Metered Orange

Review of Rita Banerjee’s Echo in Four Beats (USA: Finishing Line Press, 2018)
By Kendrick Loo

When Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar published The Madwoman in the Attic in 1979, their focus on how women writers were limited by patriarchal stereotypes of female embodiment represented a landmark recognition that writing is hardly apolitical or objective. Decades on, we understand that canonical writing was formed by predominantly male ecosystem of publishers, translators, and critics. However, tension remains in how to deal with the problematic legacy that our literary forebears have left us—how do we acknowledge 'canonical texts' as meriting analysis, while simultaneously remembering and honoring those rendered invisible and pushed to the margins by the historical prejudice. Out of this quagmire emerges Rita Banerjee's debut collection, Echo in Four Beats. A reflective book that questions the status of canonical writing, its multilingual intertextuality belies a poetic voice that dances between criticism and innovation of poetry to restore female voices to literary canon. Concerned with language as political signifier—which is to say how language connotes, inscribes, and affects how one is perceived—it retains a feminist approach to historical texts.

Subdivided into four sections, Echo in Four Beats is, as suggested by its title, concerned about the Ovidian myth of Echo and Narcissus. In the classic tale, Echo's misfortune begins when she tricks the goddess Juno so that her sisters—who had slept with Juno's husband, Jupiter—can escape. Cursed by Juno to repeat only the words of others as punishment, Echo later fails to approach Narcissus, a beautiful man Echo has admired from a distance but never spoken with. Terrified, Narcissus runs away from Echo while Echo herself wastes away from heartbreak, leaving only her voice behind. In Banerjee's collection, this myth is visited in a poetic sequence titled "Creation Hymn," "Sustenance Hymn," and "Destruction Hymn," where a process of erasure is enacted upon a translation of Ovid's The Metamorphoses to create a personal version of events. This technical restriction enables Banerjee to honor and resist simultaneously the restraints that Juno imposed, while creating a lyrical and haunting voice that speaks for both poet and muse. The reader is rewarded with thematically resonant poetry that can be easily attributed to the original myth such as the following fragment from "Sustenance Hymn I":

Her voice, her bones,
shapes of stone heard
by everyone: sound lives in her

Based on the titles alone, one might say that the process of creation and destruction is a kernel around which the collection is formed. However, the hymnal sequence is compelling for other reasons, namely that of transformation. Consider how the detachment of the sequence vanishes when one reaches the segment titled "Destruction Hymn I," where the introduction of a first-person perspective creates a personal voice, breathing life into the poem. Its immediacy and intimacy signals that a female voice has been discovered, delivering retrospective justice to Echo who was consigned by Ovid to a mute end, embedded within and serving Narcissus' larger narrative. Banerjee’s I retrospectively fulfills the promise raised by the very first section of the sequence, “Creation Hymn I”:

she, who cannot be
silent, might learn how
to speak first herself

The desire to amend history, therefore, is an impulse that the poetic voice of Echo in Four Beats keeps central to its work, emerging from the feminist recognition of the marginalization of women in literary works. However, Banerjee never loses control of her grasp for reinvention: in the opening poem of the book, "The moon had jackknifed,” Ovid's myth is given a new ending. Banerjee describes via the use of past tense a man who dissolves into "a lovely blank" at the touch of the moon. Such evocative imagery strengthens the poetry, as it does in the lines "the orbs splitting yellow/ spoke of oblivion,/ his eyes glimmered,/ the moon understood." By suggesting the contours of the original myth, Banerjee positions her collection as an alternative chain of events, picking up where Ovid leaves off when the male figure fades away.

Nonetheless, Banerjee does not limit herself to interacting with creative works solely inspired by the myth of Narcissus and Echo. Echo in Four Beats is redolent with rich allusions to a wide range of writers and artists. The poem "Please Listen and Do Not Return," for instance, critiques F. Scott Fitzgerald and John Steinbeck for their female characters, who are conceived as extensions of desire and utility to the narrative's male protagonists. The title therefore is a blunt warning not to repeat the mistakes of these protagonists, situating the poem as a post-script to the original works. Yet, one might wonder why Banerjee engages in intertextuality and ekphrastic writing. This question is answered in Banerjee's collection by a poem called "The Figure," which asserts that despair results from the desire to quantify things that exist beyond our capacity for description. Instead of starting with a question that would premise, and therefore demarcate understanding, the persona of the poem singles out the act of enlightenment:

I only understood by casting you
first in flesh, then in clay,
and finally in frail, sea-water words.
You tendered there—
adrift on the tide

This process of creation in reverse, from flesh to water, generates solace while never revealing what the narrator knows. Only the foreword, with a line by the Japanese literary figure Jun-ichirō Tanizaki ("We find beauty not in the thing itself/ but in the patterns of shadows"), and a line on the repairing of old wounds (“…heal the lines/ between blue and continent"), suggests that the original question is about beauty and meaning that cannot be quantified by categorization and description. This explains why the poem quoted above focuses on the growing transience of the figure's form, instead of explaining the figure's gradual dissolution. Only by creating, not explicating, can the speaker grasp an elusive meaning.

