Life and Times of Mr. S by Vivek Narayanan. HarperCollins. $16.99 99pp.
What does it mean to be an Indian writer? Does it mean you’re writing in Hindi? Or Tamil? Or Bengali? Or any of the many dozens of languages that have produced high literary achievement? Does it mean you’ve grown up in India (like Rushdie, or Kipling), or live in India (like Arundhati Roy, or Ruth Prawar Jhabvala), or are of Indian descent (like Naipaul or Jhumpa Lahiri)? The question gets complicated very quickly, and fraught with competing interests. More to the point here, how does one identify oneself as an Indian writer, and then negotiate those choppy waters?
Identity figures large in Life and Times of Mr. S, Narayanan’s second collection of poetry, after Universal Beach in 2006—but here the issue is less of a single identity than of shifting identities and of what is encountered in the sometimes numinous, sometimes agonizing spaces between selves. First and foremost, the book is a kind of act of ventriloquism, even more so than all books of poetry are. The “Mr. S” of the title is a Mr. Subramanian, a sort of everyman foil through which the details of an inner emotional life and outer social reality can be exposed. Some of the poems feature Mr. S as the speaker, but more often, it is a compelling, sometimes sardonic voice that recounts (often indirectly) the daily travails of this character. We follow him through his search for a wife, the beginnings of a marriage, the birth of a child, his attempt to come to terms with his parents, and all along the poems are undergirded with history, myth, the Tamil classics of Indian literature, sociology, anthropology, technology, emotional insight, and understated humor. Narayanan keeps a firm hand on all of these themes, and he threads them through the book like firebreaks: they burn constantly in order to keep it all from going up in flame.
The first poem, “Waking in the Simultaneous Present,” sets us down in place and disorients us:
alone with his sponging self
and like the suicidal pigeons on the ledge
Master S himself
is not quite cracking the code
of the succession
that is he (reality
my favourite movie
a friend said, except
that it never begins).
We know where we are, and yet not. The book unfolds in a series of codes, not intended to hide information, but to reveal it. When there are many simultaneous presents, i.e., many concurrent possibilities for lives lived and unlived, perhaps the only angle of approach is sideways. This first poem also sets the high-energy, often wry tone of the book that pulls us in even as it tries to keep us at arms’-length. That fundamental tension—the push-pull of writer/reader, husband/wife, lover/stranger, parent/child, native tongue/adopted accent—underlies all of the poems that follow.
Another source of tension here is narrative. Unlike many collections, this book tells a story, and the specific placement of poems feels more than logical: it feels necessary. In “A Brief Explanation of Mr. S’s Accent,” which comes second in the collection, we learn who this character is. “Who” not in the sense of where and what and when, but “who” in the sense of “why.” Here is the poem in its entirety:
The simple if mildly scandalous truth was that his
accent changed. Close attention to its
timbre might allow a new faith in the fact of
continuous revision; accent not an
indisputable centre but a desire, an attuning beyond
certainty sprung in that lush early
valley of surplus identity, a valley where decision was
unashamed and the real accent was
on how and when and whether
time because hard or supple
in the course of this unfolding.
There are none of the details that make up the practical stuff of life, and yet the character has been deftly brought alive. Here is a man with “surplus identity” who must be ashamed of not having been able to chose one “indisputable centre.” We know then, too, what his surroundings are: he is judged by the way he speaks. This skillful little poem is a compressed spring, and the rest of the book launches from its kinetic energy.
Here is one way Mr. S sounds when he speaks:
My dear Appa, would you mind very much
if I borrowed your memory? I feel such an odd deficit
in not having heard Madurai Mani
at three in the morning
in some darkened Tanjore
. . .
Appa, I still wonder about My Tamil:
shall it be Your
Tamil (you know
what I mean) or must I strive
even harder towards
a recombinant street? Will
it be your Kaveri
or an Indian
Ocean that yet
might be mine?
