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Chapter- IV

Last Poetry

The move of perspective of Ramanujan in relation to identity politics in his

middle poetry further complicates the notion of identity in his diasporic location as a

displaced individual. His aesthetically obtained ‘second sight’ as an intricate and

strategic manoeuvre to engage with identity politics, however, fails to afford a well-

knit perspective of identity; rather, this ‘second sight’ unboundedly promulgates his

newly formed notion of identity as open-ended, multifaceted and equivocal at the

same time. Susan J. Hekman rightly remarks concerning such situations that “social,

political, and psychological theorists each have a particular position to argue on the

question of identity and identity politics . . . the problem of identity will not go away .

. . . No one approach to identity solves all the issues raised” (1). His Second Sight is

ended with the never-ending tension between the naturally obtained first sight and the

aesthetically obtained ‘second sight’, where the poet is found to be predisposing

towards more complicated set of mind and trauma of displacement. As a displaced

individual engaged with identity politics, the poet is oscillating in between his first

and the ‘second sight’ for the sake of elucidation of his predicament. Although, the

poet is found to be ironical towards both the ‘sights’, his ironical posture is the result

of lack of firmness concerning his perspective and identity, in addition to

manipulation of a separate context of living. Even his multiple positionalities

representing the hermeneutics of nostalgia and imagination vis-à-vis past, present and

future in his middle poetry are not only pinpointing towards unstable personal

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identity, but also the notion that “the individual’s perception is also fluid and shifts

and changes over time and place” (Agnew 212). Such instabilities regarding

perspective and identity are the results of his constant negotiation with cultural

dislocation, and liminality of location along with predicament of identity crisis. His

last poetry composed with The Black Hen (1995) and Uncollected Poems and Prose

(2004) is his introspective assertion of those multiple positionalities and shifting

perspectives which were still lying unsolved till to the end of middle poetry. In both

the volumes, the poet has marked a decisive departure from his earlier sociological

perspectives as revealed by his early and middle poetry.

One of the distinguished features of Ramanujan’s last poetry is that both the

representative volumes of this period are apparently detached from critical awareness

of Indian and foreign critics. Less numbers of criticisms are being published on his

last poetry. Basic reasons behind this detachment are somehow unprecedented. Both

the volumes are published after his death and are structured and edited by a committee

composed with eight writers. Molly Daniels-Ramanujan in her essay on “A Note on

The Black Hen and After” indicates that “Eight writers helped select the poems in The

Black Hen, roughly about half the total number of poems that the poet had entered

into his computer” (278). The same message is repeated by her concerning

Uncollected Poems in the essay “A Note on A.K. Ramanujan’s Uncollected Poems:

The One Self Within the Many Selves”. On the other hand, in both the collections the

poet has presented his shifting perspectives and fuzzy awareness concerning those

mentioned issues in a more delicate and introspective way, which often seems

incomprehensive and inscrutable to general readers. In both the volumes Ramanujan

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has revealed him as a “poet of the consciousness of the self”, where his notions of self

and non-self are amalgamated with his nebulous thoughts regarding growing personal

predicament, anxiety and identity crisis (Daniels-Ramanujan 106). In his last poetry,

the poet has entered into a discrete poetic zone where all his prevailing notions and

perspectives remained infertile in relation to his personal predicament concerning

mounting awareness about death and self-erosion. Although the poems are

fantastically written and leavened with introspective mood and less clarity, all those

poems are written in a “self-consciously late, dry, at times didactic manner” opposite

to typical Ramanujanian usual method, as King says (Three Indian Poets 118). His

Black Hen is the emblematic assertion of all those unsolved questions, suppressed

anger and weariness which are catastrophically fallen on the poet in his diasporic

location. With the recurring image of the ‘black hen’, the poet seeks to reveal those

aporias that obliterate his “positionality” and sense of belonging and which are yet

undistinguishable and difficult to understand (Sachez 38). In the poem namely “Blind

Spots”, the poet clearly indicates how it is difficult to reach “a thought / in the air”

(10-11), and “learn the smell of fear” in a situation devoid of constancy and belonging

(16). All these unresolved ‘blind spots’ enhance complexities along with anxieties in

life, and thereby have confined the poet within a complex paradigm of inquires. In

other words, the ‘black hen’ itself represents those ‘blind spots’ and aporias pervaded

with powers of incomprehensibility or inscrutability. Regarding such inscrutabilities

apparent in these poems, Molly Daniel-Ramanujan firmly remarks, “Nothing is

simple in these poems: the seeming simplicity is deceptive” (279). That spuriousness

not only deceives thoughts of readers, but also encumbers precise critical analysis of

those poems.

