Read Carolyn Forche's article in Poetry magazine: "Reaeding the Living Archives: The Witness of Literary Art," discussed in class. Click on the following link for the online version of the article:
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/article/241858
How does Forche's position help you reflect on Sarpa Satra and Heart of Darkness?
Post your response by Monday November 14.
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/article/241858
How does Forche's position help you reflect on Sarpa Satra and Heart of Darkness?
Post your response by Monday November 14.
In her article, ‘Reading the Living Archives: The Witness of Literary Art’, Carolyn Forche makes an interesting statement. She says that a poem is ‘not a recounting, is not mimetic narrative, is not political confessionalism, and it is not simply an act of memory’, rather it is a witness of history. She goes on to suggest that poetry of witness, far from being representational in nature, serves as documents of evidence.
ReplyDeleteAn example of this may be seen in Arun Kolatkar’s Sarpa Satra when Jaratkaru, the snake-woman, reels off the names of her kinsmen who had been pulled into the sacrificial fire so far: ‘Pradyot, Chakra, Purna, Prahas, Paila…’ (Kolatkar 70). Here the poem may be seen as a ‘living archive’ by providing the list of the victims who were slaughtered in the yajnya.
Citing the example of the Russian poet Anna Akhmatova who lived through the Yezhov terror (the mass repressions in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics in 1937–8 conducted by Nikolai Yezhov when about 300,000 people were executed, and 3,500,000 deported to concentration camps, throughout the USSR), Forche says that Akhmatova transcended herself and used her poems to remember not only the injustice done to her personally but that which was borne collectively by a people.
When you consider the fact that Akhmatova was writing from her personal experiences, it’s hard to call Arun Kolatkar a ‘poet of witness’ in the same measure. He was not one of the snake people certainly! Why should he write a poem so feelingly about an incident that took place (in mythology) thousands of years ago?
A possible answer could be that the poem ‘Sarpa Satra’ may be seen as an allegory for modern day nuclear warfare (Arjuna and Krishna’s fantastic weapons (Kolatkar 45)), terrorism (Takshaka as a terrorist (Kolatkar 39)) and use of rhetoric to launch war or promote a Holocaust (Janamejaya ennobles the massacre of snakes using the word ‘sacrifice’ (Kolatkar 55)).
‘Witness, then, is neither martyrdom nor the saying of a juridical truth, but the owning of one’s infinite responsibility for the other one’ says Forche. In my understanding, Kolatkar is expressing his solidarity with the victims and trying to awaken humanity to the incredible ‘human capacity for cruelty and complicity with evil.’ (Forche, Living Archives).
Carolyn Forché concludes her essay on The Witness of Literary Art (of poetry in particular) succinctly through the following words:
ReplyDelete“In the poetry of witness, the poem makes present to us the experience of the other, the poem is the experience, rather than a symbolic representation. When we read the poem as witness, we are marked by it and become ourselves witnesses to what it has made present before us. Language incises the page, wounding it with testimonial presence, and the reader is marked by encounter with that presence. Witness begets witness. The text we read becomes a living archive.”
What she is saying, in other words, is that poetry is not always merely a piece of literature that should be deliberated over for the choice of words and the language. It often speaks volumes of the suffering of the poet. It bears witness, the same way a person may. It becomes a document for posterity; a testimony that is born out of an undeniable force of urgent necessity.
When one reads the passages which voice Jaratkaru’s trepidation in Arun Kolatkar’s Sarpa Satra, one understands how well poetry can bear witness to the sufferer. Her words about the victims who fell to the incineration of the Khandava forest go beyond sympathy and take the form of an empathiser’s words; she too is a victim to such reckless carnage.
A bearer of witness, Jaratkaru explains to her son evocatively about how burning down of the rain forest resulted in the obliteration of countless innocent living beings:
“By the time these two were done,
It was all gone,
Everything.
Not just the trees, birds, insects and animals
(herds upon herds
of elephants, gazelles, antelopes),
but people, Astika,
people as well
Simple folk,
children of the forest
who had lived there happily for generations,
since time began…..”
