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Daria, Badal, aur Baadshah
(river, clouds, & the emperor)
the river takes shelter in the world tonight,
her lashes ache with the weight of clouds
in white, to blind,
no one can say if rising or falling tonight,
a stitch / or an asterisk — between open wounds
now both lie beneath the footnotes of the emperor,
along with riverine vegetables
& people.
O' beloved Dilli your daria & badal fused in froth,
& your emperors,
frozen tongue, henna dyed, skin dead, blood wet, fighting their own,
your destiny slips like a lemon soap,
washing their 'small' sins and misdemeanours
remember being called the twin sister of the blessed heaven
by your poets,
now all your prayers for utopia
diving the sand
head first
like your black kites,
may an unruly sigh
leave your body,
may it destroy the world tonight.
Rachit Sharma
In the 1978 essay Literature and Ecology: An Experiment in Ecocriticism, where American literature scholar William H Rueckert introduced the world to the term ‘ecocriticism’, he talked about the generosity of poets. Those who lend their voice to the voiceless, who give without needing anything in return. The poets’ act of holding something very close and then giving it all away, Rueckert says, is truly selfless.
This is especially true of the ecopoets, who feel and communicate on behalf of the members of the biosphere who do not speak in the human tongue, and create a safe space for their expression.
This transference of emotions and words to the sentient and non-sentient beings is probably the building-block of nature writing, marking the frontier at which humans begin to interact with other lifeforms intellectually, and catapulting literature within the context of ecology.
Over the last two centuries of industrialisation, poets generously lent their grief and angst to the dying rivers, birds and trees of the capitalist world, in a process which was also reciprocal, as transferring the rage to another voice was the only way the poets could dare call out the greedy leaders. When Sharma absorbed the wails of a diseased Yamuna, perpetually exploited and discarded, the cold fury moving through his vein wanted to overthrow the apathetic powerful. Along with his anger, he also lent his strength to the river, reminding it that it can “destroy the world” in a night.
Reuckert makes a special mention of Gary Snyder’s Turtle Island, a 1974 book of more than 70 poems exploring the “energy pathways” that make life possible and let humans engage with “place”, an ecosystem pulsating with life and memories. In the 1950s, Snyder (now 95 years old) was one of the Beat Generation authors, and along with the likes of Jack Kerouac, was writing in strong protest of the filth, corruption and injustices of post-World War-II America. What set him apart was his deep connection with nature and spirituality that brought him to his era of ecopoetics. He practiced environmentalism like a religion, through a mindful lifestyle and activism.
In Turtle Island, we see him mourn the ecological loss with the directness and outrage of Beat poetics. The opening paragraph of Front Lines from the book:
The edge of the cancer
Swells against the hill — we feel
a foul breeze —
And it sinks back down.
The deer winter here
A chainsaw growls in the gorge.
Decades later, another poet was engaging with place and memory in a different continet. In post-independence South Africa, during the 1960s and through the 80s, the all-white apartheid government systematically pushed the indigenous landowners, tenants and community members out of their native place and into infertile land in the fringes of cities. Poet Gabeba Baderoon, whose parents were relocated a year before she was born, captures the pain of displacement through memories shared by her parents. In her 2021 poem Green pincushion proteas, she records her mother projecting the displacement horrors onto plants at Athlone, their new “homeland” after they were displaced:
Do you remember, she asks, and then I do,
green pincushion proteas this small?
…
that we found here among the rocks and grey sand
under tall trees unnameable in memory
…
They died, she recalls.
They don’t like their roots to be moved.
…
Why did we move them to another place,
we, who were removed to here?
Do you remember, she asks.
Baderoon's lamentation for the sufferings of her displaced ancestors turns into rage against the soldiers in her 2008 poem Nature from the book Orchestra of Tongues, for the deeper wounds inflicted on her people and their environment. To ensure the indigenous people remain confined in the hastily created “homelands” or “bantulands” away from the urban centres that the white had captured, the apartheid government tore down the houses and burnt their farmlands. She writes:
To salt the earth
is a term taken from warfare,
a way of acting on time itself.
A rural people must be removed
from the possibility of growing food
and starved. They must watch.
The taste of water fade.
Generals know it was the future
they were killing
by burning the farms
The words of the beloved Parsi poet Keki N Daruwallah brings the anger and intimacy to places closer home. Writing about droughts that struck coastal areas and robbed the fisherfolk of their livelihoods, he invokes environmental consciousness and justice for the people suffering a climate crisis they did not cause and who have been left out of policy documents. Excerpts from his poem The Wringing of Hands in the collection Winter Poems illustrate the grief he shared with those affected. As cited in a May 2017 paper published in the International Journal on Applied Linguistics and English Literature:
He walked over land dry enough to set fire to.
Hard enough to crucify a God on.
Cracks wide enough to swallow a million Sitas.
…
A day, a night, another day and still
no fish, and then the sweats broke
His heart heaved and strained like a hooked fish
And stumbled into a murmurless quiet.
In Angst, also from Winter Poems, he crucifies the architects of relentless, unsustainable development worldwide, pushing the biosphere towards tipping points. But it also evokes a sense of helplessness that this generation feels in the face of an imposing climate crisis.
Death-light that falls
like a rain of radioactive spikes
Death-light that falls
through holes in the ozone belt.
Cows grazing on meadows of bitumen
A bulldozer that shovels
children over a cliff.
…
…the forests of the earth,
turning to deserts.
The poem is part of a new series titled ‘Memories of Yami’ by Rachit Sharma, poet and founder of Dillipoetry.