Amit Shankar Saha
The Nomadic Trail: Seventy Poems by Jharna Sanyal
New Delhi: Rubric Publishing, 2019, ISBN 978-81-938312-5-0, Pages 88, Price INR 300
Jharna Sanyal’s debut collection of seventy poems has a sort of accomplishment that one usually does not assume for a debutant. It is a book that delves deep into the psyche of a poet who has a long association with poetry in its variety of depiction of themes, display of emotions and techniques of art. There is a definite deftness and overall accessibility in each poem to arrest a reader for a lingering moment. Interestingly the book, instead of a Preface, has a Postface, which is also worth reading. The opening poem “A Barbecue Evening at Long Island, NY” is emblematic of the title of the book. Here the poet writes of “new nomads celebrating after the harvest is reaped” but she does so in a language that is filled with visual delight making the scene alive: “Inside the house and outside,/ in the backyard green, and also in between,/ people float past. Sarees, skirts, shorts, jeans…” The poem, in six parts, is of memories and global nomadism. In the second part a little blue bubble machine is perceived to be churning out infinite dreams. In the last section, amidst the children running for pizzas and lemonades, the bubble machine is depicted waiting and trying to count the bubbles that flew away. If this poem is about geographical migration poems like “Behula”, “Matysagandha and Parasar” and “The Snake” are about mythological migration. There are poems which talk of new technology like “Photoshop” and “Selfie”. Poems like “Ctrl+u” and “Nakushi” deliberately avoid capital letters to depict gender subjection. There are poems where spaces play as important a role as do the words. The poem “Architecture of Memories” is, as the title suggests, about reminiscence but without any melodrama. Each of the six sections of the poem starts with cursive letters about the poet’s memories of her mother: “the tangled ribbons”, “the package tour”, “masks”, “the tree by the window”, “Revathi Maria Gomes”, “the boat” – symbolic of a discursive journey and a letting go. The poem is followed by two blank pages, yet another symbol of space where the poem continues wordlessly and the reader pauses in silence for the passing away of a poem. The poem has a perceptive power of a nomad walking through time. Such a sense of perception comes because the poet is also a painter and many of Sanyal’s poems like “Academy of Fine Arts” and “Canvas and Coasters” are her impressions about paintings. In the poem “Dressing
Table” she writes: “Seeing is an act of imagination.” she writes: “Seeing is an act of imagination.”
John Forster in his book The Nature of Perception writes that the perceiving of one physical item is “perceptually mediated” by the perceiving of another and the perceptual contact with the things in the physical world becomes direct at the point where there is no further perceptual mediation within the physical domain. This, according to Forster, is the point of φ-terminality. The concept can be explained through a platitude of epistemology that when one sees a “whole” object one does not see the “whole of” the object at once for many parts remain outside the line of vision. But this does not hinder in comprehending the whole object as perception of the whole is mediated by perception of the parts in this case. Under the shadow of this theory I take Jharna Sanyal’s poem “The Chair by the Window” as an object of perception and try to perceive it mediated by the painting “A Chair by the Window” (oil on canvas by Jharna Sanyal) that appears on the cover of the book The Nomadic Trail. The poem was written on completing the painting of the chair by the poetpainter while on a trip to Finger Lakes in Central New York where she found “a lone chair which appeared to be lost in thought, waiting through eternity for someone to arrive”. The nineteen-line poem has five sentences arranged in two stanzas of sixteen lines and three lines. Looking at the portrait of the chair and reading the first sentence gives a sense of what the chair is looking at outside the window:
The abandoned chair looked out of the window
at the floating clouds white, blue,
tinged with all the hues of sunset memories
melting into each other wearing resilient patterns
connecting disconnections.
