Poetry Session - 24 February, 2025

Temsula Ao is among the women poets of the North East of India who taught English at North Eastern Hill University, Shillong, the capital of Meghalaya. Fluent in Assamese, the language in which she was educated, she wrote her poems in English, publishing at least 7 collections. Arundhaty chose her poem Dream in which she has a conversation with Shakespeare.

We had Devika reciting from Rudyard Kipling who has been chosen numerous times. The poem about a lost road through the woods is a recollection of something lost:
where the ring-dove broods,
And the badgers roll at ease,
There was once a road through the woods.

Geetha’s choice was Jiddu Krishnamurti who was brought up to be a seer and mystic and later threw off that persona and freed himself. In this poem he discovers the entire tree from a single leaf:
The entire tree, its great trunk,
Its many branches, and its thousand leaves,
And an immense part of the sky.
I swore there there was no other tree, no other part to the sky –

His schools survive as a legacy of an approach to eduction through nature, the most famous being the Rishi Valley School in Madanapalle, AP. There is a rock, I am told, where students go to meditate. Birdwatching is a particular activity that is encouraged.

The Meditation rock at Rishi Valley School

Joe had recourse to a poem by a poet who lamented the great calamity of the Palestinian people in Gaza. Refaat Alareer who foresaw his own death left a death poem about what should happen afterward. It would cause a little boy to look up and see hope in the sky. The poem If I Should Die has been translated into hundreds of languages, and Joe preferred to recite it in a simple Hindi version with the original English alongside.

Kavita’s choice of Sarojini Naidu as a poet was a poem that describes bangle sellers who brought a ray of golden light:
Who will buy these delicate, bright
Rainbow-tinted circles of light?
Lustrous tokens of radiant lives,
For happy daughters and happy wives.

Sarojini Naidu (1879-1949) was known as the ‘Nightingale of India’ because of her lyrical poetry. She was a political activist, and freedom fighter too.

KumKum chose two poems of Rainer Maria Rilke, a favourite of Bobby Paul George who was a co-founder of KRG. They are humanistic poems and both have a sad ring, one extending empathy for a cripple, and the other for a lonely star that seems to call out to him:

I long to still my beating heart.
Beneath the sky’s vast dome I long to pray . . .
Of all the stars there must be far away
A single star which still exists apart.

Pamela chose a poem by a young black poet Amanda Gorman who was called on to celebrate the inauguration of Mr Biden as President in 2021 by reading a prose-poem titled The Hill We Climb. Her costume (a red Prada headband and yellow Prada coat) was more striking than the words, mostly a borrowed feel-good kind of rhetoric:

And, yes, we are far from polished, far from pristine, but that doesn’t mean we are striving to form a union that is perfect.
We are striving to forge our union with purpose.
To compose a country committed to all cultures, colors, characters and conditions of man.

For my money there should be a ‘not’ before the first striving ...

Amanda Gorman Photographed by Annie Leibovitz, Vogue, May 2021

She became a fashion influencer immediately afterwards with a photo-shoot for the Vogue magazine.

The moment when Poetry struck Pablo Neruda and changed his course in life is celebrated in a poem of that name that Saras read:

Poetry arrived

in search of me. I don’t know, I don’t know where
it came from, from winter or a river.
…
my eyes were blind,
and something started in my soul,
fever or forgotten wings,
and I made my own way,
deciphering

that fire,

and I wrote the first faint line,

His romantic ardour is expressed feverishly in the poem Don't Go Far Off.

may your silhouette never dissolve on the beach;

may your eyelids never flutter into the empty distance.

Don’t leave me for a second, my dearest,

Shoba selected poems by Gwendolyn Brooks, author of a score of books and the first black woman to serve as Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry, at the Library of Congress. Sadie and Maud tells the story of two sisters, and though Maud is the one who avoided trouble she is described at the end thus:
Is a thin brown mouse.
She is living all alone
In this old house.

