Is it a crime to write poetry when war breaks out? Those who are in power will say, yes. The sycophants will say, ‘Which war? We are at peace. India is a blessed country. There is no war…everything is in the right tune.’ But a poet with a conscience can feel the air, can smell the gunpowder and burnt skin. Modern warfare has different techniques. The rich siphon off all the wealth and the rest of the Indians jostle with each other for the remaining 1%. Meena Kandasamay is a poet who is quite aware of the war between rich and poor, between women and the patriarchal hegemony of everything, and between the fascist state and the oppressed people.
Meena Kandasamay is a poet who is quite aware of the war between rich and poor, between women and the patriarchal hegemony of everything, and between the fascist state and the oppressed people.
Meena is a poet with a conscience. She bleeds, she cries, she shouts at the warmongers but she never gives up. Her poetry collection, Tomorrow Someone Will Arrest You is not a passive submission to the establishment but a hard slap on the perpetrators of human rights violence and the throttling of rights to speech. The collection has five parts: The Poet, Her Comrade, Her Lover, Her Friends, and Her Country.
In the first part, The Poet, Meena as a wild woman on a word hunt searches:
‘…find me a word
that flinches at the thought of being
trapped, a word that shows me
stealing time, not men.’
She has to undergo vilification as a marginalised woman. But this constant attack on her caste identity, and identity as a woman does not give her an inferiority complex. Rather, she fights them back. In the poem, “Sapphic Scar” she writes,
‘Being seen as denominational sets me alight,
makes me write word after word in rage,
leave behind this body of work,
so that someday, at another time,
someone else will read me and say:
she deserved her place.‘
She is very much conscious of the refugee crisis and the helpless deaths of the people of Syria, as she writes empathetically in “The Wars Come Home”. She is also very conscious of the fascist attempts to throttle every voice of dissent at home. Every free voice in India is under attack. With rage, she writes,
‘Tomorrow someone will arrest you.
The court, in a rare gesture, will give you the benefit of bail. The police will rearrest you in another case. This will go on and on.
Tomorrow someone will arrest your children. You will be underground. The police will tell your old mother to consume poison and feed it to the kids.
Tomorrow someone will arrest you, your partner, your children, your children’s children. Some measures are essential to keep a democracy alive.
Long Live Silence.’
Meena’s poems provoke the readers
Daunting, courageous Meena has never been silent. She is rage. Her words are the hammers melting the dead silent and thus becoming one of the very few voices fighting for the idea of an all-equal land. She is not afraid to stand for the Bhima Koregaon activists who are undergoing the trial process which is itself a punishment. She writes,
‘PROCESS= PUNISHMENT
(Dedicated to the Bhima Koregaon – 16)
Some activists dreamed of another world, demanded paradise,
repeated the same old, the same old:
The people want the fall of the regime
The people want a welfare state
The people want a people’s rule
The people want to tax the rich
The people want their children clothed & fed & taught…
The people want freedom
The people want hope.’
Meena Kandasamy is hope. Though she is punished for being her and her readers are also punished for reading her, in this unsettling poetic force lies the hope of germination, the hope of the birth of something new, fresh and just from a supremely unjust, chaotic and hegemonic right-wing ecosystem system of belief. She writes,
‘A young friend in Kerala told me his cousin-sister was rejected from a marriage alliance by the man’s family who said: ‘She is the kind of woman who reads Meena Kandasamy.’‘
In a country which is sliding fastly into becoming a majoritarian ethnic democracy behaving like a typical fascist state by allowing the lynchers and bulldozers to roam free in the street, Meena perfectly enumerates the strategies of the state against the poet after she defended the organisers of the 2012 Hyderabad Beef Festival and her condemnation of the subsequent violence. As she goes on writing about the plans that the state employs to dissuade a poet or a bitch from eating beef, she ends with,
‘PLAN TWELVE: ISSUE A GANG-RAPE THREAT Tweet @beefeatingbitch: ‘Bloody bitch, u sud be gang-raped n telecasted live, that will be an awesome experience.’ Simultaneously, explore the possibilities of an Islamic-style Hindu fatwa to finish the bitch once and for all.‘
To counter the fascist endeavours of shutting down a woman by giving her rape threats, Meena Kandasamay minces no words at all. She is the proud owner of her words. In the next poem, she writes,
‘#THISPOEMWILLPROVOKEYOU
This poem is not a Hindu.
This poem is eager to offend.
This poem is shallow and distorted.
This poem is a non-serious representation of Hinduism.‘
This dares to offend the most powerful polarising force is Meena’s forte. She is straightforward without obscurity and the use of simple language and texture makes her stand out as a poet. When the oppression is blatant and obvious, a poet’s ability to touch those wounds with plain language is commendable work. Every oppression in the name of caste, creed and gender makes her furious. So in the poem “Rape Nation” which is inspired by the Hathras rape case, she writes,
‘Manu said once, so his dickheads repeat today:
all women are harlots, all women are base;
all women seek is sex,
all they shall have is rape.
Manu gives men a licence plate, such rape-mandate.
This has happened before, this will happen again.
This has happened before, this will happen again.
Sanatan, the only law of the land that’s in force,
Sanatan, where nothing, nothing ever will change.
Always, always a victim-blaming slut-template,
a rapist-shielding police state, a caste-denying fourth estate.‘
Meena as a poet and witness of the present time
Herself marginalised in many ways, Meena stands with all her poetic armours for the Muslims, for the Dalits, and for the people of the LGBTQ community. Though for some she is “anti-national” Meena Kandasamay aches for the lonely death of the people in the time of Covid – 19 pandemic. Her poem “India is My Country” reminds us of the thousands of mass shallow graves exposed by the rains in Uttar Pradesh. She laments for the deceased and their near and dear ones:
‘Only the endless sight of anonymous corpses wrapped in white plastic streaming out from ambulances, a lone relative who builds the pyre with a lot of help, rows & rows & rows of open-air pyres with wood mercilessly piled close together to contain the flames, unrepentant fire and ash, cremation workers moving around in that smoky daze, recycling the wood that has not had the heart to burn.’
But while mourning she also takes a jibe at the government’s effort to hide the exact number of deaths and the indifferent inhuman attitude of the state that could not hide the poor health infrastructure that left the people of their own in the face of the raging pandemic:
‘We mourn for the lost pride that let us say each day, India is my country, and now we feebly add, my country is a crematorium.’
Everything is falling apart. The institutions are being hollowed out. The democratic values are eroding fast. Brave voices are being arrested. What is the need of a poet in this time? A poet with a conscience is now the only hope. She can be the witness. Meena, in the collection of poems titled Tomorrow Someone Will Arrest You doesn’t fail us, the readers. Meena’s poems are alive and witness that everything is not dead yet. She rightly writes,
‘What is the use of a poet in a season of bloodshed?
Tell me, dear ones. Is she the one who grieves?
Is she the one who guards the embers
of a people’s rage?
Is she the one who mirrors your shattered heart?
Or, is she the one
who speaks to show
she is not yet dead.’
Meena’s poems are the fire we need to ignite our dying embers with.
This poetry collection Tomorrow Someone Will Arrest You testifies that she, the poet, is not dead yet and the struggle for the idea of a pluralistic welfare state is not dead yet either. Meena’s poems are the fire we need to ignite our dying embers with.