The painting does not show clearly what the chair sees – there are no white, blue floating clouds in resilient patterns. But the poem shows the reader what the chair sees and thereby it mediates the perception of an end-of-day memory in Finger Lakes, Central New York. The mediation of the poem through the painting is like “connecting disconnections” where one art melts into another and connects with something (a memory) which was outside the purview of perception of the reader. It continues into the second sentence:
Someone has left,
the fragrance sits on the chair
like a marmalade spread on a piece
of pampered buttered toast.
After the visual treat comes the olfactory – the fragrance – but in a very corporeal form of sitting, spreading and being pampered evoking, no doubt, a memory of a family that has left. But is this evocation in the poem also mediated by the painting? One does see the empty chair in the painting but if the poem is an impression of the painting, as the poetpainter claims, then the brushstrokes must also convey a sense of smell. Perhaps it does to a connoisseur of visual arts. The poem continues into the third sentence:
Someone is yet to arrive
and occupy the chair…
and tell bedtime stories
to the darkening autumn forest
Here the poet-painter conveys both through the poem and the painting the haunting imagery that she perceived, which remained impressed on her, of the eternal wait of the chair to listen once again to bedtime stories. The “darkening autumn forest” can be seen outside the window the chair is looking at in the painting. Till this point one finds that the perception of the poem is still being mediated by the painting to some extent. Then one comes to the last sentence of a comparatively long stanza:
The chair had lost count of the moments
that drip through the air from the fleeting
rainbow clouds.
Perhaps this is the point of φ-terminality where the poem is no longer being mediated by the painting because the reader no longer finds something in the painting that is also in the poem for he/she is now sucked into the world of the chair. The poet once again evokes imagery of melting and clouds reminding of the opening lines but this time not from the point of view of the chair. The Dali-esque imagery of moments dripping through the air and fleeting rainbow-hued clouds give a sense as if the poem itself has become a stand-alone painting. This is emphasized even more when the second and last stanza appears:
Waiting lingered
like a slippery shawl
till the chair fell fast asleep.
What has just happened is the transformation of the poem into a painting through tangible and yet viscous imagery – “like a slippery shawl” – “connecting disconnections.” But what is even more strangely transformative is the blurring of identities of discrete forms of art where reading and seeing become the same or rather indistinguishable in a synaesthetic equivalence. Jharna Sanyal’s poems do this.
These poems, as the title suggests, are about the poet’s visits to various places and her travelling in general – both physical and temporal. In “At a Mellow Hour” she recalls a tea club adda at Calcutta University staff room where poet Amitabh Dasgupta is seen reminiscing: “Do you remember Ujjawal,/do you?” and “memory – like a doting grandmother/ brings back home whatever/ we had left behind in the cold.” In “At the Airport” she writes that in a globalized world “Changi, Kennedy, Heathrow, Frankfurt, de Gaulle/ all familiarly strange, yet so strangely familiar” and ends:
far beyond the protected area,
where entry is strictly prohibited,
a barefoot world
looks familiarly familiar and strangely strange.
It is this search for the familiarly familiar and the strangely strange that forms the trail of Sanyal’s poems. She can muse about ceramic poppies and beanie kangaroos as well as see “a lame dog with wings” and how in “the glossy paper, poverty has a sheen.” In “The Backyard Patio in Arlington” she writes or rather paints:
The patio is another space
we map onto our nomadic life,
sharing its border with the hopscotch ground
we’ve left behind in the cloud… monsoons ago.
The juxtaposition of the fixed space of the patio with the nomadic movement gives a grating sense of reconciliation of incongruities and acknowledgement of some loss. Sanyal’s poems are not so much about understanding but more of seeing for the knowing is embedded in the seeing. Being a painter as well as a poet she becomes a whole artist and destabilizes any defined functioning of an artist in a particular domain. To search for meaning one must first start by seeing because “The instant, shorn of all its/ banal meanings, prepares itself/ to be healed and made whole again” (“You Had Left the Door Open”). In The Nomadic Trail Jharna Sanyal opens a door into her world and the reader must tread into it as softly as if one is treading into Diego Velasquez’s Las Meninas.