Thus, as Forché puts it, poetry of witness “is a mode of reading rather than of writing, of readerly encounter with the literature of that-which-happened, and its mode is evidentiary rather than representational—as evidentiary, in fact, as spilled blood.”
- Evelyn Ratnakumar
In keeping with the discussion on representation of an oppressed individual or community, a point which Carolyn Forché makes is that the poetry of witness works as a piece of evidence rather than represent someone or something. She says that a reader becomes part of the poet’s experience upon reading this poetry and the incident described in the poem becomes as real to the reader as it was to the poet when she/he experienced it.
ReplyDeleteWhen put in context with Sarpa Satra, Forché’s observation develops interesting dimensions as Sarpa Satra is a fictional account. However, the poem does grapple with issues of representation as Kolatkar chooses to speak on behalf of Jaratkaru, a woman of Naga origin.
Kolatkar also displays some apprehension on the detached nature of ‘objective’ reportage in Sarpa Satra, when Jaratkaru says that Vyasa wrote passively of the war that raged between his own grandsons. He is aware of the fact that that is what he does too as a poet when he puts an event down in black and white.
In Sarpa Satra, the issues of witness reportage and representation are constantly clashing with each other as Kolatkar plays the role of a storyteller when he tells us of Janamejaya’s snake sacrifice, but the fact that he gives voice to Jaratkaru and uses her as a medium to get a point across to his readers is slightly problematic.
Forché’s argument then, does not stand on solid ground in case of Sarpa Satra, solely because of the fictional nature of the poem and the style of storytelling adopted by Kolatkar.
-- Parvati Mohan.
Carolyn Forche's article gives a different perspective in approaching Arun Kolatkar’s poem ‘Sarpa Satra’. This line of approach is to read Sarpa Satra as ‘poetry of witness’. Forche defines witness as a “readerly encounter with the literature of that-which-happened, and its mode is evidentiary rather than representational”. However, since Kolatkar is talking of mythological characters and a mythological happening, it is not possible to go by Forche's definition of ‘witness’ if one wants to read Sarpa Satra as poetry of witness. So in the poem, witness should essentially refer to the characters through which Kolatkar speaks; in that case Kolatkar ceases to be a witness in the immediate sense of the words in the poem.
ReplyDeletePoetry of witness approach appears to find a resonance somewhat more cogently in the section of the poem where Jaratkaru, the snake woman speaks to her son Aastika.
But nothing was left, not a trace
by the time these two were done,
it was all gone,
everything.
Forche’s says that poetry is written not after ordeals and shattering experiences but often in their aftermaths. In the above lines, Jaratkaru harks back to the time when the Khandava forest was destroyed by Arjuna and Krishna. It was not only the flora and fauna that had undergone the wrath, but the language “that sounded like the burbling of a brook” too.
Forche believes in the purgatory experience as a necessary condition for the language to undergo so as to transform into poetry. This comes out tellingly in Jaratkaru’s words above. Forche says, “Languages that also continued to bear wounds, legible in the line breaks, in constellations of imagery, in ruptures of utterance, in silences and fissures of written speech.”
One, here, sees a link with Russian poet Anna Akhmatova’s poem Requiem written during the years of her son’s imprisonment: a deep concern for the personal, and then, a gradual furtherance from the personal to the larger realm of the public - “Akhmatova wrote it in the cry of a woman who had become all women.”
But the most important difference remains that Jaratkaru is a mythical character and hence couldn’t necessarily qualify as a witness.
Sarpa Satra, then, also needs to be read as a political allegory and for its poetic accomplishment.
