The Subterfuge of Identity: Self and Society in the Poetry of Eunice de Souza PDF

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1 The Subterfuge of Identity: Self and Society in the Poetry of Eunice de Souza1 In the age of techno-capitalism where terror, unequivocally and ubiquitously, has emerged as a terrible reality affecting and defining our lives and identities, is there any scope for either reading or writing poetry? R...

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The Subterfuge of Identity: Self and Society in the Poetry of Eunice de Souza1

In the age of techno-capitalism where terror, unequivocally and ubiquitously, has emerged as a terrible reality affecting and defining our lives and identities, is there any scope for either reading or writing poetry? Replacing stealth bombers, when human suicide bombs are ripping the spine of communal harmony in society, does poetry still have any relevance in our lives? Taking up some of these not-so-easy questions, Nair argues with conviction that more than anything else, it is poetry that can act as an antithesis of terror. Poetry emerges as a creative safeguard by turning the terror away from waging war against others to waging war against oneself; by shifting the battleground from landscape to mindscape. Because poetry is a veritable text of crisis, the poet, with her sheer faculty of imagination, transforms the very terrain of terror with weapons of love and peace.1 More than at any other time and on any other occasion, right now, amidst the overwhelming presence of hatred and cruelty, that poetry has, as Keki Daruwala writes, a more significant role in the ‘reconciliation of the inner worlds with the complexities of the outer. 2 It is in this context that we can situate the poetry of Eunice de Souza that comes as an affirmation of life, as a modicum of exploring organic and harmonious links between one’s self and society. Eunice de Souza is probably one of the least prolific among the modern Indian English poets. But her poems stand out because of their poignant, succinct and daring style as well as for the diversity of themes that they deal with. As A K Mehrotra says in his introduction to her poems in the anthology, Twelve Modern Indian Poets, “Eunice de Souza’s poems have the brevity, unexpectedness, and urgency of telegrams.”3 Like most Indian English poets of her generation, de Souza draws heavily from her personal life and she successfully manages to connect her personal experiences to a broader context of the cultural and political milieu around her. Having been brought up in a conservative Catholic family in Goa, she has a first-hand experience of the multi-layered subjugation that women are subjected to in India. Her earlier poems are portrayals of the hypocrisy of the value system of the catholic community in India and its unjust treatment of women. What makes these poems interesting is the sarsactic depiction of the clash of identities that happen in a society which does not give space for individual growth. The poet 1

Muse India, issue 42 (March-April 2012)

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gives vivid depictions of the neurotic gender identity which is an offshoot of the Christian conception of sexuality as a sin. The following lines from the poem ‘Sweet Sixteen’, give a detailed account of how a girl is forced to go beyond her body to seek a frigid feminine identity that comes to a catholic girl as almost a legacy at a tender and vulnerable age: Mamas never mentioned menses. A nun screemed: You vulgar girl don’t say brassieres say bracelets. She pinned paper sleeves onto our sleeveless dresses. 4

These lines painfully reflect how a tender girl is compelled to go beyond the immediate reality of her body. As Katrak notes: The poem evokes many levels of cultural and psychic violence: a repressed morality that encourages mothers to "never mention menses"; the nun's "scream" that will not allow young girls to acknowledge their own sexuality: "don't say brassiers/say bracelets"; and further, not even their physicality—their bare arms have to be covered with "paper sleeves." 5

De Souza’s critique of the discrimination based on gender is contextualized in relation to other identity markers. Her focus is on the contingency of socio-historical factors that determine an individual’s space in society. Her poems are conceptually linked and when they are read together, a world view emerges in which everything is connected to everything else. Beginning with the discrimination of women within the Catholic community in Goa, she goes on to explore the problematic relationship that community has with India as a nation. The colonial past of Goa is one of her major preoccupations, which is deftly interwoven into her intricate depiction of Indian nationalism. Unlike other parts of India, Goa was under the Portuguese rule and continued to be so until 1961, when it was forcefully annexed by the Indian military. The euphoria of nationalism which pervaded the collective consciousness of the Indian mass during the freedom movement and later developed into a meta-narrative institutionalized by the Indian state, had different ramifications in Goa than in other parts of India. By virtue of having a different colonizer and by being aloof from Indian nationalism during its formative years, the region became a metaphor for the contradictions of history and a play ground for the crisscross of different cultures. Goans of De Souza’s generation inherited two cultural legacies – Goa with its unique historical experience and Indian nationalism with all the cultural traditions that went into

