On children
with Ursula K. Le Guin, Jonathan Swift, and Mohammed El-Kurd
So much happens in the span of a few seconds nowadays. I fight the urge to start every commentary like I started the last one - a rumination on the nature of time in the age of the information onslaught. Every time I sit down to write poetly, I am distracted by a new question, a new catastrophe. No poem seems to really hold the diameter of the bomb. But distraction is a privilege.
Since I last wrote to you, it feels as if the lines that etch a global cartography of pain and violence have become sharper. The everyday shocks me. Most mornings, I have a variation of the same dream. My mind recasts the motif of chess within themes of genocide, Hindutva, violence, or misogyny. I always remember the last part of the dream, where each time some new version of stalemate (not checkmate, mind you) jolts my sleeping body awake, and my fingers remember the smell of disaster as they clutch a fighting bishop, or a disillusioned pawn. (The chess motif recurs simply because I obsessively play online chess during work breaks, and while ruminating).
I wonder whether this was what the recent AI generated digital protest ‘All eyes on Rafah’ was about. I find the medium of resistance interesting enough to distract myself momentarily from the reality of war. Even ‘apolitical’ friends were crawling out of the woodwork, earnest to be a part of the fight between good and evil, and lend voice to the unheard and the unsung.
This is the third occasion where India’s great middle class seems to have been aW(o)kened in the recent past - the other two being 1) the “Not in My Name” protest when people from Malabar Hill stepped on to the streets, and 2) Aryan Khan’s arrest where even someone like Subhash Ghai turned activist (Imagine - the same guy who made the regressive Pardes, for eg.). I’m sure there have been other such critical moments of rupture, but these two examples are fresh in my memory, and they address my conceptualisation of what it takes for the hive-mind to process everyday atrocity and violence on marginalised communities as shared experience - even national or global ‘events’.
As I attempt to apprehend the mysterious emotional heft of empathy as political impetus, the real question is what really counts as the tipping point? When does that glorious, chaotic spectre of anarchy capture even the most stubbornly apathetic mind? What is the moment when it is too much, when we feel it’s time to “speak up”?
This did not happen when Dalits were massacred in Khairlanji, or when the Bhima Koregaon 16 were locked up. Very few people took to the streets when Gauri Lankesh was murdered in cold blood, when Dabholkar and Pansare paid the fatal price for their social and intellectual work of reform. This didn’t even happen when an entire state was thrust into emergency mode, put under an indefinite curfew and communications blockade. Ordinary people watched from the comfort of their living rooms when the farmers marched into the capital, and refused to budge for months, forcing, even the prime minister, for the first time, to go back on his words. At least he seemed shaken, then - nervous and fumbling, as he feebly attempted to claim benevolence even in defeat. (I mean, the man has clearly gone insane, now, or perhaps in-saint??)
Even though the entire country rose up in protest against the CAA, when young students and activists, friends and comrades, were arrested, many ‘soft’ Hindutva people kept quiet, and the bill was passed in parliament.
How many times… How many roads… What does it take…. for us to wake up, finally?
The answer is right in front of us - plastered in big glowing letters on every tweet, post or caption - Children. apparently. The decapitation of babies, and subsequent burning of infant corpses is where we draw the line, eh?
Social media has been aflame with the recent agitations, repeatedly flaring up in sync with the American endorsed attacks on Rafah, but also, the visceral news updates of children turning into ash during the bombings. It was actually a western news outlet’s justification of the legality of ‘killing children’ in a twisted, Machiavellian argument about Hamas fudging numbers for propaganda purposes, that pricked the ire of the great Indian middle class. A close friend who called me when Modi announced the rollback of the farm laws, actually sent me an audio message about the whole thing. His voice was flecked with genuine helplessness and an undercurrent of nervous anxiety as he murmured - “What can I do for Gaza?”.
