Process of Identification and Postcolonial Trauma in Jayanta
Mahapatra’s Hesitant Light
Padma Kalyani Mohapatra is pursuing an M. A. in English from the Department
of Languages and Comparative Literature, Central University of Punjab.
Abstract
The collected poems
in Jayanta Mahapatra’s Hesitant Light take
an active role in expressing the structuring of self and healing through the
traumatic effects ramified by colonialism, thus implying the psychological
dimension of the resultant innate conflict of figuring out his postcolonial
identity. Therefore, it is due to this colonial trauma that the poems also
embody and reflect a sense of loss. The present study would like to reestablish
the view that apart from the political and cultural independence, the sense of liberation
in terms of psychological paradigm would lead to the complete or total
liberation of the individual from the degrading effects of colonialism.
Keywords: Poetry, Postcolonialism,
Jayanta Mahapatra.
The
process of colonialism is marked by violent intrusion of the native’s land,
culture, and language and most importantly it affects the psyche of the
colonized, resulting into an experience
of a traumatic situation by the colonized victim. The colonial process affected
different countries in different ways, for instance, if we take British
colonialism into account in relation to its construction of the entire colonial
structure in India, with respect to Africa, we are apprised of the subtle
differences in the treatment of the British who labelled Africans as pagan,
evil and barbaric, whereas, they didn’t overtly label the Indians as pagan or
uncivilized, rather they were of the view that India in the past, i.e., in the
pre-colonial period was embellished in rich culture and heritage, but for some
reason, the present generation of Indians have fallen from grace and accounting
to the perplexity of the people of India as to pinpoint the exact reason for
their downfall, it becomes their (British) moral responsibility to ‘civilize’
them so as to help them revive their lost grace. So, specifically, in the
context of India, the ongoing process of decolonization has always revolved
around the revival of the golden past of pre-colonial
India. But the problem lies in the fact that the colonial process exerting its
drastic influence on the present and future conditions of the state, also tries
to eradicate or erase the precolonial past of the captured land; thus breaking
the innate connection between the colonized by rupturing their authentic source
for revival and thus shattering their desire to merge their present to their
former state of being.
The
importance of past of a particular nation
(referred to as history) lies in the concatenation of innumerable blocks of
cultural elements that have conflated in gradual years to form the basis of the
identity of a particular nation-state that all individuals living as a
community share. But when their foundation is ruptured, their essences and
identities drain out, leaving them in disturbing space of chaos and conflict.
On the other hand, the “in-between” mediators of the state, owing to their
exposure to a Western system of
knowledge, have been relatively blurred to such an extent that they fail in
their endeavor to represent or ‘voice’ for the victims of colonialism. This act
of suppression of their culture and identity
leads to repression of self which further traumatizes the colonized subject.
This act of oppression leading to suppression directs us to the fact that the
process of colonialism is not only political
but also involves the psychological or mental aspect. Thus, this prolonged
tunnel of traumatization integrates the obvious confusion of the colonized
individual’s perceived identity, the colonizer’s imposed values molding his
identity, the colonized subject’s resistance to it, the resultant
disintegration of the former cultural identity of the colonized, formation of a
new identity that lacerates the individual’s self-consciousness and
affects his conception and understanding
of his self and ignites his desperation to find his own self-identity and his
mode of social identification.
The poems in Jayanta Mahapatra’s Hesitant Light try to take an active role in structuring of self
and healing through the traumatic effect ramified by colonialism, thus implying
to the psychological dimension of the resultant innate conflict of figuring out
his postcolonial identity. Therefore, it is due to this colonial trauma that
the poems reflect a loss of consciousness of self. This article attempts to
reestablish the view that apart from the political and cultural independence,
the liberation in terms of psychological paradigm would lead to the complete or total liberation of the individual
from the degrading effects of colonialism. One of the major concepts that this
chapter focusses on is the concept of ‘trauma’ which as defined by Oxford
dictionary is an “emotional shock following a stressful event or a physical
injury, which may lead to long-term neurosis” thus, implying an aftermath of a
cataclysmic event that results in total shattering of individual point of
reference resulting in total defiance to immediate understanding.
Therefore,
the event of colonialism can be taken as a cataclysmic event annihilating the
basic constructs of individual’s identity and self, and thus make it difficult for the colonized to
recuperate from the effects of colonialism, long after attaining political
independence from the colonizer. For instance, India achieved political
independence from the British on 15th August 1947 making the
citizens of India politically independent, but even after seventy years of
independence, the once-colonized subject’s psyche is scarred with the brutality
of violence, both physical and psychological, that colonialism accompanied.
