A RIVER RUNS THROUGH IT
The poetry of Tanya Mendonsa, by Martine Meijer
“I woke up after my first night in Moira, sat down and wrote a poem. It
has not stopped since”, says Tanya Mendonsa. In Moira she found she
could do what she was born to do - all the poems in her first volume
entitled “Dreaming House were written in the two years after she came to
live in Moira.
In 1995, after spending 19 years in Paris, Tanya returned to India with
a prayer in her heart - to paint and write again, surrounded by green.
In Goa, the spirits of nature bestowed this boon upon her and because of
this she has dedicated her first volume to the community of Moira.
Together with them she is engaged in a valiant and ongoing campaign to
preserve its river, its waters, is trees and all the life in them.
Tanya’s poetry is born from consciously living the conflict of our
times: that, as humans, we are both modern and natural. As in these
lines from “Divorced from Green:
One has no forewarning,
in the days of the fish and the dragonfly,
that this will not be forever.
(….)
The demands –
of a world you never knew existed
hang weights
on limbs
that yesterday
had no idea they were any different
from tree branches or the haunches of a deer.
The feet meet cement,
and are forever divorced from green.
The author returned to green but on her morning walks along the river in
Moira she found her views blocked by construction sites, and she
stumbled over rubble and garbage.
The relentless encroachment of a one-sided humanness stirred up pain,
anger and bewilderment. The conflict forced her inside of herself, to
that place of nature within us - that place where, if we only dwell long
and deep enough, something new and earlier unknown will show itself
between the opposites. What came to her from there is a new way of
seeing and the words to make us see anew too. She quotes one of her
favourite poets, Mary Oliver: “ Whoever made music of a mild day?”
In Tanya Mendonsa’s poetry nature is not just a pretty backdrop to a
life full of only human concerns, not just matter that humans can bend
to their will, but spirit redeemed - nature once again as essential to
us. When asked about the meaning of redemption for her she quotes
Shelley: to preserve oneself from the “contagion of the world’s slow
stain” , and thus to delight in something saved .
“Dreaming House” is not the work of a beginner. It is informed and
inspired by a long life of reading. Tanya says she has practically read
a book a day since she was 10 years old. Growing up in an English
speaking environment in Calcutta, the book fairs there were a delight,
and her mother Gilda ( herself a writer of cookbooks ) bought her books
constantly. After moving to Paris at the age of 21, she had to earn a
living there, but the reading never really dried up; nor the writing of
poetry.
Which brings us to the poet’s precursors, some of whose lines, with a
little guidance, we can find hidden in a few of her poems: W.B. Yeats,
Wystawa Szymborska, Gerald Manley Hopkins, Mary Oliver and George
Herbert ( a priest and poet from the 16th century). The last three are
her favourites because of the way they marry complexity to a clarity of
expression, and because they are always unexpected in their use of
language.
Indeed “Dreaming House” shows Tanya’s mastery in combining original ways
of seeing with a clear language, alternating between earnestness and
frivolity:
“Staying Single”
To sleep till noon
and, summoned by the
moon through an open window,
go out to dig and plant
in her company.
Letting the dishes pile up in the sink;
to stand, elbows on a wall,
in the cool wind,
eating a sandwich
of hot boiled egg and salt
at 3 am.
The scope of “Dreaming House’ is wide. Once in Moira Tanya could look
back in a different way at her varied experiences and from that
wellspring came the first part of the book called “ The Voyage Out”:
about maturing, about people real and imagined , about love and loss,
about a life away from India. In the poem “Staying Home “:
(…)
The blood and the guts of life
are better engaged with
when your feet can feel the earth;
(…)
The second part of the book, entitled “The Country Beyond” speaks of the
infinite love that has grown in her soul for Moira, its landscapes, its
people. The two parts are united under the one roof of a “Dreaming
House” by the sensuousness of their language. This poetic language
reminds one of the language of dreams, saying exactly what it has to say
in its own unique form, creating a direct connection with that fabled
world within us - our psyche, which is Nature itself.
Reading her poems, whether they speak of nature, people or inner events
moves us to see differently for a moment, and brings about the aliveness
that comes from feeling connected to something larger, when the ordinary
becomes extra-ordinary.
From “Staying Home”
Every day, the same landscape shifts.
Every day, the same face alters.
Every day, the same word rings a new note :
all strike,
slantwise,
a different truth.
Tanya firmly believes in poetry as a vital force for change. And change
we must if we wish to save our soul and the world we are a part of - or
Moira to start with. Reading poetry can connect us to that old soul
inside of us, where we are reminded of where we come from, who we also
are beyond being ‘contemporary’: descendants of ancestors who had a
reciprocity with the animate earth. We do have that archaic man inside
of us who knows that “ we are human only in contact, in conviviality
with, what is not human “ in the words of the author D. Abram. It is
maybe only from a place of soul, of deep aliveness, that we can know how
to bring the two together, modern man and archaic man and thus sing a
different world into being:
From “The Sower and the Song”
(….)
begin to sow the seed and reap the flower:
if we should sing the dreaming house into being,
will he not walk in one day, hand on heart?
Amitav Ghosh wrote, of “The Dreaming House “ : “Tanya Mendonsa’s work is
cosmopolitan in reference, yet deeply rooted in the red earth of Goa :
her Moira poems are a fitting elegy to a magical corner of a stored land
“. (ENDS)
“The Dreaming House” by Tanya Mendonsa, Harper Collins India, Rs.299,
is available in bookshops all over India and online abroad at
NBCIndia.com
Martine Corina Meijer has a background in depth psychology & the arts
and is a frequent guest of Goa
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First published in Goa Today, Goa - January 2010
