Koyamparambath Satchidanandan's speech at Sahitya Akademi (Meet the Author)

A B O U T P O E T R Y , A B O U T L I F E

"I cannot tell from where poetry came to me; I had hardly any poet- predecessors. Whenever I try to think about it, I hear the diverse strains of the incessant rains of my village in Kerala and recall too, the luminous lines of the Malayalam Ramayana I had read as a schoolboy where the poet prays to the Goddess of the Word to keep on bringing the apt words to his mind without a pause like the endless waves of the sea. My mother taught me to talk to cats and crows and trees; from my pious father I learnt to communicate with gods and spirits. My insane grandmother taught me to create a parallel world in order to escape the vile ordinariness of the tiringly humdrum everyday world ; the dead taught me to be one with the soil ; the wind taught me to move and shake without ever being seen and the rain trained my voice in a thousand modulations. With such teachers, perhaps it was impossible for me not to be a poet , of sorts. I have looked at my genesis with detachment in an early poem ‘Granny’ : “My grandmother was insane./As her madness ripened into death,/My uncle, a miser, kept her in our store room/Covered in straw./My grandmother dried up, burst,/Her seeds flew out of the windows./The sun came and the rain,/one seedling grew up into a tree,/Whose lusts bore me./ How can I help writing poems /About monkeys with teeth of gold?”.It was not only my grandma who was insane; there were three in the family, all women.That explains the celebration of madness and the suspicion of sanity in many of my poems.

Our village was beautiful though I was unaware of its charms as long as I lived there. It had paddy fields that would fill with water during floods and with blue flowers after harvest in August, hills with named and nameless creepers and flowers, backwaters on which little open boats plied with men and merchandise, little peaceful temples, mosques and churches which bred genuine gods and not devils as they sometimes seem to do now. The northern part of our village, Pulloot, was dominated by communists and the south by Congress men. My primary and upper primary schools were in the north which meant I was a tiny communist there, but at home all went with Congress. Even our gods whose pictures adorned the pooja room seemed to belong to either of these parties, though a little more violent than the party men were for they never wore garlands of skulls, carried swords and spears nor had several heads like the gods: still those Goya- figures the family worshipped seemed to go well with those post-Gandhi times. That was also my second lesson in sur-realism, the first having been the three-month long fever that had almost killed me when I was four and given me Dali-like nightmares that crowd my early poetry.

I was born in a middle-class home, and by the time I was born it was a unitary family, with my parents not educated beyond the high school, and a sister and a brother who were elder to me. My father was doing odd jobs, farming on our family land -where we helped too-, working in a lawyer’s office, helping people prepare legal documents for land transactions. Earlier he was in the police force from which he had voluntarily retired . Two of my sisters had died in accidents before I was born; I have written a poem addressed to one of them who had appeared before me one night, put her soft betel-leaf hand on my palm and invited me to her enchanting land, slightly above earth but below heaven. My mother taught me to respect all religions, and I accompanied my little friend Abdul Khader, to chandanakkudam, the festival in the mosque with the same enthusiasm with which I attended thalappoli, the temple festival and liked the pathiris made at his home by his sister Khadeeja. My brother used to write poetry- though he ended up as an engineer- and by the time we needed higher education, the family, now larger with my sister’s children, had been rendered even poorer by the inevitable land reform that took away a good part of our land which had been with the tenants. But scholarships helped us pursue studies in college. My divorced sister had now married V T Nandakumar, a fiction writer adding one more writer to the family already struggling with two aspirants! My friends in the Malayalam medium schools in the village were mostly from very poor families:I have remembered them in a poem on my classmates, Kunjimuhammed, Vasu and Janaki none of whom went to college. Some of my teachers, especially in the High School at Kodungallur, the little temple town-earlier Muziris, a port that brought Greeks, Romans and Arabs to Kerala-that I reached after crossing a river and walking miles, encouraged me to write. Raghavanmaster, my Malayalam teacher, would send me to every poetry competition and the disciple seldom disappointed him. I cannot forget also Sankaran, a mad man, said to have been a Malayalam munshi, who introduced me to Kumaran Asan’s great poetry that he would sing and interpret every morning to an eager crowd in the village square. I would reach school late, but this was better education. My first poems were published in the manuscript journal of the village library and the high school magazines.