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Manifesting such deceptions and inscrutability, Ramanujan says in the title

poem namely “The Black Hen” that “the black hen stares / with its round red eye /

and you’re afraid” (11-13). However the unsettled images or thoughts of the poet are

addressed here as ‘black hen’, the most difficult part of the poem is not that image,

but the addressee. The poem is addressed to something ‘It’ without any specific

reference and identification. A group of poems in the volume including

“Salamanders”, “From Where”, “It”, “Three Dreams” alludes to that ‘it’ addressed in

“The Black Hen”. Several critics of Ramanujan including Bruce King are unanimous

in the observation that the ‘it’ refers to the process of creation, specifically the art of

writing poetry as the poet remarks in the poem “The Black Hen” that “It must come as

leaves / to a tree / or not at all” (1-2). The King version of criticism about the poem is

that ‘“It’ is the first word of the first stanza when ‘It must come’ naturally ‘as leaves’

on a tree and where the assumed meaning is poetry . . . .” (Three Indian Poets 125,

emphasis original). King’s comment is thoroughly repeated by other critics like Bijay

Kumar Das in his essay “Post Colonial Reading of A.K. Ramanujan’s Poetry”, E.V.

Ramakrishnan in “Locating A.K. Ramanujan” Memory, Self and Identity in His

Poetry” and P.K. Kalyani in “The Black Hen: A Trans-Continental Experience.”

However Ramanujan as a poet has not envisaged the art of writing poetry is as natural

as the leaves of trees. In an interview with Chirantan Kulshrestha, Ramanujan himself

says that “poems don’t come to you abstractly . . . poems come in different ways.

Sometimes I work on a poem for 10 years . . . it may ripen or just rot, crabbed beyond

recovery” (Interview One 45). In his vision, writing poetry is an introspective art of

constant manipulation and reconsideration till to the level of self-satisfaction. The

expression ‘it’, hence, from this perspective is not as straightforwardly and solely

alluding to the art of writing poetry as mentioned by those critics. A supportive view

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of this particular observation is itself the poem namely “It”, which directly addresses

the metaphor revealing an opposite picture of King’s account. In this poem, the ‘it’ is

already inside leaves:

I see it but there like a small

tree with two broken branches

between two gnarled oaks lifting

their full head of leaves

into the rain. (1-5)

Here the ‘it’ is like a tree which the poet finds everywhere and hears “running like an

underground Ganges” (22) under his feet and above his head and sometimes within

him “like tummy gurgles” (27); however that ‘it’ is always running away from him.

The poet is found to be in utter difficulty and bafflement in reaching that ‘it’

corresponding to his sense of loss and dejection. For the taste of that ‘it’, the speaker

remains always thirsty. In both the poems, the said ‘it’ tacitly alludes to some sorts of

ideas, thoughts, existence or sense of belonging, which the poet now lacks and fails to

achieve at the same time. That ‘it’ is always available to the poet in some abstract

forms as mentioned in this poem.

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This inaccessible denotes the sense of frustration and sadness to the self of the

poet in all the poems alluding to the ‘it’. In all the other poems of the group,

Ramanujan has not identified that unachievable ‘it’, except in the poem

“Salamanders”; in this poem that unachievable is named as:

the nothing,

the zero where numbers die or begin,

. . ………………………………….

where sounds do not become words

nor words the rivals of silence. (1-2, 4-5)

However, the ‘nothing or zero’ mentioned here is not something abstract or numerical

in the real sense of the term; here Ramanujan is certainly influenced by Nagarjuna’s

philosophy of emptiness which Nagarjuna conceives as the main essence of one’s

very being. Although, the other critics like Bruce King has also accepted Buddhist

influence in his poetry right from the end of his middle poetry, they have not specified

any Buddhist philosopher in this regards. In our reading, it is evidently revealed to us

that the features of nothingness that Ramanujan has projected in his last poems are

certainly unanimous with Nagarjuna’s philosophies of emptiness specifically exposed

through his notion on Middle Way philosophy. According to Nagarjuna, the notion of

impermanence and essential decay constitute the notion of emptiness in the very

essence of things. All things are devoid of substantiality, and though they exist, they

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are not absolutely existent. As Nagarjuna says, “. . . everything is impermanent,

devoid of self, refugeless, protectorless, and homeless . . . .” (Jamspal and Chophel

35). The impact of Nagarjuna’s philosophy seems clear to us when the poet says in

the poem “Salamanders”:

We, denizens of this nowhere nothing,

flame within black flame…

………………………….

empty hub

of the turning wheel, mother and father

of the forever unborn. (18-19, 21-23)

However, the other critics are agreed upon the view that the unnamed ‘it’ in these

poems evidently points toward the art of creation, the evocative connotations here are

positively indeterminate reality and the self. And “Salamanders’, which means

amphibian existence, is found to be alluding to the ‘it’ of the other poems in its very

first line, where the poet says: “Again, here it comes, the nothing” (1). As a sequel

poem of the group, in “Salamanders” Ramanujan manifestly indicates how it is

difficult to cling to that ‘it’:

How describe this nothing

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we, of all things, flee in panic

yet wish for…. (6-8)

The poet now understands that the so called nothingness is always unequivocal and

beyond the reach of ordinary human ken. All things lost the inherent value within the

ambit of that nothingness; hence everything becomes ‘zero’ in that nothingness. In the

poem namely “At Zero” the poet clearly indicates the standstill universality and the

stillness of the zero hour manifesting nothingness. In the zero hour, as the poet says:

the twelve

numbers

say nothing, untouched

by and hand: time circles

making no mark in space:

