Wartime

Our country is not warring right now
With any other country
Still, you have got to know
A state of war has been declared
Barbed wires at the borders, beyond that – prohibition
In olive-coloured clothes
Alertness of the woodlands
And so, with much added caution
One steps into the forest
To the sound of bullets, a fusillade, do you hear it?
Within wordlessness, now
Are bitter words of wartime
An explosion created by anger’s frenzied regret
Is to be deflected – towards safety
By lowering a trench that lies only within your heart
Did you know this?
Here, the worldly-being
Recalls the honeyed moment
Just before the war began
The sanyasi
Seeking peace after the war
Sits bent-kneed
Even the poets
From the trenches, through their binoculars
Watch the seasons turn
The chilly winds of Magh
Sweep memories in
And depart with dreams
This winter
Is your dress smeared with the colour of olives?

— Translated from the Bengali by Prasanta Chakravarty

Wartime is not war, though it could include actual conflicts. It is simply a tract of time, a signpost “wherein the will to contend by battle is sufficiently known; and therefore the notion of time is to be considered in the nature of war,” Thomas Hobbes had averred. Indeed, wartime is a predicament and a temperament to which a whole people one day wake up and find themselves mired in. In fact, unknown to them, they begin to gravitate towards such a state until it takes away their multiple private times and flattens them into a homogenous time for everyone. Such a mad ancient condition is renewed from time to time amongst socially interacting human beings. Could it be that otherwise, a time of such unease and rancour also offers possibilities of renewal and redemption from within its own belly?

A wartime situation

There have been quite a few distinct poems on war and its effects on daily living in Bangla (especially on the two world wars and the Bangladesh war of 1971), but this one, written by actor, theatre director and consummate writer and poet Soumitra Chatterjee, stands apart for its psychological insight and modernist suggestivity.

The first four lines constitutes the proem:

“Our country is not warring right now
With any other country
Still, you have got to know
A state of war has been declared”

A case is made to distinguish the temporal slice of wartime from the physical fact of warring: that one knows the peculiar texture of a time of war, though one’s own country may not be going through an actual war. How could such a wartime situation have been ushered in? Who may have declared it? It could be that battles rage in and among other lands and the economic or political costs also have an effect on us. It could also be that some civil war takes place, within one’s own land, region or community, for which no actual declaration of war is necessary. Still, it is not the war itself that is important here. The “state” of being in war is. Time has turned itself into a state of being for agents gripped by it. Perhaps such a state of war happens more at the level of individual agents and rages even within one’s own psyche? Wartime is a sudden realisation; it dawns upon oneself – “you got to know.” Everyone knows. The declaration of wartime is in the air, so to speak.

The next section elaborates on the actual predicament: the borders are guarded and wartime means encountering a certain alert watchfulness everywhere.

“Barbed wires at the borders, beyond that – prohibition
In olive-coloured clothes
Alertness of the woodlands”

Barbed wires have arisen between us and a hush descends in everyday living. A pall marks wartime. Regular human interaction is suspended. A time of war is known to us by being aware of the limits and boundaries that cannot be trespassed – among friends, relations, even loved ones. One would perhaps not even cross the limits of one’s own imagination and mind-space. All movement is stymied. The state of war begins to choke you. You refrain from argument and affection alike. Breathlessness begins to congeal as time turns prohibitive. You endure.

And here, the poet offers a visual image – that of the forest. Is the state of war literally related to the forest? That is to say, are some secret battles raging within the innards of the country? Or is it that the forest is a metaphor for the state of society as such? And alertness in the forest dons a colour too –olive. Olive is, of course, a Mediterranean hue and flavour. But it is also universal in its reach. We are all aware of its dark yellowish-green hue. We also know that it is widely used as a camouflage colour for uniforms and equipment in the armed forces. Olive is the colour of combat. But here it is used in a more universal sense – in order to denote the forest, and a watchfulness associated with the forest at wartime. Thickets are soothing to the eye, but underneath their foliage lurks mystery and danger.

And at this point comes the first interrogative statement of the poem:

“One steps into the forest
To the sound of bullets, a fusillade, do you hear it?”

A process of recovery

From generality, now the poem turns specific and we realise that the poet-speaker is actually directing his words towards some interlocutor. What kind of interlocutor is this? A close friend may be, a lover, a relative by blood – with whom now things have turned frosty? Now, a parity is drawn between the two sides with the sound of bullets – which defines a wartime atmosphere.

We also realise that the real explosive nature of the failure of wartime communication lies in non-communication: wordlessness. And wordlessness is not benign – it hides disquiet within quietude, hides the bitter words of discontent within. A remarkably evocative and powerful phrase comes here: “anger’s frenzied regret.” What had ignited the wartime climate was anger, which soon turned into regret. The frenzy of it, though, lies not anymore in being angry but in being unable to retrace that anger and resolve the troubles that caused it in the first place. Things have gone beyond settlement. Impasse arrives at actors in wartime as regret, and its expression is inarticulacy and hush – the effects of the barbed wires which enthral our psyches and begin to demarcate the spaces between humans during such times of distancing.

