by Douglas Messerli
Ranjit Hoskote Jonahwhale (Hyrana,
India: Penguin/Random House, 2018)
In reviewing his 2014 volume Central
Time, I concluded “Hoskote has not only created a major new work of poetry
but has suggested an alternative to the threatening world in which we daily
face our lives.”
His slimmer, new volume, Jonahwhale, not only continues to
provide linguistic shelter in a world of terror and horrors, but pushes his
language, even further, revealing just how talented a poet he truly is.
The very first lines of
this work suggest that terrifying world:
Last
word on the subject, I promise.
I walked
into the train station and it was terrifying.
Like
nerve gas had laid the architecture out flat,
the tall
glass columns bloodshot and the booking clerks
slumped
over, all dead at the till.
Even a “plaster Gandhi,” the symbol of pacifism, becomes a kind of
threatening figure:
You
missed the last train, it said, he said,
you
missed the last and only train that was save
for a
man who’s left half his life behind.
As critics have observed, there is something almost Eliot-like about
this poem “The Churchgate Gazette,” with its dead clerks and eerie atmosphere
suggesting a feeling of “hurry up please it’s time.” Yet Hoskote’s ending is
far more surrealistic that anything Eliot might have written, breaking up
syntax while turning inward:
Break,
ice, for me,
Let me
fall through stinging water
in my
skin of rust and flame.
I’ve
jumped from a tree
That’s
branched into the clouds.
It’s
sucked up all the reality
I’ve
watered it with.
Its
fruits are red and wrinkled.
I
plunge into drowned gardens
where I
walked once.
Sinking, the water stroking
my
crown of leaves
as it
comes apart,
dark
tribune, archaic clown,
I open
my eyes.
Here, whatever achievement the poet might have thought to have
previously accomplished (the laurel crown) is mocked, as he comes to a new
perception and a new kind reality about his personal failures.
Even though he has
promised us that this is the “last word” on the subject, we already know in a
collection that interweaves the stories of leviathans such as Jonah’s whale, in
whose belly he sat for three days, and Melville’s Moby Dick that we are in for
far more troublesome moments.
And the poet, in this
case, takes us across a bleak and worrisome landscape of doubt and loss.
If some of these moments represent an almost comic view of his
condition, such as the invocatory “The Atlas of Lost Beliefs,” wherein he his
lists numerous of those beliefs, among them:
….apsaras,
kinnaras, gandharvas, maends,
satyrs,
sorcerers, bonobos, organ grinders,
stargazers, gunsmiths, long-distance runners,
gravediggers, calligraphers, solitary reapers…
in a mini-list that goes on for 11 lines longer, ending with “women
who run with wolves,” he later takes us into remarkable new worlds, such as in
the beautiful poem “Ocean,” beginning with the Melvillian-like “my name is
Ocean,” while simultaneously introducing us to larger than life figures such as
Ahab (in the poem of that name), where the man in constant pursuit regrets his
voyages: “If only I’d harpooned this monster on a page.”
Like a kind of crazed
tourguide, Hoskote takes us into wasted provinces in “the kingdom of shadows,”
(“The Heart Fixes on Nothing”) rivers that sometimes run in you veins (“And
Sometimes Rivers”) and a world which “empties itself”:
You
shall build your citadels on silt said the preacher
and sink your pride in spice currents
take your parakeets and painted cormorants
with
you but leave the coconut palms and the Inca silver
leave behind a bloodful of curses
The traveler (in
“Sycorax”) wakes up trapped in a tree truck, “speech slurred, though all I’d
drunk / was berry-blood.” A wonderful version of Melville’s Redburn, temporarily on shore leave,
recounts the dangerous world of Liverpool, where he is attacked by Indians and
others, as we see him retelling his own tale with crossed-out lines.
“Cargo and Ballast,”
dedicated to Édouard Glissant, warns us from the start that “Everything will be
used against you” and continues with another version of the “Noah-boat
Jonah-boat”:
The captain’s seasick
and dying.
The
mate’s a safe pair of hands
but he’s sulking.
Let
the drunk passenger handle it. He was
a slave-captain before. Leave it to him.
What shall we do with ‘em?
Throw ‘em in!
The end of this wonderful poem shifts into another magic listing of
sins suggesting what “the everything” that will be used against “you” includes:
Beginning with chalk, sulphur, ochre earth, jagged bamboo,
ratooned cane, and the blades and axle shafts of words that
are
javelined at you and you turned into birdcalls,
passwords, anthems, spells.
It is as if the you, the poet and reader together, is certain to be
tortured by the language of the poem itself.
So many of these early poems
are such startling revelations that is little wonder that the second part of
the book, “Poona Traffic Shots,” good as it is, simply can’t match the wild
adventure of the first part, “Memories of the Jonahwhale.”
Yet, the final section,
“Archipelago” contains many lovely poems, wherein Hoskote once again takes his
amazing ability to mash-up memorable images with a sophisticated moral vision
wherein terror and odd beauty meet,
dancing hand in hand. “Aperture,” in memory of Diane Arbus, for example, begins
with the question:
What
would the knife-grinder want
with a
broken spoon and a pair of melons,
a
Japanese bowl spangled with an iron glaze
and
three dried lilies?
He’s
waiting for the little boy and girl
standing hand in hand
to
cross the chalk line between kerb and street
and go
off like rockets
Or, in another tourguide-like stance, Hoskote humorously relates his
“Eight Rules for Travellers to Thebes”:
Beware
of babies left on hillsides with their feet pierced.
Don’t
fight with old men where three roads cross.
At 49, Hoskote might be
described as a poet in mid-career. Yet this work is so excellent that we
suspect that he will soon be, if not already is, one of the greatest anglophone
poets of his country.
Los Angeles, August
28, 2018
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