Yellow by Sukrita Paul Kumar, published by Sahitya Akademi, New Delhi, 2024.
ISBN: 978-93-6183-586-5.---Tansy Troy
There is more than one way to pray.
On receiving Sukrita (Paul Kumar)’s book of ‘poemlets’, I find myself
holding Yellow in suppliant palms, my
fingers, reaching for meaning like the branches of the amaltas trees painted on
its bright cover.
Something defies gravity in these prayer-like verses, as if a gust of
Spring wind is sending blossom floating upwards. Turn to the title page, and you will discover
the faint yellow glow of cream rather than white paper, with the book’s name (and
the logo of Sahitya Akademi) stamped in red, reminiscent of an old haiku
master’s signature seal printed at the corner of a page of elegant, assured,
yet egoless calligraphic scroll.
My first impression as I read through is definitely and unmistakably one
of all things golden, glowing and occasionally decaying, in the spirit of fin
de si├иcle ‘yellow’ poetry from previous epochs.
I am reminded of Oscar Wilde’s ‘Impression du Matin’ and ‘La Mer’, as
well as the more obvious ‘Symphony in Yellow’.
There’s also a nod towards far Eastern verse, in both the sparse and
whittled down, very essential choice of words and in the way each poemlet
appears on the page, mainly uncapitalised, sometimes with only a single word
per line.
Occasionally, I feel like I am looking through a book of paintings: colourist,
imagistic paintings. Sukrita’s frequent
allusions to the colour yellow and its metallic counterpart, gold, suffuse the
poetry with light and gravitas all at the same time:
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| Tansy Troy |
‘the sun…
the steel-grey
savouring
the gold’
(bir poemlets)
‘two little yellow mushrooms
solid and fragile
sprout from the roots of an
unknown tree
bearing the whole sun
within’
(invisible signs)
‘the golden sheen on the pines…’
(ibid)
‘terror-struck bees
buzzing in hornets
yellow sun
shooting out of
black clouds’
(not so randomly)
‘the sun shines
on his yellow shirt’
(we the homeless)
‘firey sunflowers
holy marigolds
roses smitten with love…
(generation gap)
Blue, green and silver are equally important components of this poet’s palette,
giving us a sense of watery reflections beneath a fiery firmament. When I asked Sukrita whether her choice of
colour was consciously considered while creating/curating the poemlets for Yellow, she expressed surprise and
intrigue that there was any discernible reference to the colour that gives the collection
its title. ‘Actually I have always
avoided using yellow in my paintings,’ she confesses, ‘since I think of it as a
colour that speaks rather loudly and draws too much attention to itself.
Moreover, I perceive it as the colour of the sun… and I see myself closer to
the moon.’ That said, Sukrita admits to
being inspired by the amaltas trees, uplifting the spirits of so many citizens
at a time of annual, excruciating city chaleur.
‘I have always been fascinated by the delicate and yet overpowering
yellow of laburnums in the hot summers of Delhi. How do they survive in that
heat…?’ muses Sukrita during our conversation.
‘They dangle from the branches of trees seductively with the gold of the
sun rays in their veins, emanating joy when it is sweltering hot! My painting
(the cover of the Yellow) tries to
capture that spirit of glory, of yogic detachment from the environs.’
There are other instances of Nature’s hymn to yellow that have left their
imprint on Sukrita’s imagination: she describes ‘the wonderful chinars, oaks
and pines of Himalayas, the savannah grasslands of Kenya where I grew up and
witnessed the play of colours in animals such as the giraffes, zebras and
lions! That’s the poetry of Creation that runs in my veins, along with the
poems by different poets such as Wislawa Szymborska, Adrienne Rich, Kamla Das,
Kofi Awoonor and many, many others.’ And
on re-reading Yellow, I discover that
there is indeed the feeling of wide-open spaces (abstract mountains, curvaceous
rivers, big wholesome moon-scapes). Even
the sun Sukrita describes feels larger, hotter, than the one which bakes India’s
soil.
Through describing such expanses, is it any wonder that the poet feels
humbled and almost invisible? Perhaps this
is reflected in Sukrita’s use of almost entirely lower-case letters, including
the use of ‘i’ when describing herself. This
decision, Sukrita explains, was made with ‘some deliberateness… in the final
edits of the poems. I just did not want the “I” to dominate. Yes, it also has
to do with the desire to diminish the ego that tends to creep - on the sly -
into the experience of the poem. One needs to then make conscious efforts in
the craft/form as well as the content to somehow quieten the voice of a
presence that disallows the participation of the reader for one. Also the “I”
that creates a self-centeredness needs to be demolished…The entire universe is
the home, not just a particular self…’
Paul Muldoon, in his essay ‘Capital Case’ on the 20th century
poet e.e.cummings says
that like Joyce and Eliot, e.e.cumming’s felt a general ‘distrust (of) the
hierarchical in every aspect of life, beginning with his own being.’ Like cummings, Sukrita chooses to capitalise
only very specific, generally religious words. To understand why this may be, I
turn to my Oxford English dictionary (A-Markworthy) to discover the Latin root
of the word ‘capital’ (capitalis- caput, capit- head) with its later interpretations and meanings of
‘important’, ‘on top’, ‘initial’ and most common in our ‘capitalistic’ times,
‘of or pertaining to the original funds of a trader, company or corporation’
(1790) and ‘Capital Stock (of the Bank of England) (1709). Considering how, by the mid-1700s, the East
India Company bosses were well and truly swimming in the capital wealth made
through trading India’s massive material abundance and working people of that
land to the bone in order to harvest it- considering how this company’s trade accounted
for more than half the world’s economy- we might well imagine that Sukrita (and
every other decolonizing poet) may wish to resist capitalisation in any form, eschewing
associations of a merely transactional relationship with both Nature and the
rest of Humanity.
