Art of Pariahs

About the poet

Meena Alexander (1951-2018) was born in India, raised in India and Sudan, and lived and worked in New York City. She is what we call a “transnational” poet: her experience of transnational migrations is a large part of her identity. Her poem Art of Pariahs draws from the cultures of Egypt as well as India, thus showing her transnational aspect.

Introduction

The poet imagines the mythical-heroic figures of Draupadi, Rani Lakshmibai and an unnamed Nubian Queen to have accompanied her to the United States. Thinking of herself as a pariah (an outcast), the poet takes help from other outcast women in the popular cultural imagination of India and Egypt to make sense of her own displacement. Her gender also plays a role in such an imagination.

Detailed analysis

I

Back against the kitchen stove

Draupadi sings:

In my head Beirut still burns.*

The poet found the line “In my head Beirut still burns” written on a wall in NYC. That act of writing on the wall is the same as Alexander’s own writing of the poem. Diasporic poets write from memory, and hence it is in Draupadi’s head that Beirut still burns.

However, in bringing Draupadi from the mythical stories of The Mahabharata to a modern kitchen in the United States, the poet makes her perform a literary act of migration. Such intertextual migrations are commonly found in poems by the Indian diaspora, where the fluidity of poetic form allows poets to merge and mutate different texts.

II

The Queen of Nubia, of God’s Upper Kingdom,

the Rani of Jhansi, transfigured, raising her sword,

are players too. They have entered with me

into North America and share these walls.

This is where it gets interesting. The poet combines Rani of Jhansi with Queen of Nubia, fully aware of the way that she has ‘transfigured’ their (his)stories.

The thing is, though, the history of Rani Lakshmibai is well-documented by the British and Indian historians alike. Compared to Nubian times, it is much more recent and there is a lot more historical clarity surrounding Rani Lakshmibai. The unnamed Nubian Queen, however, is shrouded in mystery. There were many Nubian queens, of which Amanirenas is one that has been represented with elephants. However, this occurs not in a written historical record but in an Alexandrian legend (legends relating to Alexander the Great and having nothing to do with Alexander the poet lol). By mentioning the army of elephants, Alexander heightens the legendary aspect of Amanirenas.

It’s not a stretch to argue that the legendary Amanirenas occupies an in-between space for the mythical Draupadi and the historical Lakshmibai. What we have, therefore, is a migration of the poet’s diasporic self across the realms of myth, legend and history.

III

We make up an art of pariahs:

Two black children spray painted white,

their eyes burning, 

a white child raped in a car

for her pale skin's sake,

an Indian child stoned by a bus shelter,

they thought her white in twilight.

So the ‘art’ of the pariah is her response to the violence that accompanies her displacement. Alexander’s poem is the same as Draupadi’s song, Lakshmibai’s swords and Amanirenas’ elephants: they’re all efforts of the pariahs to make sense of their respective exiles.

It should be noted here that the figures mentioned by the poet are all queens. By calling upon queens to occupy her position, Alexander literally includes herself with royalty. This indicates her class position, which is clearly different from the migrant communities that are most prone to racial violence.

IV

Someone is knocking and knocking

but Draupadi will not let him in.

She squats by the stove and sings:

This knocking is against the borders of Draupadi’s body. In the beginning, Alexander mentions that she shares the walls of this displaced body with Amanirenas, Lakshmibai and Draupadi. It is also a gendered body, constructed against ‘he’ who is knocking; who is denied entry into the boundaries that are drawn by gender.

V

The Rani shall not sheathe her sword

nor Nubia’s queen restrain her elephants

till tongues of fire wrap a tender blue,

a second skin, a solace to our children.

The ‘tender blue’ here is the blue of the American flag. In her book The Shock of Arrival, Alexander mentions feeling that her act of writing gives her “the right to be in America.” So in this instance, the poet is effectively saying that the art of pariahs, which is the act of articulating this diasporic reality, will someday give legitimacy to the Americanness of the immigrant people of colour. She hopes that somehow, this national identity will be a ‘solace’ to the future generations of POC immigrants.

VI

Come walk with me toward a broken wall

- Beirut still burns - carved into its face.

Outcastes all, let’s conjure honey scraped from stones,

an underground railroad stacked with rainbow skin,

Manhattan’s mixed rivers rising

In a typically diasporic way of writing, Alexander contrasts the solidity of the stones and the broken wall with the fluidity of honey and rivers. The wall represents written history, and the carving upon the wall prompts the poet to blend history with poetry in order to relate her experience in her own manner. Similarly, to conjure honey from stones is to make fluid art out of solid historical fact. This is an instance of ‘chutnification of history,’ a phrase coined by Salman Rushdie which refers to the diasporic writers’ experimentation with literary form in order to refute fossilised history and thereby expressing diasporic reality.

