The Poem, The Pause, and the Pandemic

The Poem, the Pause, and the Pandemic
By Pervin Saket

Writers write. We are rather proud of this affliction. In every writing workshop, the ‘emerging’ writer is almost always told in no uncertain terms that for a ‘real’ writer, writing is not really a choice. Rainer Maria Rilke wrote in his first letter to a young poet, “Above all, in the most silent hour of your night ask yourself this: Must I write?... if you meet this question with a strong, simple ‘I must,’ then build your life on it. It has become your necessity.”

But Rilke was also telling the new poet about the value of silence, the importance of ‘the most silent hour.’ We can forgive readers for assuming writing to be the performance of lines on a page. They are understandably carried away by the spell of robust metaphors, fluid verbs, and dexterous poetic flourishes. But writers are intimately aware of the silence that precedes each page. Most of my writing takes shape after a certain kind of stillness. I remember once listening in as a child on a ‘discussion’ (my family’s word for a quarrel) where a garrulous uncle insisted, “It’s all about the gift of the gab.” My mother had retorted, “It’s all about the gift of silence.” I have often returned to that response, especially in these days of lock and down, when I have been forced to examine my place in this new world.

But first, let us pause here to recall one of the most fascinating moments of silence. It lies in the Hindu myth of how the gods gained immortality. The gods and the demons, still very mortal, are churning Kṣīrasāgara, the Ocean of Milk. At its bottom lies amrita, the elixir that will grant them immortality. This extraordinary mission needs an extraordinary rope, and the serpent Vasuki offers its services. The gods pull on one side of Vasuki, the demons pull on the other side. The grand ocean is frothing with the friction of this epic struggle. Finally, the pot of ambrosia emerges from the depths, but with it, the Ocean also expels the deadly poison Halahala. The poison explodes into the skies and is about to fall into the pot of ambrosia. Chaos ensues. As the gods and demons bicker among themselves, the great tale pauses mid-fall, to reflect on the options. The poison will not be destroyed; it must be consumed. But who will do it? As the others are arguing, wordlessly, one of the gods opens his mouth to accept the poison. Shiva, the god of destruction, receives it on behalf of all the others. But he cannot swallow the liquid for that would kill him. He cannot spit it out either for that would poison the worlds. Hence, Shiva simply holds it in his throat. The poison turns his neck blue. It remains in his throat for all eternity, earning him the name Neelkanth—the one with the blue throat.

These days, I am interested in Neelkanth’s act of holding. Of opening the body to a new poison, physical or metaphysical, and resolutely storing it in the throat, which is traditionally an agent of expression. It is not easy, this pause, this in-betweenness that straddles swallowing and spitting. Now, with the world undergoing a new churning of sorts, I have been examining my own throat. And the throats of others.

We are in a historical moment, and as writers, we are acutely aware of its magnitude. For have we not turned to literature to discover insights about Great Events? Wars, revolutions, freedom struggles, and pandemics are the subject matter of prized collections and public libraries. I spoke with Anjum Hasan, novelist, poet, and editor, on books written during—and about—intense periods of history. She mentioned Vilas Sarang’s Marathi novel in translation In the Land of Enki, which is set in Iraq in the late 1970s when Saddam Hussein’s Baath party was taking over. She also recommended Isherwood’s Mr Norris Changes Trains, for its powerful immediacy, written as the Nazis were coming to power in the early 1930s. Literature written close to the fire of history certainly bears more than a trace of passion’s heat. The stories are immediate. They are unmediated. They are inevitable. Some writers may hold them in their throats longer than others, but the moment needs its narratives.

Undoubtedly, our own pandemic deserves its own stories, and the day is not far when we will see English Literature PhD theses on “Lockdown Literatures of Covid-19.” This puts great pressure on writers to write in order to be significant. We are called upon to record and interpret this new human condition through stories, novels, plays, poems, and creative podcasts.  Our pandemic might have started as a health crisis, but it bared open vast inequalities, making it a bigger humanitarian crisis. Add to that, loneliness, uncertainty, anxiety, and the guilt of privilege, and a writer could be busy for a lifetime. Not all writers take a lifetime though.

