Proma Tagore's Poems

Had been reading Proma Tagore's work from Red Silk: An Anthology of South Asian Canadian Women Poets. I wanted to read her work primarily because she is another South Asian academic-poet figure, and on top of that, writes about Bengali-ness in interesting ways. For example, one of her poems is called khichuri after noon. Now how can I just bypass a title like that? Similarly, she has a bi-lingual poem called "between tongues" which is literally a list of phrases in Bengali and their translations in English. It is an interesting idea, but there were a couple of places where I stumbled hard. For example, kalpanar daka, she has translated as through a calling of dreams. Now, kalpana is so not dream, it's imagination. So, I keep wondering is it a bengali-american's lack of enough knowledge of the language, or is it more like a stretching of the meaning of the word kalpana. Similarly, chotobelar gantha has been translated as "childhood weaves". I find that too literal, for "gantha" is indeed weaving, but it's also a word which connotes stories or narratives. And here, I would have liked a little bit of more exploration to play with that double-meaning in the English translation. But maybe then, she leaves them in the way they are for only the Bengali readers to get certain things? In any case, I don't think I will venture out to write a bi-lingual poem in that way anytime soon. I will stick to English and Bangla. Separately.

But overall, I do think, her poems do have some strong lines. For example,
"in remembering,
our rage will hold,
our words will refuse to be kept,
and i will not be consoled
tonight."

Or,
"resilience singing out
in all textures of brown:
earth, mud, clay, bark."

I like these lines because there is an effort to engage with colonial/imperial/neo-colonial state of being in here, it moves beyond the de-politicized way of dealing with gender in both American and Bengali mainstream women's poetry. I like the little reference to color, the different shades of brown all explored through concrete objects. It irrevocably brings up race, without being very explicit about it. That is, it does not pronounce the word "race" anywhere. I love the title of her poem "when places leave." There's a sense of mystery in there. And again, a sense of an awareness of the colonial/neo-colonial state. I mean,places vanish. Literally. In so many ways. And then, obviously in the minds of the people. And my home-state is, right now, in the middle of all that. Places are vanishing fast. So are people along with them.

But where I am also thinking a little bit, and feeling somewhat skeptic, is the way I am seeing post-colonial academic jargon very squarely placed in her poems. I want some of that there, though not in the form of those jargons themselves, but rather in forms of ideas, concrete stories, images, and words. In short, I want that theoretical knowledge from post-colonialism and gender studies to be translated into poetic forms and formal techniques of writing. The other thing is, these poems are little too "diasporic" for me. I am not "hybrid" in that sense. I speak and read and write in my native-tongue quite quite fluently. Thank you.

So, there is that obvious problem of not being able to relate to that immigrant anxiety in here.Instead, I would have liked a little bit more delving into concrete history through the images and the stories. Like, the little note she has about the use of the word "khichuri" in her family, especially in women's lingo, could well have been a poem in itself, and in my opinion, a much more interesting one than the one she has now.That footnote has a sense of history, social space, language in the way the poem does not have. Especially, I could have done without a coinage like "hybridized tongue."

My own writing has taken a back-seat now. I mean, I am writing. The second draft of the first chapter of my dissertation. So, I am not seeing much chance of spending much time with my poems and stories until Spring Break.