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its making as well as those that were deliberately overlooked. De Souza uses this historical situation to delineate the different cultural identities associated with it. The idyllic past of Goa is part of her family folklore and it represents the nostalgia for a colonial past. It is neatly expressed in the poem ‘Idyll’: When Goa was Goa my grandfather says the bandits came over the mountain to our village only to splash in cool springs… 6

The imagination of this idyllic past is a psychological necessity for a parochial community which finds itself alienated from the nation it belongs to. India with all its diversity and anarchy is the cultural ‘other’ for her community. But de Souza belongs to a generation of Indians who were fated to define their individual identities within the broader framework of Indian nationality. Hence, we find in her poems a deliberate attempt to locate her identity in the vortex of nation. As G J V Prasad puts it, “hers is another attempt to contextualize herself within the complex grid that makes India and Indianness.”7 To contextualize herself within the ‘complex grid’ of Indian nationality, she has to identify the different traditions that constitute it and put them into a perspective that she personally subscribes to. The poet’s take on the influence of religion in Indian society is such an attempt. In the poem, “Sacred River”, the visit to a crematorium on the banks of a holy river happens to be a nauseating experience for her: “But nothing stops faith/ No. Nothing stops faith/ It will be heaven to get out of here.”8 For her, the world she is familiar with is heaven compared to the suffocating ambience of the holy place. But for the people who believe in religious rituals, the physical world they live in is hell and religion is their ‘passport’ to heaven. Thus the last line of the poem – “It will be heaven to get out of here” – implies contrasting perspectives on religion. While keeping in mind the futility of religion and the bourgeois rituals associated with it, de Souza is able to relate to the dynamism of Indian spirituality. In her poem, ‘Return’, she addresses Tukaram, the seventeenth century Bhakti poet: Tuka, forgive my familiarity. I have loved your pithy verses Ever since that French priest

4 Everyone thought mad recited them…9

Even though rooted in the metaphysical philosophy of Hinduism, Bhakti poetry defies the conception of any sort of a structured world view and its natural corollary- a fixed identity. Eunice de Souza as a poet knows that the true spirit of religion can be found in the imprints left behind by great human beings such as Tukaram for whom she has great admiration. While she appreciates the radical spirituality of the Bhakti poet and differentiates it from the ritualism of institutionalized Hinduism (‘the priests do not sound like you/ but I will offer a coconut anyway/ for someone I love’), she has reservations regarding Tukaram’s attitude towards his wife: You made life hard for your wife And I’m not sure I approve of that. Nor did you heed her last request: Come back soon.

While revealing the poet’s distanced reverence towards saints and their lives, these lines also reflect her healthy irreverence that an individual needs to keep in matters related to spiritual things. Through these lines, she is able to relate herself with the dynamism inherent in the way of life expounded by the Bhakti poet to an extent where she can criticize him out of love and freedom. The consciousness about the unpredictability of existence which is at the heart of the Bhakti worldview, gives space for contradictions and this very fact makes it difficult to be contained in the ‘certainties’ of tradition. A K Ramnujan’s comment on the conceptualization of tradition, in his introduction to Speaking of Shiva is relevant in this context: I think it is because the ‘great’ and ‘little’ traditions, as we have described them, together constitute ‘establishment’ in the several senses of the word. They are the establishment, the stable, the secure, the sthavara, in the social sense. In another sense, such traditions symbolize man’s attempt to establish or stabilize the universe for himself. Such traditions wish to render the universe manipulable, predictable, safe. 10