We are seeing a new wave of quick turnaround books inspired by the pandemic. They are not all memoir, self-help, and spiritual guides on coping either. Poets have stepped into a space accorded to them only in times of crises: the space of relevance. For instance, Knopf’s Together in Sudden Strangeness: America’s Poets Respond to the Pandemic records the vulnerability, resilience, and inequities that the pandemic has brought to light. Featuring Billy Collins, Jane Hirshfield, and several beloved poets, the book is an urgent response to a world that is only a few months old. Closer home, several celebrated poets come together in Singing in the Dark, a stellar collection edited by K. Satchidanandan and Nishi Chawla, published by Penguin Random House.

As natural as it may seem to transfer our ‘new normal’ anxieties or hope onto the page, for me, it was neither tempting nor easy. In fact, for a while, I was more preoccupied with ongoing drafts than with writing about this change. It seemed like with the world frozen, I would actually be able to close pending projects. The pause, initially, was a chance to catch up with words that had raced ahead of me. A half-finished poetry collection, co-writing a screenplay pilot, and a couple of requests for beta readers. Even as the world came to a standstill, I could not resist the narrative of productivity, the pressure to use time rather than simply live it. Many writers on various writing groups seemed to be telling themselves—and each other—to turn their anxieties into verses and their 'free time' into polished manuscripts. No one was spared reminders of how Shakespeare wrote King Lear during a quarantine. And the unspoken nudge: what do you have to show for this time?

And I did indeed make headway with a few backlogged projects. I edited a couple of manuscripts and navigated various online platforms to facilitate two writing courses. One of them was initially meant to take place at St. Xavier’s College, Mumbai, but was hurriedly shifted online. Over blurred video, the students and I bridged some of the distance with canteen catch-up. (“Is the masala dosa still as good? You haven’t tried the egg Burma!”) A few days later, I woke up to photographs of the college converted into a mass quarantine center. There is something disruptive about watching a space you have known intimately get fitted with blue hospital beds. This was where we once discussed Beckett and danced away our ‘socials.’ Now there were just rows of monochrome beds fitted as close as the guidelines would allow. Right under the library that houses Mary Shelley’s The Last Man, and Edgar Allen Poe’s The Mask of the Red Death. Illness and literature, again, side by side.

However, each time I tried to engage in new writing, I only encountered false starts. The sentences were awkward, the phrases forced, the flow uneven. This unsettling relationship with the blank page was nothing like what I had read about writer’s block. I noticed a tiredness with language and an unwillingness to twist old metaphors into our new world. This then got me interested in how other writers formed their own connections with language and the pandemic. When Dhauli books announced an anthology titled Love in the Time of Corona on March 27th, just a few days into the (first) lockdown in India, I was amazed at this quick response in publishing. I spoke to Manu Dash, the publisher, who said he would soon release the Odia short story collection Hatadhua Bela (In the Time of Handwashing), the first ever collection in a regional Indian language that uses the realities of Covid-19 as central unifying theme.

Already there are bookshelves full of pandemic writing to choose from. However, I am most interested in Tabish Khair’s Quarantined Sonnets: Sex, Money and Shakespeare, mainly because the poems are not an instant response to a new world. He had already been working on an academic paper on Shakespeare at the time of the lockdown. This led to a natural recording—in verse—of the realities that troubled him. (When on the dole because recently fired—/ The virus crisis was hard on me, mate,/ And even afterward no one’s been hired,/ The working class abandoned to its fate). Although the sonnets employ humor, there is a meditative reflection to the lines. And because Shakespeare would have written at least some of the originals during the bubonic plague outbursts of the 1600s, this book appears to be like a mirror of our plague gazing upon the mirror of another plague. The ‘accidental’ project was not meant for publication either. “Mostly because I knew there would be an explosion of Covid literature,” Tabish said, “and I had no desire to add to it.” But the publishers, Singapore-based Kitaab, offered to donate all profits and royalties to the Migrant Workers’ Centre in Singapore, and this helped change his mind.

