WHAT SURVIVES IS THE SINGING
By Shanta Acharya
Indigo Dreams Publishing Ltd.
Devon, 2020, £9.99
ISBN 9781912876211
“A Shining Forth”
Review of Shanta Acharya’s poetry collection, What Survives is the Singing, by Lance Lee
Darkness has an unexpected quality, the quality of ‘how it lets us see’ (‘Strange Times’) — so begins Shanta Acharya’s powerful seventh book of poetry, What Survives Is The Singing (Singing hereafter), marking new paths after her recent selected poetry, Imagine: New And Selected Poems. Singing also sees her integrate into her poetry the abuse of women that appeared powerfully in her novel, A World Elsewhere (2015). There her heroine endures abuse (at times graphically) as she breaks free from tradition, marriage, and India for a new life in England. The abuse of women may be only one kind of abuse, but Acharya makes sure we get the point about its barbarity before she turns to other issues.
In ‘Alphabet Of Erasure’ a daughter’s life begins ‘with a bloody Caesarean’ to produce an almost perfect daughter doomed ‘to live in the shade if not oblivion’. She is ‘crossed out’, pursues ‘other people’s dreams’ in a ‘self-mutilation’; she might just as well be ‘bleached/reefs of coral as the earth’s treasures disappear’. What can you expect when ‘barbarians run the city, legislate on art/and beauty in the name of progress and diversity’ to deny ‘us the gift of exploring the world’, let alone ourselves.
A young woman in ‘Ambala’ admires another, more free-spirited, but finds her one day before a mirror ‘peering deep inside herself’. Is this a new yoga position, she wonders? But there is blood on the carpet as Ambala sees the clitoral mutilation of her friend, ‘a most brutal and unkind cut,/nothing like male circumcision’ but now her friend’s ‘wound, her shame, her secret laceration/as she lay writhing on the floor,/unable to face a life of pain and humiliation.’
In ‘Can You Hear Our Screams’, Acharya evokes the variety of such abuses, while in ‘To Lose Everything’ she shows how a sophisticated, ‘knowing’ woman lures another into prostitution. Alesha witnesses the murder of her liberated sister by her tradition-bound parents in ‘Alesha’s Confession’. She shudders as she hears ‘mother whisper: Let’s finish it here —’ and mother and father strangle her sister to death. This poem is partially based on such an ‘honor’ killing by Pakistani parents in England. Only in 2016 has Pakistan outlawed honor killings. These poems add a poetic immediacy and urgency to a subject too often relegated to prose, even in so fine an examination of the abuse of women as Rachel Snyder’s recent No Visible Bruises.
Acharya is a poet of great sophistication, Indian and English culture, capable of subtle reflection, and, at times, humor as in ‘Testing The Nation’, where, after exposing some popular absurdities, like French fries are not from France, she asks:
then waht is rong if r children
cannot reed or rite, lak comun sens,
tink egs do not gro in Grate Britun
and potatos r milkt from caus?
But she has a more urgent range of abuse to pursue, as in ‘The Bull Fight’ where a bull is wounded by lancers, ‘until he staggers in pain’ ready for a matador’s kill— which leaves the bull standing, suffering a slow death ‘marking man’s inhumanity,/bearing witness to the barbarism of human beings.’ But then it takes ‘a long time to be human’, Acharya points out in ‘Parliament Hill’ where children, oblivious, learn to fly kites, unaware of the layers of violent history represented by this hill, an ‘ancient site of druidic disputation’ and later a retreat for Roundheads against Cavaliers, among others.
Most of all in Singing Acharya searches to find place, home, self, and meaning in our ‘strange times’. Her mixed English and Indian background attunes her to the variety of cultural traditions which at once frees her yet leaves her to wonder to which she belongs, and if not to one or the other, then to what? In our world of unrelenting technological upheaval, the wearing away of cultural and historical norms, the accidents of globalization, to which we can now add pandemics that seem almost to strike from a clear sky, how is one to think of him or herself? In what are we to root? What is to give us the strength ‘to be our self’, not just a statistical entity, a ‘consumer’ of this age group or that, a ‘user’ of this who is ‘used’ by that; the strength to prevent ourselves from being defined by income as a matter of fact and, among some of our barbaric (neo-Liberal) neo-Darwinians, character? What would ‘being our self’ mean? In fact, does our life, does our world, would our freedom, have any meaning at all?
Not many take on considerations like these, or manage to do so with the resources of their art so that meaning strengthens their work’s artistry and emotional impact. Acharya does. Take ‘Belonging’: to have one’s ‘meanings inhaled the way elephants/ smell water from a distance’ is striking, but the poem is an ‘ars poetica’, wondering if words were ‘turned over’ like a matriarch elephant who nuzzles ‘the bare bones of an ancestor’ meditating, ‘her sensitive trunk caressing the carcass/as a blind person memorizes a face’, then they could hold memories that ‘travel from bone to bone/like words from mouth to mouth’. What else should a successful poem do but move ‘bone to bone’?
‘For this is a world of empty promises’ (‘Exile’), one where ‘you simply play a part, an actor on a screen’ (‘Parallel Lives’), one where we are ‘trapped in relationships’ (‘Relationships’), a world we come into with ‘only my shadow’ (‘Kew Gardens’), where if you try to define the color red (‘Infinity Of Red’) you end with a flood of contradictions that sum up the world, like ‘A newborn child wrapped in its amniotic fluid crying’. It may well take ‘a lifetime to be oneself’ (‘The Best is Yet To Be’), while age is ‘ultimately the triumph of matter over mind,/revenge for the idealistic delusions of youth’ (‘Indian Summer’). A word master, Acharya can ask ‘Is poetry so bitter, bitter the company of poets,/a jungle consuming itself like a raging fire?/… we are drawn to illusion,/dreaming of worlds other than the one we live in’ (‘Where In This World Does One Find Happiness’) because this world is so brutal, illusory, repetitious, and senseless. That she intersperses humor in these poems testifies to her self-confidence.
‘Shringara’ in her earlier book of that title gives us a good way to underscore Acharya’s development in Singing. There as ‘A participant in life’s carnival, I prepare for illusion’. She imagines putting on makeup, including Nirvana and Samsara, ‘to travel towards what end I cannot say’. Along the way she is defined by all she meets, encounters, becoming the result of ‘unpredictable circumstances’. So what, she wonders: what else is there but this shringara, this shining forth of herself? But in Singing, in ‘Self Portrait’, she again looks into a mirror, and now sees … strangers (‘incarnations of myself’). No sooner does she identify with one of them than she finds herself someone else. ‘Imagine,’ she writes, ‘finding yourself at an exhibition/where none of the portraits resemble you’, leaving you nothing but shadows. Whitman might celebrate his multitudes, but through all her multitudes, Acharya searches for ‘the life that belongs only to me—’, to ‘discover what manner of human I have been’.
This is a ‘shining forth’ with the strength to face searching always through the passing moment in which we find ourselves which in turn involves ‘startling discovery’ (‘Being Human’), yet without reaching a final self-definition or comprehension. In ‘Did You Know’, ‘A bird doesn’t sing because it has an answer—/it sings because it has a song’. For Acharya finding our true self is not our end: the journey itself is our being, our song.
Lance Lee is a recipient of several awards including the Creative Writing fellowship of the National Endowment for the Arts. His collection of poems, Seasons of Defiance, was a finalist in the 2010 National Best Books Awards in the US. Elemental Natures (2020), his seventh poetry book, includes a selection of work spanning more than thirty years of poetry, art, and essay.