…………………………

the eye looks,

cannot see anything

………………………

the ear listens, cannot hear

a thing. (13-17, 25-26, 29-30)

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The poet’s perception of that nothingness and one’s inability to accomplish it in the

course of time paves the way for realization of pain and suffering infused with human

in assorted context of life. Regarding this emptiness, as Nagarjuna remarks: “The

form is not the self, the self does not possess the form, the self does not dwell in the

form, and the form does not dwell in the self- in this manner also understand the four

remaining aggregates as empty” (Ibid 29). Here the four ‘aggregates’ mean suffering,

impermanence, self and the ingredient parts of human body. Following the same

perception, some other summative like feeling, perception, predisposition and

consciousness can also be seen as empty. As a result of this separation, the self cannot

even realize its basic relation with the indeterminate reality. This reality, which is

above all forms, is the ultimate ground of one’s very being. And it is the basic human

nature, according to Nagarjuna, which eventually seeks to cling or seize that

indeterminate reality as determinate and separate, and which is the core cause of

human suffering. This propensity, for Nagarjuna, is worked under a false imagination

and ends with self-contradiction. Commenting on Nagarjuna’s perception of

emptiness, K. Veenkata Ramanan remarks:

the thrust for the real is . . . the root of all the activities of man, it is

under ignorance, not knowing the true nature of things that one seizes

hold of everything one comes across, clings to it as a safe refuge, as

ultimately and fully satisfying thirst for the unconditioned, only to

meet with . . . frustration. (38)

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The utter fragmentariness of self and other things is the consequence of this

ignorance, and this fragmentary nature is vindicated by Nagarjuna as one’s

incapability to know the nature of non-existence of existent things. Human being’s

subsistence in between existent and non-existent forms is the basic ground of

Nagarjuna’s Middle Way philosophy. The root idea of his Middle Way philosophy is

defined by Nagarjuna in this way: “Activity is not constituted of conditions nor it is

not non-constituted of conditions. Conditions are neither constituted nor non-

constituted of activity” (Kalupahana 108). For Nagarjuna, hence, everything living or

non living things are living in-between self and non-self nature; the self and the non-

self are both inherent parts of constituted elements. Criticizing his Middle Way

philosophy, Ramanan says: “As the principle of comprehension it is the Middle Way,

the way that rises above exclusiveness. In it there is no rejection of anything except

the imagination of the absoluteness in regard to what is only relative” (40). In his

analysis, the determinate as well as the indeterminate entities are always indispensable

to analyse what is real or true.

The tension between that basic human instinct i.e., the trust for real and the

nature of indeterminate reality does not end in a compromising note; rather, it brings

various notions like essential vulnerability of self and body including other

contiguous things. The persisting tone of suffering and bitterness in Ramanujan’s last

poetry is the direct consequence of realization of that ignorance along with the

mentioned susceptibility of self and identity. In the poem namely “Pain”, the poet

plainly indicates how pain has diseased his body and soul from within:

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Pains in my ankle flicker, nerve ends

glower and dim like, cigarette ends

in a chain smoker’s mouth night and day. (1-3)

The poet, hence, now prays to the almighty, the ‘god of knowledge’ to send the

goddess of ignorance to cure him from pain that the poet is suffered from:

O god of knowledge…

……………………………...

send your old companion here

. . . goddess though of ignorance

send her soon so she can kiss away my pain

as she has always done. (21, 23-26)

Following Nagarjuna’s mentioned concepts, the poet now conceives that it is the

‘ignorance’ which causes all sorts of sufferings and pains inside his soul and body.

His suppressed anxieties and sorrows apparent in his last poetry are the results of

growing awareness of that indispensable vulnerability and decay as vital truths of

human life.

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In its critical juncture, the point of similarity between Nagarjuna’s philosophy

and other prevailing notions like Bhabha’s “third Space” and hybridity inevitable in

diasporic existence is that all these notions, directly or indirectly provoke the notions

of liminality or in-betweenness (“The Third Space 211). As discussed in earlier

chapters, Nagarjuna’s notion of self also, which is the basic ground of the Middle

Way philosophy, fosters the notion of in-betweenness. Regarding Nagarjuna’s notion

of self, Ramanan clearly indicates that in Nagarjuna, the “sense of “I” is at cross

roads, it has double reference. It shares at once two orders of being, the conditioned

and the unconditioned; it is at once a universalizing as well as a particularizing

tendency” (100, emphasis original). In Nagarjuna, the sense of self or the sense of “I”

is the “reflection of the unconditioned reality in the conditioned self-conscious

intellect; it is the sense of the real in man” (98). Thus the original meaning of the “I”,

in philosophical sense, is that unconditionedness, which people in ignorance

conceives as mundane and conditioned nature. One has to go beyond that ignorance

for the sake of attaining knowledge, as Nagarjuna himself believes that “within the

same mind there is knowledge as well as ignorance” (Ramanan 72). On the other

hand, the unconditioned is also the reflection of utter emptiness of all living or non-

living constituents. It is worth mentioning that, as a living human being is a

conditioned being, the self-consciousness of him/her deals both the conditioned and

unconditioned, self and the non-self, absent and present simultaneously. In most of

the poems of his last period, these dualities of existence are clearly evident and

interestingly, the “Salamanders” is the culmination of his assertion of amphibian

existence. In the poem “One More on a Deathless Theme”, the poet obtains an

impersonal look towards his own self, and goes on introspecting over the nature of

