Review by: Deeptesh Sen
Book Details:
Title: Sin of Semantics
Publisher: Copper Coin
Year of publication: 2019
Price: Rs 299
Saima
Afreen’s debut collection of poems, titled Sin
of Semantics, takes the reader on a journey through a dreamscape of magic
realist fantasy. Every movement, every brushstroke and every allusion is
carefully sculpted so that the transition from one image to another is often
seamless, magical and carried out with an effortless mastery.
Afreen’s
poetry is heavy on images that create rich paintings, with the colours spinning
on a wheel to create magical images. Each image is beautiful and fleeting as it
morphs into the next one at a breathtaking pace. The transition is often
radical but it brings about a willing suspension of disbelief so that it leaves
you gasping for more.
In
‘Shab-e-Qadr’ for instance, the sunset is sliced thin like butter paper the
size of a school workbook and the starlit sky marks clear prophecies.
 |
| Deeptesh Sen |
under the net of stars that were clear
prophecies
till he destroyed it with speech
within which grows a door and then another door
embraced by bakhoor forests.
Sweet scents move within sleeping bodies
like babies smiling in exile
tasting deserts, then milk.
The fake star from my mother’s dress catches light
as she tosses between silks, shifting between souls
In Afreen’s
dreamscape, ‘metaphors rain, mingling with the green waters’, ‘the moon
drowns herself in
the water lilies of Mon├йt’ and ‘flowers in transparent glass turn into perfume’
like the last act of survival as the sky collapses. To traverse this dreamscape
is to travel through heightened sensory perceptions into a world of ethereal
and sublime beauty. It is a beauty that enthrals and at that same time strikes
terror with its power of fantasy.
Every sight, sound
and smell comes together in these poems to create a Bakhtinian chronotope where
time and space meet and melt away as you transcend the banal and travel into
the realm of the ethereal. Yet the divergence is never absolute; rather the two
are intertwined like in a Mobius strip. It is this seamless transition from one
world to another, the presence of the ethereal in the everydayness of being
that lends the magical quality to these poems.
Fairy
lights swallow
the
shine of glac├й cherries
the
reflection of white cakes
dancing
on clear glass,
the
way its glint partitions
the
rest of the world
from
the world within
lit up with
Hanukkah candles
 |
| Saima Afreen |
…
Two angels drop
tears
on wide shoulders
their pens move,
their mouths don’t
they count the angels
within, the soft haze, the whisper
from split wicks,
dry blood.
What make the
images richer are allusions that refer to a wide gamut of places, folklore and
literary classics. Afreen’s poems travel through and across Greek mythology,
Russian classics as well as the magical lands of Persia, Palestine and Kashmir.
At times, these
magical lands also bring with them their troubled geographies of map-making and
neocolonial violence. People turned into prisoners in their own land, these
places with idyllic landscapes also bear the sad history of robbed childhoods
and ‘butchered lullabies’.
Child,
Do not long for the moon.
Tonight
It will be cremated
By wolves in khaki:
Guards of ‘Peace’!
The thud
Of their boots
Tramples upon the wails
Reverberating from the red carpet
Of fresh blood
On streets.
Afreen paints a
chilling picture of Kashmir filled with unburied shrieks of beheaded dolls,
smashed skulls and crushed butterflies. Even children who would rather play
with crayons have been robbed of their childhood — red is the only colour they
know of. It is like the Syrian child in ‘A Small White Balcony in Banjara Hills’
who does not know ‘the difference between a refugee camp and his sister’s
dollhouse’.
Like in ‘Survival’,
each poem in this collection carries petals rich with metaphors of possibility.
Each petal has a story to tell and a world to show, but also carries with it
the promise of a missed future. Peel away the layers and colours from this
dreamscape and you will find stories of unhurried nostalgia for a past that has
been irretrievably lost.
Therefore, the
charpoy that grandmother left behind becomes a tapestry of absences, its each
rope carrying the DNA of lost maps and the sad history of Partition.
There she is again in the shadows
of
a white cotton sari, sitting,
smiling
on the charpoy she
chose
from her father’s house
as
a 13-year-old bride when red
was
the only colour she knew—
then
she saw her house near the border
of
Pakistan: a white square fading
in
an orange dusk. All that was left in her eyes
was
the print of barbed wires and prayers on her lips,
the
rosary moving between her fingers.
The
charpoy creaked
under
the weight of violence her face sighed,
each rope in its
crisscross knew a tale:
The onslaught of
absence is sometimes stark and sudden when the poet remembers the couplet by
Faiz that her grandfather hummed while picking a sugar cube for his tea. Soon
his sweet memory of the couplet unfurls a sense of deeper loss.
The
couplet slows down like the train
he
alighted from at Nizamuddin.
He
looks down at the rim of the cup
the
brown water wells up to the top
he
has stopped humming, his eyes fixed
on
the lips of a young man in a clean shirt
my
dad, who also hummed the couplet till
the
day he came home:
wrapped in two
yards of white.
This absence is
one of the recurring undercurrents of these poems — it manifests itself in the
form of the portrait of the father in the ‘60s when he ‘waves in his ebony
hair/Parts rivers with his pink knuckles’ as he sets time on his HMT watch. The
smell of Cherry Blossom Shoe Polish evokes memories of ‘My hands./Held by a
ruddy pair firmly. Dad./ Sitting in a sea of shoes. Family feet’. It is the
smell of absence wafting from polished shoes. However, the footsteps are
fleeting and prints can never be captured; just as they had appeared, they
erase quickly.
This absence also
manifests itself in the form of remembering a past that is fast vanishing. We
are transported to the Calcutta of old, with the old corporation buildings
painted red, the silver screen of New Empire cinema hall and the hand-pulled
rickshaw. It also makes way for a deeper absence in the textual space as
letters splinter and fall, opening up symbolic gaps that can be traumatic to
encounter.
Inherited
by a sentence
What
is it that weeps
Inside
the frontier
Between
The
rivers and mirrors?
Darkness
s p l i n t e r s as my sun
And
I—f a l l
Into
a
Place
That stems from
you
It is the symbolic
absence that opens up as the sea polishes the corner of the names written in
cursive nastaliq on the shore.
The temptation to
get lost in Afreen’s rich dreamscape of metaphors and magic places is indeed
alluring, but richer still is the world that lies underneath. This world is
different; stripped off the technicolour of butter paper sunset and Monet’s
waterlilies, the absences are stark, sudden and endless. Afreen invites the
reader to take this journey beyond the colours to endless depths of loss as she
writes:
December only
remembers snow, not the dead
underneath it.
Author bio: Deeptesh Sen is a PhD student at the department of English in Jadavpur University, Kolkata. His book of poems titled ‘House of Song’ was published by Writers Workshop in 2017. He blogs at www.deeptesh.net
Superb In-depth review! Congratulations to Saima and Deeptesh
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