Academic Essay | Vaibhav Sachan
Kamla Das has her oeuvre for poetry that explores female sexuality to its utmost. P.P. Raveendran, in his article, Of Masks and Memoirs: An Interview with Kamala Das writes, “She is a keen observer of the world around her, and is quite alive to the socio- political issues of the day.” Extensive writing has been done where there has been an exploration of the expression of radicalism and guilt free female sexuality in Kamala Das’s poems. This essay draws on such critical commentary and demystifies the silent spaces and silences of the narratorial voice.
The poem Words begins with a certain sense of excitement about the various words that are coming to the mind of a speaker. It would be agreed without contestations that the speaker here is a woman considering the host of feminine writing that Das has done.
The repetition of the ‘words’ creates a kind of an echo effect as if these are reverberations. It is also a suggestion of the multiplicity of thoughts and feelings coming to the woman. Moreover, the emergence of these thoughts is organic in nature as is suggested by the simile of the leaves on a tree. These words grow from ‘within’ and they have a gradual growth. This makes it very much more organic and passionate. However, she has to silence herself because of the reasons that she follows up with.
The presence of the very emphatic ‘but’, dramatically changes the tone of the poem. From what was a very zestful and impatient probable desire of expression, now becomes a scepticism in the legitimacy of these words. Her fears are related to the probable consequences that these words might have. These words could be “paralysing waves” or a “blast of burning air”. A staunch feminist would not hesitate in propagating such words that would possibly stir patriarchal foundations but the female speaker here has hesitations in the poem. The hesitations are located in the places of silence from where these ‘words’ are coming.
The very fact that this vault from where these uproar of voices is coming, is a place of silence is suggestive of the systemic and institutional marginalisation of women. These are deliberate attempts to silence the feminine voices by the patriarchal structures of the society. This is a clear demonstration of the conditioning that women have to go through that leads to an automatic self suppression because the consequences of feminine expression might be unimpressive, or perhaps, the very expression itself might be unimpressive, at least the patriarchal bases of the society, “A knife most willing to cut your best/ Friend's throat…”
A lot of Das’s writing has unconcealed and provocative sexual tones. Her poem, The Looking Glass, for instance, is one where a woman is being told that all that is required to love a man, is to stand with him, unclothed in front of a mirror and express your desires and needs. It is a satirical commentary on the skewed power dynamics in the hetrosexual relationships. Luce Irigaray, in her essay, This Sex Which Is Not One, remarks how female sexuality is complete within itself and an intercourse by a man, silences the woman’s needs because of the skewed power dynamics and the ‘recognised value’ of the phallus which it holds in the problematic scheme of things, thereby rendering the female as a lot of “atrophy”. At all points of time, the woman has to live within the ‘dominant phallic economy’ that leads to the silencing of her needs.
Towards the end of their essay, Irigary extend this loss of agency and power that women have in the general scheme of things, this is what she theorises from their suppressed sexual needs of the woman. “There remains, however, the condition of underdevelopment arising from womens submission by and to a culture that oppresses them, uses them, makes of them a medium of exchange, with very little profit to them” (Irigary)
If one was to situate this poem in Irigary’s understanding of female sexuality, one would realise that perhaps the disregard and the silencing of the ‘words’ that the speaker does towards the latter half of the poem, “Words are a nuisance”, has to deal with these suppressed anxieties and needs. The speaker says that the words still keep coming to her. This is a continuation of the opening lines of the poem but with a certain kind of resolution to the problem that was created in the beginning, much like in a sonnet. The problem was that the locus of origin of the ‘words’ was unknown, which is why they had to be silenced and disregarded as ‘nuisance’. The resolution, however, is that they themselves come from a place of ‘silence’, a place that is ‘somewhere deep within’. There has been severe suppression of the needs, voices and expressions of the woman. Therefore she is hesitant. Her expression is necessarily a negative expression which is possibly the outcome of being subject to age long oppressive regimes.
More than anything, Kamala Das has recorded unabashed female sexuality in her poetry. Such provocative expressions are vulnerable to societal and patriarchal backlash and attempts of being silenced. The very act of writing poetry with such themes is an act of rebellion against the taboo of female sexuality. The poem, Words therefore states the anxieties with the expression of the suppressed thoughts. Whatever thoughts and feelings she has are also coming from a place of silenced needs and quelled motives. Therefore silence becomes the only mechanism of survival, at least for the female speaker of the poem, if not the poet. Whatever thoughts and feelings she has are also coming from a place of silenced needs and quelled motives.