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identity, and, thereby, affirms the false nature of self that the poet as an ignorant deals

with:

This body I sometimes call me

sometimes mine as if I’m someone else

owning and informing this body. (1-3)

The sense of the ‘I’ brings the sense of what belongs to mine and me, and thereby,

emerges the sense of ego. It is the false sense of the self, according to Nagarjuna,

through which, “with the rise of the sense of “I” and the sense of “mine”, there arises

the sense of greed in regards to things . . .” (Ramanan 104). Such greed, as a result of

the need of individualization, fosters the basic human instinct of clinging to the

indeterminate as determinate and conditioned. To discard his false sense of the self,

hence, Ramanujan tries to incorporate the essential relatedness of constituent things

evident in the living context. In the same poem namely “One More on a Deathless

Theme”, the poet thinks him to be a short of breath to a dog, a “god” (16) for his wife

and “astronauts” who “return / from faraway Jupiters / or just downtown” (76-78).

That same kind of self annihilation is central concern for the poet in the poem “A

Meditation”, where “In the course of a meditation” (1) the poet first thinks him as a

“black / walnut tree” (2-3). In a rainy day, “The municipality came / with electric /

chain-saws, cut it up in convenient / pieces, loaded them in their truck / and took it all

/ somewhere” (15-20). The carpenter worked with that, and “made a butcher block

table and / a butcher block chair” and also rolls of paper (24-25). And when the poet

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is sitting on a chair and writing with a pencil, it seems to him that he is writing on his

own body and head:

my living

hands moving

on a dead one, a firm imagined body

working with the transience

of breathless

real bodies. (35-40)

The poet’s transformation from an animate body to inanimate things is described here

like a typical Ovidian tale of metamorphoses. Such self annihilation, besides the

notion of essential relatedness of things fostered by Nagarjuna, too promotes the

notions of multiple identity and uncertainty at the same time. In the poem namely

“PAIN: trying to find a metaphor” the poet clearly indicates his multiple identity when

he says that pain has “a house on invisible fire / with a house of all my selves” (11-

12). Such notions of multiple identity and instability are two conspicuous elements in

Ramanujan right from his middle poetry; however, his last poetry is relatively

different vis-à-vis his move of perspective from sociological to the metaphysical one.

Tracing his self-consciousness and identity politics in tacit terms, the poet here resists

all the stereotypical notions of identity politics.

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In most of the poems of this group, that self-annihilation is successively

culminated with his total negation of self identity. In the poem “Not Knowing”,

tracing his lack of continence in anger, the poet is even questioning his vital identity

and desires:

not knowing who I am or what I want

I roam the city walk into movies. (11-12)

The poet continues his roaming “till mirrors in a mirror shop” (14) have broken him

up into many selves and showed him “in profile and fragment” (16). All his multiple

selves, in relation to others in fragments, besides focusing the apparent liminality of

existence, too reinstates the observation that identities arise in a “structured field of

relations” (Appiah 64) and are a “consequence and not the cause of conflict” (Agnew

204). Molly Daniels-Ramanujan remarks in this connection that Ramanujan “prayed

for double vision and found it in the interconnectedness of vegetable and mineral,

man and animal” (278-279). In the poem “Mythologies 2”, the poet clearly mentions

about this twofold vision as an object of his ultimate destination. The poet prays to the

“midnight sun, eclipse at noon, / net of loopholes” (11-12) in order to assassinate his

“faith in doubt”, and hence appeals (14):

Adjust my single eye, rainbow bubble,

so I too may see all things double. (16-17)

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The poet’s “faith in doubt” in the poem is the metaphorical assertion of the restricted

unitary vision that is traditionally or culturally imposed on him (16). The single

unitary vision or the first sight is certainly coterminous to the liminality of diasporic

location, where identity is appeared as fluid and indecisive. Within the ambit of

diaspora identity politics, that double vision is compared with the split-consciousness

of diasporic existence. On the other hand, this so called “structured field of relations”

(Appiah 64) is vital to one’s perspective and identity, as the poet believes in the poem

“Lines” that:

. . . the invisible things you see

affect your looks, the form

…………………………..

but they do not add up

to who you are, and you too

are no longer you. (12-13, 16-18)

In comparison to his early poetry, where the poet conceived all concrete things as

substantial things of living context or as director of identity formation and

perspectives, here, in his last poetry Ramanujan believes that ‘invisible things’ can

affect one’s perspectives and in the midst of which one cannot remain as what or who

one was or is. All those things, once real, become invisible in future. Hence, the poet

says in the poem “Fire” that “Brown eyes, family faces, maculate giraffes / jiggle and