Conclusion

‘Manhattan’s mixed rivers rising’ in the face of the wall’s stony reminder of historic wrong is an idealistic image while the assertion of the American identity as salve to racial violence is downright naïve. The anxieties that prompt this writing accompany Alexander’s experience of displacement, which the poet articulates by distorting place and time within the poem. For the diasporic poet in America, this distortion holds her migrations across myth, legend and history, which in turn reveal the connections she forms across cultures and continents.

Small-Scale Reflections on a Great House

 

About the poet

A. K. Ramanujan was a poet, translator, folklorist, and philologist who wrote in Kannada and English. He taught in several universities in the U.S., chief of which was the University of Chicago, where he was instrumental in developing the South Asian Studies program. He was awarded the Padma Shree (1976), the McArthur Fellowship(1983), as well as the Sahitya Akademi Award (for The Collected Poems 1999, posthumously). Ramanujan’s poetry is modernist and sophisticated, often dealing with the themes of transnationalism and cross-cultural hybridity.

Introduction

In Small-Scale Reflections on a Great House, the poet presents the Great House as a micro representation of India. The house bears witness to massive historical changes, adapting to them by cross-pollinating with ‘other’ cultures and schools of thought.

Detailed analysis

I

Sometimes I think that nothing

that ever comes into this house

goes out. Things that come in everyday

to lose themselves among other things

lost long ago among

other things lost long ago;

The poem begins on a mundane, weightless observation and snowballs into something much more pointed. The indeterminacy in "things" and "other things", as well as the temporal vagueness in "lost long ago", points to an utter lack of specificity.

The "long ago" also points to the long, complicated history of the subcontinent. This history has many spaces of intermixing and amalgamation. This, of course, also means an erasure of individual, specific occurrences in favour of large storylines and grand events.

II

lame wandering cows from nowhere

have been known to be tethered,

given a name, encouraged

to get pregnant in the broad daylight

of the street under the elders’

supervision, the girls hiding

behind windows with holes in them.

Patriarchy functions in the great house as a tethering device. It tames and domesticates wandering cows. Through the greatness of the house, then, womanhood is tethered into name and honour. Tethering gives recognition, and quite literally, limits femininity within the premises of the house. Based on the colonial themes of the poem, one may argue that the great house colonises women’s bodies through the institution of marriage.

The impregnation of cows also stands for foreign things being accepted by Indians, intermixing and reproducing with Indian things to create a hybrid progeny. The fact that elders witness and supervise this sexual hybridising represents the Indian family’s need of, and obsession with, a patriarch’s guidance.

III

Unread library books

usually mature in two weeks

and begin to lay a row

of little eggs in the ledgers

for fines, as silverfish

in the old man’s office room

breed dynasties among long legal words

in the succulence

of Victorian parchment.

Books represent knowledge and ideas. Books that are borrowed from the library but never read, therefore, come to represent global ideas that were accepted by Indians without much foresight or second thoughts. Building upon this line of thought, the row of little eggs is the rising fine of unreturned books, which for us are the economic consequences of unwisely borrowed knowledge.

Seeing as the poem was written in 1971, Ramanujan had obviously witnessed the suspension of the five-year plan between 1962–8. Nehru’s policies were famously held responsible for the shortage of food grains and other problems in India, a sentiment that may be found represented here. Foreign knowledge being mixed into the Indian folds costs the country millions of rupees. This can also be read in the context of the global debt that India has.

IV

Neighbours’ dishes brought up

with the greasy sweets they made

all night the day before yesterday

for the wedding anniversary of a god,

never leave the house they enter,

like the servants, the phonographs,

the epilepsies in the blood,

sons-in-law who quite forget

their mothers, but stay to check

accounts or teach arithmetic to nieces,

The house is always borrowing and amalgamating, engulfing things into itself. Neighbours can mean neighbouring nations, cultures, or civilisations, parts of which become tied to the house’s daily functioning.

The mention of "sons-in-law" and "epilepsies in the blood" reinforces the hybridising nature of this exchange. Ramanujan’s intense focus on sexuality conceives of the birth of a nation as necessitating a sexual and hybridising exchange between different entities and the endlessly accepting Great Indian House.