Tabish Khair’s reluctance to contribute to Covid literature is heartening to those of us who prefer to occupy spaces of silence. Silence is as active a response as language, indeed a part of language, neither empty nor idle. We have long known how different forms of silence serve as fertile reservoirs from which art might emerge. Now, as lockdown literature makes its way to virtual bookshelves around the world, can we also hold space for this embryotic hush? Writers have always recognized the dangers of being silent when we must speak up. Perhaps it is time to also consider the dangers of incessant outpouring when what we need is an honest stillness. We might attempt different modes to record and narrate our times, but it will be a while before we fully absorb their collective trauma and grief.

An altered reality needs an altered response. We may perform the act of polishing a chapter or writing a poem but if we listen, truly listen past our busy, chatty selves, we will recognize that there is no way to normalize the circumstances we live in. We are so inundated with forwards of Newton inventing calculus under quarantine and Edvard Munch painting Self Portrait with the Spanish Flu in isolation, that perhaps we need to resurrect Bartleby the Scrivener’s “I prefer not to.” Hold space for his resistance to capitalist ideas of value, to the expectation of ‘performance.’ By assuming routines focused on work, we mimic the capitalist trajectory of effort, reward, and all the conventional narratives of triumph.

Writers, however, seek immortality, not productivity. We are constantly churning our personal Kṣīrasāgara, with language as our rope, for that elusive pot of amrita. But, immortality, as Shiva’s tale tells us, needs a price and a very specific skill. The ability to wordlessly open ourselves to a poison, and to hold all its scathing trauma. A return to stillness. At least at the surface, at least for a while, as the throat turns blue.

This response, fortunately, is not entirely unique or new. Annie Zaidi, author of the award-winning Prelude to a Riot, spoke to me about how writing fiction came to a standstill during the initial months of the pandemic. “For a long time, it was difficult for me to even read sustained narrative fiction, let alone write it. Even when a few outlets asked me for work, I was unable to send anything new.” She elaborated on how the overwhelming uncertainties around us contributed to this numbness. Non-fiction allowed her a headspace more connected to the immediate, but otherwise, she said, “I need more distance before I can return to fiction.”

Distance, conventionally used for space, translates so easily into a metaphor for time. Not least with a word like ‘quarantine,’ so much a part of our current lexicon. Derived from the Italian quaranta giorni, meaning ‘40 days,’ it refers to a period of waiting for ships arriving in Venice before they could disembark, to protect the city from plague epidemics. These days, I have been thinking of a language-quarantine. A pause of sorts, a holding of these recent poisons in our throats a little longer. A reminder of Wordsworth’s declaration that poetry is powerful emotions “recollected at tranquility.” The witnessing self is swamped, and the narrating self is walled in by urgent columns of text. Some of us need downtime, some of us need new metaphors. Some of us will simply have to write in the past tense. 


Pervin Saket is the author of the novel Urmila and the poetry collection A Tinge of Turmeric. She is the 2021 Fellow for the Vancouver Manuscript Intensive, and was shortlisted for the Srinivas Rayaprol Poetry Prize 2020. Her novel has been adapted for the stage, featuring classical Indian dance forms of Kathak, Bharatnatyam and Odissi. Her work has been featured in The Indian Quarterly, The Joao-Roque Literary Journal, Paris Lit Up, Usawa Literary Review, Tiferet, Borderless Journal, The Madras Courier, Alipore Post, Cold Noon, and others. Pervin is co-founder of the annual Dum Pukht Writers’ Workshop held at Pondicherry, India.