The focus on blurring and subverting boundaries is why praise for Echo in Four Beats focuses on the "post-national" nature of the collection. In the second and third sections of the collection, for example, a large number of poems deal with foreign travel, going beyond America to engage with nations such as India or Japan. Some of these poems take a step further into the conceptual realm, when Banerjee translates into English a poem first written in another language by her own hand. These poems—namely "A Water's Sound" and "One Night”—position Banerjee in the dual role of poet and translator, inviting us to consider how translation and writing are closely intertwined. While the work of the original poet is crucial, the inclusion of both translated and non-translated versions of the same poem makes the argument that lacking translation, we lose not only the basic contents of the poem but also the nuanced explanations of cultural signifiers and references that exist only in the original language. Some slippage is of course inevitable, but Banerjee reminds us that there is still value in attempting to translate.

In addition to her sensitivity to literary texts and translation, Banerjee is also strong in examining the easily overlooked and invisible aspects of everyday life. If the dual-translation poems demonstrate how poetry is by nature political and capable of subtle influence, other poems prove by their vivid imagery that even ordinary objects are subject to invisible appraisal. In "Pygmalion & the Slippers,” a poem which responds to the Ovidian myth of a sculptor who falls in love with his statue, Banerjee imbues everyday objects such as “dusty books, gramophones/ [and] wooden panes" with retrospective significance via spatial deixis, revealing that the objects she has listed rests "near the Ganges,/ in some bastard king's chest." Elegantly, Banerjee shows that it is not just language, but objects that are subject to hierarchies of meaning and importance. As the poem later questions, even orthographical speech features, such as diphthongs and aspirations, are not exempt from being used as class and political signifiers:

Just six beads for all
of Manhattan, just six
vowels in the bidder's language
but how many aspirations for plain?

While words on the page may appear to be ordinary objects, "Pygmalion & the Slippers" makes the point that the way one uses language also influences how a person ought to be received. No doubt, Banerjee references George Bernard Shaw's play (titled Pygmalion) whose narrative follows the attempts of Eliza Doolittle to acquire the genteel mannerisms and enunciation of the upper class. “Pygmalion & the Slippers” ends with criticism of the above-mentioned play's ending, in which Henry Higgins orders Eliza to pick up his shoes, indicating that Eliza would never succeed in achieving social acceptance. Banerjee's tone is especially poignant here, laced with gentle questioning:

...so why fear? Goddess
immaculate, Virgin
Mary, too, her single form
in clay, her smile not
unbecoming, so why
do you bid her to speak,
to fetch a pair of shoes?

Casting off the visible anger, Banerjee calls for the chance to gather and engage in honest dialogue, although her questions are rhetorical. Just as ordinary objects can be ennobled by circumstance, the poem suggests that Eliza may elevate her status with just the right turn of phrase.

Yet other poems, neither explicitly political nor cultural, are about the sheer joy of representing something artfully. A number of poems in Echo in Four Beats deserve mention for their carefully plotted rhythm and striking imagery. In "Après-demain," the images invite us into a home rapidly emptied of joy, as the persona realizes that the future cannot be stored, or clung onto. Similarly, the poem "Diver" moves from observing the real world to an imagined future, brought to life by a well-placed break between lines:

Did he search for some solid form, some shard of stardust
or stone to call a diamond or some other word

for home?

Inviting though this collection is, it does strike a few off notes. This reviewer is unconvinced by the need for certain jazz-inspired poems in the first section. While jazz as a theme may contribute to the creative energy that the first section is concerned with, there is a persistent detachment to poems such as "Birds on Blue" and "The Suicide Rag" that detracts from the book’s heft, as if its documentary approach fails the subject of jazz, which seeks uselessly to lift off the page. Likewise, this reviewer is not enamored with the poem "Thanatos," whose ending clashes oddly against its previous stanzas in its attempt to reach for the sublime.

However, these few reservations do not drown out Banerjee's delightful medley: when we return in the closing poem "Lumière" to the image of the moon, the limits of language have already been stretched to breaking. As an “atomic round” explodes in slow motion, Banerjee invites us one last time to consider how meaning emerges not simply from words, but from context. It is a bold choice, to end the collection on the phrase "it metered orange," but it makes one wonder what words can be pushed to do.

Kendrick Loo is an English & Management undergraduate at University of St Andrews. His poetry has been published in SingPoWriMo '16, The New Paper, and L'Ephemere Review. He is part of the ATOM writing group.