Architecting irony in poetry

Adil Jussawalla

Adil Jussawalla was born in Mumbai, and spent most of the years between 1957 and 1970 in England where he studied to be an architect, wrote plays, read English at Oxford and taught English at a language school. Returning to Mumbai, he taught English at St Xavier’s College between 1972 and 1975. An Honorary Fellow at the International Writing Program in Iowa in 1977, Jussawalla has participated in several international conferences and festivals.

Jussawalla’s highly acclaimed first book, Land’s End, written almost entirely in England and Europe, was published when he was twenty-two. It was hailed by a critic as a book that captured “the artificiality and vulgarity of this age, the paradoxical nature of our emotions and desires, the unbridgeable gulf between ‘you’ and ‘I’, between dream and reality and the beauty and ugliness of love.”

In the poetry of Jussawalla, we no longer find the Janus-faced postcolonial impulse of looking to the past to reaffirm the present. The poetry is born instead of a decision to look the present unflinchingly in the face, in all its disfigured and fractured reality. There is no attempt to escape “the various ways of dying that are home”, no resort to a visionary romanticism nor a nostalgic recreation of a more innocent history.

The irony grows darker and is accompanied by a discernible political consciousness (Marxist-Fanonite in inspiration) in the second book, Missing Person, written after his return to India. While a morally compromised, hollow and absurd world is acknowledged, the self is also implicated in the failed quest for meaning. “If one tried literally to represent the different elements of world culture of which one’s mind is made, one would write a language no one would understand. I have tried to suggest this chaos in Missing Person,” says Jussawalla.

But also implicit in this evocation of chaos is a trenchant critique of the underlying market-driven ethic of the bourgeoisie – a class that “can only torment itself with its own contradictions or turn on itself in a fury of self-destruction”.

As critic Sudesh Mishra puts it: “For Jussawalla, the ironic emphasis on the marginal and the ‘non-human’ is perhaps a way of saying that the processes involved in the dehumanisation of art may well, in the future, contribute to the rehumanisation of man.”

Jussawalla’s is not an immediately accessible poetry, nor does it aspire to be. When asked in an interview by Peter Nazareth in 1978 about the peril of being incomprehensible, Jussawalla responded, “Well, I think the situation of the poet in India is such that being misunderstood is part of his function.”

In the same interview, Jussawalla was asked about the responsibility of the writer in times of crisis. “I don’t know,” he replied. “I think each writer will deal with the crisis in his own way . . . Maybe I see writing as an activity, at least for me personally, as linked up with a whole life, a whole sense of time. Indian writers do have a different sense of time in relation to their own work than the writers in the States, in England and in France, which means that we are bound to have a different attitude even to crisis . . . Am I being fatalistic if I say that for Indians, the crisis is perpetual?”

(By)Arundhathi Subramaniam

Some of his poems

[All under copyright. No reproduction by any source without the permission of the Author}

Sea Breeze, Bombay

Partition's people stitched

Shrouds from a flag, gentlemen scissored Sind.

An opened people, fraying across the cut

country reknotted themselves on this island.

Surrogate city of banks,

Brokering and bays, refugees' harbour and port,

Gatherer of ends whose brick beginnings work

Loose like a skin, spotting the coast,

Restore us to fire. New refugees,

Wearing blood-red wool in the worst heat,

come from Tibet, scanning the sea from the north,

Dazed, holes in their cracked feet.

Restore us to fire. Still,

Communities tear and re-form; and still, a breeze,

Cooling our garrulous evenings, investigates nothing,

Ruffles no tempers, uncovers no root,

And settles no one adrift of the mainland's histories.

Approaching Santa Cruz Airport, Bombay

Loud benedictions of the silver popes,
A cross to themselves, above
A union of homes as live as a disease.
Still, though the earth be stunk and populous,
We’re told it’s not: our Papa’ll put his nose
Down on cleaner ground. Soon to receive
Its due, the circling heart, encircled, sees
The various ways of dying that are home.
‘Dying is all the country’s living for,’
A doctor says. ‘We’ve lost all hope, all pride.’
I peer below. The poor, invisible,
Show me my place; that, in the air,
With the scavenger birds, I ride.

Economists enclosed in History’s
Chinese boxes, citing Chairman Mao,
Know how a people nourished on decay
Disintegrate or crash in civil war.
Contrarily, the Indian diplomat,
Flying with me, is confident the poor
Will stay just as they are.
Birth
Pyramids the future with more birth.
Our only desert, space; to leave the green
Burgeoning to black, the human pall.
The free
Couples in their chains around the earth.

I take a second look. We turn,
Grazing the hills and catch a glimpse of sea.
We are now approaching Santa Cruz: all
Arguments are endless now and I
Feel the guts tighten and all my senses shake.
The heart, stirring to trouble in its clenched
Claw, shrivelled inside the casing of a cage
Forever steel and foreign, swoops to take
Freedom for what it is. The slums sweep
Up to our wheels and wings and nothing’s free
But singing while the benedictions pour
Out of a closing sky. And this is home,
Watched by a boy as still as a shut door,
Holding a mass of breadcrumbs like a stone.