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disappear” (1-2). In the poem “Traces”, those indistinguishable things leave traces

everywhere, even, as the poet says, “The earth itself has layers of time, / selves of

fossils that carry traces / of anything that will leave a trace” (15-17). History-

including “a family tree” is the result of those traces (22). For the poet, human

memory is constituted by those traces. As those traces do not have any existence in

reality at present, hence, those traces are always transformative and regenerative. Out

of that transformative nature of past or memory, the epiphenic nature of past

experiences is aroused in consequence. In the poem “Foundling in the Yukon”, the

thousand years old seeds found by the miners in one of the coldest regions of the

earth, constitute “the kick / and shift of an intra-uterine / memory” (26-28). When

those seeds are planted, the plants become the youngest and the oldest at the same

time:

these infants compact with age,

older than the oldest

things alive

……………………………

suddenly younger

by an accident of flowering

than all their timely descendants. (41-43, 46-48)

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As the poet has mentioned in the “Traces”, all living and non-living things are

amalgamated with various paradoxical experiences, and are changed corresponding to

the change in time and space. Those experiences and changes, in a sense always

already are parts of a specific self. Here the most striking feature of the poet’s identity

politics is that all the things are already like that what they will be in feature. All types

of changes are parts of the self; such unseen things do not add up anything to one’s

etymological identity, still their impact is felt in the overall personality. Change is the

result of that impact. Hurdling after such mundane activities in search of identity, the

poet now recognizes the fact that such essential relatedness of things can be achieved

through self annihilation and negotiation.

Considering the “structured field of relation” as scaffolding to identity politics,

Ramanujan clearly discards the notion of the inherent existence of self, and, in turn,

views the self as an absence (Appiah 64). In the course of time, as the poet mentions

in the poem “Sonnet”, the self is itself converted into a square where “time moves in

and out” (14) and takes the poet “far away from home” (13). In his diasporic

existence, hence when the poet writes a poem “To a Friend Far Away”, he mentions

his own existence as “my absent presence” (17). In his diasporic existence, cut off

from his root and rural moorings, the poet nostalgically thinks in the poem “Turning

Around”:

what am I to this herd

of Indian sheep, to be fed

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and sheared or

slaughtered, or to this man

who shares a throaty cry

with his father. (16-22)

The poet’s pessimistic voice clearly shows his lack of ability to relate him with the

substantial things of his rural moorings from which he is now detached. Hence he

now seeks to memorise his typical cultural attitudes that he received from his mother;

the poet remarks in the “Farewell” section of the long poem “Images”:

Mother’s farewell had no words,

no tears, only a long look

. . . with the advice that you should

not forget your oil bath

every Tuesday

when you go to America. (1-6)

What seems really significant in this remembrance is that, within the locus of that

reminiscence, the tone of alienation is explicitly vindicated. In Svetlan Boym’s

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terminology, such “diasporic intimacy”, which he names for nostalgia, longing and

desire for home in diasporic existence, “does not promise a comforting recovery of

identity through shared nostalgia for the lost home and the homeland . . . just one

learns to live with alienation and reconciles oneself to the uncanniness of the

surrounding world . . .” (251). Boym’s intellectual analysis is explicitly conveyed

when the poet says in the section namely “Tooth” of “Images”:

The large tooth in my left jaw

aches: it’s mother again

complaining of the large tooth

in her left jaw

the week before she died. (1-5)

In his strategic manipulation of memory to live in present as a displaced individual,

the poet reconciles memory and reality artistically. In such artistic amalgamation,

beyond the hermeneutics of nostalgia, the thrust for the real is always directed

towards the need for better assimilation and creation of novel identities. This so-called

“long-distance romance between home and homelessness” directed by the ‘homing

desire’ is artistically creative as it is the desire to create home where one is in the

diasporic location (Raina 19). In his sophisticated analysis of the concept of diaspora,

Avtar Brah remarks in this regard that “the concept of diaspora places the discourse of

‘home’ and ‘dispersion’ in creative tension, inscribing a homing desire while

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simultaneously critiquing discourses of fixed origins” (192-193, emphasis original).

In diasporic location, hence to say that, the fixed notion of identity is a problematic

construction. Throughout his middle and last poetry Ramanujan discards the fixed and

unitary notion of identity and concedes identity as a process rather than a product.

Incorporating the example of a Tamil saint namely Arunagiri in the poem “Fear No

Fall”, who is too “unhoused” like the poet, Ramanujan seeks to capture the entire

process of his dissention and creativity. Arunagiri, like the poet, had “roamed /

through the town (14-15) and inconsequence, “lost in the valleys / of light and

shadow, towers / and gardens and treetops, / and just threw himself down” (24-27).

