Café Dissensus

By Nishtha Dev

Dedicated to her “incurably romantic self”, Shyamasri Maji, in her debut collection of poetry, Forgive Me, Dear Papa and Other Poems, explores diverse facets of female experience through perspectives hitherto unexplored. The poems in the collection are as thematically diverse as they are philosophically profound. They represent an enviable assemblage of perspectives on ordinary life. The reflections about interpersonal relationships, scathing critiques of capitalist and patriarchal beauty standards, poignant experiential narratives of the “unsocial” distances that the COVID-19 pandemic imposed upon us, and odes to the irreducible complexity of the relationship between human beings and nature are a few categories into which the poems in this collection can be organized.

The introduction to the collection sets the tone for the reader and also informs them of the primary theoretical framework within which she locates her poems. Acutely aware of the geo-spatial locationality of her voice, she introduces her poems as texts that resist patriarchal ideology. The refreshingly theoretically informed and ideologically sensitive introduction makes the reader look forward to the poems that cover a wide range of ideas and address significant ideological issues that are extremely relevant today.

In addition to the feminist issues Maji articulates in the introduction as being central to her poems, what is striking in her poetry is the experiential register she employs in her poems. The poems narrativize and highlight instances that belong to the realm of the ordinary. For example, poems like “Forgive Me, Dear Papa”, “Dating Online,” and “The Psoriasis Girl” render the ordinary, and almost ritualistic aspects of daily life as significant and symbolic of larger political and philosophical questions about humanity. As Shyamasri Maji states in the introduction, the narrative voice is often confessional, and the narrative focuses on the rich inner life of the narrator-protagonist. The feminism of her poetry, thus, also lies primarily in her ability to demystify social institutions through the representation of this complex interiority that is the site of many ideological contestations of the female identity. This is accomplished in her poems through a narrative voice that is both deeply personal and critically public. The private and the worldly intersect in her poetry in the most creative and critically enriching ways.

The intersection between the public and the private ties all the poems, across categories together. The seamless transition from the private, inner life of the narrator to the political and public makes the poems both emotionally and intellectually stimulating. This feature is powerfully demonstrated by the very first poems of this collection.

The eponymous poem “Forgive Me, Dear Papa” inaugurates the collection and sets the tone for the following pages. The tone is tender, yet confident; soft, yet defiant. This poem also introduces what, according to me, becomes a significant motif in the book: skin. The skin in these poems is both tactile and ethereal. In its representations, it appears as both material and sensual, as well as abstract. It is as poetic as it is political. The first poem, exploring the unique position of an unmarried thirty-six-year-old woman in a conventional patriarchal household, begins with the following lines:

“Forgive me, dear Papa,
For being a mole underneath your eye.
It bothers you while reading a newspaper,
And makes you feel depressed sometimes”

 The image of the mole as a disturbance and a disruption, figuratively speaking, places the idea and ideology of ‘skin’ at the forefront of ideological negotiations with patriarchal and capitalist notions of beauty and identity. The poem, however, ends on an unapologetic note; the ‘forgiveness’ sought here does not lead the female narrator to yield to the law of the father, but it is a defiant forgiveness that enables her to transgress the patriarchal notions that constrict her being. Therefore, skin, in this poem and others, appears as the site of ideological contestations and conflicts about ideas of gender and beauty. One of the most prominent stakeholders in the capitalist economy of the skin is the beauty industry. The patriarchal ways in which skin is framed within the discourse of beauty are criticized through the unnatural images of eternal youth referred to in the inaugural poem as well. She writes,

“the mole in your eye is growing cancerous,
Big!
As big an unmarried girl of thirty-six!
She stands like a skyscraper
Shaking hands with the sun in the smoky sky,
Whistling to the strands of her greying locks
Like the age-defying men
You admitted in the Bombay movies.”

 The critique of the capitalist discourse of beauty is developed further in another skin poem titled “Sinkholes”. She writes,

 “I walk through the windy fields
Past the singing sinkholes
of cosmetics and capitalism,
I smile for being ugly and free
Like the fiery moon
On the forehead of an abysmal night.”

The nexus between the capitalist discourse of beauty and skin, which has been naturalized in a capitalist culture industry, is exposed as a construct when freedom is represented as a stance of rebellion against these ideologies. A feminist critique of capitalist and patriarchal ideas of beauty therefore remains the overarching framework within which the dominant ideology of skin is represented in the many poems in this collection. These poems also disrupt the ideological binary between beauty and ugliness centered on notions of skin.

