Singing in the Dark Read online

  K. SATCHIDANANDAN

  NISHI CHAWLA

  SINGING IN THE DARK

  A Global Anthology of Poetry Under Lockdown

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  CONTENTS

  Foreword

  Usha Akella

  J. Joy Matthews Alford

  Anvar Ali

  Kumar Ambuj

  Anamika

  Jotamario Arbeláez

  Asmaa Azaizeh

  Stanley H. Barkan

  Amanda Bell

  Maaz Bin Bilal

  Maren Bodenstein

  Ann Bracken

  Grace Cavalieri

  Sampurna Chattarji

  Nishi Chawla

  Marius Chelaru

  R. Cheran

  Yiorgos Chouliaras

  Francis Combes

  Michael Cope

  Mangalesh Dabral

  Cyril Dabydeen

  Mustansir Dalvi

  Keki N. Daruwalla

  Najwan Darwish

  Sanjukta Dasgupta

  Uttaran Das Gupta

  Deborah Emmanuel

  Thérèse Fensham

  Jack Foley

  Sarabjeet Garcha

  Avril Gardiner

  Max Garland

  Norbert Gora

  Amlanjyoti Goswami

  Hildebrando Perez Grandes

  Joy Harjo

  Karabi Deka Hazarika

  Geoffrey Himes

  Sibusiso Hlatshwayo

  Ranjit Hoskote

  Babitha Marina Justin

  Mangesh Narayanrao Kale

  Joanna Kania

  Angshuman Kar

  Anjum Katyal

  Waqas Khwaja

  Miklavž Komelj

  Ashwani Kumar

  Nilim Kumar

  Marra PL. Lanot

  Moferefere Lekorotsoana

  Nikola Madzirov

  Goodenough Mashego

  Bishnu Mohapatra

  Sonnet Mondal

  Vishnu Nagar

  Marc Nair

  Meera Nair

  Raj Nair

  Taslima Nasrin

  Ban’ya Natsuishi

  Sophia Naz

  Kai Michael Neumann

  Barbara Oppenheimer

  Amir Or

  Harry Owen

  Jose Padua

  Diane Wilbon Parks

  Sabine Pascarelli

  Anuradha Patil

  K.G. Sankara Pillai

  Jerry Pinto

  M.P. Pratheesh

  Savithri Rajeevan

  E.V. Ramakrishnan

  Yashodhara Ray Chaudhuri

  Kutti Revathi

  Willem M. Roggeman

  Gabriel Rosenstock

  Sabitha Satchi

  K. Satchidanandan

  Sudeep Sen

  Vijay Seshadri

  Varsha Saraiya-Shah

  Aditya Shankar

  Ravi Shankar

  Ravi Shanker N

  Yuyutsu Sharma

  Manohar Shetty

  H.S. Shivaprakash

  Nhlanhla Siliga

  Savita Singh

  Ari Sitas

  Rafael Soler

  Chris Song

  Srijato

  Kim Stafford

  Arundhathi Subramaniam

  George Szirtes

  Adam Tamashasky

  Anitha Thampi

  Ngugi wa Thiong’o

  Ashok Vajpeyi

  Pramila Venkateswaran

  Xabiso Vili

  Phillippa Yaa de Villiers

  Meifu Wang

  Les Wicks

  Athol Williams

  Annie Zaidi

  Zingonia Zingone

  Footnotes

  Anvar Ali

  Kumar Ambuj

  Anamika

  Asmaa Azaizeh

  Marius Chelaru

  R. Cheran

  Yiorgos Chouliaras

  Francis Combes

  Mangalesh Dabral

  Keki N. Daruwalla

  Najwan Darwish

  Hildebrando Perez Grandes

  Mangesh Narayanrao Kale

  Angshuman Kar

  Nilim Kumar

  Nikola Madzirov

  Bishnu Mohapatra

  Vishnu Nagar

  Raj Nair

  Taslima Nasrin

  Amir Or

  Anuradha Patil

  K.G. Sankara Pillai

  M.P. Pratheesh

  Savithri Rajeevan

  Yashodhara Ray Chaudhuri

  Kutti Revathi

  Willem M. Roggeman

  K. Satchidanandan

  Aditya Shankar

  Ravi Shanker N

  Savita Singh

  Rafael Soler

  Srijato

  Ashok Vajpeyi

  Copyright Acknowledgements

  Follow Penguin

  Copyright

  Praise for the Book

  ‘The range and depth of this amazing anthology convey the conflicted and conflicting emotions of our times. It provides the consolations of poetry and the solace of art as balm to troubled souls’—Namita Gokhale, author, and director, Jaipur Literature Festival