This traumatic event of colonialism stuns the mind of the colonized thus
hindering the normal ability of the brain to rationally process the events and
eventually pushing it to the unconscious, as he reflects it in one of his poems
in Hesitant Light: “If it were a
moth, it would catch the fire’s wink, the side of its head carrying a wound
which bleeds. Something lies to me in a poem, wound or ornament, and lies without knowing it…” (35). The poet deliberately uses the metaphor of ‘wound’ to refer to trauma of
the post-colonial period but the next line unravels and makes his innate
confusion explicit, by highlighting an underlying existence of doubt as whether
to take the process of colonialism as a boon (as an ornament) or a bane (as a
wound), unable to decide whether to attach or detach from it. Once it reaches
to the unconscious realm of the colonized, it pervades in the background and
sprouts in uneven sequences through a defensive act of repeated rewinding of
the traumatic event, in a way familiarizing it.
This
repetition of the traumatic event without a rational understanding of the cause
behind it leads to loss of the individualized sense of self and pushes him into the chaotic state of identity crisis. The postcolonial subject is
involuntarily exposed to the colonizer’s ideological, cultural and political
structures of power and is invariably swayed to the perceived ‘superior’
culture while still clinging to his own traditional cultural roots thus placing
him in the ‘occult instability’. As stated by Lindsey Green-Simms in the book Indiscretions: At the Intersection of Queer
and Postcolonial Theory “… Fanon’s concept of a “zone of occult
instability”, which is an unrepresentable space of constant fluctuation used by
Fanon to designate the sphere of cultural struggle that must emerge in the wake
of codified nationalist and traditionalist culture. As the colonized,
direly affected by the traumatic event of colonization, loses his understanding
of self, this consequent transitional instability obstructs him to revive the
old, pre-traumatic self or to restructure a new identity resulting out of the
disintegration of the present traumatic self.
A
postcolonial subject starts doubting his identity, as Fanon mentions in the
chapter of Colonial Wars and Mental
disorders in the book The Wretched of the
Earth, “Because it is a systematic negation of the other person and a
furious determination to deny the other person all attributes of humanity,
colonialism forces the people it dominates to ask themselves the question
constantly: 'In reality, who am I?'” (250), the mentally colonized individual
in the postcolonial ambiance is constantly pulled to two different cultural
points which result in a divided self and
he tries to find a clarity amidst the chaos and tries to structure his own
self-identity. This
situation of instability affects the psychology of the colonized which
consequently results in his gradual loss of identity, the disintegration of his former cultural identity
and a possibility to assimilate in the oppressor’s culture leading to, what Homi K. Bhabha called, mimicry. As argued by Fanon, “The oppressor, through the
inclusive and frightening character of his authority, manages to impose on the
native new ways of seeing, and in particular, a pejorative judgment with respect to his original forms of
existing” (qtd. in Seals 38).
Such
traces of traumatic experiences is found in the anthology Hesitant Light by Jayanta Mahapatra, which blatantly unravels the
shock experienced by the poetic persona’s postcolonial self at the meeting of
contrasting cultures, the helpless state of being unable to save one’s former
culture’s essence and the eventual shock of one’s culture being perceived and
defined in derogatory terms, which heightens his intensity of traumatic
experience resulting in the formation of a divided self that constantly tries
to recuperate from the traumatic experience by ransacking his memories in a
hope to connect with his pre-traumatic self, as the resultant fluid identity
accounts for his failure to find his roots thus, reflecting his incapability to
establish an understanding and self-identity of his own. The initiation of this
traumatized self seems to reflect the poet’s own experiences direly affected by
multiple influences that have contributed in the structuring of his self,
especially the dominance of multiple religions in his life which later pushed
him into disillusionment and as a result of which he started questioning the
basic premise of ‘faith’ especially when the current religion is a byproduct of
the colonial process itself. Mahapatra apprises the
readers of his state of victimization where his identity and self-was in conflict since his birth as he was
brought up in a Hindu-dominated society, and had proximate leaning towards
Hindu faith, identifies himself with Hinduism, but Christianity is
unnecessarily imposed on him, the latter religion being significantly sowed by colonialism. When one loses one’s
self, he/ she finds the way to find one’s self by anchoring oneself to one’s
own faith (in religion, or belief in any supernatural entity), but in the case
of Jayanta Mahapatra, the bilateral struggles had already emerged years before
his birth; thus conceiving a sense of a divided self which owed its formation
to the constant struggles that he undertook to keep up with the innate (Hindu
religion, which has already become a ‘part of him’) and imposed Christianity.
