‘What happened to the flowers?’: What absolute freedom looks like for publisher-poet Naveen Kishore

They tried him. Without a trial. Accusing him of things he had not done. Pronouncing guilt. Sentencing. As punishment. They tied him up. Wrapping a rope around him from head to toe. Arms parallel to his body. His wings tightly clenched fists. Bound to his arms. As he stood. Proud and tall. Shot him with a water cannon at 40 degrees below zero. Frozen thus. They lowered him from the trapdoor in the sky. And cut the rope.

The angel expelled.

I

The forcible nature of the “Un belong”; how nations enforce a violent “unbelonging” upon their people – I use “people” and not “minority” because even though it begins with first stripping the minority populations within nation states of their self-esteem using policing methods that include a combination of constant surveillance and violence and detention and imprisonment without recourse to law, this “enforcement” spreads to take in as much of the populace as possible. No longer just supplicants but dehumanised surviving entities who spend their entire “living-lives” attempting to survive. Forget notions of who belongs and who doesn’t; who has rights to being a citizen and who doesn’t; note the fact that the law no longer stands as a counter-force against this enforcement. On the contrary, it grants it the language of legality. Justice is no longer autonomous. The very language that framed our constitution is now the language of sanction and oppression.

The first thing he did was to put the languages under arrest. All of them. That’s not all. He even put the dialects in jail. So as to reduce the agitated babble to silence. He isolated them. Then he proceeded to strip them naked. Men. Women. Children. No one was spared. Thus, reducing them to bare flesh and bones. Over time. Through a controlled starvation diet. Meanwhile, his men gathered all the name tags that the prisoners had worn and went about the task of mixing one with the other. Causing immense confusion. In a bizarre revelry of a ritual reminiscent of a lottery. An incoherent alphabet unable to find its way home.

Alienate. Isolate. Exclude.

June 4, barely free of the dust, of an Indian election process, the lynchings are back. The failure, both individual and collective, to create a space of dissent. The visual imagination of our Instagram-lives is equally violent. The voyeuristic has tasted blood. In fact, I would go further and insist that the “once bystander” of that other collective shame you of all people are familiar with is now a willing participant. No longer simply happy to turn our eyes away from the atrocity, we now actively perpetrate.

A silence

long measured
indifferent

Consider what it means to keep entire populations in a state of “perpetual war”. [Kashmir? Gaza?] Reduce our beings into physical shells awaiting our immediate demise. Not always a bodily death. The emptying of our sense of self, our esteem, our creative abilities, is death. The mind has imagination sucked out of it. It is Empty.

My friend and author Reinhard Jirgl, who in many ways, chose to “un belong” himself as an act of survival, has this to say:

The warlike rumble of thunder from all corners of the world will not cease this year either. For a long time now there hasn’t been any difference between civilians and combatants, on the contrary, civilians have to serve as shields for military actions – Total War has become the only form of war that can no longer be eliminated from the world, at the latest since WW2. And it is becoming more frequent and increasingly difficult to bring about peace agreements. In the regions around Palestine, warlike conflicts in which all involved are endeavouring to wipe out the other completely have been raging for centuries. Going back to antiquity, history shows these regions to have been theatres of war: there have always been too many foreign conquerors, too much religious fanaticism and as a result too many deaths, always followed by even more calls for revenge and retribution … Total War seems to have penetrated the region’s very geology, like a poison that contaminates the soil and groundwater and hence all other life. No, there is no prospect of peace in Ukraine today either, but there is the prospect of future returns for this war’s globalist investors – why else would the ‘West’ be giving these billion-euro “gifts” (declared as loans) to the Ukrainian state, a juggernaut of corruption, if not as investments in future power in the region?! I can’t imagine how Ukraine could ever repay all these billions in loans that have allegedly been granted & will continue to be granted! But presumably that is not the aim at all, but rather the search for new, future dependencies, which in turn will create new unrest and further escalating conflicts etc. Business first!