In her essay ‘Reading the Living Archives: The Witness of Literary Art’, Carolyn Forche draws allusions from poets who have been inspired by their own sufferings to pen down poems. She says that a poem’s witness is not a recounting, is not a mimetic narrative and definitely not an art of memory. The main concerned poets here are those who have experienced suffering themselves and have turned to poetry as a solace to vent out their misery. Forche gives an example of Akhmatova, a Russian poet who composed a poem called ‘Requiem’ during her son’s imprisonment. If we look at the first section of Arun Kolatkar’s ‘Sarpa Satra’, we find an account by Janamejaya, who pledges to avenge the death of his father by eradicating all the snakes from the face of the Earth. But if we apply the Forche’s term of ‘witnessing’, we cannot justify Janamejaya’s anger. He confesses at the very beginning , ’ It was a scheming snake, I am told , with a grudge against my great grandfather that killed my father’. We understand that Janamejaya did not witness what had happened. He had only heard of it from his guardians. On the other hand Jaratkaru justifies the act of witnessing as hers was a first hand account.
ReplyDeleteForche makes a contradictory statement when she says that poetry is not written after ordeals and shattering experiences but often in their aftermath. In the light of this statement we can view Jaratkaru’s account of the burning down of the Khandava forest in a spree by Arjuna and his aide Krishna. Though Jaratkaru makes it clear that she doesn’t support the killing of Arjuna’s son Parikshit as revenge, she says that the death of Takshaka’s wife in the forest fire instigated him to take up such a step.
In Carolyn Forché's article, she emphasizes the importance of 'poetry of witness' and how any poetry can only be fruitful and precise if it is narrated by a witness who has experienced all that he/she describes.
ReplyDeleteAnna Akhmatova wrote the prologue to her famous poem 'Requiem' describing an instance as she waited outside the Leningrad prison looking for her son. Forche says this was Akhmatova’s 'spiritual accomplishment of remembering injustice and suffering as experienced within herself and collectively borne'. All the sufferings could only be aptly put across because the person writing it had in fact been through it all.
In Ethics and Infinity, Emmanuel Levinas says that the poetry should cause an awakening, an awakening ‘signifying a responsibility for the other’. Forche goes on to say that in conditions of extremity like war and sufferings, the witness becomes ‘in relation.
According to me, all that Forche says can be paralleled to Sarpa Satra if we consider Jaratkaru as the narrator—the poet. When she talks to Astika (the reader), the emotions and anxiety is clearly put forth as she bears witness to all the wrongdoings, evils and sufferings taking place. She saw her family and friends perish in the Khandava forest massacre and again in the snake sacrifice happening now. The names of the deceased when mentioned by her is hard hitting as it provides proof of the fact that it was her near and dear ones who died and she was witness to it. So we see how Forche’s essay works in favour of Kolatkar’s narrative as Jaratkaru provides a first hand account of a story in history that has though been mentioned in books but never has it been recounted by the beholder himself/herself.
Carolyn Forsche, in her article ‘Reading the Living Archives: The Witness of Literary Art’, cites Levinas’ definition of a poetic work. According to Levinas, “A poem is lyric art, but that a poetic work is at the same time a document, and the art that went into its making is at once a use of discourse.”
ReplyDeleteLevinas’ claim could be applied to Arun Kolatkar’s poem Sarpa Satra, a snake sacrifice performed by Janamejaya to wipe out the serpent race since a snake killed his father Parikshit. It is relevant to apply because a poem like Sarpa Satra serves as a document narrating a significant event.
Carolyn Forsche particularly highlights the importance of ‘poetry of witness’. Forsche talks about ‘Poets of witness’ indulging in poetic reportage. She talks of ‘poetry of witness’ as something that possesses greater quality to serve as a piece of evidence than to represent something or someone. Forsche says ‘poetry of witness’ is “as evidentiary, in fact, as spilled blood.”
In the context of poetic reportage that Forsche talks of, it is interesting to note that Kolatkar has used reportage aptly to convey to the readers, the incident of snake sacrifice through the voice of Jaratkaru. With a tone of irreverence and sarcasm, he also makes a remark about Vyasa’s reportage of Mahabharatha.
“I mean 24000 verses, Lord have mercy!
What it badly needs
Is a good editor.”
