Lopamudra Banerjee:
Lopa is an author, poet, editor and translator, currently based in Dallas, Texas, but originally from Calcutta, India. Her memoir 'Thwarted Escape: An Immigrant's Wayward Journey' was a First Place Category Winner at the Journey Awards 2015 and also received honorary mention at The Los Angeles Book Festival 2017. Her recent book of poetry and memoir, 'Woman and Her Muse' has also received critical acclaim and been featured in various journals and newspapers including The Sunday Statesman, Kolkata, and is now part of prestigious libraries in India and USA. Her poetry, stories and essays have been published in various literary e-zines, print anthologies and lit journals both in India, UK and USA. She has received the International Reuel prize for poetry (2017) and for translating Tagore's fiction (2016) and is currently a creative writing instructor/faculty in Dallas, USA.
Her recent works include ''All That Jazz and Other Tales (upcoming), and also 'Kolkata Cocktail', a poetry film collaboration to be released in December 2019. This photo is a still from the film.
For Simone De Beauvoir
[A reaction after reading parts of ‘The Second Sex’ by Simone De Beauvoir, French writer, intellectual philosopher, political activist, feminist, and reflecting on them as a woman from the Indian subcontinent.]
The last time I woke up,
I remember, I demanded a third space.
A space that meandered
from the hopscotch square
Of estrogen games, from the erectile brain
of testosterone urges.
A space of my own desperation of belongings
‘The Second Sex’, a requirement of my syllabus,
An elusive continent, a vociferous sea,
A torrid landscape of my own making.
Simone, I hadn’t known your name
The feel of that fiercely unwomanly woman
When in my girlhood, cascading beauty
Of princesses and heroines spilled
all over our barren courtyard,
from the basket of my grandmother’s tales.
Love was the promise of a sanctioned cacophony
Of children to be birthed, the language of coercion
As kings banished queens for sons not born,
Princes’ lip-locked with princesses,
‘Hail thee, patriarchy!’
The last time you twisted and turned us
In our dreams and sold us a ticket to witness
The vestiges of war between our own troubled selves,
I remember, we had pushed some boundaries,
But there were some barbed wires
which were better left on their own.
The last time your words entered my realm,
“One is not born, but becomes a woman,”
I remember the dark hunger, the denial,
The act of letting go, the truth of our beings.
Simone, we, the ‘other sex’, reborn, recycled
A zillion times, have been churned, fermented
Reclaiming our spaces in the fickle humanity.
Instruction Manual: How To Be That Badass Poet
How to turn to a badass poet
from a domestic goddess is easy.
Just unlearn your cuteness for the essential dark,
Stay on in the pitch-park galaxy,
marinated in sacrosanct words.
Play on in the tumultuous sea of sounds,
metaphors, diction of old poets
Take a line from here, a whiplash of pain from there,
A jingle, a whisper and a surreptitious peak
from the flammable past.
And then, in your own sticky canvas,
shed them off, along with
Your engaged arms, your heaving breasts,
your womb and birth canal,
Replace them all, the sexist jargons you learnt,
And lucid memories of labor
with your nascent, blood-soaked poetry.
Then, after you knead the dough
Of fickle human stories,
Divide the dough into little sacred mounds of word-flesh,
Born from your ancestral womb
Into the cradle of feminine fantasies.
And then, slowly, crisply deep fry them
with tenderness and affliction,
Fry them some more like children birthed
post the gestation period,
As you try to make a home
out of the vestiges of war within you,
The rubble of the overgrown cities within you,
Born between your immigrant dreams,
your becoming, your unbecoming.
To become a badass poet, to be reborn
A hundred times is as easy as it can get.
Only speak to the unfamiliar earth
with your unbridled wet body every time you see
A smoke of an unborn poem, a triggered survival act.
Only speak to your displaced self in the language
Of desperate desires, your tattered earth and sky.
For a non-lover
[Dedicated to the fiery daughter of Bangladesh, feminist author and poet Taslima Nasrin, inspired by her Bengali poem ‘Ek Opremiker Jonnyo’. A trans-creation.]
You and I will live in the same city,
You will run helter-skelter, spiraling around me
On the pretext of work, to fuel your own wantonness.
Somewhere near, you will chit-chat in your leisure,
Booze, shout, create an uproar, while rejoicing.
Then, the dark night will fall asleep, but you will remain awake.
In the evenings, you might go for dinners
To some Goddamn neighbor’s places, for playing,
Who knows, for even taking off a neighbor woman’s sari?
Who knows, her house might be just a stone’s throw away
From my courtyard!
You will stroll along the same roads as I do, remain within my grasp,
You might even let me know one day, you are staying this close to me,
Everyday. I will shrink, shred my own self into zillion pieces
In the pangs of our separation, yet never welcome you, never ever.
Never will I give you the chance to let me know how busy you have been
These days, that you have no time…I will save myself from
Your loveless apathy. You and I will never meet.
Years will go by, but you and I will never meet.
And then, the nothingness of not meeting you for years
Will let me forget how it had been, the experience of meeting you.
I will forget the color of your shirt, I will forget
How you looked when you smiled, how you dug your nails
When we talked, whether you ever looked into my eyes while speaking
Or somewhere else. I will forget whether you moved
Your feet, stood up from the chair frequently, drank water
Never meeting you for all these years, I will forget how you looked,
Where were the moles in your face, or if they were there, at all.
