Redeeming poetry

One of the valuable aspects of poetry is its ability to redeem. Then there are other qualities to it as well; such as its ability to uncover truth in as gentle a manner as possible so that the end result of it all comes to the human senses when it serves its ultimate purpose of healing a society. Poetry is meant to unravel, to redeem and to heal – not the other way around.

But there is something else about poetry that makes it appear so dangerously simple looking – indeed so simple looking that we feel we can easily explain it. We use the adverb “dangerously” here because the moment we explain poetry, the moment we feel we have understood that poetry, we have unknowingly committed ourselves to an error in judgement. Our version of a poem might not mean the intended message of its author.

Poetry is neither didactic nor explanatory. It remains as it is. And it is meant to be overly complex and mysterious. Only the eye of the beholder knows it essence as beauty, as truth. Poetry is, therefore, felt and known – not explained or taught.

The art of feeling and knowing poetry can best be likened to attending a ceremony when young people are in the process of being graduated at their respective schools. In some foreign schools, for example, such ceremonies are read out in Latin. Of course no one knows what is being read then, but the most important thing is going through such a ceremony with a feeling of trepidation. So much anxiety is involved here; but again so much anticipation.

Then, of course, the hour of feeling and knowing arrives.  

President Ruth Simmons. Her popularity reached far beyond the shores of New England and extended as far as Papua New Guinea, especially in the world of academia.

Ruth Simmons, first African-American President of an Ivy League school (Brown University, Rhode Island, USA) does that very well comes commencement (or graduation) around June of each year at that school. After having read parts of the ceremony in Latin she leans over at her graduating youngsters and beams: “In case you are curious about what just happened, I’ve awarded you your degree.” And so the hats and hoods fly, the cloaks flutter, hugs abound, much rolling over and over and drumming and dancing upon the college green. They know what it was they were working so hard for the previous four years and they can feel it. Thus, the sacred essence of feeling and knowing poetry.

It is true poetry deals exclusively with human emotions. “Poetry is a spontaneous flow of powerful feeling,” declares one master of poetry. “Poetry is a science of words,” says another. And again, another, “Poetry is an imitation of reality.” But whatever it does, finally, declares quite another, there must be a certain “objective correlative” about it. So in essence there is always a reason that enables a person to write poetry.

The above are the basics of what are considered good poetry. Then there are the instances of bad writing such as when good poetry itself begins taking another direction. Such poetries fall under so many categories, but we can limit them here to protest, satire, caricatures and lampoons.

All these still constitute poetry but the sad aspect of them is that they last only in so far as the successive generations remember them. For example, the eternal poetic utterance: “Death, where is thy sting.” While many of us would associate that with Shakespeare the phrase actually comes from the Bible. Or, to look at another example, “to be or not to be, that is the question.” That poetic utterance, though first spoken some 700 hundred years ago, is still being used today. Question: Do we know what it means? Answer: We don’t have to. And that is what poetry really is, or ought to be.

But the poetry that seeks to teach, to explain, to reprimand, to rebuke or to even express a disappointment is hardly remembered by successive generations. That type of poetry is likely to suffer the severe scrutiny of an attentive literary critic. This is the guy who finally tells us if our writing is good or bad. And if we are wise we must believe him.

Now there have been so many poems appearing in the writers’ forum, but it is not storyboard’s business to accredit and assess them as poetry – as such observations usually come by upon invitation of each of the contributors to the forum. But there is one poem we would like to critique here, for just the reason of its pretentious stance of looking great. That poem is View of the Day by Deborah Kayuwa, represented as follows:

She came down to the beach

When they told her

And saw the familiar figure

Sitting still, looking out

To sea and the distant horizon

A moment of hesitation

Then the sure-footed steps towards

The figure; she sat down beside him

And took the half-smoked cigarette

From his fingers and smoked with him

The effect of nicotine helping a little

Her sisters came and placed thumbs

Over his eyes to shut them

For this had been the man who kept her

Vigilant 24 hours a day to answer

All her children’s needs, yet she

Could not take him into her family

She replaced the cigarette in his fingers

Fumes rising and sailing by

As they led her away, from the ocean

 And the motionless figure

For a moment she thought

She would pause, look back

But walked on

Although the poem may look classical it lacks depth in the sense that both poet and persona do not correspond perfectly as truthful sounding entities. On the part of the poet one suspects a member of a certain class in society not happy with his/her upbringing, suddenly caught up in some personal liaison he/she cannot get out of easily and that the only moment of liberation foreseen is re-assimilation. On the part of the persona, well, well, could it be possible that one might be in love with something that is dead? How can a dead man smoke and watch the long expanse of sea before him for a long time. But we can only admire the persona’s decision to walk away from the beach scene. Final evaluation? According to storyboard this is not at all a good poem. The author needs to enrol in more of Soaba’s literature classes.               

Meeting the white tiger

Cover photo courtesy of The White Tiger blog.

                                                                 

The White Tiger is an extraordinary novel about modern day India, a country which we take for granted as “the world’s centre of technology and outsourcing”. The narrator albeit protagonist takes us faithfully from his humble village of Laxmangarh through the tunnels of what we might regard as the underbelly of the biggest democratic country in the world, to the bright lights and chandeliers of Delhi and Bangalore. A reviewer in USA Today describes the novel as “one of the most powerful books I’ve read in decades. No hyperbole. This debut novel from an Indian journalist living in Mumbai hit me like a kick in the head...This is an amazing and angry novel about injustice and power.”

We meet the white tiger three times. Once at a rundown, neglected village school of Laxmangarh where a visiting school inspector christens him as such a one destined to fight corruption and alleviate his nation’s poverty because he has successfully recited a sentence written in English on the blackboard. The second encounter is at a local tea shop where he is forced by his grandmother to work and earn money by breaking coal to feed the ovens, just to be jeered at by his class mates:

“What is the creature that comes along only once in a generation?” one boy asked loudly.

“The coal breaker,” another replied.

And then all of them began to laugh.

Upon our third encounter with the white tiger, which is at the National Zoo in Delhi some months later, the narrator of the novel who is also the protagonist and “the white tiger” has this to say: “Then the thing behind the bamboo bars stopped moving. It turned its face to my face. The tiger’s eyes met my eyes, like my master’s eyes have met mine so often in the mirror of the car. All at once the tiger vanished.”

Meaning, our protagonist faints. This is an astonishing novel written by the Oxford and Columbia educated author, Aravind Adiga. The novel has altogether seven chapters. All the chapters are there. Except the third chapter, which presumably covers the period of time the narrator blacked out. Which is odd for a novel to have chapters 1, 2, 4, 5, 6 and 7, eh? No matter.

The narrative turns out to be an open letter addressed to “His Excellency Wen Jiabao, The Premier’s Office, Beijing, Capital of the Freedom-Loving Nation of China” who is about to visit Bangalore. The Premier needs to be informed about the realities of India. “Mr Premier, Sir,” our protagonist starts graciously, “neither you nor I can speak English, but there are some things that can only be said in English.”

And these things that can only be said in English become the faithful tone of honesty referred to earlier. The White Tiger is indeed an angry novel: that anger felt as truly belonging to the 21^st century; anger felt by the poor against the rich; anger felt by the least developed and less fortunate against the industrially rich and powerful, the ruthless and merciless. And by the by, as we reach the last pages of the novel, we realize that our protagonist has a far greater plan than we might have envisaged.

Balram Halwai alias Munna, for that is our protagonist’s name and by the end of the novel he will have assumed several more names and titles, goes through life as a humble school drop-out from the little village of Laxmangarh, works in a tea shop at the bidding of his grandmother (Kusum), runs away to the city where he learns and finally acquires a driving licence, then goes on to find work as a driver for a master, Ashok, who also had originated from the little village of Laxmangarh. Balram works for Ashok and his family consisting of his American wife Pinky Madam, and his brothers Mongoose and Mukesh Sir and their father known as the Stork.

He serves his masters well for a time until one night when Pinky Madam, drunk, takes over the wheels of the powerful Honda City from him in the streets of Delhi at two or three in the morning and runs over a child. The whole family present as passengers is shocked. Balram must be sacrificed for his masters. Necessary documentation has been prepared for him to sign and this in part reads: “That there were no other occupants of the car at the time of the accident. That I was alone in the car, and alone responsible for all that happened.” A lawyer has been bribed, all looks complete.