Forsche says “Use a language to conceive, organize, and justify Belsen; use it to make out specifications for gas ovens; use it to dehumanize man during twelve years of calculated bestiality. Something will happen to it… Something of the lies and sadism will settle in the marrow of the language. Imperceptibly at first, like the poisons of radiation sifting silently into the bone.”
There is a strong sensation of this feeling in Sarpa Satra where Kolatkar writes about how the snakes are being exterminated in a gruesome manner.
“and take its life by smothering it
bludgeoning it
or worse
No need to carve up the parts
-omentum, liver, lung, bladder,
genitals-
and cook them separately
or to roast
the victim’s still-bleeding heart on a spit.
Kolatkar also goes on explain about how the stench of burning the snakes creeps in and spreads in a manner so as to become the major part of the air we breathe and soon we would think of it as “something unindian, alien and antinational”. Interestingly, it leaves the reader wondering why Kolatkar ends the poem without a full stop.
- S. Sunitha
Carolyn Forche in her article Reading the living Archives: The Witness of Literary Art mentions how the "soliude and tranquility" which were initially thought to be the basis of literary production were absent from many twentieth and twenty-first century poets and how they have created literary art with language that has "also passed through catastrophe".
ReplyDeleteIn this context, Arun Kolatkar's use of language in Sarpa Satra can be observed. In Janamajeya's recounting of events, the poet says:
"and had grown before the nbelieving eyes
of all the king's men who fled in terror
to coil himself around my father
and sting him into a searing flame
of pure pain
and turn the whole palace in fact
into one grand funeral pyre.
The killer himself, having struck,
took off like a streak
of lightning in reverse
to watch the blaze triumphantly from above
and do a little jig in the night sky."
The trace of extremity in the language as Forche describes it can be noted. Wislawa Szymborska in "Hunger Camp" writes:
"Write it. Write. In ordinary ink
on ordinary paper: they were given no food,
they all died of hunger. “All. How many?
It’s a big meadow. How much grass
for each one?” Write: I don’t know.
History counts its skeletons in round numbers."
The poetic language here, as Forche says in her article tries to come to terms with "evil and its embodiments", and "there appeals for a shared sense of humanity and collective resistance".
Kolkatkar's use of language in the section "When Jaratkaru Speaks To Her Son Aastika", the promise of eradicating snake as a species to avenge the death of his father portrays his hatred the species as a whole. As Forche says,in conditions of extremity (war, suffering, struggle), the witness is in relation, and cannot remove him or herself. Relation is proximity, and this closeness subjects the witness to the possibility of being wounded." It is the condition when witness begets witness.
Carolyn Forché observes in her essay, Reading the Living Archives: The Witness of Literary Art, that poetry serves a record for those suffering. She says that most twentieth-century poets wrote poetry of the tragedies they were having to endure; poetry served as a medium for chronicling their sufferings not in retrospect or while looking back years later but right after the devastation hit them.
ReplyDeleteI feel this is exactly what Jaratkaru in Sarpa Satra is doing. Arun Kolatkar has given voice to a direct sufferer; a sufferer who had no voice in the epic Mahabharata.
Forché says, “The witness who writes out of extremity writes his or her wound, as if such writing were making an incision. Consciousness itself is cut open. At the site of the wound, language breaks, becomes tentative, interrogational, kaleidoscopic. The form of this language bears the trace of extremity, and may be comprised of fragments: questions, aphorisms, broken passages of lyric prose or poetry, quotations, dialogue, brief and lucid passages that may or may not resemble what previously had been written.”
This is the exact reason why I am able to forgive the possible romanticisation that Kolatkar dabbles in, in the following verse:
“Trumpeting elephants
rushing towards water
for safety
Trample on half-cooked turtles
as they crawl out of
the boiling lakes.
A gazelle trips over
a dead crab at the water’s edge
and sprains an ankle.
The taste of honey
Still on its tongue,
A bear burts into flames,
Falls from a tree
With a burning branch between its legs
To roll in the flaming grass below.
