With the lights dimmed, the ghosts walked in. Poet-publisher Naveen Kishore’s performance of poetic fragments at the ongoing IHC theatre festival evoked moods, apparitions, and memories that we suppress and the daylight splinters. Taken from his latest collection, Mother Muse Quintet (Speaking Tiger), the poems are not just about a mother-son relationship, but about language, memories, their erasure and memoralisation—how the mind arranges them after the event so that man can survive. In this case, it has also yielded the most beautiful and fragile poetry that Kishore blew into the air like smoke.
Almost a double act, sound-work artist Jivraj Singh, who composed the soundscape, says he had just tried “to create appropriate moods for Naveen to read his texts. There are also parts of the performance during which I simply think of Naveen as a co-musician and play music with him, without too many other considerations.
To enable this approach, a lot of conversation, experimentation and composition have taken place in the background, over an extended period of time… Sound doesn’t have to mean anything, and this is a great gift of the medium. Hopefully, the sound design is transparent enough for listeners to form their own associations. It is also wonderful when portions of the sound design go entirely unnoticed.”
Kishore is also the publisher of Seagull Books, a publishing house based in Kolkata with a truly robust avant-garde list.
Excerpts from a conversation:
In the first poem, could you explain what you meant by the crumbs your mother would scatter in her conversations. And by war did you mean Partition?
The use of crumbs is poetic as in the fairy tale of Hansel and Gretel. When I talk of crumbs and scattering, I am talking of her slow loss of memory. Her efforts at leaving clues like crumbs from the fairy tale so that she could find her way home during the war—not Partition but a war to keep sane and her mind alive—to capture her mind by the dementia setting in. She fails. The loss of memory happens.
A book like Mother Muse Quintet, what would you say it is about? The relationship of a mother and son? The language of signs between a son and his mother?
It started off as a remembrance thing, not so much for myself, though that’s a given, since I am the vessel, as it were, in which these memories had ‘stored’ themselves, though not consciously. The impulse was to actually share them with an elder sibling, my sister, whom life kept away from home.
Initially in school, in boarding, she was the older one…. My father kept shifting jobs. And I was the younger one who could easily change schools, and so on and so forth. And then she went to college, and then she was married, and then she was out of the country. Her memories were not like mine. Remember, my memories resided within the mother–father ambit that I grew up in. Unlike her.
The intuitive home in this particular book, strangely enough, is Kashmir, like in my first book of poems, Knotted Grief.
The memory formation for me actually started with stories that I inherited and remembered and heard as a much younger person than a sister who was five-and-a-half, six years older.
It began as an exercise in dealing with mutual grief, but more about gifting her things that she may not have remembered about her parents, her mother in particular. My poems were a way of reaching inward to express a certain human condition. Both personal and national. The rest is not in my hands. It is in yours as the reader.
The idea of home in your poems is a complex one. So, sometimes when you are speaking of grief and home you seem to be referencing almost the same time land, nation, man, woman, mother.
Kashmir and Calcutta both play an important role in my life and work, though I spent very little time in Kashmir. Later, I was to connect in my work-life with a much more conflict-ridden part of our country, but Calcutta is my home. My city. None of these poems speaks from a particular locale on the ground. Instead, they become attempts at another kind of inhabiting. That of the imagination. One imagines through empathy, the suffering of a land and people, and one writes. At the same time, for people like us there’s no sense of longing for a home that you miss.
Memory has a way of telling stories. You remember moods, you remember nuances, you remember clothes and food and touch and feel, and the air and the atmosphere.
The sense that is left behind is, in fact, what fine-hones your sensibility, it starts to show up in the way you work and think. This book of poems—it was not the initial intent or the impulse or the idea—was an afterthought, as is most of my life, a ‘retrospective’ vision.
In the book, I also talk about somebody who gave me language, and was then to lose hers, because she slipped into a fog, as it were, gradually. And then, you know, almost the theatrical presence of a struggle of how one communicates with somebody who’s losing their language—they have taught you yours, but you no longer have the words to reach them, you know, so there was a lot of that.
There’s a poem that mentions the amputation of my mother’s limb, but you can read it politically. The times that one talks about through the whole Mother Muse collection are rife with a certain politics. There is the idea of ‘home as mother’ or mother as a kind of geographical location, that we all tend to fight over in a certain kind of way, but it would be dishonest of me to try and suggest that I had that in the forefront of my mind, even though somewhere it may have played a role.
What were you thinking of when you composed these poems?
Time. The running out of it. The living through it. The urge to share. Bear. Witness. The simpler answer may well be: who has the time to think while writing poetry. One just allows intuition to erase one’s Self so it may find a voice. Become poem. Poetry.