MY SISTER’S BIBLE: NEW POETRY AND THE STEP TO HETEROGENEITY

BENOY.P.J

What we used to call ‘minor’ in literature (broadly speaking Dalit/black/women’s/minority/ gay/proletarian/subaltern) after the terminologies used separately by many theorists came with a particular predicament- the definition itself was predicated on a certain binary conceptual formulation which conceived of the relationship between the two parts as essentially hierarchic and  built up around the ‘logic of the supplement’. This was further conceived in terms of a certain primal antagonism towards the other around which the text was built up- a ‘minor’ literature  however sympathetically it was conceived was always subordinate to a ‘major’ one around which it was built up and without some notion of which it would have been impossible. Though theorists like Gilles Deleuze have tried to  conceive of it in a genuinely empathetic manner, by trying to point out that in what we called ‘minor’ literature everything was political, the conceptual framework itself was causing unavoidable problems and limitations to his formulations also, because it did go in for certain simplistic positions like ‘a minor literature could only be conceived in a major language’, which also points to the implicit hierarchies and essentialisms in this regard.

K.Sachidanandan’s introduction to the English translation of S.Joseph’s poetry is a typical example of the way in which such a conceptual formulation could have a contradictory effect. On the one hand he tries to argue that Joseph did not lay claim to ‘dalitness’ for his poetry in his earlier collections, and yet describes him as one of the first to announce his identity as a  ‘dalit’ poet in Malayalam not through his public stances. Interestingly he says on the one hand that “Josephs poetry is seldom loud like a lot of dalit poetry in other languages” and on the other hand argues that “Malayalam now has a body of dalit poetry that can easily be compared with that of other Indian languages like Marathi, Gujarati, Punjabi, Hindi, Tamil, Kannada, Bengali and Telugu”, thereby suggesting that dalit poetry in Malayalam was somehow wallowing behind the dalit  poetry in other languages. The boomerang nature of this compliment is quite obvious, on the one hand to complement Joseph he dismisses dalit poetry in other languages as ‘loud’ and then by stating that dalit poetry in Malayalam was actually trying to do what dalit poetry in other languages had already achieved elsewhere, was dismissive of dalit poetry in Malayalam  including Joseph’s poetry as lagging in time- thereby in effect dismissing both as irrelevant . He is also dismissive of Joseph’s position as a Christian dalit, by taking recourse to a secular denial of its specificity by stating , in an act of secular disavowal that ”the holy books” were useless “to a poor woman”.

My argument here on the other hand is to place the specific quest of Joseph’s poetry and dalit poetry by and large not exactly in a certain sequential and progressive historic ‘frame’, but to say that malayalam poetry itself, had called forth this new articulation out of an intrinsic need for itself, since poetry itself was also like other forms always in the process of re-examining itself through its aporias and silences, and in this case, Joseph’s poetry, by virtue of its authorial function, and also by virtue of the traces that it were trying to elucidate was a unique event in that history, and has to be reckoned as such.






To S.Joseph, the big mole which marks the face of a girl, which seems to make her somehow imperfect, is also like a certain marking by hierarchic identity, which is socially constructed, which he would like to see her without. The attempt is to see otherness beyond the pale of realism in poetry, to see the branding hand as well as to see without it, as if an original vision untainted by hierarchy could be re imagined, without succumbing to the pressures to do protest poetry. This doesn’t mean that Joseph’s poetry has no protest to make, but that it tries to move away from that primarily antagonistic imaginary of binary thought through a connection to the infinite and microcosmic aspects of new envisioning.  In that, it stands somewhere alongside Vaikom Muhammed Basheer’s writing. The aspects of nature, everyday life, the mundane and the ordinary are re-imagined with a great deal of resourcefulness that comes from a micro-politics of a new kind, which gives meaning to everything, and sometimes effectively dismisses the rhetorical and spectacular antics of much of modernism through sensitive redrawing of relations of power, which has gained a centrality here, and a ‘knowing of the ledges’ which is fundamental to all knowledge, which is much more profound and original.