Colour Problems in the Family

Mother forgot her features when the rest,
Pinker with Persia, found her future black.

So father turned up, obligingly darker,
His iron skin scorched in its shirt of rust.

Yellow frogs, grandmother called us,
Sallow herself, brass with a touch of ash.

Then you, rose, haven for browns and blacks,
Said that colours that ran in my family
Had no place in your sun.

True.
They were colours I shed on your shoulder,
Bled on your shirt as you spoke.
They were true, and continue to run.

Geneva

Let me put out my welcome like a flag
Of olive leaves to wrap you in my truce:
Geneva: metropolis: one of the neutral cities
Here to relax you. I do not rot, or run
With sores like children; fertile, eastern suns
Breed maggots like brats; but spotless, sunburnt backs
Is all my shining citizens may (publicly) show.
The rest you may read in my eyes, my glazed shop-windows.
What do you see there?
A stuffed eagle and a clapping-clockwork bear.

Let me console you. I wasn’t made between
A sundown and sunrise in labour, by hands in bitterness,
Or hands weeping over rubble; not one
Built in a brickless desert of brick, nor stone
From the sacked quarries of Greece; but a white palace
Sits on my green acres: from shattered lands
Troubled statesmen wear away its steps
For you; I’ll bring you peace: I understand,
Keep, as a souvenir,
A stuffed eagle and a clapping-clockwork bear.

Smile, love, mix in my cafés, think of
Jerusalem; bless, in St Peter’s, my vigil and valour.
My fountain leaps a sixth of a mile in hope,
And Peace a turbine humming in the deep.
My museums –

The voice cracks, the streets darken,
The sword falls dripping through the yellowing air.
There are no clouds, but over the dwarfed city,
Dwarfing the toy Alps, fight

A stuffed eagle and a clawing, clockwork bear.

The Waiters

Blacker than wine from the loaded grapes of France,
Blacker than mud their Tamil minds recall,
Dark skins serving dishes to the sallow
Sweat more night than grapesblood has. All
The long summers they abjured, for chance
Of better prospects, change, a sun of contrast,
Stick in a language their clients won’t allow.
Must button up their manners with the past.
Grow expert on the epicure’s stuffed heart,
Polite of speech, punctilious, guarded, kind.
As guardians of good taste, these waiters know
The soiled and cluttered kitchens of the mind,
The rancid oils where sweeter dishes start,
Cooked, like a pick-up’s words, the soot-black roof
Behind our pasted smiles: their darkness grew
To insight in their day; they stand aloof.
But slacken in their service after eleven.
Guarding the day’s unending appetites,
Grow shifty-eyed, avoid our munching faces,
The spit and polish of our eating rites.
Then closing time: they dream of a foodless heaven,
Shrug off their coats like priestly cloaks of pity,
Day’s ministry complete. Slip to their sleeping places
In the throat of the feasted, pink-faced city.

© Adil Jussawalla

NINE POEMS ON ARRIVAL

Spiders infest the sky.
They are palms, you say,
hung in a web of light.

Gingerly, thinking of concealed
springs and traps, I step off the plane,
expect take-off on landing.

Garlands beheading the body
and everyone dressed in white.
Who are we ghosts of?

You. You. You.
Shaking hands. And you.

Cold hands. Cold feet. I thought
the sun would be lower here
to wash my neck in.

Contact. We talk a language of beads
along well-established wires.
The beads slide, they open, they
devour each other.

Some were important.
Is that one,
as deep and dead as the horizon?

Upset like water
I dive for my favourite tree
which is no longer there
though they've let its roots remain.

Dry clods of earth
tighten their tiny faces
in an effort to cry. Back
where I was born,
I may yet observe my own birth.

EVENING ON A MOUNTAIN

The valley sunned itself all day, its span
Curving up two foothills; then the shadows
Crossed like wings across its back; further,

Ferries embroidered a slim lake, stitching
Silk into its cotton, prows snipping...
How still it was then! the sky thin and hollow,

Deflecting the words stoned across the valley,
The ears straining at each rebound; for off,
A cloud, launched from a rock, streaked

North like a startled bird.

Halt X

I
I do not know what station this is, or why
We broke our journey; checked, here in Derbyshire,
One senses danger, disquietude only.

Pieces of smoke litter the huddled town-
Card collage on felt; no pattering movement
On roads of sliding newspaper, sidling dog.
No alighting or descending the steps of its drizzling doors.

II
Rain fell like a drizzle of fine slag
On an anonymous town in smudged Derbyshire.
I counted sixty chimneys in a quarter
The size of a burgher's courtyard, wondered at smoke
Sliding edgeways through the dawn's widening slats.

A flock of pigeons dissolved in the viscid air
Like a piece of mud in a current; 5 o'clock.
A streetlamp craned its neck for the spreading frogs.