Experimental poems resonate with the poet’s identity as migrant, scholar, thinker

“Memories are more effective than memoirs. Isolation counts for more than continuity.”

— Craig Raine

The alliterative swag in the title of Ashwani Kumar’s latest poetry collection, Map of Memories, a 32-page chapbook, is intriguing. Reiterating Marcel Proust’s search for lost time, Kumar’s “remembrance of things past” re-views his emotional and cognitive travel across history. Characterised by a flow of disjointed images of topos, memory in the title “map of memories” is an abstraction. It speaks through mnemonic symbols for exploring the identity landscapes. Like TS Eliot’s Prufrock, the speaker representing the poet’s persona in the poems is a representative of an angst-ridden modern society. Embodying its chaos, he feels like a “biographical puzzle” that problematizes the concepts of home and belonging.

Bombay’s English poetic afterlife

The book cover, a piece of expressionist artwork by Sudhir Patwardhan, showcasing the cityscape of Pokharan in Thane, serves as a fitting introduction to the first and the longest poem, “An Imaginary Map of My City.” This poem is a restless, hallucinatory archive of Anglophone poetry in Bombay, mapping the city as a shifting, polyphonic text shaped by its poets – Adil Jussawalla, Arun Kolatkar, Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, Eunice de Souza, Gieve Patel, Jeet Thayil, Ranjit Hoskote, Arundhati Subramaniam among others – and the remnants of its histories. Kumar negotiates his migrant identity within this subversive, unstable cartography of voices, ruins, and hauntings that define Bombay’s English poetic afterlife.

From a tiny fishing village, the city evolved into “an auction house for ships, slaves and savages.” The transition is etched with violence inherent in civilisation’s expansion. On the one hand, it is the centre of art, poetry and cosmopolitan culture, and on the other hand, it is the cradle of lethal crimes, unremitting corruption and cut-throat right-wing politics. Even the rain, a symbol of nostalgia, here has “a strange flavour” and “tastes like garlic.” Marked by sensory contradiction, this olfactory image imparts a surreal quality to the visceral cityscape.

Migrants and their tales of displacement are integral to the city’s timeless space (“forest of fossils”). The phrase “blood of refugees” adds a raw emotional weight to its history. The speaker’s imaginary map of the city is dotted with a migrant’s isolation and helplessness:

The zig-zag pattern of the stanzas indicates wandering. Kinopoetics in the layout emphasises its hefty impact on a migrant’s social status. The speaker relates his travails with those of the larger migrant community consisting of unwaged workers, landless farmers and bonded labourers. He evaluates the obstacles in communicating their long-drawn struggle to survive in body and mind.

To the poet, the inadequacy of the conventional language system is a serious concern. Probably for this reason, he chose to express his views through allusions, allegory, intertextuality and polyphony. In the prose poem “An Imaginary Biography of Rivers,” the river, a symbol of fluidity, civilisation and tradition, upholds the significance of polyphony in the history of human existence: “Rivers play a language game with us like lions and lizards pulling and hauling at each other in the deserts. We complain, suffer and become trapped in the multiple voices of water.” The animal imagery widens the scope of articulating the semiotic inflections in personal, cultural and ancestral memory.

View of life

In the poem “Kierkegaard’s Memory of Fear and Trembling in Arabia”, Kumar’s reference to Francisco Goya’s painting The Third of May 1808 commemorating Spanish resistance to Napoleon’s army evokes memories of emotional suffering in war. His allusion to Goya’s The Naked Maja documenting the unabashed gaze of a lower-class city woman, foregrounds eroticisation in naked manifestation of violence. The intertextuality in “fear and trembling” referencing Søren Kierkegaard’s exploration of faith, despair, and the “leap of faith” that Abraham makes in the Bible situates the poem in an existential framework. The poet’s searching question, “Where are you, Kierkegaard?” and the subsequent reflections on “prophetic eyes” and “artistic furies” suggest a crisis of meaning and an absence of philosophical or spiritual clarity in the modern world.

The allegorical tone in “New and Old Memories of Virus” maps the travel of existential crisis through changing ecosystems, from prelapsarian agrarian milieu to a digitally armed consumerist age that promotes and defies bioethics at the same time. It archives the transgenerational incognito responses to virus, a symbol of archetypal dread, and explores collective angst through anamnesis and introspection:

I’m still alive but so much fear
has entered into my lungs,
muscles, and blood stream
that I can’t find my body
except on my vaccination certificate –
a false and fake memory of the virus!

The poems in Map of Memories are experimental. Their elusiveness resonates with the spectral interventions of the past on the poet’s present state of affairs as a migrant, a scholar, a poet and a radical thinker. The multiple roles that configured his memories over the years, also reconfigured his lebensanschauung or “view of life”. Symbolic vocabulary enhances stylistic sophistication, ensures safety against linguistic policing and connects personal agonies with broader human experiences of suffering. The poems underline the multivocality of thoughts at every border crossing, of time, space, cultures and linguistic protocols. In Kumar’s cartography, amorphous lines traced by memory are at once unsettling and magical, fracturing and resurrecting our perceptions of experiential reality.

Shyamasri Maji is an Assistant Professor in English at Durgapur Women’s College in Durgapur, West Bengal. Her debut collection of poetry, Forgive Me Dear Papa and Other Poems, was published in 2023.