The eyes of Ignorance
Shihabuddin Poythumkadavu
b e y o n d t i m e a n d s p a c e
Introductory notes by K. Satchithanandan
Shihabuddin Poithumkadavu has been writing poems
and short stories for quite a few years now in Malayalam. It
is a pity most of his work remains untransalated is the
case with several very fine young writers in the language.
Often the writer himself / herself has to double up as
translator so that his / her works reach a wider audience,
whether admiring or critical. I feel all writers need to rest
their writings in this way on larger platforms so that they
know what gets communicated in another language and
what remains articulated only in the original as poetry
inevitable is constituted by the universal as well as the
local. I am happy that this poet has done exactly that and
proved that his poetry is profoundly universal in its
perceptions as well as the way they get expressed in
langauge.
There are several of poetry whose soul is in their brevity,
right from the Japanese haikku, the Sanskrit muktaka and
the Chinese IZu and shi to the English sonnet and the
American limerick of the Ogden Nash kind. In Malayalam
there was the poet Kunjunni who wrote only very short
poems, mostly quartets full of wit and humour. He has his
predecessors in poets like Tholan. Shihabuddin can well
claimed to be a successor to these poets. He enriches the
tradition with his own kind of irony and paradox that are
central to these poems.
The poet mixes the real and the fantastic in the very first
poem, ‘Beside’ where the painting, the mere image of the
rose, an abstraction becomes real and concrete as the
painter’s hands get entangled in the thorns. This is very
close to the fantasies one may encounter in films for example
where a painted figure comes alive or a real human being
enters a painting. The same paradox is reversed in ‘The
Lost Child’ the mother, may be a teacher or a writer, feeds
the alphabet, filling them with meaning, while she forgets
the real baby who is hungry. The same with god; he is busy
creating the world and in that frenzy forgets to love what He
has created. (God) You escape the hurt and shame caused
by the stones thrown at you when you shed them as molten
tears. (Tear Drops) To escape a dog’s life, the dog is reborn
as man but the stone that was aimed at him while he had
been a dog hits him only after he has taken life as man!
(Dog)
Even when a person is dead, what he could not express
when alive continues to raise tides whose din the dead man
catches from his grave. (The Tide) The dream of the moon
in the eye is like a skull on a hot desert (Dream) while the
idol in the temple whose only working sense is sight, is left
in the dark! (The Sense) The man lying in ambush waiting
for the imaginary foe is disappointed when he is not
confronted even by a shade. (Foe). The soul is a fool who
thinks that you are the only world (Idiot). God creates the
Devil for company when he feels alone among his devotees
(Devil) Lust is the desire to go bak to the mother’s womb: a
Freudian concept. (Lust) Evil is a tormentor while good is
too deaf to hear the victim’s cry and is watering a plant
(Blindness) Like time waiting at the workshop, unhappy with
all the inadequate tools that the blacksmith forges, the poet
awaits his beloved (The Workshop) Life only speaks about
death : it is like a book read from the end (Life)
Death appears in ,many poems in diverse forms. Those
who wash the dead man will find every part of his body
scarred with wounds (Wounds) Death reappears in ‘One
day’ rendering everything that man had grieved for while
living insignificant . The image of the child too appears many
times as in ‘The Child’ where life leaves the poet an orphan
among beasts. God drew man in the shape of a donkey
and enshrined him in a temple with no doors or windows
(The Shrine) There is irony also here: he who went to
complain had enough time, yet could not say what he had
to, while the one who had to listen had no time even to hear
what little the other man tried to say (Helplessness).
These poems keep reminding us of the wise maznavis
and ghazals in Persian and Arabic with their wisdom and
their profound sense of the paradoxes of existence. Many
of the images and thoughts in these poems, I have no doubt,
will continue to haunt the readers long he/she has read
them.
Informally yours...
K.Satchidanandan
(Delhi, August 2012)
1.BESIDE
I ventured to draw a flower;
Entangled in the thorns,
my hand bleeds.
2.THE LOST CHILD
Mother, who left after
feeding the letters,
you didn’t see the child
seated behind.
3.GOD
without kissing me
god went on his way
to make new worlds.
4. TEAR DROPS
the pieces of rock
cast by somebody.
My eyes melt
and drop them
onto the earth.
5. YOU
when you are graceful
bathed in word,
I absorb you in to me
splitting myself apart.
6. DOG
In the past life
I had been a stupid dog.
Wandering for love,
at last,
I was reborn as a human.
It is here and now that
the stones which had been
aimed at me, hit me.
7. THE TIDE
An idea which couldn’t be conveyed
still again bursts into a wave.
I will catch that din into me
lying under the soil.
8. THE WAY BACK
Guard me against being shattered,
o,my heart !
The two -wheeler vehicle
on which you have mounted
is the return of the defeated.
9. DREAM
When the sun fills
in one eye pit,
a lustful dream
for the moon
remains in the other.
like a forsaken skull
in the hot desert.
10. FOE
Somebody awaits in ambush
to kill me striking with a hammer.
Not even a shadow
when I turn about.
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