“No matter how many nights you spend in exile,
remember, pilgrim, you come home to this skin.”
The word ‘breathless’ (or as it is in Godard’s film - ‘À bout de souffle’) comes to mind when I think of Tishani Doshi’s poems in ‘a god at the door’. I find in these poems a fervency that unspools with the energy of each gathering line, chipping away at complex themes that are fiercely contemporary. The dissent and political rebellion is offset by a sense of intimate, personal engagement with the body. These poems are bold without being loud, and filled with wisdom while retaining a carapace of humour that makes them hit deep.
“ …How else to arrive
at the ecstasy of ourselves if we cannot see another’s body?”
I read this book some days back, again as a part of the #SealeyChallenge, but then I could not let it be. I returned to the poems again and again like a junkie searching for a fix. There are some universal ideas that Doshi keeps returning to, with the centrifugal force of a vate who is struck by the wondrous epiphany of something that is beyond this reality. In fact, in a world that is broken in so many ways, her poems fill in the fissures, imagining it not as it is (that is what her poems critique), but how it could be. The warm breath of the many demons that plagued us in the last couple of years breathe down the neck of this work.
And so it is that there is pain and tenderness, satire and prophecy, blinding metaphor and sudden silence all sutured together with care, and a sense of immediacy. This underlying immediacy actually drew me to the poems. It made me feel things that I have felt while reading the fire of Warsan Shire, or the hurricane that is Ginsberg’s Howl. But of course this work, and Doshi’s style, is completely different, and refreshingly present.
Better people than me have felt this and articulated it:
Two words from Fatima Bhutto’s quote on the blurb stood out for me- ‘elegant fury’. And as Hoskote adds “..A reader could explore the topographies of this book forever”. ….As we say in Bombay - sawwal.
(No question)
I urge you to drown yourself in the beautiful madness of Doshi’s writing.
Note: ‘a god at the door’ is published by Harper Collins in India, and can be purchased here.
I have shared Tishani Doshi’s eponymous poem (from her previous collection) ‘Girls are coming out of the woods’ here.
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