“My Tamil” and “Your Tamil”: the loss of an accent, a decentering. The alienation here is softened by the sense of a genuine closeness between father and son. The issue is not of abandonment, but the slow slippage that happens between generations, particularly generations that have to deal in different ways with the post-colonial world and all that implies. The father sticks to the Indian Kaveri River, while the son looks to the ocean and what lies beyond. The father listens to the traditional south Indian music of Madurai Mani Iyer, while the son does not share the memories that would allow him to appreciate the music in the same way his father does. Yet, perhaps in tribute, one may note that Madurai Mani’s original surname is Subramanian.
Not everything in the book is so directly personal (one step removed, of course). There are several poems that lay bare the underlying sociopolitical concerns that form the intellectual basis on which this very smart book rests. “Short Prayer to the Economy” displays Narayanan’s pyrotechnic diction and his ability to manipulate sound and effect. The poem is in five main sections, alternating between “prayers” and a kind of breakdown of the vocabulary of the contemporary workaday world. Here is the beginning:
prayers for fishes, tossed each to each in translucent glue
prayers for the hairier beasts, roistering in rolling tundra
if we are to conceive a world, let us conceive it—at all risk—one
prayers for the wily bicycle, knight of secular propulsion
prayers for uncoagulated human residue impossible to weigh in balance
and our economy that intricate grows, beyond forbearance
I’ve found I don’t know I need I to know who can I talk to who can I call what must I do where must I put it how can I use it what is your number who will you call where will we go how will we make it where will we put it who can I finger how will they take it where is the button
. . .
prayers for all projectiles, red, yellow—somewhat bluish, spinning inert, riskily pulsed—
prayers for gashes of quarried stone, saunas of smelted aluminium, ever thinning veins of copper
from where the monstrous weather grows.
Feed I found I don’t I know I need I know to can who I to talk who can I call what must I do where put I must how number who what you call where go will we how it make where it put we will who finger I can how it
The language is taken apart, the syntax broken like a computer spitting out words at random, or a stroke victim trying desperately to put together a sentence that makes sense. The “I” loses its supremacy as its predicates get more and more disordered. The grammar falls apart, and with it, meaning. A broken language, a broken social order. And in India, social order carries a particular weight, as seen in this poem found near the middle of the book:
On the Necessity of Speaking of Caste
First the dreaded fear of caste, wearing its little corset
on trained and bumpy ribs. It stains your vision, corrugates
your fucking body, bawdy as it is and cussed and with
no language to speak of itself
outside itself. Then a more
untethered fear, of a kind
of polarity, a cathode
leaping current into
the other eyes, a betrayal
a way of merely
repeating with each
denial; you cut away
that plaster but your limbs
occupied the same
space they did before.
. . .
voices say — o silly Mr S give it up, relax, cool it
with that pathetic irritating upper-caste self-flagellation
again, cool it with that uneasiness in yours or
anyone else’s skin, cool the quicksand of your abstractions,
cast yourself into the waves, leave it alive, live
yourself, leave us alone . . .
Here the spring is uncoiling, and we get a glimpse into a psyche well-versed in how to torture itself, a psyche not at home in its own or “anyone else’s skin.” Its weapons of torture are history, privilege, knowledge, empathy: all those things that also go into creating a poet worth his salt. Listen also to the sounds and internal rhymes here: “little corset”; “trained” moving to “stains”; “a cathode / leaping current.” Narayanan’s ear seems never to fail him, and he makes sparks all over the page with his play of consonants.
It is a shame to redact these poems here, because Narayanan consistently displays a wonderful musicality, sometimes deliberately cacophonous, and an intuitive narrativity throughout each poem and the book as a whole. His language, referents, and turns of phrase are often different from what one typically encounters in the work of American writers, and that friction against expectation thrills. Having lived in India, South Africa, the U.S., and Zambia, Narayanan is as much a peripatetic soul as his alter-ego Mr. S. In these poems, he dissects displacement of many different kinds with an adroitness and occasional tenderness that bespeaks his talent. English may not be an unambivalent tool for him, but he wields like an ironsmith with a blowtorch: it scorches, sculpts, and leaves nowhere to hide.
Eleanor Goodman is a writer and translator from Chinese. Her work appears in journals such as Pathlight, PN Review, Chutzpah 天南, Pleiades, The Guardian, Cha, and The Best American Poetry website. Her book of translations, The Selected Poems of Wang Xiaoni, is forthcoming from Zephyr Press.
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