Mahesh Paudyal
In this article, I am reviewing Rajeshwor Karki’s poems collected in the anthology The Last Page of My Poem. For this reading, I am deriving insights from the theory of existentialism and the post-modern concept of identity. My fundamental claim is that his poems echo twofold voices: existential crisis, and quest for identity.
The conundrum who man is and what his destiny on earth is, has never been solved. From the Greek sophists to the present-day philosophers, tracing a long trajectory of scholastic schools in dark and the middle ages, man has been wrangling on this question. Of late, or to be more precise, with the advent of post-structural and post-colonial time, the question of existence has found its best stay in debates pertaining to identity. In other words, carving out identity has taken place of the polemics about ‘who I am’ and ‘what is my vocation in the world.’
There however is a stark difference between existential question, and the question of identity. Existence is an innocent issue, and concerns one’s self with no much intersection with others. It is a journey inward of an individual. It most often projects to destiny and fate, and explains man as a hapless being thrown in the crevices of existence only to get startled at his own worthlessness. In other words, existentialism is a theory of non-existence, as it annihilates hopefulness, optimism and energy. It rules out powers within man, and forces him to realize his limitations. It therefore is a theory of gap as understood by critic Clive Cazeaux. To him existentialism is a theory of gap between concepts and experiences. To extend it further down the terrain, it is a theory of limitations, and of contingencies. It forces man to accept his birth as a pre-destined accident, marked by an unquestionable doom. It is not, as many people tend to understand, a theory of the struggle to keep life going on.
The question of identity is not however an innocent issue. It is more a political question. It contends that lack of identity in man is a predicament forced upon by politics. It holds power structure as responsible for veiling the articulation of one’s human agency, and unless agency expresses itself, identity can never be carved out.
What then is human agency? How does it function? Though the Marxist critics ever since the inception of this mode of criticism rose in Europe, have always argued that human consciousness is always, already a function of material condition, there is something innate within people that is immune to all conditions – be it material or otherwise. In other words, a domain within man is out of the influence of materiality. The question further extends to the concept of ideology that forces people in the lower strata of the society to follow the rulers without questioning their authority. Agency opposes this concept too. Agency is therefore the pivot around which identity of an individual seeks to assert itself.
Seeking one’s identity is therefore preparing ground for the unimpeded expression of human agency. For this one has to subvert power equations. When it comes to poets, they must write from an anti-foundational praxis wherein the paradoxes of power structure and ideology are laid bare. One’s identity can only then asset itself fully.
Before I move on to the actual analysis of the poem, I need to make one more clarification about the question of identity. Identity is never – in any age from that matter – an absolute category. It is always, and inevitably a relative category. One’s identity emerges out of a multiple forces in and around his or her life. It at once entails multiple influences from one’s genetics to race, ethnicity, climatic and environmental, religious and cultural influences, economy, education, social relationship and what not! Besides, to accord a type of identity upon an individual, people around him or her should enter an unconscious accord, and endorse that identity. For example, if I am a critic, my identity as a critic will hold no worth unless people around me accept me as so, and start calling me that way.
These two insights – the idea of existentialism and that of identity find enough expression in Rajeshwor Karki’s poems collected in the anthology The Last Page of My Poem.
To begin with, I want to take up his first poem titled ‘My Unwritten Poem.’ The poet confesses that uncountable unwritten subjects pop up, one after another in series, and he cannot write his poem. Multiple subjects – albeit unwritten – entail multiple interpretations, and the poem is carried away from the author’s mind into a terrain completely away from the cognitive domain of the poet.
Why does it happen? Why is the author adverse to multiple subjects, and hence multiple interpretations of his poems? Does he, after all, write any poem? In fact, as Freud says, poets and artists give vent to their subjectivities through their creations. A poet weaves his subjectivity in his poem, and dreams to secure an identity in those verses. In other words, a poet’s ‘self’ overlaps with the poem’s ‘self’, and the poet assumes an existential worth. After all, existence is a philosophy that foists objectivity to something that does not exist. A name doesn’t in reality exist. It is an invention to substitute a gap – the gap here being the gap of identity.
When one realizes that his identity is fluid – flowing in all directions without any shape or concreteness, the effect is devastating. This happens when the poet’s personal ‘agency’ is weak, and the factors without are strong. They press hard upon the poet’s self, and his identity flows out in all direction like water. Such moments are indeed painful, and at times, one moves from mere schizophrenic symptoms to trauma, or even madness. The least of all, one’s cognitive faculties fail, and he or she is unable to work. Why Rajeshwar Karki’s pen stops, and why his poems remains ‘unwritten’ is therefore a psycho-existential issue deeply rooted in the nature of identity formation. The poem remains unwritten not because the author lacks method, but because he is confused, and the confusion is like the perplexity of an ant that has travelled through the whole of a table, and is suddenly at the edge, wherefrom it has nowhere to go. In short, it is an existential perplexity.
‘Buddha, I shall Worship You’ is another beautiful exemplification of a similar perplexity. Crisis does not always come out of lack. It also often comes out of multiple possibilities, none appearing better than the other. When a child is exposed to many toys at once, he is besieged by indecisiveness for some time. This brief time – a time of perplexity – forms the core of this poem. Standing in the midst of many philosophies both practical and ideal, the poet looks out, thinks, and votes in favour of the pragmatic life. His decision to worship, but not to follow Buddha is a decision taken in front of multiple possibilities. It is a decision in favour of pragmatics – down-to earth reality – against sheer idealism.