At which point the protagonist hints that the novel must end. But not before he completes a few more lectures for the Premier. India is a Rooster Coop, Balram advises. “Never before in human history have so few owed so much to so many, Mr Jiabao. A handful of men in this country have trained the remaining 99.9 per cent – as strong, as talented, as intelligent in every way – to exist in perpetual servitude; servitude so strong that you can put the key of his emancipation in a man’s hands and he will throw it back at you with a curse.”

While millions of wanted posters with his face on them are stuck on the notice boards throughout India, our protagonist of the 21^st novel retires to Bangalore a reformed man. There, to those who come to meet and know him, his reputation as a new man comes to their minds in large capital letters: “Meet Balram Halwai, the ‘White Tiger’: Servant, Philosopher, Entrepreneur, Murderer...”

And the poetry that rhymes with that, runs: “I was looking for the key for many years, but the door was always open.”

Elsewhere, within the vicinities of such geographical locations we hear echoes of same, through novels, poems, dramatic works, films, TV, videos, newspapers and radio programs and we find ourselves wondering how much of ethics and morals is visited in the dying hours of man and his endeavour to free himself from such bondage as the Rooster Coop and all the poverty, squalor and waste of human life that goes with it. The White Tiger is quite a novel and if we in PNG believe that neither the novel nor its author, Aravind Adiga, is relevant to us, then truly ol wantok we are kidding ourselves. Go to Delhi, Calcutta or Bangalore today and you will see on the walls of high rise buildings there the same betel nut spit (paang) we see on our own.

Story of a lifetime

Vonu Libitino, a 2nd year literature major at UPNG, feeling good about being the first to read Sir Thomas Ritako's autobiography. Photo by Storyboard.

                                                

Arise, Sir Thomas.

An eleven year-old boy is suddenly subjected to light jokes and mannerisms of a Titan (Manus) setting and as he turns twelve begins to take those jokes seriously. The jokes best describe him as a poor waif in the true PNG traditional meaning of the term. That further translates as nogat papa nogat mama, a term which truly implies material as much as hierarchal social poverty. Who are your parents and ancestors and where are your gardens and your land? These become impeding questions that the child grows up with on Sori Island, Manus Province.

In time, however, and as he turns twelve he sees the surrounding world differently. He cannot understand why the foreigners are bombing his beautiful islands of Sori and Baramang. He joins a group of boys his age and under direction from a 70 year-old elder they marched down to sea armed with special magical leaves, dip these into the water and then try waving the bombers away from the beautiful islands. They save their islands that way and the boy himself becomes all more curious about the given setting in which he is meant to grow up.

He thinks his biological parents, particularly his father, had been mean to dump him like that on Sori Island. He becomes a subject of both convenient jesting and ridicule among even his closest relatives but it is his cousin sisters who are more sparing, and through them he learns to question his own sense of existence.

As he does at that age we begin to see the philosophical essence of how and what it feels like growing up as a Papua New Guinean during the post-war period, the fifties, the sixties, the seventies and right up to the present. Papua New Guineans who grew up during this period have learnt something important which today we must seriously regard as the hour of our intellectual re-awakening. That period in our nation’s history is important in that sense. And we begin to see this clearly through the avenue of a certain genre in literature known as the autobiography.

This is Sir Thomas Ritako’s autobiography which runs for 258 pages and becomes a worthy addition to Papua New Guinea’s autobiographical literature that includes Sir Albert Maori Kiki, Sir Paulias Matane, Sir Michael Somare and Dame Carol Kidu, to name a few known ones. There could be several more and these would most certainly include Sir Ebia Olewale or the renown Ben Moide, depending on the talents and entrepreneurship of Papua New Guinean writers as prospective biographers.

