Glacier Journal Of Scientific Research ISSN:2349-8498
Running Head Line: TRAUMAAS REFLECTEDIN KAMALA DAS’S POETRY 1
Dr. Nazibar Rahaman\
Principal,
kaliachak college,
Malda,west Bengal
Author Note
Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Dr. Nazibar Rahaman is now Principal of Kaliachak College P.O.Sultanganj, Dist. Malda, West Bengal PIN. 732201 formerly he was HoD in English in West Goalpara College , Goalpara , Assam.Cell: 9700144644 ,Email: ;
Traumaas Reflected in Kamala Das’s Poetry 2
Abstract:
Human Life is not without emotional shock that may have long-term effects on behavior or personality that can result in different situation and steps in the experience which may increase stressand may lead to upset state. A poetic art being the basic part of literature manifests the social down the ages. The poetry of Kamala Das, one of the greatest Indian English poet, expose a lot of events and situations that wounded her personality and diminished herdesires which influence the directionof life.
This paper focuses on the shocking occurrenceof life reflected in some representative poems ofKamala Daswhich led to the traumatic situations or identity crisis. Her poetry give a picture of confessional mode like the artists of same boat as Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Berry-man, Judith Wright.
Key Words: shock, traumatic, confessionalmode,
.
full paper:
Trauma as Reflected in Kamala Das’s Poetry
3
Emotional shocks that may injure the mental health having short-term or long-term effects on behavior or personality of human being which may increase trauma and may lead to make upset the person who cannot overcome the situation. But one may trace out the way of growth with the tinge of optimism who tries to overcome the pain. Kamala Das, an Indian English Poetis one of the pioneer trios of poetic genre of Indian English Literature along with Nissim Ezekiel and A. K. Ramanujan whose grieved soul could establish her merit by trying to attain her position by overlooking the losses of love throughout the life. In national or international literary scenario she remains one the champions of the confessional mode of writing and unconventional style of composition. She has won a number of awards and honours for her works. She was even shortlisted for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1984. In different European countries, Australia along with India her works in English are widely anthologized.
The main source of her lifeline remains the struggle in every step of loss of love and trial to gain it, attacking by disease and trial to recover from it. The source of tragedy in the life of Kamala Das may be affectionless attitudes of parents, loveless bond of marriage physical disability due to prolonged illness. In treating the effect of pain or trauma a glimpse of the life of Kamala Das is to be considered.
Birth:
Kamala Das was born in Punnayukulam, Malabar District, Madras Presidency, British India,
now in Kerala on march 31, 1934 in an educated and established Nair family. Nairs belong to the aristocratic Kayastha faction of Hindu society. Malabar is situated in the coastal area of the Arabian Sea in South India. Her maternal grandfather and great-grandfather were Rajas in their native place under the colonial rule.
Combination of Royal and Peasant Background:
Balamani Amma, the mother of Kamala Das descends from the royal family of Raja and her father, V. Madhavan Nair comes from the peasant stock and influenced by the Gandhian principles of austerity. Her father was ‘for the first time into the family a bridegroom who neither belonged to any royal family nor was a Brahmin’. [i] However the
Trauma as Reflected in Kamala Das’s Poetry 4
[ii]combination of royal heritage of maternal family and peasant tradition of paternal side could not harmonize to make a happy house. ’Mother did not fall in love with my father. They were dissimilar and horribly mismatched’. [iii]
Reign of Pain:
The worksof Kamala Das reflectedterrible and pessimistic vision in the initial part but in the latter part it turned to betragic and revolting. She had no scope to maintain the originality and freedom of life and had to suffer from crisis of identity in male dominated life after marriage on one hand but on the other hand pre matrimony period was affectionless. Her works are full of agony, uncertainty and lack of peace and satisfaction. Pain reigned in different sphere of the whole tenure of her creative part but surrender to the circumstances or acceptances of failure were not found in her exposure.
Sources of Trauma:
(i)Carelessness of Parents:
Due to the ‘dissimilar and horribly mismatched’ father and mother Kamala Das exposed a lot of Sufferingof the in the period before adolescence out of humiliationone repercussion focused as “I wanted like Sita to disappear into the bowels of the earth.”.[iv]Discrimination between male child and female child, deprivation of affection, longings of love and admiration even of hugging by father torn her.
ii) Loveless Matrimonial Life:
After the first son Manu was born she hoped to be matured enough to satisfy her husband but when he came to visit them in Malabar he did not show any interest to enjoy the body of the wife even he did not pay a heed to converse with Kamala in good way. As a result she felt humiliated with this act of negligence. Moreover Mr. Das was busy enough to deal with the sister cousin’s of his wife. Both the matters of not conversing with Kamala and the intimacy with the cousins hurt
Trauma as Reflected in Kamala Das’s Poetry 5
Mrs. Das. This hurt- breaking feeling got its point when in the dusk Mr. Das was found to have a close terms with a cousin of Kamala. After returning Bombay from Kerala. Mr. Das wrote the first letter not to his wife but to the girl cousin who allowed her to hug in the evening. When he was in Malabar Kamala was ‘yearned for a kind word and a glance in my directions’ when he came to visit the first son and the mother of his own son. This yearning made her impatient and her ego as a woman pave her towards the way to teach the husband a lesson. The lesson by playing the device of tit for tat i.e, offering love to another man other than the husband.
