Beginning The Year Of Prophecy Through Poetry

“Hey, Ma, tell me my religion. Who am I?
What am I?”
“You are not a Hindu or a Muslim!
You are an abandoned spark of the
World’s lusty fires.
Religion? This is where I stuff religion!
Whores have only one religion, my son...”

Under Dadar bridge, my questions echo,
The hostile stars eat like maggots
Into my future, my buried dreams,
The umbilical cord I myself
Had hung up to dry

—Under Dadar Bridge by Prakash Jadhav, translated by Shanta Gokhale and Nissim Ezekiel

A man in a blue shirt is holding a pen. He slowly writes his last name first: Jadhav. The room is small, congested. A woman looks at him from the doorway. Before the man appears on the screen, there are street scenes, the sound of a train arriving or departing, a bridge, a hunched man, a lot of haze.

There is a rewinding of the same scenes. The poem scrolls vertically on the screen. There is no location, no explanations, no distractions. Only an interrogation of identity, of a dehumanised condition of a person who also speaks for many like him.

You are left with the poem.
Multiple poems.
Implosions, explosions.

In A Night of Prophecy, a 2002 film by Amar Kanwar, there are only poets and poems from across India. I watched the film a few years ago in his studio. When I stepped out, I asked the filmmaker about Jadhav. Kanwar said it was many years ago that he read the poem by Jadhav, who wrote it in the 1970s. Jadhav used to be a baggage handler at the Mumbai airport. In 2001, Kanwar tracked him down. I remember he told me Jadhav had a beautiful handwriting and that’s why the workers had asked him to write the slogans for their protest. Later, Jadhav was promoted. His verses had been powerful.

The poem, an interrogation of the poet’s own reality and the identity of a fatherless son born to a prostitute, is stark; writing it was an act of resistance. The poem had inspired Kanwar to make a film about protest poetry in India. Another act of resistance.

Over the years, we have spoken a lot about poetry and its role. Can it be used as evidence? How do we measure loss? Beyond the crime scene and the insistence on forensic evidence in the justice system, there is another terrain. Of experience, memory, inheritances, identities, caste, class, gender, etc.

Within the violent hazing of our times, what role does poetry play in elucidating what people know and understand about their hazing experiences?

Does the creation of a poem hold evidentiary value?

Does the poem contain the truth?

Yes.

A poem is also an act of remembrance.

***

“They make a desolation and call it peace.
Who is the guardian tonight of the Gates of Paradise?
My memory is again in the way of your history.
Army convoys all night like desert caravans:
In the smoking oil of dimmed headlights, time dissolved—all
winter—its crushed fennel.
We can’t ask them: Are you done with the world?
In the lake the arms of temples and mosques are locked in each other’s reflections.”

—Farewell by Agha Shahid Ali, a Kashmiri poet

It is this memory that the poets preserve to rescue us from the catastrophist narrative of our times hailed as history, which only tries and pretends to make sense of the past in the present. The present is a conundrum. The present is a place of untruths, a place of all negation of the personal and multiple. It is the daily continuity of lives under all circumstances that must stand as an alternative site to resist all unfreedoms, all lies, all erasures, all oppressions.

Memory recognises experiences. It recognises the individual. It agonises and liberates. Memory is personal. It is political.
Poets aren’t done with the world.

All forms of literacy are in danger in this country, in this world. Literary production and culture and politics are connected. The fact that readers of poetry are not many doesn’t diminish its place because in the near and far future, the audience for poetry will be measured through time, through generations, through space.

This issue of Outlook is to stand against the dangerous silencing of voices. Poetry must be brought before the general public. In a world of controlled speech and linear narratives, poetry offers the scope that we get affected, that we feel.

Poets have been banned for centuries. In Plato’s Republic, poets had been banished.

As a news magazine, we are expected to be reasonable and pretend that poetry doesn’t form a part of what we do. But as journalists, we must read and publish poetry because it makes us uncomfortable, it shows that there is that moral power of the individual voice that must be protected.

Poetry expands the scope of storytelling. It is evidence. Of other lives. Of our times.

***

“My home is a gun
pressed against both temples
a knock on a night that has not ended a torch lit long after the theft
a sonnet about body counts undoubtedly raped
definitely abandoned
in a tryst with destiny.”

–From My Invented Land by Robin S Ngangom, a poet from Manipur

This terrifies me, unsettles me. A poem could be that point where a journalist can pick up a story. This poem is in this issue.

Newsrooms are grim places. We scan and monitor news. An earthquake, a tsunami, a bomb explosion, a shooting. We dissect a lot, we reconstruct a lot. We analyse, we decode, we write opinions, we do data-crunching to look for evidence. But what we often don’t do is read poetry or recover the strangeness of the past, and its vastness and its lostness or write about the ordinary person, an ordinary death, an ordinary anguish.

For months, the reporters and researchers collected poems guided by the three prompts given to us by Kanwar. It was an exercise in seeing, in feeling, in rejecting the violation of the individual and collective experiences.

In A Night of Prophecy, Kanwar merged different poetic narratives to arrive at a more universal language of meanings. The viewing of the film was the moment of conception for this issue. An editor must be inclusive. A news magazine must also be a place of disruptions, a place of prophecies.

2024 is an important year. We will choose where we go from here. This issue is a place of “here” and in the issue, poetry and images take parallel routes to make us see and understand the other, the conflicts that divide and unite us, and how memory can offer resistance to imposed histories.

Poetry as Evidence is the year-opener issue for Outlook. We remain grateful to Kanwar, who worked with us and edited this issue and to everyone who gave us their poems and images, to the reporters who gathered the poems, to the designers and researchers who made it all possible. We pushed the advertisements to the end of the magazine for the sake of uninterrupted reading.

This is a leap of faith for a newsroom.

There were those who said who will read 100 pages of poems, who will see images of people protesting against injustices? Our audience will be measured through time.

It is poetry. There was no other way.

(This appeared in the print as 'The Year Of Prophecy')