"Bleeding Roses," the poetry of Adeeba Shahid Talukder

Shahr-e-jaanaan: The City of the Beloved, is Adeeba Shahid Talukder’s first full-length poetry collection. As the author states in her preface, all the poetry contained in the book occurs “in dialogue” with the Urdu tradition of Ghazal, which Talukder has studied and translated for years. 

“Dialogue” pertinently defines the complex interplay of Talukder’s creation with its literary sources. Such meeting takes a number of forms, from translated or rather “transcreated” quotes to reinventions of entire poems, from tributes to famous authors to the borrowing of traditional characters, imagery and tropes. 

The universe of Ghazal freely and fluently inhabits the page, self-deciphering as the reader proceeds, without need for punctual explanation. Although, at the end of the book the author clarifies her references, giving context to the authors she quotes as well as to the characters that she borrows from them. To revisit the book after reading the final notes is a different and worthy experience.

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But what really counts is obviously the first reading, the one before the notes. Ghazal originated in 7th century within the Arab tradition, later spreading to Persia, Turkey, and the entire Indian continent. Its theme is unrequited love, as a combination of shrill pleasure and unbearable suffering, with its trail of grief and insanity. It is the kind of love we find in the Song of Songs, in all mystical literature and, slightly tamed, in Medieval Courtly lyrics. The language describing it is quintessentially ecstatic, inextricably mixing the spiritual and the sensual, an explosive collusion of carnal and divine.

“Shar-e-jaanaan” is bravely themed after this type of love, which Talukder lets detonate through the pages, allowing it to bounce back and forth a thousand of years, across continents and civilizations, without losing a drop of intensity.  

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The book is articulated in sections titled after Ghazal tropes such as wine, the nightingale, chains, dancing courtesans, the tearing of the clothes, and more. Characters and motifs, though, don’t abide by such grouping. They make loops, go underground and reemerge, circulate at leisure, as if those partitions were loosely drawn Tarot cards, ready to be shuffled again.

The imagery Talukder sifts from Ghazal and then makes her own truly recalls ancient Tarots, even sharing their colors (red, black, white and gold), as well as it evokes European folktales, which of course weren’t European to start with. They condensed East and West as they gathered, preserved and passed down a legacy of symbols drawn from the collective psyche.

The echoes of those tales, not even consciously acknowledged, amply enable the western reader to appreciate “Shahr-e-jaanaan” without mediation.

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For example, the opening poem, a prelude to all sections, coming back in a different version at the end of section v, deals with reaching womanhood with all that such passage entails. As she realizes she no longer can “wait to be beautiful,” the poem’s speaker pushes “bangles upon bangles” onto her wrist, rubbing her “hands raw with metal and glass.”

Each time a bangle broke, I watched
the blood at my veins
with a grim face
feeling more like a woman.

If the wrist is a trope of Ghazal poetry, symbolizing, the author explains, female fragile elegance, so are bangles, dancers’ most typical ornaments. But the association of female pre-nuptial adornment with self-mutilation is practically universal, as is the ambivalence of desire for sex and abhorrence for the loss of freedom and integrity implied by marriage.

So the blood profusely spilled throughout Shahr-e-jaanaan, namely or else in the shape of scattered rose petals (a literal, constant “defloration”), rusty leaves, henna stains, is both menstrual blood and blood of lost virginity, the same bled by all little mermaids when their tail is split into legs. We easily recognize it.

Moreover, wrists like ankles are to the human psyche portals through which bad and good enter our core in order to heal or destroy it, and the same is true for the neck from which Majnoon, a Ghazal character to whom Talkuder devotes many poems, repeatedly tears his collar, shedding basic protection, making himself a pray because of despair. Majnoon is the fool, the one who has lost his reason for love.

And the bangle, the bracelet, is just the first loop of the chain it stands for, the signifier of slavery.

From section viii, “God-shaped Woman”.

… To be a slave:
the pull of light,

the chain’s idle
bind.

So the love addressed by Ghazal poetry, Petrarch’s sonnets, mystic literature, great Romantic novels, the Song of Songs, and by Talkuder, wounds or exacts self-wounding, forces its way into the heart, maddens and enslaves.

It’s a passion we are unable to negotiate because we are too young (it is love seen by the adolescent as the fate life will force upon her) or because our psyche was crushed within the jaws of some binary, smashed by the irreconcilability of pleasure and guilt, gain and loss, want and fear.

Such tornado has multiple facets, some more pleasant than others, as it implies fusional stages and the exhilarating blur of self-boundaries, as it swings between the polarities of rejected suitor and omnipotent beloved, which of course are two sides of the same coin, a mirrored reality.

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Shahr-e-jaanaan isn’t afraid of exploring contrasting refractions, as if perhaps an ultimate meaning could spring forth from their constant shuffling. What certainly emerges is a questioning of the whole mythology, a deep, open meditation made of shattered fragments, as if the poet had first smashed a mirror and then randomly picked shards, holding them to the light for readers to see what each reflects, finally recreating their own vision.

In the first poem of the book, the bangles have “no symmetry or sequence.” Their colors are “bright, jeweled, and dissonant”.

From “Kathak: The Dance of the Courtesans:”

… You, fragile
as glass, will learn:

you were made       to break.

Should a poem be selected to epitomize the collection, a sound choice would be “When in the dark / my mind brightened.”  It begins the book with striking imagery, gathering in one take the cruel rite of passage later articulated section by section. It brilliantly returns at midway, and dialogues with itself.

Also the title poem, which alone forms section vi, would be a natural choice. It describes the speaker’s admission into a mental ward, following a breakout that turns into a breakdown. Here as elsewhere, Ghazal verse and tropes seamlessly meet the present tense, traveling at the speed of light from remote ages to the now, instantly incarnated, made flesh.

My personal choice is “On Courting Calamity,” a brief poem found in section iv. Rather than exemplifying motifs, it highlights the book’s modus operandi and deeper intent. It expresses a need for joining extremes, such as an old tradition endowed with immense beauty but carrying a mortifying ideology, and a present where the ideology no more applies but the beauty deserves to live. It yearns for reconciling opposites in general, those antinomies that if not harmonized lead to insanity, such as the desire to be loved and the fear of being annihilated, the compulsion of abiding by the myths of beauty and simultaneously denying them. These conflicts are explored throughout Talukder’s verse and they materialize in the body, which they inhabit and haunt, pulling it apart, tearing at its core, unless words find the power to extend themselves over the chasm, to bridge through.

A thread

from pre-

eternity

to past time’s

end, a thread

that binds

movement

to gesture, a crow

to a narcissus.

I stretch.

My waist, this morning,

is a knot.