Basudhara Roy

Witness: The Red River Book of Poetry of Dissent

Poetry

Edited by Nabina Das

New Delhi: Red River, 2021

ISBN 978-81-948164-7-8

Pp 466  |  Rs. 499

In Dark Times
by Bertolt Brecht, translated from the German by Humphrey Miles

They won’t say: when the walnut tree shook in the wind
But: when the house-painter crushed the workers.

They won’t say: when the child skimmed a flat stone across the rapids
But: when the great wars were being prepared for.

They won’t say: when the woman came into the room
But: when the great powers joined forces against the workers.

However, they won’t say: the times were dark
Rather: why were their poets silent?

There is something about poetry as a genre that makes a certain degree of truth-telling necessary, inevitable, even inescapable. To keep one’s conscience away from the poetry one creates would be extremely difficult. When one notes how, in every age, the onus of defiance and documentation has always been on poets, it is not difficult to understand why Plato preferred poets away from his 'ideal' Republic. The looming threat of good poetry, as Auden points out, is that it "survives,/A way of happening, a mouth." (‘In Memory of W.B. Yeats’) While every earnest poem, irrespective of its art, can be said to bear witness to the moment of its inspiration and birth in some way or the other, Testimonial poetry or Witness poetry as a twentieth and twenty-first century genre, exclusively embraces poetry that responds to atrocity and social suffering. Witness: The Red River Book of Poetry of Dissent edited by Nabina Das is a staggering collection of two hundred and fifty voices speaking out from disparate locations - geographical, linguistic, and epistemological- across the length and breadth of India, testifying to the myriad shades and geometric angles of the social turbulence that each one of us, as members of a common society and a multi-hued cultural fabric, irremediably share.

"Whether it is the cries of starving children, or digital blockades of a people calling for azaadi, bullets to the head and heart, blood stains and tears, women battered and erased, or choices of love and food, the poets turn witness to the times in this vast collection to the events that have been unfolding before us day after day on themes related to oppression," writes NirupamaDutt in her powerful Introduction to the book. In her Editor's Note to the collection, poet Nabina Das asserts, "We're doing this anthology of 'dissent' poetry to counter the tyranny of our system, of the ruling disposition, and of all institutional injustices that continue to prevail and perpetuate. Especially in the pandemic - if not now, then when? - it is imperative we speak up and urge for structural changes to lives, livelihoods, and above all, for freedom of expression."

To articulate in words the extraordinary range of this extraordinary book with any sense of justice would be an endeavour next to impossible but a glance at the book's well-crafted cover speaks amply for itself. Note the defiant inclusiveness and communality of the brilliant red circle on a white background and the ninety-five storming keywords that offer sinewy windows into the book's fiery spirit. As you step into the pages, embroidered by fishes, Sufia Khatoon's aquatic art will overwhelm you with an indefinite, wistful longing. Peace? Freedom? Acceptance? Release? Hope? Faith? Camaraderie? Solidarity? All these, perhaps and more.

"Write F for fear which is present everywhere/ I stands for injury and L for lapse/ despots snatch away our complete alphabet/ they turn the violence in language/ into society's violence," writes the late MangaleshDabral in 'The Alphabet'. "History is what is remembered by the largest numbers," states Jonaki Ray in 'Pieta'. "If I am the other/ what do you answer t0/ Are you the designated one?" questions Saleem Peeradina in 'Reflections on the Other'. "I like a land where babies/ are ripped out of their graves, where the church/ leads to practical results like illegitimate children and bad marriages/ quite out of proportion to the current population," says Ernestina in Mona Zote's 'What Poetry Means to Enestina in Peril'. In 'Sangat', Lina Krishnan writes of our sad reality, "Association taints/ So we hesitate today/ To bring them into converse." Linthoi Ningthoujam's 'City, Love, and and an Accord' poignantly describes otherness in "We carry our terrain in the high of cheekbones and the slant of eyes./ They asked if we tumbled out of the same womb/ into a chaos of insect-eaters." "There's a poem somewhere about the indiscriminate nature of a bomb/ It does not know bricks from children/ Trees from women/ The hillsides from the hungry," writes LalnunsangaRalte in 'Come All Against'. Nikita Parik's 'Confinement' compares her mouth gridded with braces to a barb-wired city - "My mouth is/ Kasmir, is Palestine; is a witch,/ a homosexual." In 'Every Girl is Dinner', Sumana Roy writes, "All my life, I've always been meat -/ goat, sparrow, poultry;/ my tongue eaten raw, like a bull's;/ my fingers giving a vegetable its name;/ my body chopped into pieces for temple retail -" In Ruth Vanita's 'On the Other Hand', left-handedness becomes a potent metaphor for difference - "Though, to tell the truth,/ Some left-handed people you can't stand./ Groups, protests, struggles for civil rights - " Each one of the two hundred and fifty poems here will tug at your heart in distinct ways with their questioning irony, satire, rage and rebuttal. You will find them all speaking among themselves, reinforcing each other's voices and faith, firm in the belief that this utterance is essential, for themselves, for each other, and for the history of our times as a whole.

One can only marvel at the immense editorial effort that has gone into shaping a collection as polyphonic and as synchronous as this is. Not only has every region within the country and its diaspora been well-represented, the book carries translations from a large number of Indian languages as well to give readers a rich taste of the country's diversity. Well-established voices in poetry speak here alongside a plethora of new ones and if one were to carefully read the book, it would be a major adventure to locate the various Englishes that lushly and righteously flourish here under the umbrella term of Indian English.

In 'Poetry Will Belong', Shalim M. Hussain writes, "Poetry will be a sheaf of masur dal/ Cracked on baked earth by the lady with tamul lips/ [...] /Poetry will learn its aukaat/ Ma kasam, poetry will belong." As one enters into a dialogue with these poems, one ardently prays for them to belong - to visions, promises and legacies; to discourses, amendments, reforms; to borderlessness, inclusion and celebration; to healing, hope and health of life's breath and form.