The ability to think beyond the confines of the ‘establishment’ makes De Souza capable of dismissing the traces of establishment in a poet who is otherwise anti-establishment. On the one hand she critiques traditions which pin down the identity of an individual to a few cultural givens; while on the other hand, she revels in the ontological dimensions of identity. A constant re-imagination of identity underpins her poems. K R Srinivasa Iyengar’s comment in this context is relevant: “In her fiercely honest search for identity as a unique autonomous person – not

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simply Goan, Catholic, or even Woman – Eunice has had to break the fetters of conventions, tradition and propriety itself.” 11 But de Souza’s journey after breaking the fetters of conventions, tradition and propriety is not to the realm of the cozy security of a stable identity, but to the realm of an intense subjectivity where lack of identity is celebrated rather than lamented. In the poems which she deals with the intimacies of her subjective experiences, relationships become lenses to look into the void inherent in existence. In these poems, the major focus is on the fluidity of ‘being’. The death of her father which seems to have had a great impact on the poet’s psyche becomes an experience in the present rather than a traumatic event that happened in the past. You are the cold wind. The grey mist. The black dawn. The grinning skull. I’m you. 12

This existential tone is evident in the poems dealing with other personal relationships as well. The ambiguity involved in human relationships becomes a major motif in the poems dealing with her relationship with her mother and it develops into an ambiguous attitude towards life itself in her ‘love’ poems. In these poems, more than the object of love, discovering the different shades of that emotion finds a major thrust. I crave your dream of innocence: a profusion of flowers blooming for themselves birds big enough to swallow the avocado stones. 13

The conception of identity in de Souza’s poems has a trajectory which moves from the concrete to the abstract. She is able to create a space and a poetic idiom which can connect different aspects of identity in an abstract philosophical sense as well as within the concrete frameworks of gender, religion, and nation. An individual’s identity has mainly two dimensions – the cultural and the ontological; and, it represent two directions of quest that one has to make in order to define oneself. The cultural world that one inhabits has a separate existence of its own. Language is one of the tools available for an individual to locate oneself within that world. For Eunice de Souza, creativity is a constant process of re-defining the world and re-locating herself within it– “leave me the cutting edge of words/ to clear a world /for my ego” (One Man’s Poetry).14 As

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rightly pointed out by Bruce King, her earlier poems are attempts to make sense out of a world that is fragmentary and unacceptable for her: The poems, reflecting de Souza’s childhood, are a means to gain control over private fears, anxieties, angers. Such poems are in the confessional manner, where instead of consistency of character there is a mosaic of guilts, desires and revelations, especially about how one’s motional life has been formed by the past. 15

But the lack of ‘consistency of character’ becomes multi-dimensional in her later poems. While in her earlier poems, the plurality of identity is a strategy she adopts to negotiate with the external world, in her later poems it becomes the basic reality of her inner world. The focus of these poems is on the interiority of human existence. When de Souza speaks about an ‘inner void’ in the poem, “Monsoon Journey”, her tone resonates with mysticism: “It is grace itself/ which makes this void/ We are on the brink.” 16 The expression of the interior dimension of ‘self’, demands a new idiom because it exists in a world of its own which can at times be completely detached from the outside world. Eunice de Souza manages to connect with the elusive depths of the internal world without losing contact with the common place realities that surround her. An intuitive understanding about the transience of life makes her capable of moving from the intricacies of the physical world around her to the psychic world inside without any friction. Her critique of the different cultural constructs imposed upon individual lives is informed by this understanding. The fleeting nature of reality gives space for an individual to assert his or her urge to be free. It is this basic human instinct that creates cracks in the monolithic cultural constructs of society. As H S Komalesha says in the introduction to his book, Issues of Identity in Indian English Fiction, a culture does not produce uniform identities: But it does not mean to say that everyone born in that society and lives there, is subject to as well as subject of such socio-geographical, historical, linguistic cultural factors of that society, ultimately ends up being alike. Far from it, these common factors that define an individual, by their regional differences, local inflections and by their innumerable permutations and combinations create millions of different identities, each remarkable in its own way. 17

