Poetry Review Spring 1988

South Asian Voices
by John Welch

Finally to Sujata Bhatt: mother tongue Gujarati, educated subsequently in America and now living and working in Germany. Born in 1956, Brunizem is her first collection, and makes clear throughout the threefold nature of her experience-India, North America and Europe. In "A Different History" she explores the enigma whereby the language of the conqueror is cherished by later generations: "Which language/ has not been the oppressor's tongue... And how does it happen/ the unborn children/ grow to love the strange language". In "The Undertow" she writes "There are at least three/ languages between us... there's a certain spot/ we always focus on,/ and the three languages are there/ swimming like seals fat with fish and sun..." In a longer piece, "Search for my Tongue", she mixes English and Gujarati: "I ask you, what would you do/ if you had two tongues in your moth". The poem incorporates a transcription of a tape from home that includes local sounds and a tabla being played; it would make a fine performance piece.

There is a freshness and clarity of physical perception in many of these poems that is most attractive. The physical is represented as a source of both comfort and truth. In the erotic "The Kama Sutra Retold" the teenage lovers are guided to one another by the rightness of their unspoken, spontaneous desires: "When he touches her nipples/ he doesn't know/ who is more surprised". This spontaneity is the complete opposite of the rigorously decreed social gymnastics of the original Kama Sutra. "Mulierbrity", a rare term defined in the Oxford Dictionary as "woman hood; the characteristics or qualities of a woman", begins: "I have thought so much about the girl/ who gathered cowdung in a wide, round basket". This situation-the poet (usually a man) watching a (third-world) woman labouring-is deeply ambiguous. Sujata Bhatt writes that she has been unwilling to "use her for a metaphor". Instead she enumerates the smells that surround the image: "and the smell of cowdung and road-dust and wet canna lilies,/ the smell of monkey-breath and freshly washed clothes/ and the dust from the crows' wings which smells different". Other poems in this collection, such as "Udaylee" and "Kalika", deal in an equally direct way with the condition of womanhood. Occasionally the energy of the writing declines into diffuseness, as in an occasional piece such as "3 November 1984", her reaction to the violence in the Punjab, viewed from her standpoint in America. It's as if, lacking immediate or strongly recollected physical impressions, this writing loses its genuineness. But overall this is an exciting first collection, moving and invigorating. In the optimistic confidence with which it encompasses different cultural and linguistic traditions, it is typical of much poetry now being produced by South Asian writers.