Poets Against Arms Trade

The following poem was read by Mr. Henry Beissel in Iran in 1986, responding to statements by a Kuwaiti princess that this was no time for poetry, but a time to mobilize the military. Mr. Beissel read the poem again in June 2010 at the Ottawa arms trade (un)fair, one of the largest weapons bazaars in the world, supplying over 80 countries with weapons of death and destruction, surveillance, simulation (and some search and rescue!)

Manifesto in Times of War

Tell the enemy this:
that missiles can no more blow up the human spirit
than tanks can crush an idea.

Guns are the weapons of the impotent,
and I wouldn’t trade one line of true poetry for a thousand of them.
The blood flowers in a poem while bombs can only spill it.
Shrapnel can shatter glass and shred the flesh
but it cannot silence the song in a people’s heart.

Tell the enemy this: that our missiles fly on imagination’s wings
they’re poems aimed to explode in the heart
with all the violence of love and compassion.
It may flatter princes to think the sword mightier than the pen,
but we have the last word.
The true poet pioneers paths of freedom and places on the future’s mouth a brotherhood kiss with the rage of a rainstorm that makes the desert bloom.

Tell the enemy this: that every man, woman and child wears a helmet poets hammer from a metal
harder than any steel the metal of their faith in creation.
You can tear a person limb from limb
but you cannot sever a song from the listening heart,
and when your missiles long rust in scrapyards
today’s tears will have watered the desert
to make yesterday’s laughter blossom into tomorrow’s love.

Tell the enemy this: Yes, we’re still writing poems,
and if your grenades blow off our hands,
we’ll sing them into the future.

© Henry Beissel, 1986,2010

Bullet Holes

Here’s a poem by Alia Farooqui. After you’re done reading it, do share how you interpreted it, especially the context of the poem, and other wonderings such as ‘why would..?’s and ‘what if…?’s. Maybe in the end Alia could herself tell us what she had in mind while crafting the verse, and we could celebrate our variety of imagination.

Bullet Holes

He fired,

The shot travelled,

Travelled at the speed of light.

She didn’t know,

Didn’t know when it her.

She was standing near the window,

Just after her bath.

She was drying her wet hair,

Her skin tingling,

With the feel of her wet hair.

Bang,

The bullet was fired.

It hit the window first,

bursting the glass,

shattering an illusion.

It grazed the curtain,

left a singeing tear.

Then finally;

It hit her,

left her gasping for breath.

She looked down,

felt her hand

going to her chest.

She felt something warm,

something thick,

something red.

Her family saw her, lifeless

slumped against the wall.

They saw something more,

A bullet hole.

Reading Together: Kala Ghoda Poems by Kolatkar. With Anjali Nerlekar.

Arun Kolatkar through his work, tried to connect poetry with the world outside. Kala Ghoda Poems by Arun Kolatkar (Pras Publications, Mumbai, 2004) deal with urban spaces. The poet, through his poems brings the lives in the margins of the society center stage.

Title

The title ‘Kala Ghoda’ comes from a very crowded location in South Bombay, where is located one of the very famous art galleries in Bombay-the Jahangir Art Gallery. This is a space that has imposing colonial monuments, like the Rajabhai tower and the Prince of Wales museum. The Hindi phrase, “Kala Ghoda” literally means “black horse”; it refers to an equestrian monument of King Edward VII in black granite, a statue that was donated by Sir Alfred Sassoon in commemoration of the King’s visit to India and to Bombay in 1876. This monument was vandalized by some miscreants with a nationalist political agenda in 1965 and it now graces the zoological gardens of the Jijamata Udyan in Byculla , Bombay. But the area continues to be referred to by this now non-existent statue of colonial hegemony.

Prof.Anjali mentioned that there is an aptness in the usage of the phrase ‘Kala Ghoda’ as it reminds us of the imperialist power (of British Raj) and how it was substituted by a ‘Neo-colonial Society’ of Capitalist Bombay which marginalizes the poor and criminalizes poverty.

