Tazmeen Amna
Goner
Penguin Books. 2020.
ISBN: 9780143449164
Pp. 248 | PB | INR 299
An Onerous Achievement
Anubhav
Pradhan
Anubhav Pradhan works primarily on urban literature,
urban heritage and history, and urban planning. His doctoral thesis at Jamia
Millia Islamia was on colonial ethnography and the British imagination of India
and he has taught at South Asian University, Jamia Millia Islamia, and Bharati
College, University of Delhi.
Some books
are difficult to write about. Not because they tell a story which has never
been told before, or because they challenge in some fundamental way our sense
of self and place in the universe. There are such books, extraordinary works
which become pioneering trailblazers and leave a mark on our collective
consciousness. And then there are the more regular kind of books, sweet and
light, which leave some small, imperceptible trace of themselves like the flickering
memory of quiet sunsets on undisturbed beaches. But some books, some rare books
leave one indignant and provoked in equal measure, unsettling that distance
with which one tends to pronounce judgment.
Tazmeen
Amna’s Goner is likely to strike most
readers as precisely this sort of book. The story, by itself, is nothing new: a
young woman has an abusive relationship, is unable to prevent herself from
making bad choices, comes dangerously close to self-harm, and eventually hobbles
back to recovery with the love and care of her family and friends. This is one
of those harsh realities of life with which many of us have grappled: love has
remained the same across generations, even if its many travails are dissected much
more openly now. Seen with this perspective, there is nothing special or
riveting about the life and experiences of Amna’s protagonist in Goner.
Likewise, the
book’s claim to be a novel may well seem stretched to many. The narrative
appears too diffuse and scattered to meet conventional wisdom on the novelistic
form. The tone is a little too conversational, an uneasy crossover of the
traditional confessional and the contemporary Ted Talk. Readers may also be
left aghast at the unbridled profusion of profanities throughout the text,
something most good novelists shy from in pursuit of more impactful
characterisation. It does not help that Amna herself encourages us to read the
book as a memoir: it is difficult to not recall Mridula Garg’s injunction to
authors to not venture into retrospectives of their lives without having lived
it some years.
Yet, Goner is a striking piece of art. Not
because it tells an extraordinary story or because it attempts to birth a new
narrative paradigm, but simply because it tells its tale—broken, hurt,
resilient—with startling honesty and passion. Amna’s achievement in this book
appears to lie precisely in this, that at first glance Goner seems to merit all of this unsavoury comment. It is only on
deeper inspection, and introspection, that one realises that the book’s
excessively confused and agitated cogitation is a carefully wrought uncovering
of what passes so commonly and pervasively as the normal. It is to Amna’s
credit that she does so in a way which is as engaging as it is impelling.
Consider,
for instance, that shibboleth of language. The tone and choice of words in Goner will appear crude and unbecoming to
many, and some may well be so dismayed as to not even bother seeing the
narrative to its conclusion. Yet, this is the kind of language many of us
actually speak in private—to friends, to even family, but most importantly to ourselves.
Amna’s interiorised monologue appears all the more credible for capturing this flavour
of the casually, irreverently profane:
Oh, man, my head is spinning.
I’m drunk. Again. And I’m high on some other shit as well. I don’t know what
they’re calling it these days. Snuff? Brown Sugar? Cheap rip-off of cocaine? I
don’t know man! All I know is that it was powdery. I’m high as fuck. And not
the good type. The bad type. The very very bad type. The terrible type. Whoa,
this is a bad trip. (Amna 97)
Seen in
light of Amna’s unwaveringly level-headed exploration of mental health issues, this
vividly intimate tone of confession—more grudging than willing—appears to be no
mean artistic feat. She relates the frustration of experiencing a panic attack with
a raw brazenness that perhaps can come only from having such pain as a daily
companion. Those who have ever been through a panic attack will find it
commendable that she is able to articulate not just its onset but also her
thoughts and actions she as she wrestles against it and the spiral of her
thoughts as she succumbs to it:
I had driven only a few miles
when I felt an unwelcome jerk go through my body at first, and then through my
stomach all the way up my throat, as though I was going to throw up...
Breathe in, breathe out. It
was more like wheezing. So wheeze in, wheeze out... I’m sobbing. I’m screaming. From afar, it’s a manic
sight. You can see a girl sitting in a car rocking to and fro, hands clenched
into fists, punching the steering wheel till her knuckles bleed. (Amna 48)
It is
difficult at even the best of times for most of us to face our vulnerabilities
and address them openly and frankly, for we are all habituated to brushing our
anxieties, small and big, under that carpet of normalcy which we tend to obsessively
uphold to our collective detriment. At a time when mental health is in the
danger of becoming a fashionable buzzword, Amna is able to plumb into the
depths of the anguish and torment of what anxiety actually entails—what it
feels like, what it does. Welcome departures from the maudlin embellishments of
celebrity culture which often obfuscate the nuanced gravity of the key issues
at stake, this clarity and passion make Goner
an onerous achievement.