Religion as a vantage point is also reflected in the writings of Frantz Fanon, as stated by Bobby Seals, “He (Frantz Fanon) believed that the use of the dominant religion, Christianity, has kept the “wretched of the earth” in a state of stagnation, making them believe that “God” will free them (i.e. only when they are deceased) from the oppressive and pervasive forces perpetuated by European domination” (8). Thus, the ‘colonial memory’ that passed through generations as a family heirloom may have shook the basic foundations of faith in Jayanta Mahapatra, so as to imply the existence of ‘private memory’ of colonialism in families and the intermingling of public and private memory to form ‘colonial memory’; the former kind of memory is also known as cultural memory. Even after departure of the colonizers, with the advent of globalization, which seems synonymous to colonialism, the socio-economic and socio-political issues still pervade in the post-colonial world, contradicting its promise of ‘a better world’ as supposedly assumed to characterize the post-colonial period. According to Fanon, the intermediate space of instability affects the colonized psychologically leading him to experience dire social and cultural alienation. As stated by Seals,
Alienation forces the 'other' to yearn for whiteness because that is what is at the apex, looking
down upon the subaltern. In that sense, the main purpose of Fanon’s objectivity centered on
awakening or invoking the ‘power within’ the populace themselves of the understandability
to work toward self-determination, self-worth, and non-Eurocentric truths. (16)
Thus, apart from the political, the actual decolonizing of the mindscape can begin when the colonized will find his own self by clinging to its native roots which defines his very essence, and tries to heal and recuperate from psychic scars that resulted out of the violent effects of colonialism. This section aims to focus on the psychic influence of postcoloniality and overcoming such psychic trauma is sine qua non to total liberation of the colonized, as opined by Ifowodo,
…Fanon believes the oppressed people dwell and their souls are crystallized, where we must
come to do any meaningful work of reconstituting the fragmented subject and of national
liberation, with the realm of post-colonial trauma. (28)
Religion as a vantage point is also reflected in the writings of Frantz Fanon, as stated by Bobby Seals, “He (Frantz Fanon) believed that the use of the dominant religion, Christianity, has kept the “wretched of the earth” in a state of stagnation, making them believe that “God” will free them (i.e. only when they are deceased) from the oppressive and pervasive forces perpetuated by European domination” (8). Thus, the ‘colonial memory’ that passed through generations as a family heirloom may have shook the basic foundations of faith in Jayanta Mahapatra, so as to imply the existence of ‘private memory’ of colonialism in families and the intermingling of public and private memory to form ‘colonial memory’; the former kind of memory is also known as cultural memory. Even after departure of the colonizers, with the advent of globalization, which seems synonymous to colonialism, the socio-economic and socio-political issues still pervade in the post-colonial world, contradicting its promise of ‘a better world’ as supposedly assumed to characterize the post-colonial period. According to Fanon, the intermediate space of instability affects the colonized psychologically leading him to experience dire social and cultural alienation. As stated by Seals,
Alienation forces the 'other' to yearn for whiteness because that is what is at the apex, looking
down upon the subaltern. In that sense, the main purpose of Fanon’s objectivity centered on
awakening or invoking the ‘power within’ the populace themselves of the understandability
to work toward self-determination, self-worth, and non-Eurocentric truths. (16)
Thus, apart from the political, the actual decolonizing of the mindscape can begin when the colonized will find his own self by clinging to its native roots which defines his very essence, and tries to heal and recuperate from psychic scars that resulted out of the violent effects of colonialism. This section aims to focus on the psychic influence of postcoloniality and overcoming such psychic trauma is sine qua non to total liberation of the colonized, as opined by Ifowodo,
…Fanon believes the oppressed people dwell and their souls are crystallized, where we must
come to do any meaningful work of reconstituting the fragmented subject and of national
liberation, with the realm of post-colonial trauma. (28)
This section too aims to explore the various traces of postcolonial trauma as
reflected in the poems of Hesitant Light,
the trauma resulting into a forked or divided self and the struggle of the
poetic persona to merge both the selves so as to find a definitive identity of
his own, reflected in various poems anthologized in Jayanta Mohapatra’s Hesitant Light as “it proceeds from an
acknowledgement of the fact that the extreme experience of trauma creates a
“radically altered” sense of self. The struggle of the postcolonial subject to
recover her identity is, then, quite literally, a struggle to reconcile the
fragments of a divided and alienated self […] it is reminiscent of that fraught
struggle to merge the “two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings”
('Into the Zone' 28), mirroring my analysis which involves a close-reading of the poems
which would reflect the state of dire
desperation as experienced by the poetic persona to cease his complexity and
merge his pre-traumatized self with the present traumatized one. The following
section will solely focus on Jayanta Mahapatra’s anthology Hesitant Light.