Christ College, a well-run Carmelite institution where I did my graduation in biology, had a well-stocked library. My early readings had already been done in the village library that bears the name of Kumaran Asan. That is where I read not only the great Malayalam fiction writers and poets, but translations of Tagore, Bankim, Saratchandra,Tarasankar, Manik Banerjee, Bimal Mitra, Yashpal, Jainendrakumar, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Hugo, Zola, Maupassant, Flaubert,Thomas Mann and several others. The Malayalam weeklies of the time never forgot to serialise at least one novel each in translation, especially from Bengali or Hindi . But in Christ College I began reading books in English somewhat systematically, helped on by the librarian , John Master who was a Latin scholar.I read the Holy Bible with great attention and that had a lasting impact on my vision and imagination; many of its books were great literature, besides being moving human documents; I especially liked the Book of Job, Revelation- that was my third lesson in sur-realism- and the Psalms, especially of David. Perhaps only Mahabharata that I read later in Kunjikkuttan Thampuran’s Malyalam translation had a similar impact on me. Buddha’s Dhammapada I read when I was nineteen also has had a great impact on my ethical imagination. The Communist Manifesto was another book that awakened my moral sensibility. At Christ College I also read the Complete Works of Shakespeare spending a whole vacation on it and making notes, and the collected works of Wordsworth, Shelley , Keats and Byron and translated some of their poems., especially Shelly’s ‘To a Skylark’, ‘The Cloud’ and ‘Ode to the Westwind’, Keats’s ‘Ode to the Nighingale’ and many short lyrics of Byron. Translation, however, was not new to me: I had translated a lot of Omar Khayyam’s rubayis while in high school from the Fitzgerald version.( I translated all the sonnets of Shakespeare much later, for a volume of Shakespeare translations edited by Ayyappa Paniker.) Looking back I feel they were a part of my training as a poet though I continued doing translatons whenever my own poetry went dry so that I have now more than 1500 pages of world poetry translated by me.

Maharajas College in Ernakulam where I did my post graduation in English played even a greater role in my evolution as a writer: My reading grew more intense and focused ; I read also a lot of theory including the Marxist classics. And I got my real taste of modern literature as Yeats, T.S. Eliot, James Joyce and Samuel Beckett were part of the syllabus and I was burning midnight electricity on Sartre, Camus , Kafka, Baudelaire , Rilke and the Black poets. My poems and critical articles had begun to appear in Malayalam magazines by now, and I had a small circle of eccentric admirers though that did not ensure my victory in the college elections where I was an independent candidate supported by the Students’ Federation who always lost to a local party, the Democratic Front. My good friends included late T.K.Ramachandran who grew up into a leftist intellctual, N S Madhavan, now a major fiction writer in Malayalam, P.V. Krishnan Nair who later became Secretary of the Kerala Sahitya Akademi, Sankaranarayanan (Nambu as we called him) who is now with the Deccan Herald in Bangalore besides others.This was the time when I also met Ayyappa Paniker, the pioneer of New Poetry in Malayalam, and a fine scholar who was to play a major role in my life later, sending me to various festivals of poetry, making me translate several poets from across the world for the poetry journal, Kerala Kavita edited by him -that also published my first important poems- and later encouraging me to come to Delhi taking up the editorship of Indian Literature in the Sahitya Akademi. Maharajas college had some excellent teachers of literature and provided me the kind of ambience I was looking for with heated discussions on literature and politics, sharing of books and creative confusions. I was an angst-bearing little existentialist and at the same time a half-baked Marxist besides being attracted to the radical humanist ideas of M. N. Roy introduced to me by the senior intellectual and poet M Govindan.There was a little circle of actively dying Royists at that time around the town of Trichur. I occasionally joined their discussions along with and died a bit too. My roommate C.T.Sukumaran( who later joined the IAS and was murdered by the mafia) also joined me at times.

