Dr. Jay Basu
Dr. Sarita Sharma’s debut collection of poems, titled “Days V” string together quite a number of hushed, deeply inwarded, silent and spoken soliloquies, filtered through a densely figural structure of language that, in poem after poem, orchestrate close to the consciousness of the poetic persona. As if each read is a walk across a shadowy landscape with a feeble torchlight that hides more than it may reveal and spotlight the scenario in the pellucid dark around. Truly, poetry is a higher language of understatements, suggestiveness, metaphoric echoes and a free play of light and shade in crisscross, the symbolic and sub-textual overtones and undertones apart. The poems in Sarita’s ‘Days V’ attenuate and adduce these prime parameters of poetry at its best.
Together they conjure a resonance that lingers long after the read, and funnels the perceptive reader’s impressions to the twilight areas of a sensitive mind.
Narratologically, Sarita’s poems veer close to the technique of ‘erlebte Rede’ or narrated monologues, rendering in third-person voice the consciousness of a character. Her character may be an autonomous poetic persona or a speaking persona. Let us take for example the opening sequence of the four poems, “the schizophrenic mind (I) to (IV). The first of the sequence ricochets the archetypal old father ‘reading and rereading the days old newspapers/plastered the straight chair/in the verandah”. The other three take cue from this schizophrenic motif of ‘reading and rereading’ and weave and embroider the thread in a circular pattern that justifies the titular term, ‘schizophrenic’.
Be it noted in passing that schizophrenia is a functional disorder of human thought process. It stems from a mode of thinking through a jostle and clash of self-contradictory or mutually exclusive perceptions. Psychiatry pinpoints it as an offshoot of self-doubt. The perceiving mind gets bogged in a stasis of endlessly repeated problem-solving discharges and defuses that entail a vicious cycle of thought and behaviour in progressive isolation from the dynamics of the experiential linear world-flow outside the critical self. It is in today’s world a pervasive inner reality, endemic to the modernist and postmodernist pulses of human experience of life in non-cohering splinters and fragments. Sarita’s father figure is symbolic of the modern eveyman in the throes of schizophrenic existential angst. Here is where Sarita touches the central chord of modern life, holed up in isolation and uproot. In her poems assorted in ‘Days V’, despite thematic variations and tonal discontinuities, which are characteristic of poetry in its lap from modernism to postmodernism (the present reviewer believes that postmodernism is no qualitative breakaway from but a quantifying intensification of modernist trending that took off in the first quarter of the 20th c.) Sarita excels in creating a tapestry. Covertly or overtly, everywhere in her poetry there is a palpable underpinning of the reality of existential crisis of man displaced from the roots and comforting summative worldview. This presents Sarita in line with the central trend of the literature of our days.
Choice of words sieved by a poet of the ilk of Dr. Sarita Sharma is an index to not only the poet’s stylistic grip, but to central theses at work, too, beneath the veneer of style. I randomly cite a range of words from her poems: rheumy eyes, disconcerting, frightening, unfulfilled, unspoken, dank and dark, [p.1]; grey and tired, mourn the passing away, grieve the end of time, tied up in not living, lost happiness, insensitive betrayals and brutal ideas, my own failures and heartaches, some smiles soaked in grainy cheeks [p.2]; the dimly lit pages [p.4] : so on and so forth.
At this point, the question is paramount: are all the pages of Sarita ‘dimly lit’. The answer to this question is a straight and bland ‘No’. Maybe, she portrays looming shadows of the pain of living with memories, wistful lookbacks, stealthy presences of ennui, yet it is not all dark. On the sprawling canvas of Sarita, there are flickers of hope, thinning of gloom in the dark patches and undercurrents of optimism that ‘never die’. If we are helpless against onslaughts, and meek compliances are there, new pages will turn for the spring breeze to tide in and for the new hopes to sprout:
when spring was still awaited
when hope still sprouted green
when I and you
were still we (The Schizophrenic Mind II, p.4)
Or, where the warmth of love is reaffirmed, and we feel rain-showered and rejuvenated, Sarita, in an affected mock-metaphysical style, without detracting an iota from the truth of love-sensibility, puts it in her immaculate fashion:
how had we even perceived
that committing lifetimes
updating relationship status
changing surnames
exploring nakedness
and making it our own
would hold us together evermore
The ultimate impression that Sarita’s poetry is likely to evoke in or impinge upon her prospective readers is: Wow! At the heart of this poetry if there are moments of lyrical abstractions, if there are moments of epiphanic luminosity, there is, too, a comforting compensation in terms of happy declensions to the earthy warmth of dramatic immediacy, cool and beaming rays of love and the undying regenerative forces of life.
Sarita’s poetry will hopefully leave a deep impress on the connoisseurs of literature across the globe, and beyond the ‘borders’ in the comprehensive
sense of the term.
[Dr. Jay Basu is an Associate Professor at the Department of ELT, Center for Language, Translation and Cultural Studies, NSOU, West Bengal. ]