By Madhusree Chatterjee
The northeast has long been on the fringe of mainstream literary consciousness, edged out by its complex socio-politics, crisis of identity and the prolonged rule of the gun.
The literature from the region is a mirror of the angst.
'The Dancing Earth: An anthology Of Poetry From Northeast India', edited by Robin S. Ngangom and Kynpham S. Nongkynrih, is a saga of life as experienced by the seven sisters in the northeast and by Nepal, and told in blank verses and sonnets.
The collection brings together some of the best-known poets from the region irrespective of the state to which they belong in English translations.
The poems manage to bring out the style and the essence of the emotions of the original sonnets.
They draw from narrative folklores, songs, social rites, ethnic religions, individual memories, suffering, volatile politics, terror and the loneliness of a breed of young poets.
The poetry addresses two important issues: the question of regional identity in a land that has been described as a contiguous swathe with ethnic diversity, who share a common history, and how violence has seeped into the poetry to breed a gut-wrenching contemporary melange of content and poetic metres.
Temsula Ao, a poet belonging to the Ao tribe of Naga origin in upper Assam, has published four books of poetry and a collection of short stories. She was a Fulbright fellow at the University of Minnesota in 1985-86.
Ao's poetry in this book focuses on the lores of the birth of her tribe -- how the rocks, the trees, the earth and the wild have moulded the destinies of the Naga ethnic groups.
Her poem 'Lungterok' that the poet has translated in English literally means six stones.
Ao legends say the 'forefathers of the tribe - three men and three women - emerged out of the earth at a place called Lungterok'.
Some of the stones are still found below a village called Chungliyimti in Nagaland. The poet describes the early Ao elders as 'stone-people. The poetic and politic, barbaric and balladic, finders of water and fighters of fire'.
Poet Navakanta Barua, born in Puranigudam in Assam's Nagaon district in 1926, has written 38 books that include poetry, fiction, critical works and books for children.
His poem 'Measurements' translated by D.N. Bezbaruah in the anthology speaks of the emptiness of human existence.
'It is evening now, Let's go to the tailors to get measured. Measurement of neck, chest, hands and arms, measurement of the thumb... Fresh new measurement, when will someone stich the garment to fit man,' Barua says in his poem.
The sonnet is a sign of the times in northeast - when the prolonged reign of terror and its impact on the socio-economic space bred a fatalism that refuses to ebb despite the redressals.
Rajendra Bhandari, a poet of Nepalese origin, was born in Gangtok.
His poem 'Father and My Birthday..' translated from Nepali by the poet himself is an 'ode to the poet's father who toiled on the fields to make fallow land arable'.
And what the poet definitely knows '...is my features gradually form to resemble my father's'.
The poem written in Wordsworthian style of 'contemplative reflection' is symbolic of the Indian concept of carrying forward the bloodline -- when the son becomes a father -- in an essentially rural hierarchy of heredity.
The volume also comprises poems by Anupama Basumatary, Lutfa Hamum Selima Begum, Soso Tham, Sameer Tanti, Niranjan Chakma and several other poets from the region.
(Madhusree Chatterjee can be contacted at madhu.c@ians.in)
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