An Introdution - A Confessional Poem

Amita C. Jani
Roll no. : 11
SEM – II
Paper no : E-C-202
Year – 2011
Topic: An Introdution - A Confessional Poem

Submitted to Mr. Devershi Mehta
Department of English,
Bhavnagar University.

Kamla Das : Life and Career

Kamla Das is one of the most significant Indian poets writing in English today, her poetry is all about herself, about he intensely felt desire for love, for emotional involvement and her failure to achieve such a relationship. Hence knowledge of her life and personality is essential for an understanding of her poetry.

Mrs. Kamla Das – her maiden name was Mudavikutty – was born ar Punmyurjukan in Malabar in Kerala in 1934. Both her parents were poets and so poetry was in blood so to say. She was educated mainly at home. It seems that her grandmother showered a lot of love and affection on the growing child, and she is often remembered in her poetry as in “A hot noon in Malabar” and “My Grandmother’s House”. She looks back to her happy days in her company with hostalyia and yearning. Her parents are seldom remembered with such love and affection. She was married at the early age of fifteen but her marriage has not been a happy one; in it she has failed to find that fulfillment which a woman craves.

The result has been frustration and disillusionment and this bitter personal experience colors all her poetry. It has been a hallaw – relationship, she can neither endure not can she untie the marriage knot. Her husband is not unkind to her, indeed, he has been a good friend to her and has allowed every freedom, but as she herself tells us, it is love which she craves for and not freedom. The poignant story of her life, if the psychological traumas she suffered is narrated in her autobiography my story serialized in the current weekly from January to December, 1974 and it makes poignant reading.

Happy or unhappy, Kamla Das continues to live with her husband and continues to write both prose and poetry, both in English and Malayalam. Her poetic output in English is rather thin. It consists merely of three slender volumes published in the earlier volumes. Still she has made her mark, is universally acknowledged as one of the greatest Indian poets writing in English, says Eunice De Souza.

“In her best poems, it is impossible no to be moved by and involved in the passionate curve of rhythm, the haunting and telling image images of sterling the ultimate resilience in the face of any relationship that threatens to devastate her vital and potential self”.

She has published eleven books in Malayalam. Her prose, whether in English or Malayalam, is all auto-biographical. Her short stories such as Friyidity and Sepia – tainted photograph clearly deal with the theme of love and the emotional discontent such seems to be inseparably bound up with such experience. She has been contributing a number of journals and literary magazines including opinion, the illustrated weekly of India : Poetry east and west; Debonair; Eve’s weekly; Famina; Imprint; Weekly Round table and Love and Friendship.

Her many literary merits have been recognized and her poems find an honorable place in all anthologies of Indo – English poetry. With a frankness and openness unusually in the Indian context, Kamla Das expresses her need for love. What is overpowering about her poem is their sense of urgency. She has secured prominent place among the immortals of literature. This is so because Devendra Khli point out “Courage and honesty are the strength if Kamla Das” character and her poetry and the courage lies not only being able to admit that one has aged when one has, but in also being able to assert in the face of it that in the final analysis one has no regrets and that one has lived beautifully in this word”.

The major themes an concerns of Kamla Das :

Kamla das is one of the members of the poetic trinity of Indo-Anglian poets. Her poetry is characterized, frustrations and disillusionments with a disarming frankness she tried to assert her individuality, to maintaining her feminine identity and from this revolt arose her trouble, psychological traumas and frustrations.

1)  Summer in Calcutta, 1965 : 

This 1^st published anthology of Kamla’s poetry, sets the tone for her entire poetic output. It contains only fifty poems and with few exceptions the theme of all of them is love or failure or failure in love.

2)  The Descendants, 1967 :

The volume contains only twenty nine poems and with few exceptions they are about love. The exceptions are the two poems about her own sons Jaisunfer and the white flowers.

3) The old playhouse and other poems, 1973 :

The anthology contains thirty three poems in all of which twenty have been taken from the two previous volumes. Thus there are only thirteen new poems which revel new facts and further artistic maturity. The love theme is still there, but an entirely new dimension and new intensity are added to its treatment. The poems of the volume reveal the poet’s pre-occupation within with death and decay not noticeable in the earlier volumes.

Love theme in Kamla’s poetry :

Most of her poems deal with the theme of unfulfilled love and yearning for love. The dance of the Eunuch is good example of a poem dealing with the theme. The dance of the Eunuch is a dance of the sterile and therefore the unfulfilled and unquenchable love of the woman in the poet.

Quest for love, or rather the failure to find emotional fulfillment through love is the central theme of Kamla’s poetry and her greatness as a love-poet arises from the fact that her love-poetry is rated in her own personal experience. It is an outpouring of her own loneliness, disillusionment and sense of frustration. Married at the early age of sixteen and finding herself tied to hollow relationship which she could not untie, Kamla Das story deposit its sensationalism, which seems to be partly a pose, makes a poignant reading but for Kamla Das,  as she tells us repeatedly, they have proved to be so. When she speaks of love outside marriage she is not actually propagating adultery and infidelity, but merely searching for the relationship which gives both love and security. Her love poetry merely voices her life long yearning for fulfillment through love.

Her love – poetry is unconventional and shocking to the orthodox, for the treatment of sexual love and human body, is free frank and uninhibited. She was unconventional in life and is equally unconventional in poetry. She refused to confirm to the traditional in life and is equally unconventional in poetry. She refused to confirm to the traditional role which a woman and a wife is expected to play. In one of the her lyrics “An Introduction”, she tells us how she was asked “to belong”, “to confirm”, and how she rebelled and tried to be even with male world on its own terms :

Then… I wore a shirt and my brother’s trouser, cut my hair short and ignored

My womanliness dress is sarees, be girl, be wife, they said be embroiderer, be cook,

Be a quarreler with servant, fit in, oh,

Belong.. cried the categorizers.