The
anthology Hesitant Light begins by
apprising the readers of an existence of a fragmented self and the impending
desire to consolidate the two selves pertaining to two different states and,
the resulting anxiety and chaos the poetic persona experiences during his
victimized state of postcolonial trauma.
Cruel seem these bars, the sun so narrow,
I am my home, they say,
for once here, there can be no farewell.
This is my first tie
as my heart beats into barriers of night.
Here play the winds of the world,
the sky too in its uncanny distance.
I stand on an empty promontory
Watching the invisible wave
That goes on beating against my will. (‘The
Crossing’, 13)
The poem refers to
the ‘bars’ of colonialism that has unduly exerted its cruelty over a mass of
people, through the colonizers, over the past years. Confused about the
constancy of one’s self, the poem reflects the popular opinion of those who
claim that one finds his self in himself as self like the soul can never leave
the living “I am my home, they say”. It then refers to the conception of the
fragmented self that has resulted out of the postcolonial trauma and refers it
as a ‘tie’ between the pre-traumatized self and the present traumatic self,
where it reveals the persona’s proximal leaning to the ‘barriers of night’,
i.e., the colonial structures (of knowledge, religion, power or language) which
claim to serve as barriers to ignorance and mold the colonized in the boon of
civilizational attributes. In this ‘night’ of colonialism play the influences
of the world, the colonizers whose differences from the colonized or the natives,
seems mysteriously unsettling and weird. Using a personal pronoun, the poem
reveals the sense of trauma resulting into loss of identity and witnesses the
formation of another self ‘against my will’ (13) hesitantly leaning and
obliging towards the servitude of the colonizers.
The
poem ‘The weight of yesterday’ reflects an attempt of clinging to one’s native
roots by retracing one’s past which seems crystallized, so as to find the
pre-traumatic self:
… And I go on looking for mine,
as I pass by the unchanging garden
that speaks no bond and no farewell
whose flowers press up a cry in me:
the unheard scream of all dead marionettes
the roses who have pulled up
their legs fearfully into their bellies. (‘The Weight of Yesterday’ 19)
The poem shows the
poetic persona’s attempt to find his lost self in the frozen garden of the past
“that speaks no bond and no farewell” which symbolizes to the crystalline
nature of the past where there is no sense of attachment or detachment. The
poet uses the metaphor of ‘flowers’ to imply the various memories that evoke his emotions as he trod down his memory
lane. Among many things, the element that seizes the attention is the buried
cultural heritage of the past which he refers to as ‘dead marionettes’. The
poet creates a haunting image of the ‘dead marionettes’ screaming, but their
voice is unable to reach us in the present. The brutality of the process of
colonization has killed its essence and buried it under the stinking layers of
the past. He has cleverly used the metaphor of ‘marionette’ for culture, as
culture (even in the past) was molded as a puppet in the hands of the people or
community in dominant power, having no vitality of its own and consequently has
faced unnatural fatality when the process of colonialism initiated its
debilitating effects by dominating, marginalizing and suppressing the native
culture with that of the dominant culture of the colonizers.
Thus,
the inanimate marionettes which were functioning in the hands of the ancestral
past, have been pushed to the margins by the dominant culture. As a result of
which, the colonized lose their sense of cultural identity and belonging-ness
and suffer from the trauma of rootlessness as “the roses who have pulled up
their legs fearfully into their bellies”; thus implying cultural detachment and
scarring of the native self. Invoking the death instinct by using the term
‘dead’ marionettes maybe a deliberate attempt is made by the poet to attribute
a state of preservation of the inanimate. If we consider the term ‘marionette’
as a metaphor used for native culture, in declaring it ‘dead’ the poet seems to
freeze it thus making it incapable to get affected by any form of exterior
forces or time. As a result of its non-exposure to the colonizer’s culture, it
will remain pure in its essence and though it cannot be a part of the colonized
society’s function, but would be preserved and won’t fade away in the
infinitude of time.
