I read Nandini Dhar’s Rebought Facsimiles thrice over the last three months. Every time I was in a different city. While none of the cities resembled the one Dhar wrote about, I was looking at them through the ones I had known or lived in. The first city was Beijing, the second was Chennai and the third was Kuala Lumpur (KL). But what is to preclude these three cities sharing—each of them on their own—certain characteristics with the one she mentioned about. For any city is about the language(s) it embodies. While Beijing hailed redundancies, Chennai celebrated particularities✱ and KL somehow included both of these components and more.
While the Britannia tongue paints Dhar’s city with a privileged shadow, one could say that the cities I lived in could also be described by their dialogue with that very same tongue—Beijing by a certain silen😼ce, Chennai by a certain ‘chutneyfication’ and KL by making Britannia a topping over simme🎀ring full nations.
At this juncture, I have to add the disclaimer that when it comes to my understanding of the politics of poetry, there is no one else I’d call as a mentor more than Dhar. That, and the bilinguality💙 of both our writing aside, I presume we are really different types of writers from very different worlds, with different points of origin when it comes to poetry.
She has lived through everything I wanted to be a part of, but only could imagine and dream about. My day job is probably an antithesis of what she believes in (or maybe not). But I do believe, one has to announce their filters to the world before one truly sits down to review a book, particular🍸ly a book of poems.
Beca𝄹use, as Dhar says, a world without the possibility of poetry is a world which is inherently unliveable. To me, any discourse on poetry has to be about honesty. And in my world, honesty includes courage and vulnerability.
Dhar seeks to be unmindful of the “so-called template” of modern confessional poetry. But the way she does that is not confrontational. It is not unconscious either. These are conscious verses which are essentially non-acknowledging of the extant establishment over English (or Indian-English) poetry. 🦄She carefully grounds them before raising thꦜe edifice that is not a ‘System’.
She writes of t♈he “curvatures of extinct alphabets”, but also puts your eye to a ෴periscope lens that hints at worlds that hide inside those lines and curves, in spaces between these alphabets. She writes about cities that do not have rice fields anymore. But how can you not be reminded of the lost landscapes when you hear the roars, not wails—of “women squatting down in the middle of the fields to push out rickety babies”—every time it rains.
When she talks about the city having become a “shared thesaurus of all we have been wanting to write”, how can we not see that sometimes we oꦯnly share the words, but the meanings are incessantly branching ou👍t into indecipherable alleys altogether. But does that separate us from the sound that takes us there in the first place?
In these worlds, “a mythic carpenter is chi🤪seling trees out of furn💞iture”, not the other way around. But it is still as antagonistic as it could be to a revivalist’s dream. When she talks of the iambs that are the building blocks of English poetry, she carefully dissects its layers to reveal how it houses slaves who are the under the illusion that they are free.
And the city keeps escaping the metaphors, here the metaphors in the guise of a Heimlich Manoeuvre are actually choking the victim. Therefore what comes of it? What should have been a hybrid of a howl and a war cry becomes a harmless contract. Where revolution dies, there is an unmarked gravestone. What we now see is how while these facsimiles, these “photocopies oꦛf elsewhere invade the living”, the resistance however, comes from the city itself.
Dhar does linger sometimes into what appears to be pop fantasy territory, only to cock a snook at those wax palaces. For example, “an owl snuffing out the lights in the train station” could remind you of Harry Potter only to become/transform into a refusal to be pledged to an earlier apology. Fai𒊎rytale here becomes the persuasion ꦜof the most which is more often than not murderous.
***
I could keep going but a book like this needs to be indulged in, to unearth the metaphors that are actually flesh and blood life histories which have been denied their own agency. To add to the agony of poetry sometimes having to explain itself, Dhar offers to write one of the most beautiful essays one could read in a boo🌳k of poems. The accompanying illustrations by Indrani Halder etch in indigo what Dhaᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚ𒀱ᩚᩚᩚr accomplishes with resplendent verse.
What Dhar has done here is remarkable. She has employed all the available arsenal in English to write 🐷poetry that is the most anti-colonial and post-colonial one could get.
It is like making a movie starring a mass hero, with a single-minded focus to unmake his stardom. W🍨hat do you get when this unmaking is in reality a tribute, a labour of love, to the real he🍃ro?
Vivekanand Selvaraj is a bilingual poet who writes in English and Tamil
(This appeared in the print as 'How To Refuse The Generous Thief')