I began to take my poetry seriously in the mid-1960s when Malayalam poetry was undergoing a sweeping transformation in terms of theme, mood and form. The new poets , tired of the excesses of the Romantics and the shallowness of the Progressives were striving to create a novel poetic idiom that would capture the conflicts and complexities of contemporary life in its totality. They had learnt their lessons from three sources: the specific -oral as well as written- traditions of Malayalam poetry, the larger - classical as well as modern-traditions of Indian poetry, and the avant-garde practices of modern European poetry. New rhythms, metaphors, images, word patterns and structures of feeling and thought and radical deployment of archetypes, myths and legends from diverse cultures together transformed the landscape of poetry in my language as in many others at that time. The change had its impact on my poetic practice giving it new directions and dimensions. We rallied round Kerala Kavita, the release of each of whose quarterly issues became an occasion for discussions on poetry as well as readings, some of them directed by Theatre and Film directors like Kavalam Narayana Paniker and G. Aravindan. In the Seventies, I published a little magazine , Jwala (Flame), with my friend P. K. A. Raheem, a great supporter of the new movements as the publisher, that carried the latest in Western thought and writing.;Allen Ginsberg, John Cage, Limericks, Concrete Poetry, Argentine microtales including Borges…A new fraternity based on modern sensibility was evolving in Kerala, that included besides writers, modern painters, sculptors, film makers and playwrights. I wrote a series of articles on Modern painting besides on other art forms and also took to painting for a brief while when I had lost my faith in language and suffered a crisis of faith and consequent depression. My first collection of poems, Anchusooryan had been published in 1971 and a book on Modern poetry, Kurukshetram, one year before it; and many short collections followed, almost one every two years. That was also the time of the Film Society movement and we organized one in Irinjalakuda,the town where I was teaching, holding many retrospectives, of filmmakers from Eisenstein and Bergman to Godard and Tarkovsky. Later I added many more to my favourites, from Kurasowa and Jansco to Kieslowsky, Parajinov and Angelopoulos. I had never thought of becoming a critic; but there were few to interpret the emerging modern sensibility and I was constrained to play that role, leading me to write books or articles on new poetry, new fiction , modern painting etc.. My academic research in post-structuralist poetics and critical endeavours cannot be said to have helped my poetry; but they did improve my understanding of the complex linguistic processes involved in creative writing and the essential anonymous and polyphonic nature of all writing, making me less possessive about my own writing.

In the second half of the 1970s, a new political alertness revitalised this modern poetry; it was now ready to take on larger social issues and historical situations and interrogate the status quo.The new poetry got the eyes of history; and the impetus came chiefly from the New Left ( Maoist) movement that attracted several young idealists in Kerala as it did in Bengal and Andhrapradesh. I can now very well see that its politics had problems; but it did generate a lot of creative energy that transformed our poetry, fiction, theatre and cinema. There was a reorganization of the earlier high modernist fraternity; some poets were changed completely, giving birth to what Yeats would call ‘a terrible beauty’ while some got partially transformed and were sympathetic. Even senior poets like Ayyappa Paniker , N. N. Kakkad and Attoor Ravivarma wrote poems fired by the new social awakening with tribals and landles peasants at its core, and there were poets like K.G.Sankara Pillai and Kadammanitta Ramakrishnan who were in the forefront of the new cultural ferment. We were all active in Janakeeya Samskarika Vedi , the Forum for Peoples’ Culture that upheld avant-garde practices. Journals like Prasakti ( Relevance) and Prerana (Persuasion) gave a new impetus to the movement; street and proscenium theatres flowered with new plays and adaptations; translations ( most of them mine) of Latin American poets like Pablo Neruda and Cesar Vallejo, Black poets like Senghor and David Diop and European poets like Paul Eluard, Louis Aragon and Bertolt Brecht provided new models. The campuses became vibrant with poetry readings and campus plays.This was the time that I also adapted some plays of W.B.Yeats, Lady Gregory and Bertolt Brecht. My play on Gandhi’s last days was written later on the request of the Secular Artists’ Forum that I had also helped found along with a lot of artists and writers at a time when communalism was beginning to malign even Kerala’s body politic. I had by the time also become a regular invitee to the literary events at Bharat Bhavan, Bhopal, thanks to Ashok Vajpeyi, the cultural visionary. These readings and workshops acquainted me with a lot of major Indian writers, especially poets, including the likes of Navkant Barua, Neelmoni Phookan, Subhash Mukhopadhyay, Sunil Gangopadhyay, Kunwar Narayan, Kedarnath Singh, Sitakant Mahapatra, Ramakanta Rath, Jayanata Mahapatra, Dilip Chitre, Arun Kolatkar, Namdeo Dhasal, Sitanshu Yashaschandra, and Ali Sardar Jaffri besides poets from abroad like Derek Walcott, Tomas Transtromer and Phillippe Jaccottet, though I did meet a lot of other poets from Kim Chi-hai and Tasos Denegris to Mahmoud Darwish, David Diop and Bei Dao during my readings outside India.