I will forget how your kisses felt, how it felt when you entangled
My hair, how it felt when your face was buried in my bosom.
Years will go by, but you and I will never meet.
We will breathe in the same city, but our paths will never collide,
Even mistakenly. Both of us will fall sick, but never meet
At the end of our familiar alley, at the petrol pump,
At the fish market, or in a restaurant.
Then, many years later, when an ardent evening
Will rush inside my solitary room with its sudden bursts of light,
When I will stand, forlorn, at the verandah and the wild breeze
Of Vaishakh will blow away my sari, I will talk to the moon
The whole night, filling the sky to the brim.
I will tell you then, silently, what is lost if we never meet?
It was preposterous to think that we would die if
We would never see each other again.
Whosoever said it is true?
I never met you in a thousand years, does that mean
I never lived?
I know now what I would tell you. I have pondered over it.
The truth is, you are just an embodiment of nothingness.
I had only crafted you with my fervent wants,
It was me who had crafted you as my lover,
It is me again who crafts you as a non-lover.
I can even live for a million years without seeing you,
Without touching a non-lover, forever.
My teardrop can usher in like torrential rain,
Wiping away all that had been painted,
Wiping away your name, your existence in one swift motion.
Do not think I am living alone,
Your loveless apparition lives with me, always.
*Vaishakh: The first month of the Bengali calendar.
The Burning
Sakha mine
I didn’t craft poetry for a fortnight now.
The crescent moon has burnt inside my bosom
Turning into a full moon, an exquisite flame of my self-chosen exile.
The fortnight has meandered from the path of the silken morning
To the surreptitious route of the pitch-dark night,
My body has scalded, bore a few burn marks at the turn of every single dusk,
leading to the dark, exiled night.
The earth has grown a few shades darker,
the morning, sucking it’s deep, black exile full throttle.
I didn’t craft poetry for a fortnight now.
Are you the one who tore open the petals of my nude, feminine verses?
Sakha, are you the secret slayer, the silent demon
Eating away, insect-like, the deep blue pathos
of the universe of my lyrics, one tiny bite at a time?
Are you the one who made Time your greatest ally,
Gave me the poison ivy with passion brimming
all over your betrayer of a body, mingling with mine?
I didn’t craft poetry for a fortnight now.
Sakha, remember the last night that you made me
your partner in the luscious bed,
The dark, moonless night had merged with my fearless surrender.
My morsels were all yours, the devil of my forbidden wants
was born out of your fierce verses.
Today, my poems scald with every stroke of the night
The silent, overgrown city inside me burns in its impossible dreams.
The green of my faith, easily born, is turning into the grey ashes of treachery.
Dreamless, moonless, my Home, my land,
my comfort zones burn, what is done cannot be undone.
I didn’t craft poetry for a fortnight now.
Sakha, your burnt out poetry, your dark undone
Is my home now, where can I flee?
Indianness: The Metaphor of the Misfit
My Indianness is the bookmark
of sweaty summer musk,
Tucked within the creases
of a self-same, overused book
In the slice of space where
memories of rickshaw-rides
And an old ghaat lay suspended
in a remembered patch of air.
My Indianness is the honks of buses,
yellow cabs and the odd stir
And jerky moves of local trains
and subways in a jetlagged return
To another home, responding
to a speck of reason.
The froth of my bangla catch-phrases,
in unwarranted, white-infested places.
My Indianness is the shameless squirt of inabilities
Which makes me an oddity
in a land where new sojourns
are embarked on, new road turns are made,
with pronounced insolence.
My Indianness is my scorching inferno,
as I shuttle between safe-same chores.
My Indianness is my white wallet
purchased from the dollar store
The chain of it that opens up
to reveal two pockets,
One carrying dollars in five, ten,
the other, rupee notes saved
From auto-rickshaw rides, a fleeting whiff
of homes and hearths, abandoned.
My Indianness is the everyday injury
which I can’t bury always, safely.
The fervent flicker of memories,
the occasional dents in the brain
unfazed by changing colors,
the blinding maze of lanes, by-lanes, highways
When all around me, the sweet lure of amnesia
wins over others so easily.
My Indianness taunts me
as I dream of houses moved in, in my slumber
Houses with cement stairs
and the sparks of tube-light,
and crickets chirping
Outside large glass windows
covered with white blinds.
As I hang on a thin rope,
flanked by odorless comforts and dusky sorrows.
I write verses, stories on diaspora,
my Indianness, a nameless brook
That craves to be one with a mighty river,
a vain promise to dilute
Thick foams of whiplashes,
onslaughts, residues of soot.
My Indianness is the perpetual rebellion,
the telltale signs of embracing mess.
Ghaat: River-bank
Rickshaw: A vehicle used in India and some other Asian countries, a light, hooded vehicle resembling a three-wheeled bicycle, sometimes hand-pulled, having a seat for passengers behind the driver.
Bangla: Bengali, the Indic language spoken in Kolkata (India) and other parts of northeastern India and Bangladesh.
All Rights Reserved. Lopa Banerjee. November 13, 2019
Await more from Kashiana Singh, Santosh Bakaya, Don Yorty etc
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