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50books_poc#1: Black Candle: Poems About Women from India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
This is a book of tragedies, exquisitely rendered. I had to read it in stages because it's powerful, and I kept mentally rebelling against it. Almost every poem in it is a tale of some kind of victimization, and there are no solutions or escapes offered. I prefer stories to have endings that are either happy, or are sad but suffused with meaning. These stories either end unhappily or - worse - don't end, because the sorrows are neverending, and it's up to the reader to find the meaning.
But the book is not medicine, and now that I've made my way through it, I love, love, love it. Divakaruni writes with deep and unflinching sympathy, and the stories she tells are haunting and lovely. Her poetic gifts are profound, which makes even the most crushing tales into things of beauty.
Here is one of the poems, behind a cut for length, and also for triggers: domestic violence, stillbirth, child abuse
The Robbers' Cave, by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
My favorite game was the one
where the robbers
slip into the palace at dead of night
and kidnap the princess of the snowy mountains
to become a prisoner in their cave
until the prince rescues her.
How I wanted to be a princess.
But being seven, was always
the youngest robber,
the one who carries the rope
and, once the princess is tied up,
has nothing left to do.
The princess was a girl
whose black hair, at eleven,
already reached her swinging hips.
Her breasts pushed curiously
against the tight red kameez
her mother made her. My mother
was always pregnant, too tired
to make me anything.
Her hands blue-veined.
Her bone-bleached, bloodless face.
Father was a sour breath
exploding in sudden shouts,
punches to send us flying.
Nights I cried soundlessly
for my true father, lost at birth,
king of the snowy mountains.
The boy who was prince
had a silver sword his father
bought him at the fair. His eyes
were black lights. When he passed me
my heart leaped like a red fish
in my throat. We never spoke.
Not even on the day
the regular princess was sick
and I begged and begged until
they let me be princess
just once. I lay on the cool
cement floor of the cave,
not minding the rope
that numbed my wrists.
Breathed in the silent dark,
the odor of pickled mangoes
in large earth jars, waited
for the prince to roll away
the rock that stopped the cave-mouth.
He never came.
The pantry door was flung open
by Reba our maid
calling me to come home quick,
mother was dying.
The bed was full of blood. So much blood.
Nine-month blood
and the baby, too, dying inside her,
trapped like a blind fish
in that black tidal cave.
Blood from her fractured skull
where he had flung her
against the stair wall.
The crack of bone, the heavy thud
of falling flesh
end over end into spiralled dark.
They tell me no one heard her scream.
In my dream I hear her. Again, again.
The scream ricochets off
the moist heaving walls
of the robbers' cave
where with tied wrists I swim
feebly against the pull
of the black tide,
insidious current sucking me under
like the metallic smell of her blood,
the burning breath of father on me.
The prince never comes.
------------------------------------------
She's also a novelist, writing adult and YA stuff, and her new novel sounds great. Here she is reading some stuff on youtube, and here's her website.
This is a book of tragedies, exquisitely rendered. I had to read it in stages because it's powerful, and I kept mentally rebelling against it. Almost every poem in it is a tale of some kind of victimization, and there are no solutions or escapes offered. I prefer stories to have endings that are either happy, or are sad but suffused with meaning. These stories either end unhappily or - worse - don't end, because the sorrows are neverending, and it's up to the reader to find the meaning.
But the book is not medicine, and now that I've made my way through it, I love, love, love it. Divakaruni writes with deep and unflinching sympathy, and the stories she tells are haunting and lovely. Her poetic gifts are profound, which makes even the most crushing tales into things of beauty.
Here is one of the poems, behind a cut for length, and also for triggers: domestic violence, stillbirth, child abuse
The Robbers' Cave, by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
My favorite game was the one
where the robbers
slip into the palace at dead of night
and kidnap the princess of the snowy mountains
to become a prisoner in their cave
until the prince rescues her.
How I wanted to be a princess.
But being seven, was always
the youngest robber,
the one who carries the rope
and, once the princess is tied up,
has nothing left to do.
The princess was a girl
whose black hair, at eleven,
already reached her swinging hips.
Her breasts pushed curiously
against the tight red kameez
her mother made her. My mother
was always pregnant, too tired
to make me anything.
Her hands blue-veined.
Her bone-bleached, bloodless face.
Father was a sour breath
exploding in sudden shouts,
punches to send us flying.
Nights I cried soundlessly
for my true father, lost at birth,
king of the snowy mountains.
The boy who was prince
had a silver sword his father
bought him at the fair. His eyes
were black lights. When he passed me
my heart leaped like a red fish
in my throat. We never spoke.
Not even on the day
the regular princess was sick
and I begged and begged until
they let me be princess
just once. I lay on the cool
cement floor of the cave,
not minding the rope
that numbed my wrists.
Breathed in the silent dark,
the odor of pickled mangoes
in large earth jars, waited
for the prince to roll away
the rock that stopped the cave-mouth.
He never came.
The pantry door was flung open
by Reba our maid
calling me to come home quick,
mother was dying.
The bed was full of blood. So much blood.
Nine-month blood
and the baby, too, dying inside her,
trapped like a blind fish
in that black tidal cave.
Blood from her fractured skull
where he had flung her
against the stair wall.
The crack of bone, the heavy thud
of falling flesh
end over end into spiralled dark.
They tell me no one heard her scream.
In my dream I hear her. Again, again.
The scream ricochets off
the moist heaving walls
of the robbers' cave
where with tied wrists I swim
feebly against the pull
of the black tide,
insidious current sucking me under
like the metallic smell of her blood,
the burning breath of father on me.
The prince never comes.
------------------------------------------
She's also a novelist, writing adult and YA stuff, and her new novel sounds great. Here she is reading some stuff on youtube, and here's her website.
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no subject
Date: 2009-03-12 02:40 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-03-12 05:31 am (UTC)I read it recently too. I'm a huge Mahabharata fan, and wondered how it came across to people who didn't know the original story.
no subject
Date: 2009-03-12 11:21 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-03-12 08:00 pm (UTC)I did think the novel got a bit bogged down with attempting to summarize the whole huge story, and like you, my favorite bits were the ones that were... not least canonical exactly, but which branched furthest from the story as we know it, like Panchaali's girlhood.
My favorite line was, "Something always seems to go wrong at a swayamvara."
Draupadi/Karna 4Evar!!!
no subject
Date: 2009-03-13 04:14 am (UTC)My favorite line was, "Something always seems to go wrong at a swayamvara."
Ahahaha! It's true though! Swayamvaras that end relatively peacefully seem weird! :D
no subject
Date: 2009-03-12 05:58 pm (UTC)