The Seventies’ movement ended tragically, producing several young martyrs who were killed by the police or committed suicide out of disillusionment. I escaped their fate only as I had always kept a critical distance from the political formation and its closed ideological stance and managed to honestly articulate even this moment of retreat, isolation and fragmentation in my poetry. I also used this interval for introspection and fresh theoretical enquiries as whose mouthpiece I launched the journal, Uttharam ( The Answer).( Later I edited a third journal , Pacchakkutira (The Green Horse), for arts, creative writing, translation and social and literary theory) There were too new social movements centred round human rights, consumer rights, issues of environment and tribals’, dalits’ and women’s emancipation which gave hope. I could see a new politics of ‘microstruggles’ or ‘transversal struggles’- as Michel Foucault calls them- emerging in Kerala sharing their ethical concerns with the 70’s movement. It was around this time that Ayyappa Paniker prompted me to move to Delhi and take up the editorship of Indian Literature at the Sahitya Akedemi. Leaving my job in the college and my presence in the cultural scene of my state was not at all easy; but the adventurer in me got the better of the sober soul and to the surprise and even the chagrin of many I decided to take the plunge. Frankly I do not regret the decision when I compare what I lost with what Delhi gave me: fresh exposures to all art forms, a deeper interest in Indian literature that led to many fresh explorations some of which are collected in my three books in English on the subject, the advantage of distance form my native state that helped me look at it at times nostalgically and at times critically, the many poems on Kerala and Malayalam, the series on the Saint and Sufi poets,a large circle of writer-friends across the country and abroad, the new directions I could give to the Akademi’s journal as its editor and later, as its Executive head, to its activities, travels in three continents that often inspired a lot of my poems and also won my poetry a lot of friends and translators abroad. My readings across the globe have helped reaffirm my faith in the power of poetry to speak to people across nations, languages and communities; it is the shared mother tongue of human beings that survived the Babel. No wonder it has survived Plato’s Republic, Hitler’s Auschwitz and Stalin’s Gulag, and still whispers its uneasy truths into the human ear trained through centuries to capture the most nuanced of voices.