V

or the women who come as wives

from houses open on one side

to rising suns, on another

to the setting, accustomed

to wait and to yield to monsoons

in the mountains calendar

Here we have a pointed reference to the British rule over India. The sun is shown rising as well as setting, while the houses that bore witness to it all still function as they always did, if a bit differently.

The colonisation of women’s bodies is shown here as part of the yearly cycle, naturalising it. Similarly, foreign rule takes on an environmental colouring through the monsoons and the sun. The setting gets painted in the colours of the coloniser and acts upon the colonised subject(s).

VI

beating through the hanging banana leaves

And also anything that goes out

will come back, processed and often

with long bills attached,

like the hooped bales of cotton

shipped off to invisible Manchesters

and brought back milled and folded

for a price, cloth for our days

middle-class loins, and muslin

for our richer nights. Letters mailed

Once again, the ghost of the coloniser is present in the long bills, which represent the cost that former colonies kept paying even after independence. Now, the commerce of "anything that goes out" still bears an imprint of the earlier power relations.

Even among sovereign nations, some remain the exporters while others are the manufacturers. Economic superpowers emerge and influence global relations.

VII

have a way of finding their way back

with many re-directions to wrong

addresses and red ink-marks

earned in Tiruvalla and Sialkot.

And ideas behave like rumours,

once casually mentioned somewhere

they come back to the door as prodigies

born to prodigal fathers, with eyes

that vaguely look like our own,

like what Uncle said the other day:

Letters—the post—is another thing introduced to India by the British. Soon, it became an important means of communication, tying the nation together. The miscommunications in this system is another way of showing the newly independent colony struggle with nationhood. The fumbling way in which the new post system operates is like an infant finding its first steps.

Tiruvalla and Sialkot are worlds apart. Tiruvalla is in Kerala while Sialkot is in Pakistan: they represent not only the literal south/north difference, but also reflect upon the newly drawn borders.

When ideas behave like rumours, letters behave irrationally and the recent split in landmasses is disregarded in the chaotic consciousness of the formerly colonised.

VIII

that every Plotinus we read

is what some Alexander looted

between the malarial rivers.

Ideas spread throughout the world through channels of communication. In this way, rumour-like ideas ride upon incorrectly delivered letters to pollute places and earn "red ink-marks." The mention of Alexander between "malarial rivers'', however, recontextualises this phenomenon in a wider tapestry, showing that all knowledge is already polluted.

IX

A beggar once came with a violin

to croak out a prostitute song

that our voiceless cook sang

all the time in our backyard.

Nothing stays out: daughters

get married to short-lived idiots;

sons who run away come back

in grand children who recite Sanskrit

to approving old men, or bring

betel nuts for visiting uncles

who keep them gaping with

anecdotes of unseen fathers,

or to bring Ganges water

in a copper pot

for the last of the dying

ancestors rattle in the throat.

The house is not only a place of integration for nothings to become somethings. It also exports things and accepts them back. It is a point of intersection between many exchanges, all of which keep infecting each other. Everything keeps coming back in one form or another, and everything keeps mixing with everything else.

A prostitute, a beggar and a cook are all present in a backyard song that becomes a part of the Great House. Daughters come back as widows, sons die and come back through grandchildren who long to hear stories of their absent fathers. Above all, the house is a keeper of old people and of ancestry.

X

And though many times from everywhere,

recently only twice:

once in nineteen-forty-three

from as far as the Sahara,

half -gnawed by desert foxes,

and lately from somewhere

in the north, a nephew with stripes

on his shoulder was called

an incident on the border

and was brought back in plane

and train and military truck

even before the telegrams reached,

on a perfectly good

Chatty afternoon

Wars on faraway borders affect the house. Men who went outside as soldiers come back as dead bodies on normal afternoons. The normalcy of the house that also inevitably bears witness to big events, also paying the price (bills and zeroes, remember?) for them.

Note how the generalised, everyday nature of the first stanza has evolved into this specific, tragic reference to the "nineteen-forty-three" World War and the comparatively recent Sino-Indian War of 1962.

De/humanisation in the poem

One more thing of interest here is the aspect of humanisation and dehumanisation. Earlier on in the poem, mundane things like library fines and the domestication of cows is sexalised. By extension, this approach to hybridity via sexualisation humanises the everyday activities of the house. Towards the end of the poem, however, the dead sons of the house, the human price of war, are said to be mere ‘incidents’ on the border.

I argue that in these last stanzas, Ramanujan plants a rift between the Great House and the Great New Nation. The border-bound nation dehumanises soldiers while the House, with its porous borders, is endlessly accepting and humanising.