Volume 5 | Issue 3 | Aug - Sept  2011 |

Words are sentenced

C P Aboobaker

    At 27 Maryam Ala Amjadi is an internationally known poet, not only because she is well-known to internet readers, but also because she writes on very serious issues of mind , heart , and human society. We find her writing about a bitter home. ( Home, Bitter Home). The very first couplet of the poem is disheartening:

    From nowhere
    this house is three cigarettes away

    Here distance looks covered in cigarettes. Cigarettes must represent the bitter life our society is living. This life we live is beyond description and the poet tries to express it in terms of the pimples on the faces and in terms of the drunk up sorrows in our lives.

    So with all the eggs on our faces
    we have deadpan omelets for breakfast
    and eat our hearts out of our mouths

    I provide this very brief introductory note just to show my readers that they should not peep into these poems of Amjadi with a lazy attitude. Let us be very serious about her poems and read them with the fullest of our attention.

    These are not hollow words. What does she do? How does her poetry emerge? Does it bud in the most suitable climate? Poetry is the creation of human restlessness. It is the work of an intranquil mind, not the reflections of emotions in tranquility. Words Worth was or must have had very firm basis for his definition. He could look at a Daffodil or a Solitary Reaper and sing melodies on the beauty he found in the sight. England was an emerging democracy; within England, at least there was a feeling of this sort. They dreamt a lot, they heaved sighs of relief; even then, Byron and some others fought for the independence of far off countries and died a martyr.

    This is the anathema. In Iran or in India , we cannot write from the sighs of relief or from the realization of love. We cannot merely transcend the shining feathers on the wings of the flying skylark. That is why, yeah, it is the premises of our writings that make us say things that cannot be otherwise said. We are very eager to hear very happy and very principled things.

    Unfortunately we are not happy; on the one side is corruption; on the side is the imperialistic designs to malign humanity. The world over, poets write with the instinctive impulse regarding how hegemonic tendencies influence humanity; as a reader I discover the latent politics in these poems. Maryam writes:

    words are sentenced

    to beat their heads against walls

    in search of a window to the heart

    Yeah, her poems are stinging, but revealing. They are opening the hearts of the body-politic of our senses and our morality and above all, the cuts and breaks on the fabric of human politics.

    I proudly present the poems of Maryam Ala Amjadi. She used to write in my ezine a few years ago, while she was very young; she is still young, but is sensitive to the penchant truth regarding human life and politics.

    

C P Aboobaker - C.P. ABOOBACKER, editor of thanalonline, belongs to Calicut in Kerala. His interests include writing, publishing poems, essays, and many more literary things. Latest writing is about Channels and Globalizations. He is a retired professor of history.

    e-mail: cpaboobacker@gmail.com
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