The Soul That Knows How To Sing - A Post - Structural Analysis of Kamala Das's Poetry - Swetha Antony - Academia

4/4/2015
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THE SOUL THAT KNOWS HOW TO SING: A POSTSTRUCTURAL ANALYSIS OF KAMALA DASS POETRY
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THE SOUL THAT KNOWS HOW TO SING:

A POST- STRUCTURAL ANALYSIS OF KAMALA DASS POETRY
By
Swetha Antony
Research Scholar, PhD Program, Department of English Literature
The English and Foreign Languages University, Hyderabad
Today let this paper receive my dripping blood. Let me write like one not in the
least burdened by the thoughts about the future, turning each word into
a negotiation with my life lived so far. I like to call this poetry. I
like to call this
poetry even if my words lose their music when, after
raising in my innards a
beautiful liquid turbulence, they come to surface in
the relatively solid contours of
prose. I had always longed for the strength
necessary to write this. But poetry
does not grow ripe for us; we have to grow
ripe enough for poetry (My story viii)
No other words better define the contours of poetry as these words of Kamala Das. It is
an acknowledged fact in the Indian English Literature Scene that her poetry makes it difficult for
her to be placed simply or singly. She cannot be marked or tied down biographically or
professionally and yet she has been one of the stalwarts of Indian English Writing for more than
four decades. Much of her writing has gone into the process of being named as her as well as by
others as an otheror the same.
From the deep abyss of her self, gushes forth an oeuvre of poems, which proclaims its
refusal to be categorized. Right from her first collection Summer in Calcutta her poetry has
offered a wide horizon of her thoughts on what is life and conversely it has raised more than a
few controversies. Her openness to the experiences as a woman, much against conventional
Indian Sensibility, reflected in her poems, was a major point of debate. Nonetheless, reading
Kamala Das in the present critical scenario opens up new vistas on her poetic output.
It is possible to read her texts foregrounding the feminine in a new light. She is adeptly
using English language at communicating something beyond what she has written down. She
manipulates the strategies of writing poetry and invents the metaphor to suit her purpose. Her
poems have a vibe of deliberate ambivalence. Some lines from her poem Death is so Mediocre
can highlight this:
Like an elephant not bidding goodbye while
Taking off for that secret edge of forests
Where they slope into a sure but invisible
Sea, I shall go too in silence leaving not
Even a finger print on this crowded earth,
Carrying away my bird in flight voice and
http://www.academia.edu/3388176/THE_SOUL_THAT_KNOWS_HOW_TO_SING_A_POST_STRUCTURAL_ANALYSIS_OF_KAMALA_DAS_S_POE
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The hundred misunderstandings that destroyed

My alliances with you and you and you . . . (The Best of Kamala Das 112)
These lines do talk about death, but the images she evokes is not common, and she breaks the
conventional way of putting death into words. She could be talking about her death or the
deadness that creeps into words or she could just be stating what could happen to her writing.
She talks about leaving in silence, but as she says, the silence leaves behind a hundred different
voices. She intended her poetry to be more than just words; she was anticipating different ways
to approach the subjects in her poems.
This leads to the important question of reading Kamala Das in the literary and critical scene
today. The visible challenges are neatly summed up by K.Sachidanandan in his preface to Only
the Soul Knows How to Sing.
In Literary Theory, it means challenging the patriarchal canons,
deconstructing the phallocentric creative and critical discourses, defining
the
feminine in literary texts in the Indian context, unearthing the ideological
configurations that lay behind the reception and rejection of
literary texts in
different periods, relating their formal constituents to the
specific environment
and regional traditions, thus developing an indigenous
semiotics that connects
signs to their specific space and lineage, decoding
gender as an organizing
principle of experience and relating forms of
feminine articulation to the changing
social, racial and conceptual permutations in
Indian History.(15)
There is a certain dialectics within her poems. The same dialectics also do come up in the
reception of her poems. Some of her poems are simple - perfect word pictures while, some are
abstract, verging on the fine points of philosophy flashes of lucidity merging into chaos. Her
poems are a collage of random thoughts and after thoughts taken from the stream of everyday
life. Though her poems are in the confessional mode, she does not limit them just to her self, she
goes into the issues that make and break the world at large. She claims in the poem
Composition, What I narrate are the ordinary/ events of an/ordinary life. (The Descendants
39 - 40). Her rendering of these seemingly ordinary events exist on the verge of epiphanies.
When it comes to Kamala Das, the style of writing is also striking, the way she writes is
performative both at the metaphorical and literal planes. She admits poetry to be gut response
and employs a play with words that makes it difficult for readers to be immune to the pleasure of
the writing itself. She proclaims in An Introduction:
Why not leave
Me alone, critics, friends, visiting cousins,
Every one of you? Why not let me speak in
Any language I like? The language I speak
Becomes mine, its distortions, its queerness
All mine, mine alone. It is half English, half
Indian, funny perhaps, but it is honest,

It is as human as I am human, dont
You see? It voices my joys, my longings, my
Hopes, and it is useful to me as cawing
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Is to crows or roaring to the lions, (Summer in Calcutta 62-63)

Evidently, her poetry is unconventional not just for the sake of being unconventional but
in order to reconcile her complex attitude to life with the framework of her poetry. At times, it
seems like an outpouring, a childs babble that with all its mysteries and private worlds is
unfathomable. To cite an example - the I in Kamala Dass poetry is not just a singularity, but
pregnant with possibilities - pluralities born out of a silence reverberating from within evolving
out of conflicts within her. Was Das really attempting a play with words or was her attempt a
possibility at stating that the self is not just a construct, but something beyond it? Was she trying
to say that while being inscribed in the language, the notion of the self is not contained in it? Can
language be used to de-construct the notions of the self? The questions that her poems open up
are as many as diverse as her response to situations she encounters as a poet and a person.
Consequently, the idea of the self expressed, is not as a single entity but a divided or
fragmented selves located within and mediated by various discourses ranging from her
womanhood to her personhood and individuality. The issues of being a woman constructed
through certain notions, of identities imposed on one and the ways in which I becomes just a
name are some of the preoccupations. Her poetry does not assert or define a notion of self but her
attempt stresses that it is impossible to find a unitary self that is true for all times. She writes in
Contacts:
Only
The world
Shall die, and I
Remain, just being
Also being a remaining . . . (The Descendants 25)
She talks about being in the sense that only a part of something seems to exist, like the remains
or ruins of something that was there before. When she speaks of this partial existence, she is
anticipating an absence in the discourse of presence. The presence of remains could mean the
absence of other remains. Therefore, this I cannot be singular.
The multiplicity of self is something that has found much attention in critical theory
especially Post-Structuralism. These lines from the essay The Agency of the Letter in the
Unconscious or Reason since Freud by Lacan are relevant in this context:
It is not a question of knowing whether I speak of myself in a way that
conforms to what I am but rather of knowing whether I am the same as
that of
which I speak. . . . And it is no less true if I take myself to the other,
metaphoric
pole of the signifying quest, and if I dedicate myself to becoming
what I am, to
coming into being, I cannot doubt that even if I lose myself in the
process, I am
in that process (Lacan 183).
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4/4/2015

THE SOUL THAT KNOWS HOW TO SING:

The hundred misunderstandings that destroyed

Indian, funny perhaps, but it is honest,

Is to crows or roaring to the lions, (Summer in Calcutta 62-63)

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