While Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni is hugely celebrated as a novelist, her poetry captures the finesse of her Diasporic imagination. Like her fiction, her poetry also works on binaries – almost like a rich tapestry of dreams that are layered upon each other. The readers are assaulted with an embellished oriental vision – one that, simultaneously, recounts the trauma and the nostalgia of diasporic existence. In order to elaborate my critical intuitions, I have chosen to share one of her poems: ‘Tiger Mask Ritual’. A superficial reading of the Poem shows a vivid description of a ritual performed by an Indian hill tribe. However, a closer reading of the poem reveals a whole lot more…
The pace of the poem is chaotic, indicating the diasporic anxiety that forms the central focus of Divakaruni’s works. Furthermore, the poem is laced with images of a “raw and red” pain that is constrasted against the “musky smell” of the monsoons. Hence, through the chaos, pain and trauma the poem tries to bring out the flavours of the lost homeland. The ultimate diasporic nostalgia, that is both, disturbing and exhilarating.
On this note, I will leave you to enjoy this little gem of a poem… Hopefully, upon reading this, some of you might be able to resonate with the nostalgia.
Tiger Mask Ritual
When you put on the mask the thunder starts.
Through the nostril’s orange you can smell
the far hope of rain. Up in the Nilgiris,
glisten of eucalyptus, drip of pine, spiders tumbling
from their silver webs.
The mask is raw and red as bark against your facebones.
You finger the stripes ridged like weals
out of your childhood. A wind is rising
in the north, a scarlet light
like a fire in the sky.
When you look through the eyeholes it is like falling.
Night gauzes you in black. You are blind
as in the beginning of the world. Sniff. Seek the moon.
After a while you will know
that creased musky smell is rising
from your skin.
Once you locate the ears the drums begin.
Your fur stiffens. A roar from the distant left,
like monsoon water. You swivel your sightless head.
Under your sheathed paw
the ground shifts wet.
What is that small wild sound
sheltering in your skull
against the circle that always closes in
just before dawn?
Note:
The poem refers to a ritual performed by some Rajasthani hill tribes to ensure
rain and a good harvest.