Site

The lives of these urban poor populate Kolatkar’s poems. Anjali Nerlekar laid great focus on the ‘site’ of Kolatkar’s poetry, in other words the geography of Kala Ghoda. She emphasized that studying ‘space’ is not just measuring the area or other geometrical proportions, but understanding the relations established in the space. Thus the focus is on ‘relational’ space, termed as ‘site’. Kala Ghoda is a triangular space, called a traffic island (trisland, a word coined by Kolatkar). This triangle has ‘rounded’ corners, thus is not a rigid structure. Anjali explores the meaning of ‘softened, rounded’ corners of the Kala Ghoda triangle. Rounded corners remove the inflexibility of the site thus linking the lives in Kala Ghoda with the world outside the site. The rounded corners make it impossible to understand things as ‘black’ and ‘white’. It removes boundaries and binaries. To further explain this Anjali Nerlekar gives an example- Let us imagine a dark room with a lighted candle in its centre. If you were asked where is light you would point at the candle. If you were asked where darkness is you would point at the corner of the room. However, the space in between (where light and darkness meet) cannot be understood as ‘light’ or ‘darkness’!

Subjugated knowledge

Anjali said that the Kolatkar’s poetry is a resurrection of ‘subjugated’ knowledges. Subjugated knowledge are ideas, issues, arguments which are not visible to the ‘normalized’, ‘institutionalized’ set up. It is an effort to study the ‘invisible’ from underneath. Anjali linked this central aspect of Kolatkar poems to our micro-level ‘Informal Economy in Ganesh Utsav’ Study. She said that such studies essentially try to understand marginality from bottom. The monolithic and central explanations are dismantled through such efforts. There is strong rejection of globalism and ‘functional coherence’ of institutionalized knowledge. In the context of our study based on Ganesh Utsav, Anjali said that the dominant understanding of Ganesh Utsav of being ‘purely Hindu’ and ‘purely Marathi’ are troubled by exposing the contribution made by a large ‘Non-Hindu’, ‘Migrant’ workforce. By dismantling the dominant it becomes very difficult to assume. It removes the two-dimensional nature (flatness) of the issue and points at its depths.

While mentioning the significance of recording subjugation, Anjali pointed at the fact that there is a strong nexus between’ knowledge’ and ‘power’. The ‘accountability’ to the respondent is often challenged in the discharge and use of knowledge. This is a dilemma which concerns researchers, poets, artists etc. Arun Kolatkar calls himself a voyeur as he peeps into the private lives of urban poor on the street. He deals with this voyeurism by just allowing a ‘peep’ into their lives and not expanding it further. Anjali referred to the 31st poem (Breakfast in Kala Ghoda, a series of 31 poems) to explain this further. Kolatkar writes – ‘the pop-up cafeteria disappears like a castle in a children’s book……’ which clearly indicates that the lives of the homeless poor are not enduringly exhibited for ‘free’ gaze.

Discussing poems…..

Anjali Nerlekar discussed four poem series- Pi-dog, Meera, the barefoot queen of the Crossroads and Breakfast Time at Kala Ghoda.

Through his poems Kolatkar draws an entire gamut of the many kinds of people and things that throng the streets of Kala Ghoda– as in the child prostitute; the idli vendor; idlis; the waste picker; pi –dog; the grandma; the blind man; the alcoholic and so on..

Anjali began with the ‘Pi-dog’ series. Anjali emphasized on the spatial descriptions of Kala Ghoda (a triangular island with rounded corners). In the poem a pi-dog claims ownership of Kala Ghoda in the early morning hours. Probably that would be the only time a stray dog could call the place its own.

As she progressed, Prof. Anjali brought to our notice the use of subversive idioms by Kolatkar in his poems. Words like ‘bitch’ are considered to be outside the norm of civility. But by the very use of such words Kolatkar comments on the social construct of (in) appropriateness of words and phrases. He mocks at the idea of purity and impurity which is integral to the Hindu religion.

Through Meera, Kolatkar tries to dismantle the elitist, exclusive, museum nature of art by describing garbage piles outside the Jahangir Art Gallery as art installations. And the poet states that the little piles of garbage collected in front of the elite art gallery are the true works of art because they are ephemeral, the real key to Bombay life and a homage to the people on whose backs it is built ( ….. ‘Homage to Bombay, one’, ‘Homage to Bombay, two’)

Prof. Anjali spoke about Michel Duchamp (‘Dadaism’) who also tried to redefine the conventional understanding of art. However such acts of rebellion get co-opted with time.

In ‘Barefoot Queen of the Crossroads’ Kolatkar stares at a child prostitute as she stands ,back to her sun to dry her washed hair. Prof. Anjali states that what Kolatkar is doing is precisely an act of voyeurism. The people living on the streets have no privacy of their own; they are exposed to public gaze. These stares which include the gaze of a poet (….poets with tongues hanging out….) create a kind of ‘privacy’ which is out of sheer contempt. She further said that documenting the urban poor is in one way taking advantage of them.