I was surprised at this naive expression of righteousness. I found myself taking a patronising and pedantic tone, prepared to puncture the entitlement inherent in such a question, but then I stopped myself. I realised that it was important to mark, even this lowest common denominator of awareness. I had no answers, of course, and I said something about educating oneself, and using sensitivity, attention, and radical defiance as tools. But these were spur of the moment weaponisations of guilt, nothing else.
The futility of our combined voices kept playing back to me all day, like a reel taking time to buffer. Even as I read of Netanyahu’s admittance of a “technological failure”, I thought, ‘Was this because of the global ‘backlash’? Was AI, of all things, the last straw? Or maybe, images and memes of “killing children”, are the final ‘deal-breaker’ in this world saturated with deathly designs?
In an attempt to answer my friend’s question I harnessed my erratic imagination. I shared with him a list of links. These were poems, or works of art that frequently returned to me in moments of distress; works that gave me the strength, and reinstilled in me the spirit of resistance. I shared Sylvia Plath’s mushrooms, Pash’s ghaas and Sandberg’s grass. I spoke to him about apolitical intellectuals, while sharing Al Jazeera updates and podcasts about the latest spate of Israel’s genocidal activities. I also shared reports of Hindutva nationalist manbois expressing solidarity with Israel. This, was admittedly, a deviation in the kind of links I would share with him. Our interactions would often consist of interesting music or bollywood memes, or cricket jokes, apart from the occasional sharing of something I’d written about, or published.
This made me aware, once again, that I could not extricate myself from the subjectivity of artist. I say this, not to self aggrandise, but, rather, to articulate more clearly, even for myself, a methodology of consumption, contemplation and witnessing. The act of sensitive witnessing translates into action superfluously. We do not know when the pen rises in protest, when, perhaps, our words turn into stones thrown into the rising ocean swell of revolution. The question “What is to be done?” becomes moot. No one has to spell out their activism.
It was in this vein that I shared with him, also, Meena Kandasamy’s article, The Radical Rahul Gandhi Nobody Expected. Kandasamy is probably Poetly’s favourite woman poet (forgive this arbitrary category), along with Wislawa Szymborska. I remember seeing an interview she did with Shashi Tharoor about his book on Ambedkar, where, like a gadfly, she kept pulling him up for his popular middle-stance. She said that after reading Ambedkar for the first time as a young person she felt like “burning the world”.
I have shared her poems on this newsletter before, including a couple from Ms. Militancy. But a comprehensive curation of her unbelievable body of work, with commentary, is a project I cannot wait to begin. Warsan Shire’s poems, perhaps, echo the synaesthetic nuclear force of Kandasamy’s writing. She writes like one possessed with the fire of revolution, and each word is kerned with her passionate, witty, even sensual, anti-establishment rage. Her verse pulls down gods and men alike, and this is how it should be.
I woke up to this opinion piece she wrote in The Wire, and it made my morning. I felt a lonely tug of hope deep in my gut. Perhaps it was delusional, but I wanted to buy into Kandasamy’s answer to that much debated question of contemporary Indian politics - “But what is the alternative?”
By the time I reached the end of the article, I was rejoicing unconditionally in her assurance: “Although it is too early to predict what will exactly unfold at the ballot box, the ever-consolidating dominance of the BJP has disappeared. Even if they were to win, these are going to be extremely rocky years. If people build upon this momentum, and work on this leftward shift, the Sanghi fascist onslaught powered by crony capitalism that has possessed our nation for the last decade will face a pulverising defeat ideologically, and in time, electorally.”
Kandasamy’s words always go deeper than the usual liberal, woke assurances that the “Modi Wave is ending”. I detested these voices (journalistic, academic, “opinion leaders) in 2019 when they lulled us into a fall sense of comfort in the name of hope, and optimistic spin-doctoring. Such voices betray a deep fissure in community consciousness. They convey a kind of hypocritical posturing that relies tacitly on the misery of some people, in order to make authoritative assessments as cheerleaders of democracy. (Whose “marginalised” is better?)
