Poems from prison by GN Saibaba (1967-2024): ‘I realised that jail is not death / it is my rebirth’

A Bird in Front of My Cage

A bird in front of my cage
fell sick in his nest high
in the iron bars of the roof.
The feathers of his wings were
clipped by a strange disease in the nation.

He gasped and gasped for breath
and for a flight away from his confinement
unconscious of his bare wings. With grief
and sorrowful eyes, some solitary
souls cried out silently:

He needs fresh air and a healing touch.
Others murmured: It’s too late,
he’s half-dead anyway; now it’s only
a matter of time. Each one of the caged
being empathised with the ailing bird
helplessly and embraced him with their eyes
craning their necks up to the familiar
bars above their heads as if he
were their fellow inmate.

Many an anguished heart whispered:
He was energetic and spirited
till the other day when he built
the nest helping his beloved
oblivious of the cruel times ahead.

Now closing his eyes, he would lie down
in his broken nest day and night
ever since a stormy hot summer wind
swept away his loved one
and the newly born chicks.

If he were dead now
in his broken solitary nest
it would be a grief.
If he were removed with brute force,
it would be a death by a lynch mob,
but who cares in this callous world,
whispers spread surreptitiously
and steadily from one solitary cell
to another by word of mouth.

Yet some others suspected:
He was a dreaded agent of terror
captured while hatching the eggs
of conspiracy. Others ruled out
the conspiracy as mere rumours,
and asserted: He was a messenger
of peace and justice. But a few
jailbirds cautiously stated:

The case was made solely on conjectures,
it wouldn’t stand in a court of law,
though it might take years or even decades;
a lifetime isn’t enough to expend for justice.

Some said, he was a pigeon
while others believed him
to be a dove. But hushed voices
of nuanced minds reasoned:
He was neither a grey pigeon
nor a white dove, but a pristine
indigenous phakhta. At the end of the day,
there wasn’t an agreement on the bird’s
antecedents, whether of his crimes
or of his species. A day before
a highly placed mandarin of reforms
was to visit for inspection,
a mission was set up to clean
the dirt of the ancient premises.

Labour’s long hands were made
to work with brutal urgency;
every speck of dust was swept away
along with the broken nest. Within no time
a great flock of grieving and shrieking
voices hovered outside the cage
turning my locked air thick with sorrow.

However, the dignitary, it was learnt later,
failed to grace his own visit
due to unavoidable circumstances
or as the hearsay had it,
avoided the ghastly incident’s shadows.

The grieving air remained
infectious in my closed cage.

7 May 2019
(Written to Chandu, the 9-year-old son of the poet’s brother.)

My Love, My Freedom

My love,
These insults, censures, rumours,
oppression, tearing pain and tears–
endure a little longer.

I know how free your mind
and burdenless your thoughts
were before this shadow of tyranny took us over.

I know how you wear liberty
on your black eyelashes and pride of self-dignity
on your lovely eyebrows.

We will have a life ahead
before which you may forgive me
for dragging you into this shadow.

First they came to steal our freedom;
then they came to rob us of our courage.

We are made helpless,
our emotions shackled,
love imprisoned, thoughts fettered,
and our words chained;
our language is stolen away from us.

In this pain of separation
and shackled existence,
I feel the sounds of your helpless
heaving heart.

Have a little patience;
our courage alone keeps us alive
to a bright breaking dawn.

My love, my freedom,
raise the burning torch
in your hand a little higher.

2 January 2018
(Written to Vasantha)

Mother, Weep Not for Me

When you came to see me,
I couldn’t see your face
from the fibreglass window.
If you glanced at my crippled body,
you could truly believe that I was still alive.

Mother, cry not for my absence at home.

When I was at home
and in the outside world,
I had many friends.
When I am incarcerated in this prison’s
Anda cell,
I have gained many more friends
across the globe.

Mother, despair not for my failing health.

When you couldn’t afford a glass of milk
in my childhood,
you fed me with your words
of strength and courage.
At this time of pain and suffering,
I am still strong with what you
had fed me.

Mother, lose not your hope.

I realised that jail is not death,
it is my rebirth,
and I will soon return home
to your lap that nurtured me
with hope and courage.

Mother, fear not for my freedom.

Tell the world,
my freedom lost
is freedom gained for the multitudes
as everyone who comes to stand with me
takes the cause of the wretched of the earth
wherein lies my freedom.

Mother, I hope someone translates this letter into Telugu for you. Mother, pardon me for writing this in a foreign tongue that you don’t understand. What can I do? I am not allowed to write in the sweet language you taught me in my infancy in your lap. –Your child, with love. (After mother came to see me at the mulakat at the prison window on 14th November 2017.)

14 November 2017
(Written to his mother)

A Continuous Ode to Life, by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o

In Santiago, Chile, recently, I visited the human rights museum erected so that people may not forget the years of human rights abuse under the Pinochet dictatorship. It also covers human rights abuses in virtually every continent. Some of the images of the carnage of the fighters for freedom and human dignity for even the least among us, were hard to look at, without struggling to hold back tears of sorrow but there were others, those of scribbled notes and sketches of defiance, expressions of love, amidst the desolation in the human cages, that brought tears and smiles.

The latter made me think of Professor Saibaba and his poems from prison, with their constant affirmation of love, captured in the recurring line, “I Refuse to Die”. He is talking of the death of the spirit, the result intended by those who cage progressive intellectuals and writers in prisons. But opposed to the death of the spirit is Love. The love he talks about is both very personal, the tenderness that comes through in the poems for Vasantha, but also love of the struggling people, that comes through in all the poems. His personal anguish at his being uprooted from his family and community becomes also that of the farmers and Adivasi people uprooted from their lands to give way to mining corporations. His poetry is on the side of unity, love and life as against division, hate and death.

Among the items I bought at the museum in Santiago were small figures of Pablo Neruda and Victor Jara. Pablo Neruda alongside other poets appears in Saibaba’s poems. Neruda’s words from his Songs of Protest conclude Saibaba’s poem; “Ode to Life”:

I have a pact of love with beauty.
I have a pact of blood with my people.

Victor Jara, the Chilean musician whose fingers were chopped off by the military in a public stadium so that he would not play his guitar in support of people’s power, appears indirectly in Saibaba’s poetry in the figure of Ekalavyan, the self-taught archer in the Mahabharata, whose thumb is chopped off so he would not compete with the sons of the mighty and powerful. Saibaba’s poems are in solidarity with the Ekalavyans of the world.

One of the poems is a letter to his dear students and fellow teachers, with this touching line:

“I have lived all my conscious life on the campuses of learning and teaching in search of knowledge, love and freedom. In the course of this search, I learnt that freedom for a few was no freedom.”

This line sums up Saibaba’s philosophy and tenacity. He is continually learning even from the harsh conditions of prison. Saibaba’s collection is one continuous ode to life. It joins other great collections of poetry from prison.

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o is a Kenyan novelist.

Excerpted with permission from Why Do You Fear My Way So Much? Poems and Letters from Prison, GN Saibaba, Speaking Tiger Books.