Poetry as I conceive it is no mere combinatorial game; It rises up from the ocean of the unsayable, tries to say what it cannot stay , to name the nameless and to give a voice to the voiceless. It is no mere reproduction of established values and recognised truths; it is, as Italo Calvino says, an eye that sees beyond the colour spectrum of everyday politics and an ear that goes beyond the frequencies of sociology. It upturns the virgin soil, advances on the blank page , to use Nicanor Parra’s famous phrase.The truths it discovers may not often be of immediate use; but it will gradually become part of social consciousness.I also share Neruda’s concept of impure poetry, poetry that bears the dust of distances and smells of lilies and urine, a poetry that is often created out of words salvaged from the wreck of languages and nations. Poetry differs from prose not by following a metre or rhythm; there are many metrical poems that are worse than prose. The difference lies in its power to dissolve paradoxes and its way of imagining things into being and connecting words and memories; rhyme and rhythm may, of course, help to invoke an atmosphere. Its attraction is in what lies beyond the dictionary; it recovers words and experiences exiled from memory. Lorca used to speak of duende, a common term in Andalusin popular discourse: that sudden vision of godhead in Arabic music and dance that makes the audience cry, Allah, Allah. It is the intangible mystery Goethe found in Paganini’s art, the divine persuasion that the Gypsy dancer La Malena felt in Bach’s music played by Brailovsky. The search for it is a solitary trip without maps. Poetry too has those moments of revelation when like a whirlwind it subverts all logic and pulls down all preconceived projects. Every poet worth his/her salt must have felt the thrill and the terror of such moments of epiphany at least in the best moments of their inspiration. I too have experienced this not only while writing some poems which seemed to have been dictated to me but while istening to Girijadevi singing her tumris perched between the sun and the moon in Ayodhya leaving her voice to Sarayu’s breeze to rock the cradle of little Rama or in the ecstatic moments of Kumar Gandharv, Mallikarjun Mansoor or Kishori Amonkar singing in Bhopal and Delhi where the real world ceases to be and you float back to the times of Amir Khan or Fayyas Khan and beyond. M.D.Ramanathan’s hindol has given me this feeling as also some rare moments of Mahalia Jackson and Arita Franklin. And I have found this elevation while reading Dostoevsky’s Karamazov Brothers or Kazantsakis’s God’s Pauper. Tadeuz Rosewicz, the Polish poet said poetry should lay its eggs not on the chaff of half and a quarter words but directly in the abyss, and J.Swaminathan while speaking of the geometry of colours remarked that the triangle, the rectangle and the circle are coloured windows that open into the inexpressible and the ambiguos. He saw how in the tribal art nature and its creation enveop each other. This reciprocity is vital to any art today to liberate ourselves from the anthropocentric Western thought that speaks of nature in the language of war and rape and leads to the annihilation of man and earth.

I have often been asked what the central themes of my poetry are. It is difficult to reduce poetry to themes as any complex-enough poem works at many levels. As Umberto Eco says in a recent interview, works are more intelligent than their authors; they may contain possibilities that the author might never have known or imagined. But Rizio Raj,the writer-friend who edited my collected works has divided my work into three parts, Akam, poems of love , domesticity and interiority, Puram, poems of social concern and Mozhi, poems where language itself becomes the main theme. Gauded into a response, I will say justice, freedom, love, nature, language and death are the central concerns of my poetry as perhaps of all poetry. And the chief elements that helped shape me as a poet have perhaps been the traditions of poetry, local, national as well as global, experience, observation- of nature and of human beings, travel, interaction with other arts like music, painting and cinema, reading and translation, all turning into the fibres of my imagination.And I have been open-minded when it comes to forms having employed several verbal registers in Malyalam,from street talk to the language of legal documents and a diversity of metrical and non-metrical devices, folk, classical and modern.

The responsiveness of the Seventies is still alive in my poetry though I have distanced myself from all dogma. My commitment is largely ethical- to certain values, like justice, equality, freedom , love, respect for all forms of life.These have become all the more significant in a world governed by the values of the market and increasingly and violently being colonised by the forces of globalisation. While I have continuously raised the issues of women’s emancipation, the rights of the marginalised, ecological harmony and a world without wars, and kept responding to the tragic turns of social events, from the Emergency to the rise of communalism in our society, I have not ceased asking the deeper existential questions, of being, freedom, instincts, nature, relationships, death. I find no contradiction between the sacred and the secular; I can well be spiritual without being religious.This is something I have learnt from our Saint and Sufi poets and reformers like Kabir and Gandhi who battled against hierarchies of every kind , challenged Power in its diverse manifestations and interrogated the superfluous externals of practised religion. A poet does not need any religion other than poetry itself. Nothing can scare poetry except perhaps the empty white paper where, as Wislawa Szymborsca says, the poet has to await the incarnation of his/her essence in total solitude behind put-on masks and closed doors. I fear only the suffocating silence of a world where the soul has ceased to speak and man cannot decipher the language of leaves and waterfalls. I hope not to survive to see that day when the universe is deprived of its sacredness and evil prevails unquestioned."

As shared by the poet on Facebook, reproduced here in entirety, apologies in advance to everyone if this goes against any established etiquette