Brown Goddess of Un-Belonging: Home, Language and Self in Brown God’s Child

By Nishi Pulugurtha

Reading How Women Became Poems in Malabar, Smitha Sehgal’s first volume of poems a couple of years ago, this reviewer was struck by the powerful evocative quality that marked her lines. Brown God’s Child is Sehgal’s second volume of poems and one in which the themes of identity return all over again. Intertwined with it are the themes of home, of rootedness in space that have been a mark of her poems. The very first poem in the volume, “Brown God’s Child” make this sense of place, home, culture and identity clear:

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Sounds in my language

are symbols of dark and light,

half Sanskrit -half Dravidian,

colour of the sea, the smell of ripe paddy.

Don’t speak your tongue

they are blood clots, I am cautioned early on-

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This is the poet speaking clear and loud, aware of her place in the scheme of things and vocal about what defines her.

 

A characteristic feature of Sehgal’s poems are the way in which myths and places figure in them. They do not crowd the poems but are a presence that lingers, to create meaning, that haunt at times, that call out to the reality of things.

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Mother opened Ramayana each monsoon.

She named me Sita, the daughter of Earth.

Brown Goddess of un-belonging. (“Un-Ghazal”)

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The Sita that she speaks of in the poem “Sita” is not the passive women, accepting all. She is one that takes things into her hands -

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You forge weapons with words.

You renounce the poet who says

you are the poem.

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The brown god, Mahabali, is seen in the last poem in the volume, “The Reign of Brown God,” the god who was pushed down but who rises each year – “Here he comes/ with an umbrella of thatched coconut leaves.” There is no way a poet from the Malabar would not bring this god into her poems somewhere, the god that is a part of her world, of her culture and identity.

In “A Poem for Delhi”, one notices the way place figures, it is a throbbing presence –

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In the alleys of Chandni Chowk

where day winds down saturated with the smell

of blood and bread and Ghalib’s anguish

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“Auroville” begins with a sense of calm – “Here they grow lotus and water lilies/ in pools” and ends with the coming in of the storm. The artisan who figures in “Kaalighat” moulds clay into idols for worship, almost creating divinity with earth and water.

 

Language and identity are an important aspect of some of the poems. “Malayalam” speaks of her mother tongue

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In the honeycomb

of vowels and rough-hewn

cloak of landslides

there exist many ways

to sing and deep soak our bones in the rain.

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“Becoming a Blood Hibiscus” brings in the reference to language and its loss and a sense of pain – “memory of abandoned mother tongue.” In “Mother Tongue” she speaks of how the mother tongue had to be kept at bay, a scenario that several growing up in India and studying at convent schools would be familiar with -

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In our English medium

Convent school, mother tongue

was a deprived child who had

to pay a fine each time she uttered a word.

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The reference to language and identity brings to mind the poet Kamala Das and it is interesting to note that this volume has a poem called “For Kamala Das.” The feminist poet reaching out to her icon, speaking to her inspiration, speaking to another woman who has felt much the same way about identity and a woman’s place in society.

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Kamala, I too want to

drift into sleep by the river

under the pulsating sky,

in an immortal embrace

of the anonymous one

Alas, I do not know to love

or be the beloved

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In several of the poems one notices a searing pain that breaks out in images that tear and rage -  “the torrent of madness,” “the island smelt of sweet blood,” “Algae biting on the shallow edges/ of the dike,” “ecstasy of tides,” “counted burning stars,” “wrung her hands”. The natural world that one encounters in the poems speak of a throbbing life, of an unease with things and a sense of anxiety as well. There is a lucidity and an urgency in the way Sehgal uses images from the natural world to create the landscape of the worlds that she lays out.

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In the granary, mother carved

my ginger root fingers in

the wooden handle of a meat knife,

guarding her only sun. (“Identifying a Moth”)

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In “Nagastuti” home and loss evocatively blend as she notes -

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Mother said that our homes

under the earth are flooded

during monsoons

and this was why we lived as nomads

from the time the earth was born.

 

The smell of the natural world, of the Malabar, of the rain that drenches and of prayer that comes out oblivious to the patterns of the world are clearly evoked in the poem.  

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There are journeys undertaken, some physical, several in the mind through time and space as the speaker in the poems looks out and tries to find resonances in a world. The Assamese poet Nilim Kumar Das figures in a poem, with the speaker asking a question that often figures in poems –  “do you not hear the truth/ of what is a poem, but God’s/ flesh and blood?” Poets have often been concerned about what a poem is, about how and why a poem comes into being and it is interesting to see this in Sehgal’s poem as well.

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As one reads the seventy four poems in “Brown God’s Child” one is struck by the range and variety of the styles in which the poems are written. There is no fixed pattern in the way she structures her lines, there are some poems where the poet uses prose to write a poem, there are poems that are long , some very short. Each one of them reveal a poet working with language and style to create new levels of meaning with the structure of each adding nuances to one’s experience of reading the poems.