The Writer and the Community: A Case for Literary Ambidexterity
This essay is essentially a discourse on the virtues of knowing two languages and writing well in both. In a vast and complex country like India, these languages would mean one’s mother tongue and the language of interaction. In my case, they would mean Khasi, the language of my tribe, and English.
Heard and spoken since birth, the mother tongue is of fundamental importance to creative literature. This also relates to the nature of creative writing itself and the need for communication.
As a practitioner of poetry, I believe in a poet who is a witness, a seeing eye, someone with a retentive memory and the innate ability to capture the soul of his generation. My own poetry is deeply rooted and I see my role as a poet as that of a chronicler of subjective realities. I have talked, in my poems, of leaders lording it “like the wind”, fickle “like Hindi film stars changing dresses in a song.” I have talked of my impoverished land, and with sardonic humour, of real people who are at once individuals and types. I have tried to capture the changing times, aspects of my culture and issues on the fringe.
But chronicling realities is not an end in itself. Pablo Neruda believes that a poet should always live close to his people: “I have gone into practically every corner of Chile, scattering my poetry like seed among the people of my country.” Neruda seems to point up the poet’s need to communicate with his people. If the foundation of a poet’s art rests on his people’s life and character, then what better audience is there than his own people? And if the audience is his own people, then what better language is there to communicate with them than his mother tongue?
I too wish to address my people directly. I would like to tell them of the colossal threat posed to our land by the ceaseless flood of humanity and the growing aggressiveness of migrants. I would like to speak to them of the perils of terrorism and the greater peril of lawmen turning terrorists. I would like to tell them of the absurdity of trying to deny their own roots and the anarchy that follows in forgetting their own identity. I would like to talk of our great festivals like Weiking*, and the vitality of their role in our social life:
Weiking! Weiking!
Spring is back, begin your whirling motions
and let our life live on.
..................
Whirl on, whirl on,
what if some of us
sneer at us for fools?
We are not here to pay obeisance
to the gods for a plentiful harvest
(do we ever have a harvest now?)
whirl on, whirl on to a time
when women stood by their men
and men were tigers guarding
their homes with jealous swords.
(‘Weiking’: self-composed)
But most of all I would like to remind my people, as a poet raconteur, of the virtues of their ancestors’ ways and the necessity of perpetuating them. I would like to talk of our myths and legends and let those, who will, draw lessons from them:
Faraway
from the year dot
Ren, the Nongjri fisherman,
Ren, the beloved of a river nymph
Ren, who loved so madly
who left his mother and his home
to live in magic depths
also left a message:
“Mother,” he had said,
“listen to the river,
as long as it roars
you will know that I live”.
(‘Ren’: self-composed)
Symbolically, Ren is asking later generations to listen to the sound of his people’s life. But the sound of a people’s life and their ways can be voiced only through the mother tongue. The mother tongue is the sound of life itself, and in this sense, writing in it would mean for me helping the sound of my people’s life grow stronger.
Reading Czeslaw Milosz and his poem ‘My Faithful Mother Tongue’ has only strengthened this conviction. But the shocking reality that Milosz speaks, that his mother tongue is “a tongue of the debased,/ of the unreasonable, hating themselves’ is unfortunately true of the Khasi language as well. As Milosz puts it, “perhaps after all it’s I who must try to save you [mother tongue].”
It is in trying to do this, that literary ambidexterity can also play a critical role. It is neither desirable nor profitable to keep one’s own writings confined to one’s own language or the language of interaction.
A native author’s work with any literary merit must be brought to the notice of other literatures. As Neruda suggests, it does not matter if one’s poems have sunken their roots deep into one’s native soil; it does not matter if they are born of indigenous wind and rain or have emerged from a localized landscape. If they are worth their salt they must “come out of that landscape . . . to roam, to go singing through the world . . . ”
To do this the author must be able to translate his own work into the language of interaction. But if he is not ambidextrous in this sense, then his work must risk lurking forever in the dark recesses of his own small world.
On the other hand, if he writes only in the language of interaction, he must be able to translate his work into his own mother tongue or risk being cut off forever from the heart and mind of his own people.
The need to avoid these risks is, to quote Dylan Thomas, “The force that through the green fuse drives the flower” of my poetry as a bilingual poet. The desire to be read and understood by my own people makes me wish to write in Khasi. But how can one write in a language whose writings are, without being read, frowned upon as biblia abiblia by the educated elite? Therefore, though most of my poems are started in Khasi, my immediate ambition is to exhume them as it were from the crypt of Khasi literature and get them tested through English journal publications. That is how the scribbled pieces in Khasi are simultaneously translated into English, and the Khasi thoughts often directly transformed into English compositions. And so, driven by circumstances and supported by literary ambidexterity, the creation of every one of my poems becomes essentially the birth of twins.
January 2006, previously unpublished.
* Weiking, meaning 'whirlpool', is a Khasi dance enacted every spring.Virgin girls dance slowly in the middle of a circular field and young mendance energetically around them, to demonstrate that women are the keepersof the home and men the protectors.