Thomo selected the uncle of the folk singer Pete Seeger, singer and composer of famous songs like Where Have All The Flowers Gone and We Shall Overcome. The uncle, Alan Seeger, was one of the many poets sacrificed on the vast fields of massacre which the fields of Belgium became in WWI – Ypres, Passchendaele, and so on. Like Alareer in modern Gaza, Alan Seeger had a premonition of death when writing his poem I Have a Rendezvous with Death:
I have a rendezvous with Death
On some scarred slope of battered hill,
When Spring comes round again this year
And the first meadow-flowers appear.
…
And I to my pledged word am true,
I shall not fail that rendezvous.

Th final poem was by the poet and diplomat who wrote those unforgettable lines in To My Coy Mistress, but here he provided for Zakia, The Definition of Love. This poet knows the intimate geometry of love:
As lines, so loves oblique may well
Themselves in every angle greet;
But ours so truly parallel,
Though infinite, can never meet.

Marvell had the gift of stating in rhyme pithily and inimitably the essence of human experience.

The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid, Jan 24, 2025

 

The Reluctant Fundamentalist first Edition cover 2007

When Mohsin Hamid, the young  British Pakistani writer, began his second novel the demolition of the World Trade Tower by the Sept 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the United States had not yet occurred. He re-wrote the novel again  and again and took seven years to complete it. Ultimately, the novel turned on Changez Khan’s dawning realisation that something had changed fundamentally in the acceptability of Muslims in America after those attacks. The country would no longer be the land of his youthful dreams.

The twin towers attack of Sep 11, 2001 when airliners were flown into the towers by terrorists – the south tower is on fire and the north tower billows smoke

In  between he has a slow-burning love affair with a young woman called Erica. But she has still not come out of her depression following the grief over her boyfriend Chris, who died in the 9/11 attack. Changez loses track of Erica, but continues to think of her fondly, even after returning to Pakistan, holding onto the hope that she might one day come to him. 

When the North Tower collapsed this fire engine was damaged beyond repair — it is now an exhibit at the 9/11 Museum. Among first responders 441 died on that day

What makes Changez give up on his dreams is an eye-opening conversation he has with the head of the literary division of a company (Juan-Bautista), he has been sent to evaluate in Chile by his Wall Street company.  In a conversation he is told of young Christian boys who were captured by the Ottoman Turks in battle and then brainwashed into becoming Janissaries to work for their new masters. The implication is Changez has been similarly indoctrinated by his Wall Street firm to work against his own interests; he has become a hired gun. Juan-Bautista prompts Changez to examine his own identity and his relationship with America, which helps Changez see himself as a kind of "cultural outsider" exploited by American power structures. 

From there a transformation takes place and perhaps the poetry of Pablo Neruda one of whose houses south of Valparaiso he visits, has something to do with his deeper appreciation of his own poetic roots (his father was a poet in the Punjab).

Sumbal Maqsood of Government College University, Lahore, wrote in a paper titled Interrogating the Fundamentals of Identity: Changez’s Defining Act in the Reluctant Fundamentalist about Changez Khan’s dilemma:

“The standardized tests of America (like SAT) were traps to attract the intellectual cream of other nations, leaving the home countries deprived of brain power, while the migrants became servers of a tentacled capitalist cause. Changez realized gradually that he was just enabling the tentacles to grow more out of bounds.” 

The Reluctant Fundamentalist was adapted as a 2012 film in the political thriller drama genre, directed by Mira Nair and starring Riz Ahmed, Kate Hudson, and Liev Schreiber

The novel was later turned into a film directed by Mira Nair available for viewing free on Youtube. Many scenes are changed: Juan-Bautista in Valparaiso is turned into a book publisher in Istanbul who publishes in translation great authors from the Middle East and Asia. The book becomes more a thriller in the latter half of the film about secret CIA intervention in Lahore to rescue one of their operatives – there is no such story in the novel. In the film Changez Khan is less of a non-violent protester about American interventionism, and more of an activist goading students until he steps unwillingly into the terrorist backdrop to fundamentalism in Pakistan. Readers may on the whole prefer the novel because it leaves things unresolved at the end.

In the film Changez (played by Rizwan Ahmed, the British Pakistani actor) learns that the Istanbul publisher whose company they were evaluating, has published a Turkish translation of his father, Ajmal Khan's, poetry