The
poem ‘Not to Be Loved by a Poem’ lets the inner conflicts of the poetic persona
out in the open,” … I groan under the weight of some meaningless confusion as I
lie awake in my embrace, blind as the one who pushed me there” (20). The poem
reveals the ongoing series of conflicts that is victimizing the persona,
pushing him into a dire state of alienation. Unable to trace his cultural
identity, he sits in a state of emptiness groaning ‘under the weight of some
meaningless confusion’ that seems to imply to the confusion regarding the
existence of two selves. Not being able to merge them into a whole being and
repeatedly being pulled between the contradictory states of indecisiveness of
the traumatized self and the hesitance to leave the native self which leaves
the persona bereft of any definitive identity to hold on to and accounts to the
formation of an alienated self where he “lie awake in my (his) embrace”,
‘blind’ to find direction or a way back to his pre-traumatized state, “blind”
as the colonizers who have pushed him to this state of rootlessness, who are
‘blind’ to the richness of the culture of the colonized natives, ‘blind’ to the
brutal effects of their dominance and cultural imposition, ‘blind’ in their
superiority and the resulting inferiority of the natives, ‘blind’ in their
assertion of norms that shape the colonized society leading to alienation of
the subjects from their native culture resulting into a collective loss of
identity and social cohesion.
The
poems try to establish his cultural identity on the framework of cultural
identity as defined by Stuart Hall in his essay Cultural Identity and Diaspora, “There are at least two different
ways of thinking about ‘cultural identity’. The first position defines
‘cultural identity’ in terms of one, many other, more superficial or
artificially imposed ‘selves’ which people with a shared history and ancestry
hold in common. […] second position recognizes that, as well as the many points
of similarity, there are also critical points of deep and significant difference which constitute ‘what we
really are’” (223-25) The first way of constructing a cultural identity is to
be in terms of the ancestral and shared history of the community as a whole as
imaged in his anthology when the poet invokes the shared past of the collective
community of Odisha, by painting descriptive images of Odishan landscape, its myths,
history and this process of invoking images and description will contribute to
eventual healing from the trauma experienced due to colonialism, as affirmed by
Stuart Hall where he states that this trauma “begins to be healed when these
forgotten connections are once more set in place. Such texts restore an
imaginary fullness or plentitude, to set against the broken rubric of our past”
(225). His anthology Hesitant Light is
embellished with various images of Odishan landscape, its culture, traditions, history,
and myths so as to reconstruct the lost
cultural identity:
I am one who goes on mapping lost
boundaries,
Forgotten histories,
Making the same jars with the earth of my
words
Day after day. (‘Hesitant Light’ 85)
In the poem ‘When
the Shadows Would Leave’, he writes,
… yet again: the cool inquisitive north wind
That has made people believe in love,
The salt shallows of Lake Chilika that shrink
as flocks of flamingoes’ winter over,
and the one lonely house in the valley… (23)
The deliberate attempt
of the poet to paint this image is to establish one of important elements that
adds to the authentic culture of Odisha, as besides Jagannath Temple in Puri
which is considered as one of the ‘four dhams
and forms an indispensable part of Hinduism; Chilika Lake is Asia’s largest
salt-water lagoon which is a spot of tourist attraction which adds on to the
beauty and socio-economic aspect of Odisha. After Chilika, Hesitant Light also talks about the bridge in Jobra, which is the
longest bridge in Odisha and from which one can view the beauty of Mahanadi
river, whose fertile soil hugely contributes to the agricultural prosperity of the state.
In
the poem ‘Happenings’, he writes:
[…] with the cry of a train crossing
the loneliness of the bridge
where it stands whispering
against the sands of Jobra. (50)
Hesitant Light retells some of the shared collective histories of Odisha that has formed an integral
part of the culture of Odisha, for instance, in the twenty-eighth poem of Hesitant Light he ingeminates the
history of the mass massacre by emperor Ashoka, turning the river Dayanadi red
with the blood of the victims. The pitiable sight transformed King Ashoka
completely, who eventually converted to Buddhism and propagated peace from then
on. As stated by Jayanta Mahapatra’s himself, “You can’t separate yourself from
history or myth. The emperor Ashoka massacred thousands of my ancestors in
Dhauli. While writing this poem I felt I was back in 261 BC watching the
massacre” (31), invocation of such a shared past unites the people of Odisha in
an intimate bond of social history, it also serves as a gentle reminder of the
socio-cultural aspect of Odisha that attaches
him to his native roots and restructures his cultural identity.