The theme of existence predominantly appears in the poem ‘The Tale of a Man Deprived of Existence.’ Nature follows its course, and man, in his attempt to carve an existence within the unexplainable course of nature, turns hostile of everything around him. This is Freudian – a reaction against the outside stimuli to sublimate one’s pent-up feeling of remorse and helplessness in front of the powerful Nature. Otherwise, man has no reason to turn hostile and snap all ties of love with other men, when storm and downpour batter the world outside. In other words, an existential angst urges different actions in man, and most often those actions are violent and hostile. Such actions are paradoxical and often suicidal. They deprive a man of existence, though the man is trying to secure for himself an enduring and meaningful existence. This leads to the conclusion that existence becomes meaningful when sought within. It is meaningless if sought in reaction to the forces outside the self.
The poem ‘A Worn-out Self’ as the title suggests deals with Roquentin syndrome – a crisis suffered by Sartre’s character Roquentin in his Nausea. Like Roquentin, the author nauseates, being unable to settle himself in any explanation from nature to love. Ultimately he takes refuse in dreams, and harvests a false realization that he is laden with love. The foundation of this realization is amorphous, and makes a quicksand. Someone taking refuse in dreams for confirming his existence is nothing but an extreme schizophrenic situation. Similar theme echoes in ‘Helplessness’ – one of the most powerful poems of the anthology. All the four characters – the minstrel, the mother, the father and the lost son – are helpless, and no one has the answer to their destiny. They are characters trapped in existential conundrum, and the minstrel who sings everyone’s sorrow, is himself helpless. This is the nature of the world from existential point of view.
The same view extends to the poem ‘The Frayed Images’ that portraits a woman who finds solace in nothing but suicide. The world cloys; intrigue and falsity puke and overflow. Some people come to her and claim they are her future. They promise her a second firmament in place of the shattered first. This is an idiocy, against which death becomes far more honourable than life. The mother commits suicide.
Though ‘Gadhimai Fair’ is a social satire flaying the cruelty of human beings against the animal world, the poem has ample existential colour. The poet doesn’t take side. He is not judging the perpetrators of the violence like a magistrate. His contemplations are deeper, and wants to unveil why ‘man himself has become a subject of pity’, which in fact is an existential issue. Another poem ‘Weapons’ argues that weapons are substitutes for an apparent sense of inferiority in man. It is a metaphor of ambition that holds meaning only as long it has something to compare with. Man’s power with arms holds worth only if it can force a weakness and an ultimate defeat on the part of the opponent. When weapons become a mockery for both, man shuns weapon. In other words, when man, predestined to take a certain route realizes his lot, hatred for others becomes meaningless. After all, if you and I realize that we both are moths when we have no weapon, and our deaths are separated but by just a second, our enmity is worthless.
‘Demand’ tries to seek meaning in apparently meaningless things, and denounces human tendency to accord high worth to bombastic and grand things that glitter. It pleads for a ‘strategic essentialism’ within existential theory – that, life will hold some meaning if eyes are turned to things often neglected as useless. I call it a ‘strategic essentialism’ because, within the fold of existential theory, according meaning and worth to anything is impossible, but arguing otherwise, we cannot move ahead unless we accord meaning and worth, although, we all know, it is untrue and momentary. Meaninglessness is the only proper meaning of life.
Identity – a term that speaks for all existential questions in the later phase of critical theory – forms the core of the poem ‘A Nation sans Identity.’ Identity is a farce, a falsity and impossibility if it cannot persist and pervade. Buddha’s identity, standing for peace, non-violence and renunciation perhaps shakes, and stands on the quicksand when time no longer is peaceful, non-violent and unattached to materiality. It holds no worth if it is a mere theory. What worth does the persona of the poem hold by having Buddha’s identity carved on his heart? He is doomed to lose himself.
‘The Horizon’, the shortest poem of the anthology argues that existence, to acquire a grandeur and permanent, need to move away from sensation. Man is so much engaged in the world of sensation that he can seldom elevate himself to an occult plane, away from the sensation of cold and warmth. Man therefore, invents his own limitations and oscillates within the existential amplitude of his doom. A horizon that is away from human-like want and sensation, neither feels cold, nor experiences the pleasure of warmth, though it is the house of the sun. It is largely vacant. Vacuity, therefore, is the rule of the world. The rest is all but illusion.
The existential conundrum finds its best expression in the poem ‘Immortality’. This short poem with condensed wording catches the most subtle facets of existential crisis. Man runs from option to option seeking for himself and identity, and when nothing save failures come in the hand, he seeks the aid of destiny. In fact, it is man’s predestined lot. When nowhere in history can the poet carve his name, he asks the deity to bless him with immortality.
‘The Demon of the Folklore’, ‘My Village’, ‘Deurali’, ‘A Forlorn on the Bheri Bank’, ‘Mauribhir and the Trip Downhill’ ‘The Present Context and the New Age’ ‘Thought, Statues and Harmony’ and ‘The Last Page of My Poem’ are other poems of the anthology, and are pregnant with diversity of themes and approaches. When all are pulled within the fold of existentialism, enough digression can be detected. Yet, they somehow express the poet’s inability to adjust with the present time, and his decision to revert to a nostalgic past, which at least, can give a sense of meaningful existence – albeit false.
To sum up, Rajeshwar Karki projects a serious existential project, and inaugurates a renewed discourse of existence and identity as powerful themes of poetry. A darling of rustic images, he is simply critical. His poems are narrations in verses, telling the legends of the unheard of, unwritten ones, and the unidentified ones. He derives images from the countryside, and juxtaposes them with their urban counterpart, laying bare the paradoxes. In an easily understandable language, he speaks of down-to-earth issues, basically pertaining to existence and identity.