 In other skin poems, we see the narrative voice locating the idea of skin within other discourses as well. In a few skin poems, skin appears as a potential meeting point of disability activism and aesthetic ethics. In The Psoriasis Girl: Four Poems, the narrator, while voicing the inner turmoil of a woman with psoriasis, who seems to fail constantly against external and oppressive standards of ‘beauty’ that find legitimation not only in popular culture but also in literature, poses questions that make the reader revisit one’s notions of beauty as an aesthetic category as represented in culture and literature. The ideological and creative constraints that fuse aesthetics with ethics raise serious problems when the dominant notions of skin are only spoken of in an ableist vocabulary. In one of the most memorable lines of the poem, the poet-narrator wonders

 “In the mushaira
when they praised you for
your poem yesterday noon,
I wondered how could the poet adore
The psoriasis patches on the moon”

 Reminiscent of Adrienne Rich’s subtextual poetical and political subversions in “Tonight, No Poetry Will Serve”, Maji’s poem exposes the pain and suffering that underline the ableist notion of beauty upheld in art. The ableist notions of beauty collectively espoused by literature and literary performances like the ‘mushaira’ subscribe to a hegemonic ‘disease-free’ notion of the skin as an unproblematic, uncontested idea. In Shyamasri Maji’s poems, therefore, the psoriatic scaly skin and the thinning hair are recurrent reminders of the presence of ‘skin’ and the ‘otherness’ of the disabled female body. It is this internalized otherness that enables us to critique the ableist notions of the skin, which remain unrepresented in literature. Echoing Rich’s question, Shyamasri Maji’s poem seems to reflect upon the ideological assumptions that constitute our idea of art and beauty. What is not said, very often, is something that needs to be heard.

 In this context, the skin poems also lead us to interrogate the extent of the relationship between aesthetics and ethics. Does art have a moral responsibility? To what extent can aesthetics and art be tied to one another? In the poem “Backless Blouse”, she writes

 “Narrow edges glide, the voyeurs chide
flaky skin flaunts fashion
Stay in your room, mock epic of a broom,
Fasten your shrewish passion.

Framed in a fragile knot, an acre of patchy plot
the moon melts on the river cold
She catches a flying fish, unbuttons a dewy wish,
her blouse- backless and bold”

 The sense of helplessness and exclusion in the previous poem is replaced by an emphatic act of defiance; the scaly skin becomes the site of change and signals the beginning of a new journey towards confidence and inclusion, which is also echoed in the subsequent poems of the collection. In the poem “Wrinkles”, the mood is sombre, and the tone is one of quiet acceptance. The aging skin does not signify a personal angst or a spiritual crisis; the aging skin here is not constituted by a discourse of beauty. In “My Mottled Skin” she boldly exclaims that “shame has lost her senses”, indicating a movement beyond the capitalist, patriarchal, and ableist discourses that determine dominant representations of skin.

Skin, in other poems in the collection, also appears as an interface between the human and the natural world. In an almost posthumanist turn in the narrative, the poems present skin as not only a human characteristic but a universal trope that leads the reader to realign their perception of nature as necessarily related to the human world. In poems like “Photograph” and “Till You Cut It Down”, the sense of touch and feeling is seen as a universal and a natural phenomenon, without it simply becoming an instrument of a romantic deification of nature. Skin, therefore, is invoked in its most natural role as a sensual interface to the external world, and it is located not only in the humanist context but in a larger ecological one. In this configuration of ‘skin’ as universal, the social distance imposed on us by the COVID-19 pandemic is also viewed as an ‘unsocial’ distance. In the poem “No Kiss, No Hug!” Shyamasri Maji writes,

“Tonight, it is calm.
There’s no fear of a thunderstorm
The stars sleep like the corpses in the morgue
Your eyes meet mine in the pandemic dark
In the flute player’s tune together, we hark
Two burial beds are being dug.
There is no kiss, there’s no hug!”

Skin, is therefore, seen as central to the aesthetic, ideological and ethical questions raised by the many poems in this collection. The reconfiguration of ‘skin’ as central and not marginal to experience makes it both a site where oppressive ideologies cast their shadows and a site where, potentially, freedom from these ideologies can be sought. The collection at large, but skin poems in particular, do so by making the reader revisit the very foundations upon which our notions of beauty and art rest.

Bio:
Nishtha Dev is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English, Sophia College for Women, Mumbai and has taught postgraduate courses at SNDT University and K J Somaiya College, Mumbai. She is pursuing a Ph.D. in Indian graphic fiction, and her research interests include Indian literature, Translation studies, Popular culture, and Critical theory.

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