This is our brutal reality. Death as merchandise, a mass market product to profit from. The “perpetual” I speak of is nothing if not inward. We are at war with our own citizenry. Farmers and water cannons are merely the tip. Entire regions, zones, cities, countries, are denying the right to exist. Cities are open prisons. Bombarded round the clock with bombs that choke, burn, not just people, but the air. For years, even decades and nothing remains. Then we outsource the rebuilding to corporations in countries that started this devastation in the first place. At great cost.

Unknown and alone, I have returned to wander through my native country, which lies about me like a vast graveyard…

— Friedrich Holderlin, Hyperion

II

Imagine a narrow road. With flickering lamps from a different age. Gingerly placed atop tall posts. Shadows against the sky. Just before their demise at the hands of the morning light. Night into day. A crossfade, as in black and white film. Stretching uphill into a horizon gradually coming to life. Its silver beginning to make its presence known. The dew-washed cobblestones rubbing their eyes. Stretching sideways. Waking up. Becoming aware of the dawn light caressing them. Aslant. The road paved in silver. A feast of glitter. A scene that started like a silhouette as in shadow plays and gradually discovers its own identity as the dawn made way for the first rays of the sun. And the sounds of the morning. I cannot for the life of me choose the soundtrack. I know that I need the sound of the horse-drawn milk cart. What with cobblestones and flickering lamps. Loud honking trucks and cars in a hurry. The cycles and the morning joggers with their dogs running beside them. In the midst of this growing irritation, I am stopped dead in my tracks by a falling body. Just like that. With not a single tall building in sight. This being a small town at the edge of the world where the strictest of architecture laws prevail. One plus one. That’s it. A ground floor and a first floor. Tiled roofs. Wood and earth. So where did this thing this body fall from? Nothing to be done. I stop in my tracks. Go over to the body. White. Completely covered in a body suit made up of a fabric I do not recognise. Familiar but not known. Bend over it. Gently straightening its twisted wings. Lifting the weight of the torso to free the left one. The legs are splayed and need straightening. The feet bare. Showing signs of burns. I cradle the body in such a manner that the face and head are leaning against my chest as I sit on the road. The narrow one that walks into the horizon. The one with cobblestones. No longer silver. I notice the face. The shut eyes. The nose. The mouth. The ears. Something tells me I have seen this person with the wings before. Not in a dream. Nor in a painting. Elsewhere. But I cannot remember where. I see no visible signs of injury. The breathing is gentle. I know he is alive. I touch the forehead. Then gently try and open each eye with my fingers. I notice that the first one has a vivid dream playing under the eyelids. Compelling. Grand. Evocative. I shut it hurriedly. Feeling a sense of guilt. Like I am intruding. I slowly open the other eye. Recoiling as from an electric shock. Burning my fingers and being thrown backwards by the force of a shattered dream. The eye behind the eyelid raging. In fury. Destroying everything that had been evocative. Compelling in the other eye. Dream into nightmare.

The ships and the trains are still amongst us. As are the borders. In fact, borders are big business. As our detention centers. Transit camps. Ownership. The individual as slave. To money. Capital. The media that splits. Into multiple selves. You no longer know which one is real. The one that hides behind the “digital” or the one that has been reduced to bare survival. By forces of extreme authoritarian technology. Extreme. Authoritarian. Technology. Bears repeating. Make no mistake. It is a deliberated strategy. A shadow self of the more visibly enslaved one?

Ownership. Every thought. Every memory. Every emotion has a landowner. Things that “happened”. Are meant to belong. To you. Or to me. Like a privilege acquired at birth. A litany made up of “this is mine, yours, ours”. And nations appropriate entire histories. Lives. Other nations. People. Writing and the re-writing of things that later become our truth. Yours and mine. Living under the heel of collective ownership can be crippling. To say the least.

stripped
made naked
the bitterness

of
shadows

How does one free the “event” of one’s life from the clutches of a possessive, even dictatorial, memory, and turn it into a literature of resistance?