Perhaps the writing I share today will make my meaning clearer? 3 unrelated works help me form a narrative about what is happening in Gaza at the moment. All 3 have the common thread of the kind of dark humour that agitates, and jolts us out of our reveries. I have returned to the first two “non-poetic” pieces time and again, and each reading has always revealed something fresh, revolutionary, and living:
Ursula K Le Guin’s The Ones who Walked Away from Omelas starts by describing a city of festivities and uninhibited happiness. There is something strange about her description of the place. It seems to be too good to be true. The shocking premise is reached insidiously. Le Guin operates on the level of allegory, but her narrative pierces the very soul of the reader…
In a basement under one of the beautiful public buildings of Omelas, or perhaps in the cellar of one of its spacious private homes, there is a room. It has one locked door, and no window. A little light seeps in dustily between cracks in the boards, secondhand from a cobwebbed window somewhere across the cellar. In one corner of the little room a couple of mops, with stiff, clotted, foul-smelling heads, stand near a rusty bucket. The floor is dirt, a little damp to the touch, as cellar dirt usually is. The room is about three paces long and two wide: a mere broom closet or disused tool room. In the room a child is sitting. It could be a boy or a girl.It looks about six, but actually is nearly ten. It is feeble-minded. Perhaps it was born defective or perhaps it has become imbecile through fear, malnutrition, and neglect. It picks its nose and occasionally fumbles vaguely with its toes or genitals, as it sits haunched in the corner farthest from the bucket and the two mops. It is afraid of the mops. It finds them horrible. It shuts its eyes, but it knows the mops are still standing there; and the door is locked; and nobody will come. The door is always locked; and nobody ever comes, except that sometimes-the child has no understanding of time or interval – sometimes the door rattles terribly and opens, and a person, or several people, are there. One of them may come and kick the child to make it stand up. The others never come close, but peer in at it with frightened, disgusted eyes. The food bowl and the water jug are hastily filled, the door is locked, the eyes disappear. The people at the door never say anything, but the child, who has not always lived in the tool room, and can remembe rsunlight and its mother's voice, sometimes speaks. "I will be good," it says. "Please let me out. I will be good!" They never answer. The child used to scream for help at night, and cry a good deal, but now it only makes a kind of whining, "eh-haa, eh-haa," and it speaks less and less often.
It is so thin there are no calves to its legs; its belly protrudes; it lives on a half-bowl of corn meal and grease a day. It is naked. Its buttocks and thighs are a mass of festered sores, as it sits in its own excrement continually.
They all know it is there, all the people of Omelas. Some of them have come to see it, others are content merely to know it is there. They all know that it has to be there. Some of them understand why, and some do not, but they all understand that their happiness, the beauty of their city, the tenderness of their friendships, the health of their children, the wisdom of their scholars, the skill of their makers, even the abundance of their harvest and the kindly weathers of their skies, depend wholly on this child's abominable misery.
Notice how Le Guin deliberately uses the dehumanising ‘it’ over ‘he’ or ‘she’. The philosophical problem of a city whose splendour and peace depends on the eternal misery, trauma, and suffering of a single child, moves me. I do not know what to make of this. even today. I do not know, if I would simply walk away from such a city, or whether I would attempt to release the child. Maybe I would meekly accept the guilt - who knows.
But do you think my friend’s innocent question of “What can I do?” can be equated with a refusal to accept that guilt? Perhaps it will turn into a ‘learned helplessness’ rather than defiance. Perhaps, he would be strong enough to walk away from Omelas? Would you?
I urge you to read the story in its entirety. In case you have read it before, revisit it. It is easily available online.
The other piece of writing I wanted to share today is Jonathan Swift’s classic work of satire A Modest Proposal (1729). This controversial piece whose ironic wit and hyperbolic mock-serious rhetoric make it one of the finest examples of social critique in the history of literature, has been debated and written about by several critics and commentators since then. Swift wrote this pseudo-proposal to caricature the animosity and resentment with which elite people in Ireland at the time viewed the poor and the destitute. He writes in the style of policy makers, carefully using statistics, and social facts to scaffold a shocking suggestion.