However, displacing from the earthly abode, Arunagiri found himself “in the lap of a

very old man” and became extremely creative (30). The old man after providing

Arunagiri “his first line / of verse” (44-45), left him within the ambit of “a lifeline / of

seeking and finding and losing Him / again and again in a labyrinth / of winding

words” (50-53). Here the lesson of Arunagiri is symptomatic to Boym’s notion of

“diasporic intimacy” through which one “learns to live with alienation and reconciles

oneself to the uncanniness of the surrounding world . . .” (251). Like a genealogist,

without going for searching etymological origin and emphasizing the truth of

dissention, Arunagiri has taught the poet not to fear to fall repeatedly wherever is

necessary in a displaced location.

In his last poetry, the poet even questions the haunting nostalgias for home and

the parental root which takes him away from present context of living and in so doing

destabilizes his notions of identity and belonging. All those nostalgias and memories

are considered by the poets as unseen traces. In his poetic language, the poet names

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those traces as images also. However, the poet does not know from where those

images come! In the poem namely “From Where”, he questions the etymological

origin of those images: “I ask, where they came from” (4). In the poem, his

investigation simply ends with a pile of questions without any definite answer. The

nineteenth poems having sub-titles included in the group namely “Images” are poetic

manifestations of Boym’s notion of “homing desire” where the artistic mingling of

past and present denotes a tone of creative tension vis-à-vis home and identity (251).

In most of the poems of “Images” along with some other poems like “On Not

Learning From Animal”, “As Eichmann Said, My Brother Said”, “A Report”, “Bulls”

and so on, where the poet artistically juxtaposes past and present, memory and reality,

in which the present or reality ultimately triumphs over memory. In the poem “On

Not Learning From Animal”, the poet forgets his troublesome memories after learning

the art of tranquility from animals. In all these poems, the poet shows a big hiatus

between notions of tradition and their continuities, the world of god and its believers,

the idealized world and the present reality. He is found to be in utter difficulty in

combining an idealized Indian way of life with the realities of life in Chicago. Hitler,

Stalin, Lenin or Gandhi are now diminishing heroes, the present world has new

dictators. The bulls in the poem “Bulls” as representatives of a traditional Indian way

of life are contrasted to the modern bulldozers. In such a context, the poet exclaims in

the poem “A Report”:

what can I do, what shall I do, O

god of death . . .

. . . what can I do

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……………………………

to dream of a blue Mysore house in Chicago? (35-37, 40)

The poet in such a context questions himself whether should he be utterly nostalgic to

be engaged with his childhood days of Mysore or not! However, such “diasporic

intimacy” seems irreverent, as Boym says, in recovering the peace of mind and lost

sense of identity (251). Hence the poet becomes utterly realistic in the poem “As

Eichmann Said, My Brother Said”:

As Eichmann said, how can I

talk about it now

after all these years

of not remembering and not

forgetting either? That was

then, now is now, my brother said. (25-30)

As a displaced individual in a diasporic location, the poet once again appreciates the

fact that to live the ideal is an unfeasible task; the world of memory and the present

reality are seemingly different. What remains prominent in such a context is the total

conversion in terms of ways of life and the belief system; as the poet says in “That

Tree”:

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The legendary tree is upside down.

Roots in the air, branches in the ground. (1-2)

E.V. Ramakrishnan remarks in this context regarding Ramanujan’s notion of memory,

self and identity: “An awareness of our own essential vulnerability becomes

empowering since it makes us see the world in a different light. When the self steps

out from its habitual frames of seeing, it sees itself as part of a larger world” (100). In

this entire process, what is actually transformed is “the very apparatus of thinking” to

see, judge or to criticize oneself from new perspectives, and “to come to terms with

the contraries of existence” (Hess and Sing 145). In his last poetry, the change of

perspective towards self and reality is the result of transformation in the “very

apparatus of thinking” (ibid).

Such changing apparatus of thinking is clearly evident in his last volume of

poetry namely Uncollected Poems and Prose (2001), which is posthumously

published by Molly-Daniels Ramanujan and Keith Harrison. Besides proclaiming the

notion of multiplicity of selves, as early indicated in the very beginning of the chapter,

here in this volume Ramanujan’s chief concern is to see the world by coming out

from the habitual frames of seeing. As E.V Ramakrishnan, remarks that in this

process, the subject with his/her objective perspectives conceives the self as part of

the larger world, and through the process the subject curtains the sense of alienation in

an alien location. However, Molly-Daniels Ramanujan in her essay “A Note on A.K.

Ramanujan’s Uncollected Poems: The One Self Within the Many Selves” remarks

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that as a “poet of the consciousness of the self”, Ramanujan conceives a poem itself

“a concerted act of consciousness” through which the poet’s consciousness of the self

in a fragmented world is vindicated (107). This particular self-consciousness,

although, is not presented in a simplified manner like his early poetry, where the poet

was seen to be busy in recreating his lost identity and selfhood. The self-

consciousness of the poet in his last poetry is made inscrutable with the use of more

than one subject positions and different pronouns to mean his own self other than ‘I’.

In the very first poem of the volume namely “Invisible Bodies”, the poet has used four

different subject positions in all the four different stanzas with the pronouns- he, she,

the boy, and the girl. In the first stanza, the subject ‘he’ sees “three newborn puppies /

in a gutter with a mother curled / around them” (2-4). In the second one, the subject

‘she’ finds “a new born naked baby, / male, battered, dead . . . / with no mother

around” (6-8). In the third one, ‘the boy’ finds a “junkie / lying in the alley, covered

with flies” (11), and in the last one, ‘the girl’ finds a street full with ‘invisible bodies’.

