Perhaps nothing gets more in the way of reading and writing as the raw shock of violence. For writers to keep faith in their own voice despite it and for readers to continue to read with sensitivity and attention, one must disallow the seemingly bigger story from taking over. Our reading and assessment of writers can sometimes be obscured by events that arise from a dangerous or blatant misreading of their work.
Almost everyone knows Perumal Murugan as the writer who was threatened by Right-wing activists for his portrayal of the sexual customs of people belonging to the Kongu Nadu region in his novel Madhorubhagan.
A live exhibit
The horror of violence that was subsequently unleashed very nearly stopped him in his tracks. Murugan famously announced the death of his writing self on his Facebook page. But like a phoenix, he rose from those ashes. Or rather, he chose to write from them.
In his introduction to his collection of poems, Songs of a Coward: Poems of Exile, Murugan says: “Even when I was really young, I discovered that writing was my calling. It has kept me company, and allowed me to share things with myself, it has also helped me keep myself at a distance, gain some perspective.” This is the sort of fragile balance and self-knowledge that Murugan was in danger of losing not too long ago.
These poems, sensitively translated by Aniruddhan Vasudevan, are literally what the subtitle claims they are: poems of exile, for they were all written at a time when Murugan was faced with death threats, when he found that his “habit of talking to himself” may have to be stifled in order to ensure his safety.
The poems document this time with verve and honesty. As Vasudevan remarks in his note, they “record for us the inner life of a writer who is hurt”.
It is not out of naiveté that their speaker wears the unflattering label of a “coward”. It is, rather, an act of great deliberation.
Murugan draws our attention to the fact that under certain circumstances, the “cowardice”, inevitable or not, can become a carefully assumed position, a position one can make poetry out of.
By being the first to label himself a coward, he snatches that loaded word from the mouths of his detractors. Murugan makes the stunning argument that not only does being a coward have its uses, it is actually a pretty good thing.
In his poem ‘The Song of a Coward’, he offers a series of upside-down compliments to cowards: “Misery befalls no one/ because of a coward/ Riots break out nowhere/ because of a coward/ Nothing is ever ruined/ because of a coward” before saying “A coward/ is fearful of daylight/ Poetry comes forth from him.”
Old accounts
Almost without exception, these are dark poems. Dark poems for dark times. The speaker enters the body of “a guinea pig poisoned to death” (‘Thousands and Thousands’), sometimes he is a lab rat, lying “on a table/ legs spreadout/ and nailed down” (‘Definitely a Rat’), at other times, he stands “as a live exhibit” and “hands grope about [his] head/ looking to see if [he] has horns’ (‘An Exhibit’).
Sometimes, the speaker is just an annoying, persistent poet who intercepts all sorts of people and insists on reciting poetry to them (‘With a Poem’). Always, at the back of every poem, there is a raw, pounding fear: “When they come with closed hands/ there is a sharp knife hidden there/When they come with open hands/ it is a trick to conceal weapons/in their clothes or in their mouths” (‘Those with Hands’). The speaker ends by declaring that “anyone with hands/ is suspect”.
Another poem in which we smell that familiar fear is ‘Old Accounts’. Murugan uses a metaphor from bookkeeping to talk about the sorts of things people hold him accountable for, things for which he will be called upon to pay:
“Some ledgers contain
just a single word I seem to have
uttered
and forgotten at some point
The dues that grow from it
run to several pages”
Murugan’s poems are full of animal images and selves: dogs, rats, guinea pigs, even snails, those shy creatures of the animal world who “crawl out/ on quiet days” and are a source of amusement to the speaker who can poke and nudge them to his heart’s content, even “hurl them on little rocks/ They have protective shells/ like calcium boxes” (‘Snails’). It is only the last stanza that gives the game away: “On days I can’t find snails/ I simply look/ in the mirror.”
Protective shells
And the poet’s strange problem: his inability to keep from writing what he will, to stay out of trouble. This despite the fact that he has issued an express command to his pen:
“that the ink-drip from its ball-tip
shall happen henceforth
only for signatures
accounts and
journal entries”
(‘What Shall I Do?’)
But the pen has a mind of its own. It does strange things.
A crow appears in one journal entry. In another, a barber’s laments are recorded. Not a very obedient pen, this one.
We get to the penultimate poem ‘What Have I Lost?’ and realise that that’s the one we have been waiting for. The speaker wonders what he has lost.
After all, he was not used to “wearing an emperor’s crown”, nor has he stood with his “feet/ on the heads of thousands of slaves”, nor has he looked for praise or worship (‘What Have I Lost?’).
“Am I not one,” he asks, “who has lost everything/ but still hasn’t lost himself?”
Hope seems too bright a word to use these days and yet we are glad for this line.
The author is poet, fiction writer and Professor of Literature at IIT Madras.
Songs of a Coward: Poems of Exile; Perumal Murugan trs Aniruddhan Vasudevan; Penguin Random House; ₹299