The poems in Hesitant Light is embellished with
suggestive images which depict the landscape and various cultural practices of
Odisha, which its people identify as a part of their identity:
End of the rains in the hills of Odisha.
No wetness drips now from the trees.
Just a silvery light on the black-green twigs
more like the unapologetic smile on faces of
the old
and the ill crowding the merciless temple
door. […]
And now, in a raging harvest,
the tribe celebrates
in the drum-heavy rite of abandon and dance. (‘End of the Rains in the Hills of Odisha’ 57)
The
poem initiates the process of decolonization by connecting with the native
masses by invoking the image of the tribal or the indigenous population of the
land, as they are untouched by the effects of colonialization and thus
represents the culture of Odisha in its essence, as stated by Gandhi in Hind Swaraj, “And where this cursed
modern civilization has not reached, India remains as it was before. The
inhabitants of that part of India will very properly laugh at your newfangled
notions. The English do not rule over them, nor will you[i]
rule over them. Those in whose name we speak we do not know, nor do they know
us. I would certainly advise you and those like you who love the motherland to
go into the interior that yet been not polluted by the railways and to live
there for six months… Now you see what I consider to be real civilization” (58).
The poems anthologized in Hesitant Light
seem to revert against the Eurocentric or Western system of knowledge and
discourse by emphasizing on local landscape, culture, ritual, and practices.
But
cultural identity is not just identifying with the similarities of a shared
cultural past but also with identifying with the differences, as ‘cultural
identity’ is not a fixed entity but an ever-evolving concept as stated by
Stuart Hall in his essay “Cultural Identity and Diaspora”, “Cultural
identity, in this second sense, is a matter of ‘becoming’ as well as ‘being’.
It belongs to the future as much as to the past. […] Far from being eternally
fixed in some essentialized past, they
are subject to the continuous play of history, culture, and power. […] It is only from this second position that we can
properly understand the traumatic character of ‘the colonial experience’” (225).
So to say, the golden past of Odisha reverberating with its unique cultural
traditions, rituals, and practices came
under the influence of many kinds of colonializations and colonial rulers which
eventually shaped the cultural identity of the people living in it. Thus,
identity keeps on evolving and molding according to the course of time, power
and history and is, therefore, always “in
process”.
The
past is still accessible to the seeker, but as pointed out by Stuart Hall, the
past is embellished in four elements of “memory, fantasy, narrative, and myth” (226). Hesitant Light employs all these four devices to start the process
of recuperation from the postcolonial trauma that the poetic persona is seen to
be experiencing. The poet constructs the past by using memory as a tool as
reflected in many of the poems in his anthology Hesitant Light:
Memories have left no tracks.
Maybe this was to be expected,
For they beat, far beyond
the windows of my prisons
with their homesick, remorseless rhythms. (‘The Weight of Yesterday’ 18)
It is also evident
in the poem ‘Reenacting an Old Play’:
Once a friend pushed my seven-year-old body
off a tree branch I was sitting on,
and next lay on the ground thinking… (27)
The anthology uses
memory “under the sign of post-traumatic melancholia” (Visser 277) which
reflects the melancholic state of the victim and its post-traumatic enervating
effects.
As seen in the poem
‘There Were No Trumpet Blasts’ in memory of the 142 children massacred in
Peshawar on December 16, 2014, where the poem addresses the persona’s plight
and helplessness as he witnesses the dire inhumanity of the terrorists.
Hesitant Light incorporates numerous fantastical elements as
well. In
the poem ‘End of the Rains in the Hills of Odisha’,
The
dark goddess high up on the hill slope
Stretches
the hours of ugly, bloodied nights,
her
eyes the monopoly of death. Long,
dry
sighs of worshippers are merely marooned
in the
shadows that secure her legend and life.
She is
the goddess fetishized by blood,
Watching
over bamboo and bramble and people
Who let
themselves be swept from world to world. (56)
In the poem ‘A Burning Ground by the River’, he writes,
And as
I sat there, it came. A lost moonlight.
