Unquiet Waters

   The more recent poems of Lakshmi have gained a sharper edge to the feminist, while remaking the language. There is an impish delight in the woman who eludes science in the brilliant poem “An Autopsy”. The language is that of neutral scientific study, a post-mortem being performed on a woman. But the body on the table enjoys the bafflement of the surgeons who could find everything about her ‘identifiable, teachable, in short under control. That is, everything except her brains’.

   There is a teasing delight in these lines which stems from defeating man’s cocksureness about his knowledge of women. But here the men are confronted by some occult presence. We all know that for centuries, woman was not credited with brains. The male world even tried to prove scientifically, using craniology that woman’s brain is less endowed. (Remember Virginia Woolf’s sarcastic comment on Bertrand Russell’s opinion on woman’s brains as discussed by craniologists?) The poet says the brains surprised the surgeons, for instead of a brain, they found a ‘honeycomb’. One can see how neutral scientific terminology is supplanted by a new visualisation. The surgeons are baffled to see ‘tiny hexagonal boxes’ storing ‘viscous honey’ which they could scoop with their ‘gloved, probing fingers.’ “An Autopsy” is thus a brilliant metaphysical poem.

   What is it that disarms the certitude of the surgeons? The last stanza explains with sheer delight. There is even a cleverness in the imagery reminding us of the ‘metaphysical wit’ which produced conceits in male poetry. Lakshmi says the dead woman had ‘stashed away her private moments’. They are precious as honey; they have brought meaning to her existence in an ‘otherwise clumsy life.’ There is a strange aesthetics of self-creation. Does it suggest a far-sightedness which prompted her to keep some precious things for herself and not give away everything to others? (Remember Virginia Woolf’s lament in A Room of One’s Own on how whatever a woman makes, is taken away and she is made an ‘Angel in the House’?)

   Here, the dead body of a woman acquires a mysterious existence, for her brains contain some precious stuff, not ‘grey cells’. And she has sheltered them from the ‘dour, censoring’ eyes of the world. There is no lament but a delectable sleight of hand in cheating man’s scientific endeavour to master all knowledge and classify data.

   What suggests liberation is the phrase ‘a wild-grown honeycomb’ that can’t be domesticated or handled. Hence the last line says, ‘the honeycomb glistened defiantly under their questioning eyes.’ 

    The poem “Tinctures” castigates patriarchy. The poem uses the traditional poetical technique of refrain and its variation. What a stark change from the rather plangent, pliant use of it in Epithalamion to suit a male celebration of female chastity in his bride! In Lakshmi’s poem, pigment or colour is the dominant metaphor, as in the title “Tinctures”. Blood is biologically red. But its valuation in patriarchal society changes, which is what the variations in the refrain in the first three stanzas depict. 

   Blood, stanza one depicts, had never looked so right and so blue. Here, ‘blue’ suggests pedigree, purity, because it proves her virginity as a bride. The imagery in this stanza certainly recall to me Spenser’s cloying way of describing female purity – ‘vernal air’, ‘vestal freshness’. In Lakshmi’s poem, the world watches her bodily reaction and she obediently lets the blood “sparkling like claret” prove her bloodline “by the wine of her blood.’ The paradox is brilliantly employed in the affirmation that her blood ‘on the white/left a crimson stain of purity.’  Stain here is a testimony to her virginity.

    Stanza two rebukes blood as something that had ‘never looked so wrong and red. The context is women’s menstruation in Hindu society when rituals become a taboo. She is ‘ineligible for prayers and ceremonies.’ The natural process is required and precludes her from being sacralised.

   Stanza three avows, ‘Blood had never looked so honest and red.’ The iterative use of the word ‘blood’ ushers in another modification in the refrain. The mother ‘fattening the foetus’ by her vital blood, wins the approval of the society. The birth of a male infant wins approval, although it is her ‘fluids’ which are in his arteries.

   Stanza four has no refrain, though the word ‘blood’ recurs in different phrasings: ‘blood-letting’ like in ‘weathering values in blood-letting.’ But her existence is caught in the phrase ‘the haemophilia of living,’ the good flowing with the bad.

C. T. Indra “The Later Poetry of Lakshmi Kannan: Remaking Woman’s Language”. Journal of Literature & Aesthetics, Jan-Dec, 2010.