SILENCE: WHITE DISTRUST reviewed in Das Literarisch, Vol.4, Issue 1, 2021
Poised between Contraries: A Review of Ram Krishna Singh’s Silence: White Distrust : Basudhara Roy
Basudhara Roy
Jamshedpur, India
Ram Krishna Singh
Silencio: Blanca desconfianza
Silence: White Distrust(Spanish Edition)
Poetry
Editorial Ave Viajera S.A.S., 2021
ASIN (Kindle) B08XWHTG19
Pp 65 | Price Rs. 441
Can mental spaces engage in a chromatic dialogue? Can colours be narrativized? Can contrary impulses generate a meaningful conversation? Is it possible to find a poetic rhythm for the darkening world that has been ours ever since the Covid’19 pandemic set in? As crisis follows crisis in these difficult times and existent words recurrently fall short of expressing new, unimagined realities, one wishes one had something more concrete than language to work with and cast one’s feelings immortally to memory. “Language in art,” says Harold Pinter, “remains a highly ambiguous transaction, a quicksand, a trampoline, a frozen pool which may give way under you, the author, at any time. But as I have said, the search for the truth can never stop. It cannot be adjourned, it cannot be postponed. It has to be faced, right there, on the spot.” For poet-academic-critic R.K. Singh too, truth-seeking is a responsibility that cannot be shrugged off by the committed artist, no matter how difficult the trials faced. In Silence: White Distrust, the poet attempts the daunting creative challenge of forging a new poetic rhythm to express the new pandemic experience of disillusionment, fractured chronological time, acute biological consciousness and an alienating isolation from the social world. What is remarkable is that the attempt, besides meeting unquestionable success, reaches into the depths of philosophical questioning to offer new perspectives on life and the potential of the human mind to map its paradoxes.
In his Introduction to the collection, the poet writes:
Covid-19 lockdown has been a physically, mentally andemotionally challenging experience. Living in isolation inconstant fear, suffering strict social and personal distancing,there has been a gradual rise of ‘distrust' in all that was positive,self-regulating, and internally strengthening or uplifting. Mysilent reflections within, and observations without, exposedto me my personal, as well as socially larger, loss of hope andfaith that embed spirituality.I noticed the trend in my recent poetic expression anddiscovered that it was possible to develop a new collection ofpoems with a thread of silence and distrust running throughit. It also seemed possible to do a long experimental haiku-tanka-haiku linked verse….
The entire collection is composed in the fabric of a linked haiku-tanka-haiku sequence that not only appears to replicate the experience of pandemic slow time but conjures in sincere, heartfelt rhythms the despondency and sanitized silence of our days. Singh’s poetry, as one reads through it, records the minutiae of our everyday lives with infallible accuracy and stark realism. Strewn across it are familiar landmarks of desire, unfulfillment, waiting, conjecture, failure, disappointment and loss. Singh’s evocative imagination finds powerful metaphors for emotional states in the most mundane objects of our daily world – “empty chairs”, “stain-dried lingerie”, “spiders' network/ between two photo frames”, “broken bangles”, and “the city’s garbage”. The observations are neither extraordinary in themselves nor worth pondering over out of context. But through their rare felicity of association in Singh’s poetry, they derive a potency that transforms them into three-dimensional architectural images of memorable strength and beauty.
Throwing light on the significance of his title, Singh writes, “Silence ispositive; White too has positive connotations, but Distrust isnegative. White Distrust is ironical; it is a harmless fib. Thereis no moralising, lecturing, or teaching.” The idea, one realizes, is to sketch experience sharply poised between contraries. On the one hand is the overwhelming regime of silence with its epistemological, creative and poetic possibilities. On the other, however, is the constant and poignant sense of distrust that inhibits the mind from settling down comfortably into this space of silence. Here is a vivid and vibrant interaction of two opposing modes of feeling – silence with its connotations of fertility, expansiveness, absorption, acquiescence and peace, and distrust with its echoes of interruption, destructive questioning, faithlessness and disjunction. The accomplishment of the book rests on the delicate but firm balance established between these powerful opposing emotional forces. It is to Singh’s immense credit as a poet that he never disregards the unspectacular truth to conquer the glamorous falsehood and allows them both to stand as they are, sans regret and sans illusion. In Silence: White Distrust, there is no obliteration of one category of experience by the other but rather, a unique expression of their cohabitation. If silence is spatial, distrust is projected as temporal so that the two remain ceaselessly poised in a perpendicular relationship, commenting and reflecting on each other through these monologic verses of confident elegance.