III

For me it is a stepping into the mirror. Causing conflict between what should simply have been two reflective even reflecting images. The closeness as usurpation. Of space. Of identity. The hug or the embrace or the clasp that should have been one of friendship and sisterhood even brotherhood becomes one of suspicion, stabbing the one that reflects back. Clearly made visible, larger than life in the silver. The trust and its opposite. Or. A dailyness of mistrust. Feeding on itself.

Mirror. Mirroring. Transformation of an image that stops being mere reflection of that which is mirrored. Life as it unfolds in the time of authority. Culture under a heel. Resistance a performative rage.

The mirror revealed a shadow. Its own.

Dislocation. The sudden lack. The not-knowing. The sense of self that you grew up with. In a land you called your own. One that nurtured you. Suddenly no longer welcoming. Paper. Documents. Proof. Always having to prove your existence. Or end up in detention. Awaiting transport. Familiar? To where? Uncertainty that keeps you off balance. Do you belong?

the sun is at its harshest
the shadows have packed up

she plucks a mirror from the rosebush
and smashes it
her bunched up fist
streaked with blood
blinks back at her

you miss your hold on the cursor and fall

sung in an incessant loop
morningnoonsunset
unlucky angelus

the sun is at its harshest
the shadows have packed up

she stares at the poem
her bunched up fist slamming shut
the laptop the cursor arrested
in mid-sentence stifled angelus?
or just unlucky again?

you stare at the white
of the table cloth streaked with blood
and wonder
what happened to the flowers?

the sun is at its harshest

a thought crosses my mind how does one show
the colour red in black and white

the shadows have packed up

should I
she wonders
pluck a mirror from the rosebush
and smash it

What then is a better way of reconciling two seemingly opposing truths?
Do you “thrash” it out?
Like a boxing bout?
Or do you retreat?
Without letting the world follow you into seclusion as you brood.
Mull. Ruminate. Attempt.
To understand the truth that is not yours.
The one that needs to be understood can never be yours.
And yet it is imperative you try.
To make what seems like a lie appear not only palatable but perceived as true.
Albeit through borrowed lenses.

Somewhere there is a reality.
One that belongs to us all.
But as individuals.
A lonely truth.
Owned by one person.
Singular and unique.

Or.

Prepare for another possibility.
One in which simultaneous truths are not only possible.
They actually exist.
Your truths. On one hand.
And truths that belong to them.
On the other.

I conclude with the opening line of Waiting for Godot.

Nothing to be done.

IV

For those of us who do not wish to be left without hope, I offer you a true story:

The child began to weep in her sleep. In her bed. Where she slept. On the top floor of a seven-story building. At the busy confluence of two streets. At that time, I had no inkling. Of either the child. Or the building. Or that she cried. In her sleep. I had not known these tears before. Known tears yes. Other tears. Not these. At the time I had no idea who they belonged to. Or what had caused them to begin weeping. Without so much as a sound. Or how for that matter they had found their way to the street. Much to the amazement of the people who went about their daily lives. Heads lowered in concentration. Swiftly walking in every direction possible. Simultaneously. Later someone would say it had begun as a trickle. She would point at a tall mansion at the corner of two streets. A handsome redbrick edifice. Seven stories high. With large windows. Everything happened swiftly. Others would chip in with how the water had appeared to rise. And flood. And slowly swirl around every single passer-by and structure. Submerging everything in its wake. Cars and buses and trams and every conceivable mode of transport. Rising to the stature of a full-fledged flood. Restless. The kind that happens when the river bursts its banks. Or the sea comes calling. And not being familiar with the courtesies of what it can and cannot do it gets carried away. This was not the water main bursting. And since it hadn’t rained for many months, it certainly wasn’t a flash storm. Nor had any hurricanes visited the city in a long time. The end result was a city about to drown. Unless. Unless someone managed to wade through the floods. Make their way to the red brick building. Force their way into the flooded building. Climb up to the seventh floor where the tears seem to be coming from. Break down the locked door. And swimming against the turbulent current make, their way into the sleeping child’s nightmare. Save her from drowning. Stop the child from crying.