Old Playhouse’,
“...... you called me wife,
I was taught to break saccharine into your tea and
To offer at the right moment the vitamins. Cowering
Beneath your monstrous ego I ate the magic loaf and
Became a dwarf I lost my will and reason, to all your
Questions, mumbled incoherent replies’’ [v]
ii) Illness and Loneliness
The works of Kamla Das including poetry, novel, autobiography and essays are replete with tragic temperament, among them poems, novel, autobiography are pessimistic and there remain a slight optimism in the essays those bear the note of
rebellious tone. The major portion of her works witness the autobiographical elements. In these writings she traces herself as neglected child, an unloved wife overall an unhonoured women. Out of which she gathered an idea about the surroundings which was full of terror,betrayal and unsecured. Dwivedi rightly comments on the optimistic element in the works of Kamala Das.
Trauma as Reflected in Kamala Das’s Poetry 6
Instead of robust optimism of the kind of Robert Browning, we find tragic outlook behind her work of the kind of G.M Hopkins (minus his religious fervour) and Thomas Hardy.” [vi]
If there are the ingredients of tragedy in the poetry or novel it can be regarded as the tragic poetry or novel. So the poetry and novels of Mrs. Das bear the tragic vision as they have the tragic element. The tragedy of Manasi, the protagonist of the novel Alphabet of Lust reminds us the Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar though the latter from Australia.
The true tragedy of her heart is reflected in ‘The Freaks’in the collection ‘Summer in Calcutta’.Her hopelessness is also aired in the poem.
who can
Help us who have lived so long
And have failed in love.
Here the poet expresses the innate nature of woman impatience and frustration with man for sexual failure. The frustration with time is also found for the long period she has to suffer her lot. In the poem Sepia she portrays the human sorrow:
‘Let anger grow like a living sun
And scorch
Scorch to the very marrow,
This sad mouthed human
Race...... ’
This is an ironical element to express the poets wrath against the very marrow whom she wants to be scorched. She gets angry and out of anger she becomes rebellion against the sad mouthed human race.
Trauma as Reflected in Kamala Das’s Poetry 7
‘With its quiet tongue’ traces the wretchedness of her own which has broken and become cold facing the loneliness and her personal predicament:
‘My heart-the wretched thing - is today
Cold like those pale green mirrors
One sees in corridors...... ’
‘...... I think of death.
Understanding it to
Be like night fall, just a
Temporary phase, which
Brings no loss,...... ’.p-61
Like her poetry there is a serious note of death reality in the 50th chapter of her autobiography. She became gloomy and dispirited in her activities when she was ill.
I have been for years obsessed with the idea of death. I have come to believe that life is a mere dream and that death is the only reality. It is endless, stretching before and beyond our human existence. To slide into it will be to pick up a new significance. Life has been, despite all emotional involvements, as ineffectual as writing on moving water. We have been mere participants in someone else’s dream.[vii]Misery in her life makes her cold and frigid where she cries the loneliness out of her husband’s bond of ill-treatment. She writes:
As I wrote more and more in the circles I was compelled to move in, I became lonelier and lonelier. I felt that my loneliness was like a red brand on my face.In company when there were dinners at any friend’s house,I sat still as a statue,feeling cruel vibration all
Trauma as Reflected in Kamala Das’s Poetry 8
around me. Then my husband realised my plight and stopped taking me out any where.[viii]
Her tragedy has got expression in her poetry, her autobiography as well as in her novels also. In the novel Alphabet of lust Kamala Das painted the picture of the protagonist of the novel, Manasi. The tragic temperament is so evident in her life that her all section of writings covered the theme.There are some references in every works among which the exemplary touch about the temperament is noted in this work and a simple quotation is placed here, where Kamala Das notes the feelings of Manasi:
Perhaps there was a God. A power higher than even the Prime Minister. She hated herself then. How despicable I have become, she whispered into Amol’s ears as he kissed her throat.[ix]
Once Manasi comes from Delhi to her home she confessed her fault to her husband.She understood the plight of her daughter also that she was raped by the rapper of the mother herself.She also understood that she was responsible for the ruin of the family.
These analysis of the writings of Kamala Das shows that there is a rebellious tone against the male and the pessimistic note to have the solution of it with the tragic tempts but there is a quest of comic pleasure in it. Life is not dull and it should not be spoilt there must have a happiness, for it one should struggle and find the way which may leadher a happy abode even in exchange of all efforts. Then the person will be an independent and free women to deal the life on the spacious earth and under the open sky of the world .
Kamala Das though was hunched over the tremendous trouble from her husband and envious critics never lost the undaunted will to have a happy ending of her life. The beauty of life, the sweetness of the earth the mirth and joy of family were her target, though here was a death consciousness in her and there was a severe bitterness in the circumstance.She felt panic, suffered ill health in the period of pregnancy but the joy of listening the delicious call ‘Amma’ had not resisted rather composed poetry in the mirth. The married life proved failure, become doubtful in the eyes of her own, received not love but
Trauma as Reflected in Kamala Das’s Poetry 9
betrayal, attacked by criticism wanting freedom, she wanted not the divorce but hopped to be a good wife, a good mother, a good women. That so why it is true that Kamala Das expressed the tragic temperament which resulted from her practical day to day life, but this is not all in her experience rather she show very strong intention in search of a pleasure in the days to come.
References:
[i] Das Kamala, My Story, Sterling Publication, P- 4
[iii] Ibid
[iv] Ibid P- 42
[v] The Old Play House 40
[vi] Dewivwdi A. N. Kamala Das and her poetry, P- 83
[vii] Das Kamala, My Story, Sterling Publication, P- 218
[viii] Das Kamala, My Story, Sterling Publication, P- 176
[ix] Das Kamala, Alphabet of Lust P-143-144