A treasure difficult to express in words Ashley Tellis
When Eunice De Souza’s Fix was published in 1979, the Indian poetry in English scene had seen nothing like it. It blazed on to the scene like a comet and no one has really recovered from it, not even Eunice herself. The book fixed (as the title suggested) its subjects — members of the Roman Catholic community from Goa but living in Bombay, a poetic persona who usually introduced herself as ‘I,’ and all readers, in its excoriating and yet crushingly tender gaze. The cover was terrifyingly beautiful in a similar way, designed by the redoubtable Arun Kolatkar (contrast this hideous cover by Penguin), which showed a stunning Eunice with her blazing eyes and the x of Fix an ashen tikka on her forehead.
Eunice, for those of us growing up in Bombay, was a terrifying figure alright. Caustic, vicious, brilliant, she could cut you down with a sentence and a ring of smoke from her ubiquitous cigarette. She did not need the necklace of skulls of one of her poems to be terrifying. Part of a generation, or a couple of generations, of brilliant poets — Adil Jussawalla, Arun Kolatkar, Dilip Chitre, Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, A K Ramanujan — most of whom lived in and around Bombay, the others constantly came through, she stood out as the best-looking among them but also, ironically enough, as the most human of them all because any close reader of her poetry knew how vulnerable she actually was, and is. As a single woman, a woman unashamed of her unconventionality, her sexuality, her identity and unafraid to lay bare the faultlines of her psychic formation in her sparse and utterly self-respecting poetry, she was to many of us, especially from her community and similarly vulnerable, a treasure difficult to express in words.
This Collected Poems (which is not a Collected Poems at all because it carries only extracts from all her books and not any of them in their entirety — when will Penguin grow up and learn what the words Collected Poems mean?) is remarkable for at least three things. First, its brevity. Eunice has always been the poet of the short lyric, her poems more like (to quote Mehrotra on her) telegrams. Snapshots, images in themselves (as de Souza reports Jussawalla saying of them in her characteristically understated and brief Preface to this volume), of people — mainly this poetic persona herself — caught in midflight, in embarrassing positions, in postures of extreme pain, the poems tell stories that keep opening out in the reader’s mind long after one has finished reading them. Second, its ability to consistently fertilise a very small space. Almost all the poems in all the collections are in the interior world of this single woman persona, furrowing deeper and deeper into the self and making that earth sprout flowers of ever-deepening shades of blood. And third, as finer and finer examples of literary irony (Alanis Morrisette should read de Souza and learn what irony is). Each poem in its very brevity, opens up to wider and wider circles of ironic knowledge, exposing no one more to its relentless knife-cuts than the poetic persona herself, yet coming out fuller for it.
Often, one has to shut a Eunice de Souza book and come up for air, breathe, cry. The final and most profound achievement of this irony, however, is its gendered quality, what one might call its feminism (and de Souza, thankfully, is not one of those hideous women ashamed to call herself feminist). No one haunts the effects of cultural femininity on women more than de Souza, no one understands femininity’s intimate violence on women better.
This world can also get suffocating, repetitive and each poem runs the constant risk of looking a little too arrived, too finished, almost clever. To her immense credit, almost none of the poems fail. They take the risk and they survive it and that is the hallmark of de Souza’s gendered candour, her ultimate openness to the world, despite the fact that the world mainly gives her shit. Nevertheless, one would like to see de Souza in other spaces, other places. This reader, for example, would like to see her in Dantewada, or speaking to Irom Sharmila, or talking to bar girls in a seedy Bombay suburb. He would like to see the poems that emerge from that.
Generations of students have marvelled at the ferocious brilliance of de Souza as a teacher. Generations of readers will now marvel at this steely and vulnerable, sad and vicious poet who tells us about the ironies of the heart like no one quite does in India. What better way than to end with a short gem from her, asking readers not to look for her life in her poems, distancing herself from the autobiographical mode even as she employs it to the best possible effect:
Poems can have order, sanity./ aesthetic distance from debris./ All I’ve learnt from pain/ I always knew,/ But could not do.
(Ashley is an academic based in Hyderabad) -- [email protected] Goanet A-C-E! Arts ~ Culture ~ Entertainment
