she suspects might be a poet, she hears nothing of poetry from him but of his money problems and the uncertain future of his children. But it is not a poem of despair; on the contrary, while acknowledging our troubled times, it also cries out in hope. The jury has been out on whether or not poets speak the truth ever since Plato accused versifiers of being artful liars, but Doshi seems to have taken on the mantle of singing for our troubled times.

The book is framed by two poems — “Contract” and “When I Was Still a Poet”.  Both are acutely conscious of the task, as well as the duties, of a poet. To the reader, Doshi says she will go to a great extent to create her poetry: “I will forgo happiness, / stab myself repeatedly, / and lower my head into countless ovens”. This is a wilful ritual of becoming vulnerable. Her plan is to metamorphose into an “immortal mosquito”, buzzing in the ear of her audience, provoking fury in them. The last poem has a sensation of giving up, of ennui: “Now that I / have given up, / afternoons dry as raisin skins scrub / by.” This is also a sort of death — an emotion that seems to permeate the entire book.

Between these two poems are 39 other lyrics of varying lengths, arranged into four distinct parts of nine or 10 poems each. How they are classified — chronologically or thematically — is not immediately clear, though there are some clues. In a recent interview with Scroll.in Doshi explained how she put the book together: “The process of editing poems, particularly with a collection where the poems aren’t bound by any sequence, is really quite organic. There will be a central core of poems, and then around the periphery poems that either make or don’t make the cut.” The organic manner in which each poem flows into the next is evidence of how successful this process has been. This also facilitates how these verses travel from Madras (Chennai) to Calcutta (Kolkata), Rome, Gwangju, Sweden, Mexico, San Francisco. Travel — physical or metaphysical — is an important theme of the collection.

Girls Are Coming Out of the Woods; Author: Tishani Doshi; Publisher: HarperCollins; Pages: 97; Price: Rs 399

Poetry has historically been related to places. We have Sophocles’ Athens, Wordsworth’s Lake District, Frost’s New England and Eliot’s London. Doshi’s process is in a way closely related to the landscape in which the poems are produced. Madras — her hometown — is where it all begins, but also ends: “Everyone is the house is dying” (“Summer in Madras”). There is death and decay also in “Calcutta Canzone”: “For nights after I return from Calcutta, / there are piss-filled, shit-strewn dreams.” There is a romanticising of decay, interconnected with poetry that the eastern metropolis is famed for. The action in the poem is a sort of surreal tug-of-war for the soul of the narrator’s brother between the monster city and the poet: “Calcutta, / you think you’re going to pour your song of decay / into his delicate ears, but my brother — / he can’t be seduced by your trees or your poetry.” But this death is not a surrender, not a ceasing of struggle, but a continuation of action.

Every poem in this book is, in fact, imbued with action. Doshi is also a dancer and perhaps the forms of dance and poetry are caught in a conversation in her poems. One is reminded of Yeats’ question: “How can we know the dancer from the dance? (“Among School Children”)” At times it is thematic, as in the case of “Ode to Patrick Swayze”: “At fourteen I wanted to devour you, / the twang, the strut, the perfect proletarian / butt in the black pants of you.” In other times, it is revealed in the movement of the lines of poetry. Take, for example, the poem from which the collection gets its name. The phrase “Girls are coming out of the woods” is repeated like a refrain, but also like an incantation: “Girls are / coming out of the woods / with panties tied around their lips, / making such a noise, it’s impossible / to hear.” 

I read this poem even as the floodgates were opened by the Harvey Weinstein case and the subsequent slush pile of Hollywood, followed by the #MeToo campaign on social media and the list of South Asian academics accused of sexual misconduct. True to Doshi’s words, it seemed like “Girls are coming / out of the woods, clearing the ground / to scatter their stories.” In ancient Greece, poets were sometimes considered philosophers. It may be a long time before girls — and all of us — actually emerge from the woods. But it has definitely started.