  ‘Perhaps no catastrophe has ever struck human life with power as pervasive as the pandemic. While the benumbed world is struggling to combat the apocalyptic devastation it has wreaked, a choral spectrum of poetry has emerged to rekindle the spirit of hope. Has poetry not always spelt hope in dark times? Over a hundred voices of unparalleled resilience have gathered here to speak in a “jumbled mix of words” to carry a “sky of memories”. Sharing the “earth’s breathing”, they have burst forth into a “slipstream of time”. In each of them, the word of the poet rises across nations reduced to the “size of a mouse hole” to envision “the anguish of mountains”. It is a word of love, solace and bonding; the word the world today is sorely in need of hearing’—Gulammohammed Sheikh, artist and author

  ‘I salute this effort and extend sincere congratulations to all the poets included in the anthology. Although it may seem that devoting poetic energy to an invisible enemy that is pushing the world towards a terrifying future is too closely tied to social duty, the truth is entirely different: it is not death that the poets are celebrating, it is life’—Evald Flisar, Slovenian author and playwright

  In the dark times

  Will there also be singing?

  Yes, there will also be singing.

  About the dark times.

  Bertolt Brecht, ‘Motto’

  Rich men, trust not in wealth,

  Gold cannot buy you health;

  Physic himself must fade.

  All things to end are made,

  The plague full swift goes by;

  I am sick, I must die.

  Lord, have mercy on us!

  Strength stoops unto the grave,

  Worms feed on Hector brave;

  Swords may not fight with fate,

  Earth still holds open her gate.

  Lord, have mercy on us!

  Thomas Nashe, ‘A Litany in Time of Plague’

  Foreword

  At the dawn of the global pandemic early in 2020, we began thinking of bringing out an international anthology of poems that reflects the mood of these times when human beings are threatened on an unprecedented scale by a pandemic reminiscent of the destruction caused in earlier ages by plagues and other epidemics. We had in our mind James Joyce’s famous saying about writers, ‘Squeeze us, we are olives’, and Bertolt Brecht’s lines, ‘Will there be singing in bad times? Yes, singing about dark times’, both of which remind us of the anguish at the root of all genuine creativity.

  This is indeed a time of deep reflection as the first global pandemic of the social media age. Its spre
ad has necessarily evoked introspection, especially on the relationship of human beings and nature, among poets and artists who are the most sensitive representatives of the human species. Poets look at this altered sense of reality in their own special ways, and we asked ourselves what it means to write poetry inspired by and about the COVID-19 pandemic. We did realize that poets typically privilege a slow churning of their art, and that not many poets would embrace the idea of immediately responding to the pandemic as it is shaping and reshaping our lives. Yet, we were pleasantly surprised by the overwhelming response from a global community of established and well-respected poets. We were also pleased by the ease and facility with which we got publishing rights from so many poets with strong literary credentials, from Europe, India, Israel, Palestine, East Asia, Australia, Africa and the Americas.

  We believe that all of these poets have been rendered so vulnerable, along with the rest of humanity, that they were moved to project their brutally changed reality amid the unique and poignant consequences of the pandemic. We are convinced that the personal experiences of the lockdown that have been recorded in these fine poems and their possible ramifications, biographical or autobiographical, true or fictive, real or imagined, will offer an invaluable poetic record for all future readers to experience first-hand our dramatically altered times. Some poets have experimented with the vast possibilities of technique and thought, and others have reflected in a philosophical spirit on their personal journey. The anthology will well serve the purpose of capturing the anguish and the trauma, the anger and the befuddlement, as well as the hope for returning to the certainty of the world order that the pandemic has destroyed or the movement towards a more just and egalitarian world. As poets and academics ourselves, we approach poetry with a strong commitment to the literary traditions that challenge readers and promote a strenuous engagement of the imagination. We have received a vast array of poems that provoke readers to new experiences of rendering transparent the raw opacity of our altered situation, analysing complexity, and discovering, in the concrete density of their poems, a new aesthetic and new meanings for themselves.

  It is, of course, ‘writing from the heart’ that we have looked for. However, at the same time, the poems we have received from more than one hundred poets from twenty languages are diverse kinds of emotional and intellectual journeys that bring out in subtle ways our human dilemmas and our predicaments, our introspection and retrospection, our response to social isolation and physical distancing, and some common but significantly shared experience. We are firmly convinced that a collection of poems that addresses the existential experiences and responses of these well-recognized poets from across the globe will be remembered and cherished by generations of readers to come. We have arranged them in a simple alphabetical order so as to eliminate any kind of hierarchy. We sincerely hope these lonely voices of hope, despair and meditation will resonate with every lover of poetry.

  Nishi Chawla, K. Satchidanandan

  August 2020

  USHA

  AKELLA

  has authored four books of poetry, one chapbook, and scripted/produced one musical drama. She recently earned a master’s in creative writing from Cambridge University, UK. Her latest poetry book, The Waiting, was published by the Sahitya Akademi. She is the founder of Matwaala, the first South Asian Diaspora Poetry Festival in the US (www.matwaala.com).

  CAVED—7.8 BILLION

  1

  This one looks like a planet of red windmills whirring

  or a field of poppies, a wild corona of a star, heart of sunflower,

  this pretty thing is fanged, arsenal in Death’s stockpile,

  small unseen things are perfectly precise,

  Hanuman burnt the city of Lanka thus, eroding pride.