It played around the ashes. It had a face,
looming larger as it approached.
Every look seemed to be an attempt on my life.
The wind couldn’t escape being choked
by the ashes. I couldn’t help notice
the cold uniform of the moonlight.
It took me years to walk back home. (90)
The
third device of ‘narrative’ is used explicitly in the poems. In relation to the
post-traumatic situation that the poet mirrors through the poems, the use of
narrative in his poems is an essential tool as “narrative is a powerful and
empowering therapeutic tool, enabling integration of the traumatic experience and
aiding healing and recovery” (Visser 274). Instances of such a usage are found in his poem ‘Crossing the River’,
where he portrays the story of a marginalized tribe ‘Kondh’ woman’s rape
scene:
Her
face buried in their rage,
the
stripped, naked Kondh woman
writhing
on the forest floor
can
only implore
her
deity of the silent trees
to pull
down those leaves upon her. (15)
As
one cannot separate oneself or one’s identity from the various cultural myths
and histories, the anthology is embroidered with a huge number of such myths.
One of the important myths that the poem seems to reiterate is the myth
revolving around the conversion of King Ashoka into Buddhism after a sudden
visual shock that he underwent after the mass massacre he committed turning
waters of river Dayanadi into red, in his poem ‘At the Rock Edict of Emperor
Asoka, Dhauli Hill, Odisha, 261 B.C.’:
High
up the hill, one watches
as the
moonlight still scours the dry riverbed
for
bodies of the dead in the vain sands
trapped
by cries of pain, as the year’s pilgrims
trudge
the tortured valley of the Daya
in the
pride of a singular belief. (55)
These
four devices provide the required cultural traces for the poetic persona to
trace his cultural identity by integrating them together. As cultural identity
is not rooted in one’s history and past, it cannot be defined as a fixed
cultural essence, rather it can be interpreted as one’s specific position at
that time, so as Stuart Hall affirms “not an essence but a positioning”.
The painful crossing through the
dark tunnel of individualized postcolonial trauma involves turning to
collective trauma, where one kindles
out oppressions on various communities owing to their race, sex, class, and gender, even experiences of day to day life
that inflicts pain. Jayanta Mahapatra’s Hesitant
Light not only paints local traumatic incidents but also incidents that
affected the global population. Some instances of such recollection of global
memory and collective trauma are reflected in many of his poems when he writes lines such as: “and I
suddenly remember/ the
well in which villagers up north/ had
found seven corpses in the first light” (32); and, “or in
the hope of the hostage looking up/ at the
sword that will, or will not,/ behead
him;/ time’s
there in the first careful step/ the
Taliban jihadi took as he fired/ at the
fourteen-year Malala” (45);
or, when he recalls the traumatizing incident of rape: “And
the story of Shabnam/ The
raped sixteen-year-old/ Who
disappeared from Dargha Bazar/ That
still clouds the necklaces/ Of festival
lights” (94).
In the crisis of traumatization, the
poems seem to reflect an ardent desire to relive the past. Owing to the sudden
blow of colonial trauma, an existence of two selves: the pre-traumatic and the
post-traumatic emerges out of the poems. Pulled between the contradiction of
reliving the past and inability to bring it back or replicate it completely,
the poems places both the selves in two time-periods: past and the present, so
as to distance the pre-traumatized self in order to get a rational clarity of
the present and find an alternative way to merge the two selves, creating a
possibility to fuse the situation in the present with some vital elements that
could be resurrected from the past. The poem ‘A Meaningless Evening’ in Hesitant Light apprises the readers of the existence of a second
self:
Only a
part of me
savors
the joy of the footsteps
while
another part sweats in fear
at the
thought of the many dead
who
don’t know where to go. (66)
The
excerpt may refer to the poetic persona’s fear of extinction of his cultural
values which are typically Odishan, with the onset of the dominance of the post-traumatized self which
has been exposed and has imbibed the western tongue which justifies his constant
search for his roots by recalling the historical and familial past. The poem
describes the persona’s confused state of being and the resulting ‘ambivalence’
which is characterized by significant attraction and repulsion from the
colonizer who is perceived as ‘superior’ in the light of the ‘inferior’
natives:
Like
finding oneself
at the
corner of an unknown road,
and
wandering through the confusion
of some
powerless anonymity. (71)
The
poem points to the amalgamated present self that has inculcated certain western
ideas and values and states the fact of
the inseparability of those influences
and impossibility to wholly return to the past, pre-traumatized self, in the
lines: “If I could return to where it came, would it
recognize itself?” (78). Like
Agha Shahid Ali he uses the word ‘shadow’ to imply one’s past, in a way letting
out his inability to separate himself from the colonial experiences, out in the
open. As seen more evidently in the poem ‘A Mood of Denial’ which connects the post-traumatic condition of alienation
with the process of recuperating from it, as he writes,
If you
feel you are alone,
there
must be a shadow inside you,
This
shadow must have come
from the past you did not want to be
in.