Besides the subsequent difference between the animal and the human world, what

seem more difficult are all those four subjects’ positions that the poet fastidiously

mentions in every stanza. Molly-Daniels in her essay, questions in this regard that

whether all those persons are barely different from one another or “eerily connected

by the consciousness of another at a particular place and time”, or they are the

metonymical revelation of the same ‘I’ wearing the mask (Ibid 104)! She also

questions that “Is the speaker presenting the self and the non-self? Could the personal

in the poem be parts of the speaker? Are they a metaphor for the split within him”

(Ibid 105)? Molly-Daniels’ observation seems handy for us because all the first three

stanzas of the poem signify the same location as it starts with the repeated sentence

“Turning the corner of the street” in the line number 1, 5, and 9. Here the incidents in

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these stanzas suggest three different perspectives of the poet irrespective to time and

gender. The authorial ‘I’ is dislocated, however, in the process the persons are

connected through consciousness and disparate images. ‘The invisible bodies’ in this

sense, as the title signifies, are suggestive of the invisible split personalities

manifested through different perspectives present within the self.

Such fuzzy consciousness and shift of perspectives are explicit in all the thirty

two poems of this volume. In most of them, the presence of another as manifestation

of the split personalities within the self further complicates the issue of identity and

the authorial presence within the poems. The poet in these poem often shares his

consciousness and experience with someone else, who is present everywhere in the

poems, but always disguised as ‘he’. In the poem “Postmortem”, again like “The

Invisible Bodies”, the poet presents various subjects positions which are

interconnected through consciousness and the experiences of the characters. The other

in these poems always shares a variety of experiences and emotions whereas the poet

remains as a watcher as mentioned in most of the poems of his middle period. The

inseparability between the other and poet becomes more explicit to us in the poem

“Backstreet Visit” where the poet unequivocally mentions about this dichotomy:

He put down cash, dollar bills,

before the pan-chewing madam

in the hills

and then he, and I

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cowering deep within him, went

into the bare room. (1-6)

The poet and the other person, who is addressed as ‘he’, is distinctly inseparable as

both are recoiling within one self, i.e. the self of the other person. And when “the pan-

chewing madam” was cringed by the sound of a young cat, the poet proclaims the

suggested inseparability distinctly (2):

A kitten mewed in the next room.

She flinched.

I left in a hurry and he, he vanished

into my sweat and shudders. (23-26)

This other person seen in most of the poems of this volume is nothing but the result of

the objective look that the poet has put onto his own self as a watcher. The detached

selfhood resulting out of that objective look, though different as persons, is connected

with each other and maintained by the split of consciousness as inner and outer

respectively.

The ‘I’ in these poems, hence to say that, is the never-changing inner self of

the poet which always strives for nostalgia and rootedness even in an alien location,

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and the other person is the displaced, hybrid self resulting from spatial and cultural

dislocation. It is a kind of strategic manipulation of thoughts to conquer and to live

both the positions that a diasporic writer always deals with. It is the revelation of the

“two languages of the homeless writer, that is the one he was born in and the one into

which he is thrown . . .” (Raina 20). The two homes as representations of the two

languages “are not antipodes, but two facets of a cultural fate revealing the

uncommon relationships between creativity and bondage, art and compromise, poetic

practice and physical and intellectual survival” (Ibid 25). The other person in

Ramanujan’s poetry represents the second type of languages which is not only

alienated from the root, but also from his own self. ‘He’ in his poetry is a displaced

individual busy with what Bhabha says as “a culture of survival” (“The Vernacular

Cosmopolitan” 142). This other in comparison to the ‘I’ of the poems is less nostalgic

and more realistic in his dealing with the “culture of survival” (ibid). It is the reason

why the other person after returning from abroad does not find his mother at home.

The poet remarks in the poem “Returning”:

Returning home one blazing afternoon,

he looked for his mother everywhere

……………………………………..

she wasn’t anywhere.

He looked and looked, grew frantic,

……………………………………..

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He ran out of the house, shouting, Amma!

……………………………………..