In my sister’s bible, the necessarily double aspect of the poet’s move is to on the one hand try to establish the Bible as something that is fundamental to her life, not only as a social identity, perceived from the outside, but also as an intrinsic aspect that defines the life of this woman and gives a certain meaning to it, albeit in a non conforming way. Unlike the secular dismissal , this double move seems to more fundamentally reinvigorate the text by discursively reinventing it, as intimate and still to be elicited in new ways, as much of black writing would have it, keeping faith in its mission and sometimes dismissive of debilitating specifics that would tend towards the demolition of prophetic thinking.

To Joseph, as a writer, poetry in the writing like his is taken out of its comfortable and familiar haunts and is taken to a trip to spaces where there is depravity and ordinariness, but one which has its own uniqueness, and can easily show itself as on a road much more fundamentally open and free in every aspect, dismissive of the empty claims of ‘freedom’ and ‘liberty’ by the traditional elite, with their empty and casteist jargons and hierarchically differentiated claims to these aspects. Elitism, with its spatial temporal and social differentiations is shown as fundamentally unfree and anti egalitarian whereas the common peoples lives are endowed with more resources for hope even in these respects.

“What you want is freedom,right?

That is all that we have

You can say what you like,

Can bath in the brook

Can chirp with wag-tails

Visiting the compound

Can sit on a mat on the verandah.

Mother and father will keep you company.”

Unlike the notions of depravity that characterize social realism, the new vision talks back about the strengths of ordinary folk without trying to be apologetic and caught in the unending dilemmas of the elite.

This translation of S.Joseph’s poetry into English, “My sister’s Bible” thus can be seen as a significant contribution to Indian poetry in translation and gives us some idea about the new explorations that have redrawn the map of Malayalam poetry by moving towards a more multitudinous present, in which this poet has played a significant role.

In the poem called ‘The Light of God” Joseph tries to talk about a believers approach to God, and tries to posit god as a light that protects her, calls for her obedience and prayer and it is also a light that lets another person see her. It has been a long held tradition to call God ‘light’ while the fact remains that God has existed alongside darkness even before light was created and that “darkness was spread over the depths”. Light, which itself was one of the creations of God did not necessarily occur as existing in a contradiction with darkness, which in that sense is even more  primal. The creation of light that divided the waters, created day and night, good and evil and so on, was a theological event introduced into faith by Pilate and Mariam two of Christ’s friends and torturers when they created the church. Joseph here continues with that tradition, which denies Christ and works with Pilate, and in that sense continues with the Pharaonic element in Progressive , secular thought (pre- endarkenment) due to his prioritizing of the binary of light / darkness, even though Joseph’s writing is by and large sensitive and firm in its denial of the subordinations in the binary towards the aspect of darkness. In “Can write about the western parts” tries to imagine afresh the subordinated knowledges of ordinary people without the mark of that subordination, placing it on par as equally valid and important to the everyday life of ordinary people. 

The many different ways in which his poetry thinks about an element like fishes/fishing etc.,  in its various instances, if we trace it through his different poems in this book, gives us some idea about how his work is sensitively moving away from stock approaches and rationalities.  The experience of abandonment, also, of his mother, an elderly woman who sets out to go away from the rudeness of her children, realizes that she has nowhere else to go, and comes back home after sitting for sometime under the coconut tree; or of an ant(Running ant) , or a penniless friend in a city of which he knew but little; or of a cat is something that returns hauntingly in its various manifest forms.

He doesn’t really prioritize the poets work over that of a mason( The maso), in a way that poets are want to do, but tries to approach it like a knowledge worker on an equal footing, as K.K.Kochu, writer and intellectual would place the question sometimes.

The translations in this book published by Author's Press are done by K.Sachidanandan, A.J.Thomas, M.T. Ansari, Ajay Shekhar, Jobin M Kanjirakkat, Saritha Varma and myself. T