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Paradigm Shift in The Poetry of Kamal Das
Paradigm Shift in The Poetry of Kamal Das
Paradigm Shift in The Poetry of Kamal Das
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Paradigm Shift in the Reading of
Kamala Das's Poetry
Indian-English literature.
Kamala Das's poetry, like the poetry of Shiv K. Kumar, begins in
pain and anguish caused by her loss of freedom to live her life, the way
she liked.Her best known poem, "An Introduction" sets the tone of
her poetry and reveals her mind.
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But my sad woman-body felt so beaten
The weight of my breast and womb crushed me. I shrank
Pitifully. (Only the Soul Knows How to Sing 96)
The abovequoted lines suggest the pain and anguish that crushed
the poet. Later on, she wrote poetry of human love like John Donne
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Obviously, the answer is no, but then Kamala Das also suggests 'truthfully,
that in this game of love and hate, the woman is as much to blame
as her male partner, because she too is driven by her sexual urges.
poetry not only negative but ironical. In "The Stone Age" she compares
the husband to an 'old fat spider' and dramatizes wife-husband relationship
with a tinge of irony:
The dissatisfaction with the husband and the desire for another man
becomes prominent in "The Stone Age".
Kamala Das is not only a poet of love, she is the poet of body.
Her emphasis on the satisfaction of the body finds support in the work
of the Queer theorist, Judith Butler, who maintains that it is the body
that determines one's nature and character. Our fate lies not in the stars
but in the body. Betrayal in love breaks the heart of the poet. In order
to save the love relationship, she advises women to gift all to men in
a poem called, "The Looking Glass":
If that does not save the relationship, she advises women, 'Don't cry
embarrassingly loud when /jilted in love'. Her poem, "The Suicide" reminds
us of John Donne's "Aire and Angels" in which the latter lays emphasis
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on body. Das begins her poem playing on the dichotomy between the
Bereft of soul
My body shall be bare
Bereft of body
My soul shall be bare...
If love is not to be had
I want to be dead, just dead.
(Only the Soul Knows How to Sing 86-87)
I lay on it as on a divan
I lay on it just like
Matisse's Red Odalisque
Water was my strange flower
One must picture a woman
Without a toga or a scarf
On a couch as deep as a tomb.
Indeed, one might link Kamala Das not only with Sylvia
Plath, but with Anne Sexton who "is a truer example
of the confessional mode." (Kulshrestha 195-196)
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Notonly in sexual imagery but in the choice and collocation of
words, Kamala Das makes innovation in Indian-English poetry. Words
like warm shock of menstrual blood' 'the musky sweat between the breasts,'
'the jerkyway he urinates,' 'my pubis,' 'lesbian,' 'frigid,' 'queer,' 'sandal,' 'scent,'
Playhouse", "A Requiem for My Father", "My Father's Death" and "Blood".
Her grandmother and great grandmother remain for her the centre of
the family. In "Blood" she says,
To watch it die
When I grow old, I said
And very very rich
My great grandmother
Touched my cheeks and smiled.
She was really simple.
Fed on God for year.
(Only the Soul Knows How to Sing 72)
they adopt as their own. Hence, they are suspended between two worlds—
never at home, here or there.
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The unwanted wait here, and there for aeroplanes
Having discussed the poetry of Kamala Das, the question that lurks
in the mind is that how to rate her as a poet. Paul Valerey once said
that a poem is never complete but abandoned. This applies to Kamala
Das's poetry. Most of her poems end with three dots which invite the
readers to expand them.
E.M.W. Tillyard divides poetry into two types: direct poetry and
oblique poetry. Direct poetry is that in which the surface meaning is the
same as deep meaning but in oblique poetry one thing is stated in terms
of another. Though Kamala Das has written a few oblique poems, she
excels in her direct poems. The strength of her poetry lies in her frankness
to say the ordinary things of life without ambiguity. Clarity of thought
and felicity of expression go together to make her poetry immensely
readable.
Supremely confident of her ideas about love, lust, body and
man-woman relationships she knows that she can come closer to readers
supreme indifference.
ordinary life.
("Composition")
against male hegemony in some of her poems, she also accepts the value
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of wife-husband relationship as a norm in family-life. Both the attitudes
are expressed in the same poem, "A Widow's Lament":
Kamala Das's texts are worldly. They are about contemporary reality.
She writesabout women who are discriminated against by men in
the society in our time. Hence, her poems can be termed topical
poems. She was disturbed by the riots in Delhi in 1984 and the killings
in Sri Lanka. Poems like "Delhi 1984", "If Death is Your wish" , "After
July", "Smoke in Colombo" and "The Sea at Galle Face Green" reveal
her concern for suffering mankind and anguish for senseless violence.
There is variety in her poetry. If in some poems she denounces love
that becomes the other name of lust, in others she accepts it when it
becomes tender. If love becomes 'skin-communicated thing' in her negative
poems, in her positive poems she feels the absence of the husband. She
writes;
Do I miss him?
Of course, I do, for larger than life
was he.
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There is a love greater than all you know
expressed through the body also transcends the body:' ('Transcending the
poet lies in her ability to bring feminism and postcolonialism closer for
exploring new themes and images. Both women and the colonized were
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live in the texture of her poetry so that it ceases to appear strange to
us. In his well known book, The Western Canon, Harold Bloom ponders
over the question, 'What makes the author and the works canonical?'
and says, 'the answer more often than not, has turned out to be strangeness,
a mode of originality that either cannot be assimilated or that so assimilates
us that we cease to see it as strange' (Bloom 3). In a way Kamala Das
assimilates us and we take her poetry as authentic representation of women's
poets and writers in the twenty-first century for her daring portrayal of
love and body in straightforward language. It is her emphasis on body
that becomes an eye-opener for Indian-English writers who openly and
frankly describe the contours of body in their work. She knows that 'life
is too short! for absolute bliss'. Hence, we should explore more and more
to understand and experience it in the world going beyond the dictates
of the society. We should live our lives to the full. That seems to me
the message of her poetry.
Works Cited
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