In the last poem series, ‘Breakfast time at Kala Ghoda’ Kolatkar gives a panoramic view of people having breakfast across the globe and then slowly moving towards India, Bombay and ultimately Kala Ghoda. Prof. Anjali spoke about the ‘politics’ of food. She said that more than the breakfast it is the context in which it is positioned, consumed that lends it meaning. The subjectivity and sensuality with which Kolatkar describes idlis in one of the poems points out at the pleasure with which the homeless urban poor of Kala Ghoda have them. This may be their only meal for the day and thus becomes a heaven- like experience for them. Idlis being described as Infant Krishna also points at the same fact. The homeless poor of Kala Ghoda resist by staying alive on these idlis served by Annapurna.

-N.Shobhana

Poetry And Music with Open Space

We started with the song Janane Ka Haq, and poetry recitations and music followed from many participants. Three of the poems recited at the event our given along with the lyrics of the Janane Ka Hap song.

mere sapnon ka janne ka huk re My dreams have a right to know
kyun sadiyon se toot rahe hai why they have been shattering for years
inko sajne ka naam nahin like they do not want to get fulfilled

mere haathon ko janne ka huk re My hands have the right to know
kyun barson se khali pade re why they have been empty for years
inhein aaj bhi kaam nahi hai they till today do not have a job

mere pairon ko yeh janne ka huk re My legs have the right to know
kyon gaon gaon chalna pade re why they walk from village to village
kyon bus ka nishan nahi why there is no trace of a bus

meri bhUkh ko yeh janne ka huk re My hunger has the right to know
kyon godamon mein sadte hain daane why are foodgrains rotting in the godowns
mujhe mutthi bhar dhan nahi (paddy) I dont even have a handful of grain.

meri budhi maa ko janne ka huk re My old mother has the right to know
kyon goli nahi sui davakhane why are there no medicines in the clinics

patti tanke ka saman nahi why there are no bandages or stiching aid.

mere kheton ko yeh janne ka huk re my fields have the right to know
kyon bandh bane re bade bade why are there big dams being built for water,
To bhi faslon mein jaan nahi and still there is no life in my crops.

mere jungalon ko yeh janne ka huk re My woods have a right to know
kahan daliyan woh patte tane mitti where are the branches, leaves and earth
kyon jharno ka nam nahi why there is no trace of springs.

meri nadiyon ko janne ka huk re My rivers have the right to know
kyon zeher milaye karkhane why are the factories poisoning the rivers
jaise nadiyoon mein jaan nahi as though the rivers dont have life.

mere gaon ko jaan ne ka huk re My villages have the right to know
kyon bijli na sadke na pani why there is no electricity, road or water supply
khuli ration ki dukan nahi Nor ration shopopen

mere voton ko ye jann ne ka huk re My vote has the right to know
kyon ek din bade bade vaade Why one day we hear big promises
fir panch saal kam nahi And for five years, no work

mere raam ko janne ka huk re My god has the right to know
rehman ko ye jannne ka huk re why there is bloodshed on the streets
kyon khoon bahe re sadkon pe as though we are not human beings.
kya sab insaan nahi

meri zindagi ko janne ka hak re My life has a right to know
ab hak ke bina bhi kya jeena if my life is worthy of living without promises
yeh jeene ke samaan nahin is it even equivalent to living.

SAFETY- Alia Farooqui

Safety:

A mother is hiding beneath her bed,

Wishing her children don’t cry,

There isn’t any Safety;

the rioters are here at the foot of the bed.

A brother is hiding just behind the window sill,

He doesn’t want to die the way his sister did,

There isn’t any Safety;

caught between bullets that’s how she was killed.

A daughter is hiding in the fields,

She assumed she could choose the partner she wanted,

There isn’t any Safety;

her family will be ready, to make her feel haunted.

A father is hiding alone in his house,

The land he loved isn’t his anymore,

There isn’t any Safety;

the Developers will chase him out, like a cat chases a mouse.

The mother is crying now,

Her lament is like a tortured bird’s song.

The rioters found her children,

They knew where they were all along.

Firdaus Soni

PASSIVE
“Coming” her voice
sails over the buzz of activity.
We are going to the bazzar.
The scent of talcum and Mogra
Lingers in the air
Doors swinging
Feet moving
A ceremony is happening
The family is going to the bazzar.