When human relations are compelled by an era and commanded by time, it could produce a sense of determinism – a sense that things will remain thus, suspended forever. Are we able to detect any chink in the bounds of fate and determinism? The interrogation in the poem is the first breach of such a deterministic impasse: a question is the beginning of a renewed communication process, though gingerly made: “To the sound of bullets, a fusillade, do you hear it?”

The addressee is purportedly listening to the friendly question. Is this some sort of gesture of reaching out? What follows is even more mitigating. In fact, a new turn, a fresh process of recovery begins at this stage in the poem. A deflection is required in order to find safety again. But where is such a route to a safe haven in wartime? And here we have a remarkable gesture of loving rapprochement – a trench lies deep inside the warring parties themselves – in their hearts. They have forgotten the presence of goodwill in their own hearts, for the barbed wires have hardened their very hearts. So, a trench has to be lowered in order to rediscover such generous depths of mutual sensibilities.

A second interrogation follows in quick succession – “Did you know this?” It is less of a question and more of an affirmation. Your heart is golden. It still pulsates, even in such difficult times. You have to reorient your sensibilities to its presence. The poet-speaker is saying, as it were: I know that in your heart lies such a giving and joyous trench, a safe haven for me. Do you not remember that you used to have such a heart? I hereby affirm that you did, in spite of the misgivings that the barricades and fusillades have produced between us. This newfound sense of the intimate trenches that may be buried right within us actually frees each actor psychologically during wartime. They begin to feel afresh that life is not about security and embracing fate, but about a renewal of fresh and fecund possibilities.

Once such a breach is made possible in what seemed a moment ago to be a deterministic scenario by invoking trenchlike hearts or heart-shaped trenches, the next step is hope, however tentative and quivering it contours might be. No wartime is perennial. There used to be a time before the war began. And surely there will be another time when the state of siege will come to an end.

In order to imagine the future, you need a conception of the past. This is precisely injected into the poem here, when the poet-speaker places in front of us two character-types: the sansari/worldly-man and the sanyasi/ascetic renouncer. These two types are counterpoints to each other, but are necessary to be invoked simultaneously to give us a sense that the current state of affairs may not be as water-tight as it seems. The man of the world recalls the beautiful, pleasurable moment just before the state of war had begun. Things used to be pleasant and perhaps can again become so. The sanyasi-renouncer seeks peace, which must arrive once wartime exhausts its state. He can and shall exhort and pray. At this point comes the third group of agents – the poets on patrol. They study the newfound situation through their mind’s eye – the whole vista that lies in front of them. The poet is a visionary who can see through his divine binoculars even as he patrols the ravaged wartime social terrain. The visionary poet is indeed not watchful anymore in being cautious. He can sense when the wartime season turns.

The penultimate four lines of the poem bring us to the conclusion by deftly sketching another image: that of a wintry Magh season. The chill of the winds also brings forth memories – which may have been happy and throbbing. Or is it that the poet-speaker again takes us back to an ambivalent state where the past is also full of strange fissures which memory now invokes? The chill indeed departs so that spring might be ushered in, but why then does it depart with the dreams? What about the thawing of the icy nature of wartime impasse? Where lies the promised trench at this point?

The poem concludes with a masterfully interrogative line, with phrases that congeal the angst, hope and ambivalence that must be running through the poet’s mind and soul after the full gamut of a tense wartime predicament is traversed: “Is your dress smeared with the colour of olives?”

The return of the olive immediately takes us back to the mention of the dangerous forest of watchfulness and bivouac that we had earlier encountered. Indeed, olives as a species can be cultivated but need a lot of patience and hard work. And wild olives are truant. Olives have often been used in ancient texts in order to depict the scattering and gathering of human beings. Olive is also the symbol of resilience, health, ancestral ties and community. The olive shrub and the drupe reserve great medicinal traits.

The poet again invokes colour. The same addressee/interlocutor is being asked the question one last time, in whom the poet had sought the trench of love. Olive, as a metaphor, could now be a mark of new green hope. The metaphor of the olive branch too is gesture of truce. But it could also be a far darker possibility of returning to wartime chill, especially if the winter has taken away the dreams along with it. Would the season indeed change into spring? This question is kept open by the very suggestivity of the final line. The nature of the olive metaphor or colour that the addressee will choose will be decisive in changing or maintaining the wartime situation. The poet-speaker has invoked the heart and has shown us a glimpse of the possibilities of overcoming the chilly nature of miscommunication, regret and the silence that spins thereof. It is for each one of us to respond to his call.

First written in Bengali, the poem has been translated by the author.

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