Book Review: Aakriti Kuntal's 'God, Am I Your Eyelid?' Is A Visceral Incantation Of Illness And Survival

Aakriti Kuntal’s debut book God am I your eyelid? is a visual incantation weaving together matter and metaphor in its exploration of corporeal fragility. This graphic chapter book is a unique archive of tentative choreographies shaping the contours of convalescence within an unsettled ambience of clinical spaces. The consummate aesthetics of this glossy volume are shockingly counter to the anthropocentric cri de coeur that escapes from its hermetic restraints. Aakriti journeys into the pulsing heart of a ruptured ecology, a sensibility wounded by the mutating topography of severe illness. The pictorial poeisis unfolding here is somatic attunement sublimating in unspooled sensations of darkly radiant wisps in deep crimson and night black. Fluid tangles of string gleam in the images of the first section provocatively entitled Cartesian Flutter. Each visual offers a discursive frame using a vernacular of intimate tactility.

The slow recovery period from a protracted illness while trapped in excruciating malaise, provoked in this young poet a visceral imperative to document her experience of freefall into furious quiescence. The book simmers with internal movement within enforced stasis. The flailing wingbeat of Aakriti’s mental flights into haunting incandescence acquire a luminous energy, as they land on the pearly white expanse of the page. The sonic impact of her pulsing neural maze arouses vicarious trepidation in a reader, as do its floating signifiers whose twirling fragments cohere and form “twilight inflammation” and “blood fractions.” The reader’s gaze feels hijacked as it makes a landing on her “umbilical moon”.

Corporeal gesture becomes self-referentiality: a mode of gathering and reinventing herself in precarious circumstances. The disinfectant smell scape of hospital air is captured in the syntactical texture of a prone, malleable existence in dauntingly fearsome references to “clot’ and “mass" and “cough. The existential riddle of being unfolds as “the red kidney glows in the nerve chapel.”  As the poet rewrites herself into existence, she is in animated conversation with this prosthetic self, creating a timorously bold ontology of survival. A “loose daydream” emerges as the process of creative grief consumes the poet, and her pain seems to grow eyes, their vigilance thick with anxiety and unrelenting intimacy with death. In brilliantly masterful combinations of image and text, Aakriti captures the trespass of invasive procedures and traces the psychic cartography of fragility itself:

“A diagram of respiration / nebulization / the air runs like a thread stitching all mass into a tune…"

By transposing a cognitive landscape on the deep structure of physical organs, Aakriti provides them with a subaltern voice. The symbiotic bonding and artisanal finesse of her expressive visual renditions acquire a strange allure, as the reader starts to inhabit the diffuse, vanishingly thin markers of her sensorial meanderings. The psychological burden of becoming a cipher wandering through the deterministic world of biometric identity gains in amplitude in her “dilating universe.” She forges a space of imagined possibilities through typographical gestures replete with ellipses, creating a spatial matrix which throbs with life. The swollen horizons of her bodily and emotional imprint are anatomical signatures which sculpt her words and give them agency even in the throes of vulnerability:

“…the body clutches to its own breath and pretends it hasn’t gone mad"

The word-wielding exegesis of Aakriti’s imagistic writing is akin to bottling up a storm and slowly releasing its power. The reverberations are intense and place a laser focus on an ailing patient relegated to warded-off invisibility, and left to struggle in soporific isolation. The behavioral shifts of social networks and care-givers around this are conveyed in suggestive innuendo. The disorienting weariness induced by clinical habitats finds poetic release in a dystopian fever dream, a kind of sensory jet lag throughout the compressed narrative. While navigating this cloak of vibrating stillness, a musical trope surfaces through the “naked treasure” of living presence, expressed as the poet’s “homage to nothing.”  A wrenching lament follows in the next section shining a blinding light on the diminishing field of her relevance, her boundaries and her voice:

“Iota, has my thumb crawled into you?"

This section offers a series of haibun-like prose pieces where emotional vicissitudes are vivified through carnally surreal formations. The body’s iterations migrate from “whimsical insect” to “variable hung in space-time” to “blood mannequin” in a relentless search for coherence and meaning. A mystical sense of ascension and emergence is exquisitely calibrated in the midst of these anarchic peregrinations, when the body imaginatively morphs into an entity climbing like “a deer into the radiance of things.”

A “percussionist’s game” is breath itself, as arrival “gestates in time’s lap.” The “soup of muscles” is continuously consumed by volatile specters of uncertainty. The self “spinning inside a helix” is a sun-drenched syncopation - a primordial echo given enigmatic proximity as it emerges from a quantum labyrinth, its elemental secrets spilling out of cellular portals. Spartan in utterance, yet operatic in scale, the musical resonance of Aakriti’s writing emerges from a vortex where constellating mortal awarenesses whirl within the glow of her voice:

“…the kneecaps grow like tombs upon lathered skin"

Aakriti concludes her quiveringly intense narrative by inviting us into the folds of her radically hospitable gaze, using jazz-toned hypnotic undulations of word magic. She hints almost audaciously at a “peek” into the “drooping mouth of all creation.” An unbridled embrace of precarity leads her to an existential frontier, taking the reader on an inexorable journey to the edge of understanding. A fractured social and physical life becomes her tunnel into the unforgiving trenches of atrophy, the very substrate of darkness. Using her renegade pen, Aakriti has presented us with the untelling of a story: an unraveling of sorts. We are left with a trembling cauldron of enfleshed yearnings, liminal stirrings, and a feral intimacy with the roar embedded in the magnetic silence around her words.

As a redemptively engaging and dazzlingly eclectic poetic presence, Aakriti has created a morphic field of haptic splendor. Her lyrical meshing of body and spirit make her reflections feel like an intrepid pilgrimage into the ravaged quarry of the soul, where consciousness is savagely alive: a disembodied warbler fiercely auditioning to the heavens that are contained in the fleshly crucible we call existence. A truly impressive debut by one who animates the seething anatomy of survival through her passionate poetic articulation, ardent creative energy, and movingly evocative art.