Her aging eyes savor the sight
As they follow her wrinkled fingers
Feeling the maroon Mysore silk
She wraps it around
In a practiced grace
I exclaim and inwardly smile.

“Looks good?” she asks
I adjust the mogra in her plait
“Sexy” I wink.
She eyes my levis in disdain
A sigh escapes
A mutual understanding, it’s in vain.

Sparkling eyes, she walks out
to see if others are done.
Secretly awaiting
his adoring reply.

“What a gaudy color!!”
“Are you going to wear this?”
Eyes downcast
Heart melting from
disappointment to guilt.

Oblivious to the hurt, he points out
to a light blue sari.
“that’s so much better simple and elegant”
“wear that”.

Realization dawns
Responsibility beckons.
I know I have to defend.
Words fidget to form.
A knot constricts my throat.
Appalled at my own failure
Conscience throbs
A mute witness
I see her unfold the blue
Replace the maroon.
She gazes in the mirror
Reassurance takes over resentment.
“he is right, the maroon is too gaudy
and the silk too royal.”
A sigh escapes …again.

Words solid in my throat
Melt in my eyes.
I gasp at his indifferent back
Trying to voice the right words
I throw a pleading look at her
“this is how it is”
My defeat is
reflected in her eyes.
The knot tightens
Strangles
Conscience throbs
Maybe next time
Yes, next time for sure.

Firdaus soni

TONIGHT- Rajashree Gandhi

Roman historian Tacitus writes about “Nero and the burning of Rome”.
People believed Nero had set Rome on fire. So, Nero had to do something to distract the population of Rome. He decided to hold the biggest party ever held in the history of the Roman Empire. Nero offered his gardens for the spectacle. The problem was how to provide nightly illumination for the party to which the entire Roman elite was invited. The intelligentsia, the artists, the gossip columnists, certainly the political correspondents, anybody who mattered in Rome was at that party. So
they solved the problem, writes Tacitus, by bringing the wretched
criminals and prisoners from the jails, and burning them alive at stake around the garden! Their pyre-fire would lighten the party.

In one of his talks, P. Sainath (A rural reporter, due to whose efforts the issue of ‘farmer suicides’ in India was brought to the forefront) wonders, how the issue is not Nero.
The issue is Nero’s guests. Who were the guests at that party? What sort of sensibility did it require to pop another fig into your mouth as one more human being went up in flames nearby to serve as ‘a nightly illumination?’ What was the mindset required to take a sip from a goblet, as someone burnt alive? For the party to go on, singing and dancing, as the spectacle unfolded? These were people who were the intellect of
Rome, the best and the finest. In today’s context, who’s the ‘Nero’s guest’?
This poem strives to search an answer.

Tonight.

This is the dress I’ll wear tonight
From the fanciest of boutiques,
woven of exclusive strands of insensitivity,
smeared with the lustre of carelessness.
Made of less cotton, and more of green suicides.

This is the goblet I’ll hold tonight
What the goblet shall hold, is a surprise.
Perhaps less grapes, and more of red spilled
from slaughtered voices,
and squished rights of the little people.

This is the necklace I’ll adorn tonight.
It’s made of deluxe diamonds,
those which reflect callously,
the light from burning pyres,
diverting the sin to your eyes.

This is the fork I’ll use tonight.
To chomp off elegantly,
the lives of malnourished children,
between sips of water, from their
mother’s tears or grandmothers’ wells.

This is the pair of shoes I’ll wear tonight.
Specially crafted, so that the
tips always point at someone.
And the heels keep me high above
the Dalit, the BGT victim, the beggar.

This is the purse I’ll carry tonight.
Can fit in all the necessities
for a party like this.
Elite lie lip color, blinding kohl.
But it has no room for a red sponge pump.

This is the smile I’ll wear tonight.
Sphinxlike, designed of human hide.
Engineered to keep smiling,
even in the event of catastrophes,
or tragedies; or serial murders.

I’m Nero’s guest, waiting for tonight.
But tonight could be like 2nd Dec, 1984.
Even if not, what am I?
An ongoing tragedy? Unfolding in slow motion?
Do I even need a gas to kill me?

Or will my breath of indifference be enough?
Or am I just a corpse, faking a life?
I am the perfect Nero’s guest, waiting for tonight.

XxxxxxxxxxX

Notes:

BGT: Bhopal Gas Tragedy
2nd December 1984: When BGT started.