And if
you are going out of the door
you
don’t know if it’s the same
person
you are when you come back in. (87)
The
past is like a “familiar door” that holds no choices, but just “the frail songs
of years past, sit up, bolt upright, silent and terrified, not knowing where to
go” (84).
The poem ‘Signs’ reveals an
initiation of slow acceptance of the persona’s present traumatized self which
is slowly calming the mental and cultural chaos and after a rough-driven
transition of fifty poems, one can notice a shift from an ardent desire to go
back to the past to a gradual acceptance of the present self, suggesting an
imperceptible healing of the colonial trauma:
To
tell the truth, a voice inside
calls
for help still. The childish sorrow
leaps
at me like a cat, when I feel
I have
become someone else. (92)
As
a victim of colonial trauma, he raises issues such as hunger, poverty, rape,
etc. that can be stated as the ill-effects of resulting experience of
colonialism. Hesitant Light shows the
process of colonialism as a force that has drained the country and its fellow
men of all its resources and virtues and has
left it in a highly dilapidated condition which will take years to recover. As
Irene Visser quotes Hartman in her article “Trauma Theory and Postcolonial Literary Studies”: Hartman had already
presented trauma theory’s range as including the chronic and the collective,
due to its “emphasis on acts of violence like war and genocide” and its
attention to “familiar” violence such as rape, and the abuse of women and
children” as well as the “nature of emotion and daily hurt” (qtd. in Vesser 276). Hesitant Light has numerous such
incidents that highlight the different
kind of “familiar” violence that aggravates the traumatic existence of the
colonized, as seen the poem ‘Elsewhere’:
Yes,
the man walking down the street
knows
all about suffering,
crying
quietly in his cancer. (41),
or
in the poem ‘Already the Houses Appear’, where he depicts the scene:
Somewhere
on the riverbed, four men
are
raping a young girl, one after another. (58)
The
poem seems to question the underlying ambiguity that revolves around the
concept and shaping of identity, whether it is a fixed entity, or is it a
continuous process of mixing and intermixing of influences, or is it just a
name? In the poem ‘Homecoming’, he states:
Like
religion was purely a part of certain things which the world brought into being
just in
a way flavor arises from a blend
of
spices and herbs, it’s a name when I wake up.
Or like
history, one we have made ourselves. (60)
In
the above excerpt, we get an insight as to how the concept of ‘identity’
emerges from the poems anthologized in Hesitant
Light. The anthology deblurs the fluidity of
identity by questioning as to whether ‘identity’ is fixed from one’s
birth itself, as religion. Or it is a flexible entity incorporating numerous
influences in its course of formation?
Thus, Jayanta Mahapatra’s Hesitant Light seems to mirror the
post-traumatic state as experienced by the poetic persona who undergoes a
traumatic event of colonialism leading to the fragmentation of the self into
pre-traumatic and post-traumatic selves inducing chaos and confusion in the
psyche of the colonized, compelling him to question his identity. The poems show
an attempt of the colonized to clutch to his native roots in order to anchor himself as
he slowly starts to recuperate from the colonial trauma. When he starts the
process of reconciliation between the two selves, he realizes that he can
neither completely resurrect the past nor can there be a complete erasure of
the colonial influences from his present traumatized self. The text traces the post-traumatic experiences and chaos felt
by the poet in forms of personal and shared narratives and experiences, native landscapes filled with the darkness of poverty,
hunger, futility and rape or abuse of women, disillusionment of life. This results in the formation of a divided self which
distances one form of self from the other, thus finding a possibility to fuse
the two selves, and in some way, to recover from the present traumatic
state. Mahaptra's poetry is a wave of effort that resist ‘forgetting’ and encourage ‘reviving’.
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