A rebel : her disillusionment :

The conflict between passivity and rebellion against the male oriented universe emerges as a major theme in her poetry. Her poem like “An Introduction”, we find the final analysis on acknowledgement and a celebration of the beauty and courage of being a woman. She was a social rebero and like all rebels against the accepted social norms, frustration and disillusionment were her lot in life and herself expression in her poetry is therapeutic. Her life itself violated the chiseled, systematic and traditional norms and values and she affirms to a form of life which is characterized by the unconventional and extremely modern point of view. Even in her poen “An Introduction” we find that she is in disillusionment in her love and marriage life.

Tension between love and lust :

Kamla Das’s ultimate vision of love forms the central core of her poetry. Her persona no doubt is given to carnal hungers and suffers like tragic protagonists the catastrophe inflicted upon them by their own doings. Kamla’s own disgust and failures led her to a frantic search for the mythic Krishna the ideal lover, in whom she could establish internal bond. This search made her aware of the need to study all the men: “All at once the plot thickened with a researcher’s hunger for knowledge, I studied all men”. Since, the quest has, by and large failed in her case sex is no more man than a “mindless surrender” or a heartless participation not a “humming fiesta” without emotional involvement. Sex is barren and sterile for her. The charge of lustfulness and obscenity can, therefore, not be maintained. Her quest is spiritual gratification, in which however she fails.

The confession mode :

Kamla Das has been called a poet in the confessional mode. The confessional poet deals in their poetry with personal emotional experiences which generally taboo. There is ruthless self-analysis and tone of utter sincerity. The facts are not always true, but there is no deviation at all from emotional truth. What a confessional peot gives is us is the “psychological equivalent” that we always get in the poetry of Kamla Das, confessional poetry is struggle to relate the private experience with the other world as it is. Such a struggle is in evidence in the poems of Kamla Das from a very early stage. In “An Introduction” she struggles to keep her identity against “The Categorizers”  who ask to “fit in”. Having refused to choose a name and a role she feels it necessary to define her identity.

I am saint I am beloved and the Betrayed.

I have no joys which are not yours,

Aches which are not yours I too call myself I…

The painful assertion, “I too call myself I”, comes from the predicament of the confessional poet. Her experience are common and ordinary, infect too common to give her any, special identity. But the “I” which experiences them, she insists, is separates and unique. This, to her,  is the only way to retain her sense of personal worth in the world of categorizers. She sees the outer world as hostile to the world of self.

An Introdution :

- Kamla Das

An introduction is a subjective poem of Kamla Das. She follows the “school of feminism” while writing this poem. The poetess is aware of her gender and status in the society in which she born and brought up. As a woman writer, she expresses her feeling in reference to the conditioned Indian Society. She poses herself as a rebel against the traditional Indian family. She wants to be a free woman. She defies the set rules and regulations of the society. At the same time she is proud of being Indian. The poet says that she speaks three languages and writes in two but dreams in one that is her mother tongue. Her acquaintances comment upon her writing in English. The poet wants to be a human being read sense. The poet tells about her childhood days, about her plight. She tries to ignore her gender by wearing her brother’s trouser. The elders of her family reprimand her and try to snub her. They all tell her to behave like a decent woman. The poet then tells about her miserable life and she is not satisfied with her present condition. She experiences an unbearable loneliness. She wanders from place to place. She feels that she is guilty. However, she feels that her painful experiences are her own. She favors individuality.

First, there is the freedom to choose her own language and confidence in her creative talent. Then comes the puzzling adolescence an the pain of growing up. This is followed by a desire to be even with male world on its terms, despite the family and social pressure to conform to the traditional feminine role and finally comes the realization that her experiences are the experience of every woman. There is passivity as rebellion against a man-dominated world. The poem may not be her poetic manifesto, but it certainly tells us much about her views regarding the medium of poetic expression. The medium does not matter much; it is the thought thought-content which is of her utmost importance. An introduction offers neither an excuse for writing nor a poetic manifesto: it is vitally related to her urges and aspiration and registers the graph of her growth and consciousness, love and despair, and all that she can do with the English language. Kamla das presents a new aesthetic in poetic terms. But the full import of the line “I speak three language, write in two, dream in one” – is not quite clear to us.

This long poem is roughly divided into two sections. The lines of the poem are unrhymed and irregular. The poet has used very long sentences divided by commas and dots. They are suggestive to the mental confused and disturbed and so she hesitates in her say. The poet is the narrator and the character of the poem. The poet has used rathotarical questions beginning with the “Wh” questions word “why” in the beginning of the poem. They are the examples of the structural repetition. The poem has used the pronoun first person singular “I” that refers to the poet herself. The poet slips into the memories of her bitter past. The phrase “hungry haste” is the example of the alliteration and also the personified metaphor. The line beginning with “of river, in me… the oceans tireless waiting… ” is also example of the metaphor. The poet compares her indifferent lover with the reference refers to the smile and alliteration. The phrase “drink lonely drink” is the example of the transparences. The poem progresses from the simple to the complex. The poet has used diverse of the contrast by identifying herself as the sinner and the saint, as the beloved and the betrayed. And these references also refer to the alliteration. The entire poem tells about the condition of woman in modern Indian society which is still male dominated society. The poem is backed by extensions.

The phrase “a rattle in my throat” is the example of the metaphor. The poet has used many “ing” verbs in the poem. They are “cowing”, “roaring”, “muttering”, “blazing”, “knowing”, “dying” etc. These words forms out a lexical category at grammar level. The poet has used the present tense while writing the poem.

“Suresh Kohli” observes “An Introduction is vitally communicative in as much as it is an indication of Mrs. Das’s use of language which is not her mother tongue”.