  2

  The bush is bursting with red berries,

  spring has slipped through the crevices breathing green on the city,

  a musician plays his oud to the sky in himself,

  the trees are gravestones to the forgotten dead,

  the deer conglomerate driven to community,

  more families staked by windows notice the heartbeat of nature.

  3

  The camera has vertigo, it’s a crazy arc

  leering on the hoarded splendour of one family,

  (what madness was this to record and proudly share?)

  lines of bottles on the kitchen cabinetry

  riddled with oil of bright urine hue,

  toilet rolls, bounties, tissues, food cans,

  a pantry full of debris for doomsday,

  this raid of the innards of stores,

  this back-to-basics, to Freud’s Id of fear and self-first.

  4

  Where do we send our unclaimed sorrow?

  The unlabelled debris of life?

  The racking cough of unprocessed wounds?

  There is no island to send them off, be done, be free.

  Like those lines of caskets in dirt in Hart island,

  where New York City is belching unclaimed bodies

  its gut overflowing.

  5

  The mind is like an abacus now

  computing deaths on the excel sheet

  of consciousness; from the Spanish flu 20-50 million,

  from the Black plague 50 million, from COVID . . .

  what black hole continues to gorge up souls

  or is it an empyrean of hopeful light,

  what joust happens in the universe’s annals

  between what forces, this unending play

  into and out of life, where is that mighty

  being who once gave the song of life

  to a tremulous warrior’s heart in the middle of battle?

  Each of us is a naive question as we have always been

  curved like an embryo, full-stopped by death.

  J. JOY MATTHEWS

  ALFORD

  was appointed the inaugural Poet Laureate of Prince George’s County, Maryland, in September 2018. Also known as ‘Sistah Joy’, she is an author, arts advocate, and produces and has hosted the award-winning poetry-based cable television show, Sojourn with Words, since its inception in 2005. Sistah Joy received the Poet Laureate Special Award (2002) in her native Washington, D.C. In 1995, she founded the socially conscious poetry ensemble, Collective Voices, which has performed nationally and internationally. Sistah Joy is the author of three books, Lord I’m Dancin’ As Fast As I Can (2000); From Pain to Empowerment: The Fabric of My Being (2009); and This Garden Called Life (2011).

  KITCHEN WINDOW

  Standing here

  the world looks bright.

  Squirrels still scamper

  and red-breasted robins hop

  amid my freshly cut lawn.

  A lone but lovely lilac bush

  and soon to bloom forsythia

  soothe my spirit.

  All seems right with the world

  through this window.

  Countless have been the tranquil hours

  we have shared. She has been my respite,

  affording me moments of peace and

  serenity amid life’s tumultuous storms,

  shielding me, albeit momentarily,

  from some of life’s harshest realities.

  Her gently framed view of the world

  provides, even now, a pastoral view

  that is sacred to my soul.

  I come to this sacred space

  knowing it has been given to me

  for times such as this

  when reality overwhelms

  and would deny the notion

  that beauty still exists—

  this space where even washing a dish

  can return calm and control to my life

  banishing such blight as disease and pandemics,

  signals that the ravages of devastation and loss

  linger so very close by.

  ANVAR

  ALI

  is a poet, documentary film-maker, lyricist and tr
anslator. His three collections of poetry established him as one of the prominent voices in contemporary Indian poetry. His poems have been translated into various Indian and foreign languages. He has won two international awards and a state award for the screenplay of Margam, the feature film he has co-written. Call from the Other Shore, a biopic on Attoor Ravi Varma, the renowned Malayalam poet, is his first independent documentary film. He participated in the Writer-in-Residence Program of Literature Translation Institute, South Korea, in 2007 and has represented Malayalam poetry at various national and international writers’ meets and festivals.

  THE SONG OF SONGS*

  It went off startling the cities.

  The scattered bones

  didn’t become the destination

  nor the stones a punishment.

  From measured distances,

  each city heard its bark.

  Each channel was filled with its foam.

  Since there was no more distinction

  between the body and the soul

  it passed

  formless

  as incarnate speed.

  *

  Renuncees of the future, know

  one day

  this journey will end

  on the tip of a rubbish heap.

  The nervous system

  that had been circulating

  the anarchist electricity everywhere

  will that day reverberate

  as a single string.

  It will hug and crush

  and explode the last vowel.

  From then on

  the rubbish dumps of earth

  will give birth to

  rivers that will drown

  heaven and hell.

  Love’s army, all nude,

  Will stand guard to it.

  Nothing that is not mad

  will have entry there.

  SMELL*

  A damn smell,

  tired from wandering

  through all the air and draft,

  would come knocking

  on the soot-covered door

  one day.

  Serving

  the last drop of blood

  from its heart,

  the body

  would sigh.

  Then,

  a suicide truck of the wind

  would rush inside,

  bearing the death-smell

  of all that ran away.