Silence, yes, but why distrust, one might be prompted to ask? Also, one wonders if these are entirely topical poems that derive their shape and sensibility from the context of the difficult pandemic? A close reading of the collection amply illustrates that the answers to both questions are linked. The distrust is dominant only because though appearing during the pandemic, these are not exclusively or merely pandemic poems. Born out of long drawn-out years of Singh’s constant poetic searching for permanent existential truths, these poems claim for their creative site, the ageing human body and a mind wizening towards omniscience. For Singh, the body through its needs, demands, rituals, illusions and fallibility, establishes itself as the most significant medium of experience. The fact of ageing and distrust of the body marks itself indelibly in these poems:
things get hairy, scary
with body failure
ailments pop up
spirit dries up
mind disconnects
hesitating
to take the first step through–
stands at the door
unhappy
with how I look and
feel right now
seek a best version
and just look within
It is worth noting how the spatial breaks in the poem underline the sense of disconnection, hesitation, faltering and repair. The rhythm is that of the colloquial, speaking voice and yet, the arrangement of the lines graphically on the page compounds its meanings manifold. “The white space between anytwo haiku and tanka adds to the sense of silence or peace,” explains Singh. “It adds to the sense of Meditation too. The verses becomemeditative as Silence is poetically and spiritually meditative,but its rhythm is disturbed by the rising feeling of Distrust.” Consider the following set:
earthy body
nights of silence
fear in mirror
return to the river
echoing hollowed sound
long waiting
short consultation–
ophthalmologist
morning smog–
an asthmatic with grandson
coughing restlessly
on the terrace even
a limping crow seeks fresh air
The fragility of the body is paramount here and yet, one realizes that this fragility is not only physical or individual. It is, in the larger sense, a condition and imperative of life itself, of the earth, of human myopia, and the thread of existence that inevitably runs from one generation to another. Even the mirror and the crow then, become a part of this uncertainty and distrust, reflecting it and responding to it. Consider again, the following set of poems:
pre-monsoon ramble
wilderness in harmony–
worlds within world
hail stones
lashing mango florets
my car too:
I fear thunder squall and rain
leaking roof and wetting bed
wild sugar cane
no animals savor
ageing monsoon
Here again, the poet leaves us amazed by the symbolic registration of the progress of time through telling images – pre-monsoon rambles, lashing mango florets and the ageing monsoon. The temporal pace of these poems merits observation as the reader is constantly made aware of the steadyflow of moments and seasons in a cyclical frame. Singh’s economy, terseness, sharpness and precision of expression deserve special attention as does his mastery over poetic form. The haiku and the tanka are highly challenging poetic forms by reason of their sheer minimalism, their syllabic discipline and their ability to speak more only through less. Independent, self-referential and self-explanatory units of meaning and thought, the haiku and tanka demand a deep acquaintance with techniques of condensation, reflection, refraction and amplification. The haiku-tanka-haiku sequence that Singh crafts in the book bespeaks volumes for his expertise and experimentation in minimalism, transforming the linked sequence into an evocative narrative of colour and a dense chromatic dialogue between the myriad hues of the mind. Each haiku and tanka has its own distinct subjectivity here as it formulates its personal perspective of the world. And yet, there is a strong etiological force spurring the reader on from one poem to another so that in its totality, the sequence acquires a grand epical quality and becomes a poignant litany for our times.
Tranquil yet restless, linear yet cyclical, multi-layered yet unified, fragmented yet compound, R.K. Singh’s Silence: White Distrust that includes a Spanish translation by Joseph Berolo, Bogota, Colombia, is a singular success in the poetic ambition of translating emotional colour into language and engaging contrary ideas in an insightful colloquy. Travelling through the piece which is now included in the poet’s latest collection Against the Waves: Selected Poems (New Delhi: Authorspress, 2021), is a journey through life’s outwardness into the deep, inward recesses of the self. As a reader and critic, one realizes that an encounter with this book shall remain memorable and worthy and that these poems shall continue to be valued both for their independent lustre and for the astounding brilliance that they impart to the unfathomable wisdom of life.
posted by Ram Krishna Singh at 11:20 PM
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