The possibility of the creation these innumerable identities, comes from the dynamism of human consciousness which constantly struggles with the different cultural conditionings. The consciousness which refuses to take the plastic identities associated with gender, religion and

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nation for granted, becomes self-reflexive when it is exhausted with the objects in the outside world. It is a journey from the platitudes of society to the intimacies of subjectivity. The denial to look away from reality, however ugly it may be, is what makes this journey possible. de Souza is able to balance herself on the thin line between escapism and mysticism. The socio-cultural world that one inhabits often takes the shape of a labyrinth. It provides two possibilities for an individual- to lose and find oneself within its structure again and again or to locate the lack inherent in its heart and substitute it with an anti-structure. For a writer, this substitution is done through language. But language itself is a cultural product and it bears the cultural baggage of centuries. It is through the engagement with different components of this cultural legacy that a writer creates a space for the communication of one’s subjective reality which exceeds all cultural definitions. Eunice de Souza negotiates this space by constantly being in dialogue with three prominent identity markers- gender, religion and nation. By de-constructing the conceptions regarding these, de Souza unloads the cultural baggage she inherits. Through her poems, she identifies the vacousness of these structures and replaces them with the enigma of the most private spaces of her identity as a woman. In this sense, her poetry becomes a mask, a powerful subterfuge with the help of which she creates a disturbingly unique poetic persona through which she attempts to come to grips with trouble and turmoil in the outer world. As Adil Jussawalla – her fellow poet and contemporary – aptly observes, “(de Souza’s poetry) bears the stamp of today's terrible pain, endurance attempted now. On each page it blazons freshly. She makes no attempt to make us like or pity the persona and yet we find ourselves respecting it deeply”.18

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Notes: 1

Rukmini Bhaya Nair, Poetry in a Time of Terror (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2009) Keki Daruwala, “Poetry in a Time of Terror”, The Hindu, February 1, 2009 3 A K Mehrotra. ed. Twelve Modern Indian English Poets (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1992) 114 4 Eunice de Souza, “ Sweet Sixteen”, A Necklace of Skulls Collected Poems (New Delhi: Penguin, 2009) 6. 5 Ketu H. Katrak, “Decolonizing Culture: Toward a Theory for Postcolonial Women's Texts”, Modern Fiction Studies, Vol.35, no.1 (Spring 1989) pp. 157-179 6 Eunice de Souza, “Idyll”, A Necklace of Skulls Collected Poems.15 7 G J V Prasad, Continuities in Indian English Poetry: nation, language, form (New Delhi: Pencraft International,1999) 44-45 8 Eunice de Souza, “ Sacred River”, A Necklace of Skulls Collected Poems.112 9 Eunice de Souza, “ Return”, A Necklace of Skulls Collected Poems. 80 10 A K Ramanujan, Speaking of Shiva (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2004)8 11 K R S Iyengar, Indian Writing in English (New Delhi: Sterling Publishers Private Limited, 1985) 727 12 Eunice de Souza, “ For My Father, Dead Young”, A Necklace of Skulls Collected Poems. 25 13 Eunice de Souza, “ Songs of Innocence”, A Necklace of Skulls Collected Poems. P.66-67 14 Eunice de Souza, “ One Man’s Poetry”, A Necklace of Skulls Collected Poems. 30 15 Bruce King, Modern Indian Poetry in English (New Delhi: Oxford University Publication, 1987) 157158 16 Eunice de Souza, “ Monsoon Journey”, A Necklace of Skulls Collected Poems. 49 17 H S Komalesha, Issues of Identity in Indian English Fiction: A Close Reading of Canonical India n English Novels (Bern: Peter Lang, 2008) 14 18 Adil Jussawalla, “One Woman’s Poetry”, Journal of South Asian Literature, vol.18, no.1 (winter, spring 1983) 90 2...