Suddenly he remembered he was now sixty one

and he hadn’t had a mother for forty years. (1-2, 4-5, 8, 12-13)

Although, what is fascinating in the course of the poem is that here the poet mentions

about the displaced other within his selfhood, not about his inner ‘I’, which is always

homesick, and endeavoured to be intimated with the bygone past. Unlike the other in

his poem, the poetic inner self of the poet i.e. the ‘I’, as the poet mentions in the poem

“Eagle and Butterfly”, his inner self is intimated with his mother’s memory even in a

hyper-real situation:

. . . mother’s Persian capets

………………………….

waking me to childhood

Mother brings me tea again at 6 a.m.

before she dies in another time zone. (9, 12-14)

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In comparison to the inner self of the poet as a revelation of the authorial ‘I’, the other

within his self is more realistic and intimated with the outer world. In the poem

“Returning”, the other unable to find his mother in his house quickly becomes

realistic and recognizes the harsh reality of his life: “he hadn’t had a mother for forty

years” (13). In the poem “Smells” when the other speaks about the ‘smell’ of the

unseen presence of his wife in his house on the day of his marriage anniversaries, the

poet relates his panicky with tradition: “I know men who panic at the thought / of

turning fifty-seven on a Sunday / in December because their father died / at fifty

seven on a Sunday in December” (9-12). In this trajectory between the inner self to

the displaced other, the inner self of the poet conspicuously deals with self-

preservation while the other in all the poems of this group manifests self-fashioning

attitudes. One deals with the question of renewal and “homing desire”, whereas the

other provides the poet better scope for assimilation and “diasporic intimacy” (Boym

251). In this way, diasporic condition becomes a means of self-fashioning and self-

preservation simultaneously. The interconnection of both the two means paves the

way for hybridity, profound uncertainties and existential crisis.

The tension between the two stands for the metaphorical expression of the

duel identity or the double consciousness which Pramod Kumar Nayar considers as

the chief features of “the hybrid identities of diasporic or displaced individuals” (198).

For Nayar, the tension between the “root and routes” creates the space for the ongoing

dilemma in diasporic literature (Ibid 199). The conspicuous ironical stance in

Ramanujan’s poetry is also the result of this unsolved tension between the “root and

route” (ibid). In the poem “Smells”, the poet says that on the death days of their

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ancestors, “Hindus offer rice to crows / and to Brahmins” (13-14) with Vedic chants

to make happy “hungry ancestors” (18). In the poem “A Rationalist Abroad”, which is

actually addressed to his own self, the poet prescribes the help of “ouija board” (1) to

be intimated with the sights of “the aphrodisiac rhino in the Himalayas” (8), and the

“the maiden name of your mother” (13). However the poet with his ironical stance has

named this spiritualist attempt to contact the dead as rational attitude. In an alien

location, such activities seem rational for a displaced individual striving with the

tension between the “root and routes” (Nayar 199). In such a stipulation of in-

betweenness, the notion of nothingness again usurps the poet’s attention even in a

concrete situation of one of his friends’ visit to his house. In the poem “Waiting”,

when the poet was “Waiting for a friend from Milwaukee”, the sense of nothingness

was seizing his thoughts unknowingly (1):

They were waiting

for nothing, …

………………………….

As I watched them

turn into 57th street, I too waited

for nothing for a moment. (11-12, 15-17)

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Revitalizing Nagarjuna’s notion of emptiness as discussed earlier, here the poet has

showed again how his inner self is detached from the surrounding, in which he lives

as a psychologically detached individual.

In a context like this where notions of split-consciousness and multiple

identity mark reciprocity with the notion of nothingness, the process of identity

formation to a displaced individual always becomes more strategic and multifaceted

against the conventional understanding of diaspora literature. When almost all the

critics of diaspora literature have emphasized uncertainty or fluidity of identity as the

basic feature of identity politics in such situation, Ramanujan, unlike those critics,

conceives all kinds of transformations as parts of the essence of the self. All kinds of

transformations in the course dissention are always already existed within specific

things. In the poem “Becoming”, the poet clearly indicates:

On the grass of sloping hills

a scatter of white sheep,

unraveling already like the balls

of wool they are going to be. (1-4)

Following this same pattern, the snakes are “looking already polished / like women’s

wallets and gigolo / shoes” (6-8), deer are like “deerskins for gurus / to sit on” (11-

12), “Men and women run / races in faraway places like Seoul / and Munich, make

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four-minute miles / beat their own records, to become videos / and photographs that

sell shoes” (13-17). In the process of historical dissention, all sorts of transformations

are always already parts of the etymological identity of things, in which such

transformations occur. These transformations as parts of the inner essence of a self,

remains explicit as per the need and requirement of the context of living and desires.

Such notions of transcendence not only curtain diasporic alienation of a

displaced individual, but also negate the notion of essentialised or imposed identity. If

the future transformations are already parts of the inner identity of things, then there

cannot be any essential identity. From the philosophical point of view, the inner

identity, which is the basic essence of all the living things, is itself hybrid and liminal.

As the poet mentions in the poem “Traces” of Black Hen that all things are compact

with all sorts of paradoxical experiences and changes irrespective of time and space,

the transformation of identity in the course of time in this sense is as natural as the

growth of a tree from a seed. It is the reason why the poet mentions both the past and

the future as some traces evident in the present status of things. Like the future

changes, the changes of the past always remain in things as traces. These traces like

the future transformations are too transformative, and are aroused in some new forms

and ideas in future. In both the volumes of his last period, A.K. Ramanujan is aware

of the two simultaneous truths that as the future is evident in the present like some

traces, the past too is apparent in the present as some traces. In this reciprocity, both

are transformative and regenerative. If identity changes in the course dissention, those

changes are etymologically the parts of the inner self which consumes those changes

in the past always already.