This poetry collection fearlessly confronts profound grief, offering a powerful exploration of loss, resilience and the human spirit’s enduring strength
Grief is an experience that is known to all of us, some encounter it briefly while others live with it forever. Living in grief or rather living on with grief is extremely daunting and challenging and we tend to hold back our state of mind and the volatile assault of emotions from the purview of the public.
Middle-class women, in particular, are expected to participate in ritual mourning but not talk about their grief in public.
We are counselled to uphold our ‘dignity’ and adhere to decorum as codified by our society. Swati Pal defies this unwritten, socially imposed code most evocatively. She articulates her grief, challenges the reader to reckon with it, to allow her to affirm, explain and articulate her experiential reality in the public domain.
If personal is political for women, the poet Swati Pal wishes to politicise her personal grief, by refusing to push it to the innermost recesses of her being. Instead of pushing one’s grief behind closed doors; she chronicles it, shares it with the outside world and thereby juxtaposes it to the grief induced by various political crisis across spaces.
The poet demands an equal space for the individual and the nation, she raises the voice as an individual mother grieving for her son and on behalf of the mothers of a war-torn nation/community. For instance, in the poem Let us Talk, she explodes:
Writing poetry, in Swati’s trajectory as a poet, could be read as a coping mechanism, a strategy of surviving, enduring the compulsion of living on after the loss of a loved one. It proves to be a vicarious but rewarding experience for the reader. Swati demands empathy not pity from her interlocutors. The past haunts her but it also nourishes her present. She will not let go of it, she does not wish to let go of the memory of giving birth to her child even as she is torn apart by the memory of his death.
It is an enabling paradox, a dynamic trajectory that intersects life and death, one that valiantly talks about death but does so most eloquently through tropes, images and a graphic narration of shared moments with the five elements or images drawn from a pulsating Nature.
References to sky, ocean, breeze, sprouting seeds that break through the parched earth abound in Swati’s poems. It is noteworthy how life surrounds her being even as she fiercely clings to her nightmare of finding her ‘severed head in my hands’, a striking image that collapses the process of living and dying, the eternal and the fleeting-aspects that she wrestles with in her quotidian life. There are glimpses of a Faustian pride as she clasps her grief, as she flaunts it to the world and challenges its ignorance of the life led by her, following her monumental loss. It is a sorrow that is deeper than anyone else’s, she asserts. The poet’s life is embedded in ‘silence’, ‘emptiness’, ‘nothingness’, ‘shrieks’, ‘utter darkness’, ‘nightmare’, ‘hell’ and she lays awake night after night. She echoes Macbeth, as she wails,
“I sleep no more”:
Having seen
With open eyes
My young son
Be enveloped
By the flames
When we sent him
On an unreal journey
At the crematorium.
…
I can sleep
No more.
….
No
I sleep
No more. (p.24-25)
Swati’s daring to record her grief is an act of defiance that challenges the socially codified silencing of a grieving woman. She knows that “the world has no patience for grieving folks” (p.42) but she refuses to adopt the prescriptive self-censoring of a woman’s /mother’s most deeply felt emotions and lived experience.
Her son Mohan continues to envelop her body and spirit, “I am within you”, and forever present in the breeze, in the raindrop, among the playful pups and the duo’s favorite kitty.
Her poetry mourns and celebrates Mohan with equal intensity.
In this collection, Swati Pal has included some of her Haikus which capture her thoughts and moods in a telling manner sustaining a graphic, lucid and enigmatic texture. My favourite one is :
the heart is wintry
i find spring
in colours and scents (p.61)
She is in search of a key to her “locked hope”. Hope she gets the key to open this magical world of hope through her pen.
Her verses have immortalised Mohan even as she struggles to live on, to live each moment, one moment at a time. For all her sustained recalling of the past, the poet lives in the present as she is no escapist. And therein lies the rewarding hope for the reader, to brave life in each of its moments and live in the present, cherish the past and forge a future steeped in empathy and love.
About the Book
Book: Forever Yours
Author: Swati Pal
Publisher: Hawakal
Price: Rs 300/-
— The author is a faculty member in the department of English at Aryabhatta College, University of Delhi. Views are personal