The ‘policy document’ makes allusions to problems of poverty, unemployment, crime and a certain ‘national’ awareness. Children are an “additional grievance”, and a symptom of the poor people who know no better than to breed, multiply, and leech on the resources that rightfully belong to the rich, productive contributors of the land. He observes that “whoever could find out a fair, cheap and easy method of making these children sound and useful members of the commonwealth, would deserve so well of the publick, as to have his statue set up for a preserver of the nation.” This is exactly what Swift sets out to do. This is his solution:
I have been assured by a very knowing American of my acquaintance in London, that a young healthy child well nursed, is, at a year old, a most delicious nourishing and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled; and I make no doubt that it will equally serve in a fricasee, or a ragoust.
I do therefore humbly offer it to publick consideration, that of the hundred and twenty thousand children, already computed, twenty thousand may be reserved for breed, whereof only one fourth part to be males; which is more than we allow to sheep, black cattle, or swine, and my reason is, that these children are seldom the fruits of marriage, a circumstance not much regarded by our savages, therefore, one male will be sufficient to serve four females. That the remaining hundred thousand may, at a year old, be offered in sale to the persons of quality and fortune, through the kingdom, always advising the mother to let them suck plentifully in the last month, so as to render them plump, and fat for a good table. A child will make two dishes at an entertainment for friends, and when the family dines alone, the fore or hind quarter will make a reasonable dish, and seasoned with a little pepper or salt, will be very good boiled on the fourth day, especially in winter.
The irony is heavy is it not? I do not think I need to expend too many words to make the connection clear between this piece and events taking place in Gaza as I write. While the equivalence is not direct, I deliberately highlight the metaphorical power of “eating children” as another way of thinking about the social justification of “legally killing children”.
Last night I attended a beautiful concert by a brilliant Brazilian Jazz musician who spoke about that now-familiar untranslatable Portuguese word “Saudade” with reference to one of the songs she rendered. Various English definitions have surfaced for the sentiment indicated by this word ever since the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows made it popular online. One source refers to saudade as “a sad state of intense longing for someone or something that is absent.” Many people speak about this as a kind of nostalgia. Historically, some writers have spoken about the sorrow of wives whose husbands set out to undertake adventures during the periods of expansion when Spanish and Portuguese explorers made journeys to faraway land across the seven seas. This is a weak socio-linguistic explanation, and there are temporal inaccuracies that negate such a statement. The nostalgia of an unknown thing, place, person, or ‘home’, however, is something that I think many of us, today, can identify with.
The fact of sudden death brought on by war ensures that there is never closure. Grief rarely runs its natural course, and spouses and survivors are left with broken pieces of the lives of their loved ones. As all eyes are on Rafah the atrocities continue - Israel continues its relentless foray into Gaza, going deeper and deeper in an attempt to annihilate an entire people. The sophistry of this killing machine is impressive enough to sometimes distract certain groups. But many have said this about the Nazi regime too. I can only draw some hope from the calls now emerging from various nations across the world for ceasefire.
No tears must emerge from all the eyes that are on Rafah. Only rage. Cold, unmerciful, punitive, explosive rage. Is not anger the whetstone to action? How else must we encounter an evil that has gone beyond language and humanity? With what face must we confront these tyrannous, soulless, machines of death?
Perhaps poetry is never enough. But for now let the rage, and sorrow of this poem that I share with you keep you awake. Let it churn your blood. What we sit here and do - read a poem - does not even come close to the pain, anguish and suffering of the people it describes. Amen.
This poem feature on the Spring 2024 edition of The Poetry Review.
Feel free to write in (to poetly@pm.me) with any questions, queries, or comments. We will write back as soon as we find the space, and the time.
If you like what you read, do consider ‘buying me a coffee’.