The one of Sir Thomas Ritako’s is the work of Dr Bernad Minol of UPNG and Prof Ted Wolfers of the University of Wollongong, Australia, and it is published as Arise Sir Thomas by the University of Papua New Guinea’s Bookshop. What Minol and Wolfers did was guide Sir Thomas Ritako along and he in turn put pen on paper to let his thoughts come flowing out, forming one of the finest historical literary publications of our times. The same method, of course, was used by Professor Ulli Beier when initiating Albert Maori Kiki into the world of arts and letters, a work which would later become the monumental Ten Thousand Years in a Lifetime. The moral lesson to this remark is thus absolutely clear: Papua New Guinea you have all your resources available that are within reach; you alone can write your country’s literature and history. Look around you now and see how many whose life stories you can help write and publish for our future generations.

Of course, Sir Thomas was not stranded on Sori Island, to be left there feeling sorry for himself. He did venture out from the confines of simple Titan island life and travel eventually to New Ireland where he would meet his biological parents and ask why he was seemingly abandoned to fend for himself in the company of his grandmother, Awoh, who chided him one moment but came to his rescue the next when his cousins’ jestings could hardly be contained even by the adults themselves. After that meeting with his parents Sir Thomas then resolved to do what many Papua New Guineans of his generation set their minds to do: to pursue the challenges of education to the very roots of their foundations and come up with the resolution that, yes, we all can and be.

With that determination in mind he proceeds to Utu Government School but not without his father’s wish to send him off on yet another mission, this time not to Sori Island among his own blood relatives to do the preferred traditional “growing up” exercise, but with someone else, a school teacher known as Joseph Ritako who will become a mentor as much as a parent whose name he shall bear to the end of his days. Thus, the emergence of Sir Thomas Ritako.

From Utu Sir Thomas went to Kerevat Central School and then to the famous Sogeri Central School. What proceeded thenceforth is the same series of episodes that Papua New Guineans are familiar with, but with a great difference – and that is what the name Ritako suggests. The name, which is New Ireland in origin, derives from the Manus term Dritakou – meaning “over the fence”. For we can see now that what Sir Thomas did is a step further than what Sir Albert Maori Kiki did in Ten Thousand Years in Lifetime. From Sogeri he went through several stages of heightened intellectual development, at the Fiji Central Medical School, for example,  then to Port Moresby Teachers College, then to his postings as a teacher (like his two fathers before him), back to the Administrative College where he married his childhood sweetheart, Ruby, and onwards to some very important public service appointments, including overseas postings and his final achievement as a knight within the British Commonwealth of independent nations of the world.

Arise Sir Thomas is a beautiful autobiography to read. It brings fresh insight to those ideas already represented in the earlier autobiographical and biographical writings of PNG. The book also sheds light on various historical, intellectual as much as psychological details of our country, by being itself a very simple story so very simply and humbly told.

You can get your copy of Arise Sir Thomas from UPNG Bookshop at the Waigani Campus.

Poems by Deborah Kayuwa

                                                          

View of the day

She came down to the beach

When they told her

And saw the familiar figure

Sitting still, looking out

To sea and the distant horizon

A moment of hesitation

Then the sure-footed steps towards

The figure; she sat down beside him

And took the half-smoked cigarette

From his fingers and smoked with him

The effect of nicotine helping a little

Her sisters came and placed thumbs

Over his eyes to shut them

For this had been the man who kept her

Vigilant 24 hours a day to answer

All her children’s needs, yet she

Could not take him into her family

She replaced the cigarette in his fingers

Fumes rising and sailing by

As they led her away, from the ocean

 And the motionless figure

For a moment she thought

She would pause, look back

But walked on

            

Walking

Amazing how men choose

To walk ahead of others

Believing they are better

Than the rest

They stroll on ahead

Oblivious of the seasons

Walking the talk, talking

The false or truth

But they walk, anyway

Now I could tell you

About my own lover

Who’d once walked the talk

Way, way ahead of me

But that is yet another story

For another time, another place

Somewhere within the galaxy

              

Ring bark trees

My lover, he’s simply smashing

I tell Charity, my little sis

As we trace the initials carved round

The bark of this ancient tree

So many things carved on this tree

Of and by humanity in passing

Like stars and heart shapes

And diamonds and rings

Next to twelve others

Is my lover’s name

He is the best, I do declare

I notice tears in Charity’s eyes

She weeps for joy, she tells me

I know you are happy, she says

Let there be no other, she prays

Don’t hurt this one, big sis