With this idea in mind, what could it mean to capitalise a deity in a
poem, or even a poemlet? Could it
indicate that a poet’s personal experiences and the authority to write about them is legitimately granted by a (male) monotheistic deity, the same God
in whose name wars are bitterly fought, communities destroyed, bombs dropped
and unlimited carbon released into the atmosphere; the same God who apparently
sanctifies transactional economies, however destructive they may be to the
Earth or humankind, merely because those who act according to His name shall
be, allegedly, redeemed? Sukrita, like
cummings, experiments with the ‘extinction of personality’ (as Eliot dubbed it):
yet neither poet quite dares to de-capitalise God:
‘i thank You God for this most amazing day: for the leaping greenly
spirits of trees and a blue true dream of sky; and for everything which is
natural which is infinite which is yes’
writes cummings, a hundred years ago: and while Sukrita does not glorify Him
with quite the same ecstatic fervour - in fact, in her poems He appears to be
invisible when the homeless need him, or the rickshaw walla displays his open
wounds to the sky- yet other more benign
masculine deities in the poems retain their capital status, perhaps for the
same reasons of awe, gratitude, deep reverence as cummings felt about God:
‘Allah Allah Bismillah
Sat Nam Shri Wahe Guru…’
writes Sukrita in ‘diary of final destinations’, a poemlet dedicated to
her father. Buddha too, is conferred his
upper case ‘B’, Jesus his ‘J’, and the Quran its Q. However, Ganga, by far the longest poemlet in
the book, flowing as she does over 23 pages in ‘dialogues with ganga’ is only described
by the humbler ‘g’, although the feminine river has the ‘world throbbing inside
her belly’ like a great ambivalent goddess, subsuming all tragedy within her
tides, showing neither affection nor emotion for her hapless offspring, merely
sustenance, flow and a promise of afterlife.
That she is divine there is no doubt.
Yet Sukrita does not beatify Ganga.
Is this because the river is of this world, of our present material
reality? Or because even as a women
poet, she/we operate/s in a masculinised economy, in which the father is so almost
always the head of every family, be it domestically, professionally, politically
or globally? What of our mother goddess heritage
of an anciently heterarchical India? Or
would capitalising the goddess be nothing but a further propagation of masculinised
ego/English alphabet? Should everything,
every word, now take on its most ego-less form?
Or could the only truly feminine answer be one of wordlessness, communicated
in the language of animals and the weather?
In ‘breaking silence’, Sukrita begs to differ:
words fall from her mouth
as rain
on deserts
Poems quench our thirst for answers to the mysteries, even as they
present us with greater ones. Perhaps we
should simply lie back on the dried out, parched earth and open our mouths to
catch the raindrops as they fall.
Finally, in my unravelling of Yellow,
I decide to examine Sukrita’s punctuation- or lack of it- to glean whether the
omission of full stops allows continuous flow and never-ending journeys from
earth to sky, like prayers or condensation rising, or from sky to earth, like
blessings or rain bestowed. Verses – or
sections of a single poem- are separated
by pictograms of a tiny peepal leaf, leading the reader to experience the poem vertically,
rather than horizontally, something that brings back to mind Chinese and
Japanese scroll painting, read from top to bottom of a page and makes me think
(bearing in mind the reference to tree as both rooted and crowned on the cover
of Yellow) of the backdrops of giant pine
trees in Japanese classical Noh theatre. Are the conventional indicators of closure
(i.e. full-stopped lines) replaced by the dot which signs off the small, newly
humbled ‘i’, the disembodied narrative voice?
Sukrita elucidates: ‘Last lines of the poems with no full stops
definitely are indicators that the poem’s journey is not over with its last
line. The track is all set in the poem to lead itself into the reader’s mind
where it acquires its shape and perhaps a resting place. The poem has to be
dynamic and the journey goes on with all its mutations and transformations.
Even when re-visited, that same poem becomes something else for the reader…I
wonder if the poem ever has a closure!’
This generous experiment in reader-autonomy is a success. One is left with the feeling of a gift, an
inference, a communication to stir up some memory in the form of a wisp of
smoke from a fire outside the ‘gufa’ that is universal refuge until the end of
time. This ‘universe of animals/of history, people and trees’ is the ‘grand
woman’s womb/where narratives of future/are mediated/and time slips into
eternity’.
Sukrita, I will meet you there.
***
Bio:Tansy Troy is an
India-based educationalist, poet, performer, playwright and maker of bird and
animal masks. She conceived and edits The Apple Press, a young people’s eco
journal @the.applepress which includes poetry, stories, articles and artwork by
both students as young as eight years old and household names in
literature. In 2023, Tansy published her
first collection of poetry, Ratnakosha,
with Red River Press and since then, has had poetry, articles and reviews in The Hindustan Times, The Hindu, The Scroll, Punch Magazine,
Art Amour, Open Media and The Chakkar. Her verse has been included in Muse India, Plato’s Cave and anthologised in The Yearbook of Indian Poetry in English 2023 (published Pippa Rann, London) and The Tagore Anthology. 2025
will see the release of her next two volumes of verse with both Red River and
The Writers Workshop.
Join her on the journey
@voice_of_the_turtle, @the.applepress and @the_adventures_of_tara