He is recording, through Jaratkaru, what has been so far an unspoken documentation of a mythical catastrophe. A little romanticisation is allowed. There does exist something called an artistic license, is it not?
- Manish Raj
Carolyn Forche mainly talks about "poetry of witness" and "witness of poetry" in her article 'Reading the Living Archives: The Witness of Literary Art'. As far as she explains the term "poetry of witness" she says-"it is a mode of reading rather than of writing, of readerly encounter with the literature of that-which-happened, and its mode is evidentiary rather than representational—as evidentiary, in fact, as spilled blood." Relating this to Arun Kolatkar's Sarpa Satra, which a fictional account of Snake sacrifice described in the famous Indian epic Mahabharata, he takes the help of the voice of Jaratkaru (a snake woman) to put forth his views. He himself did not witness the event but makes his experience of reading (the event in Mahabharata) and what he interpreted,known through Jaratkaru. This right of representing his voice through a character present at that time is questionable, though he might have used this tool to authenticate his work.
ReplyDeleteApart from this, Carolyn Forche brings forth other interesting points poetry being written not after enduring great sufferings but "in their aftermath-in languages that had also passed through these sufferings; languages that also continued to bear wounds, legible in the line breaks, in constellations of imagery, in ruptures of utterance, in silences and fissures of written speech." This argument gives strength to Kolatkar's use of the voice he chooses to use. As Jaratkaru was the one who was a witness of all that happened and the events that preceded the 'sacrifice'. The language used by Kolatkar, in that sense might be modern and casual that cannot be attributed to a snakewoman, but it hits the reader hard as its satirical in its own way.
And thus comes the role of the reader, "the witness of poetry" as she calls her the 'other'. She expects this other "to be in turn marked by what such language makes present before her, what it holds open and begets in the reader."
The point that Forche tries to make is the same as what she learnt that poetry can also be about evil, suffering or wrong being inflicted. And thus she mentions Anna Akhmatova's 'Requiem'. She also writes "Poetic language attempts a coming to terms with evil and its embodiments, and there are appeals for a shared sense of humanity and collective resistance". In Kolatkar's Sarpa Satra, Jaratkaru's voice becomes so powerful that Janmajeya finally goes and stops the sacrifice, thus 'saving the humanity'(as is mentioned in the poem). She further adds how while reading the poem we become a witness of what is being presented before us through the poem.
In the end,she again brings about the role language plays as she says "Language incises the page, wounding it with testimonial presence, and the reader is marked by encounter with that presence". And how while reading the poem the reader comes to 'witness' the text. Forche's article though leaves one question unanswered, which is the role Vyasa's witnessing and writing who does nothing to stop the sacrifice and goes on writing the great Indian epic.
-Anumeha Saxena
Carolyn Forche, like Pablo Neruda, has the ability to use the ‘political’ with the ‘personal’. In the article, ‘Reading the Living Archives: The Witness of Literary Art’, she says that a poem is a witness of history, not just a piece of literature. She points out that the poetry of witness does not represent anyone or anything, but works as a piece of evidence. She also says that when the reader reads a poem, he experiences what the poet experienced while he was writing the poem.
ReplyDeleteShe goes on to suggest that poetry is not just a ‘mimetic narrative’, or ‘political confessionalism’ or not just representational in nature, but acts as document of evidence. It speaks about the suffering of the people and the poet.
This observation can be applied to Arun Kolatkar’s Sarpa Satra as well. Though it is a mythological and fictional account, the poem does act as a historical piece of evidence. Kolatkar, through Jaratkaru, says that Vyas wrote one part of the story and the other part is what Jaratkaru is telling. Kolatkar has put down the events like a reporter does, which is what even Vyas did, and Kolatkar is aware of that.
The poem constantly deals with the question of representation as Kolatkar is giving voice to Jaratkaru.
However, Forche’s argument cannot be completely applied to Sarpa Satra because it is a fictional poem. I think Forche was talking about real incidents when she said that a poem is a witness of history.