This Dell Of Death Is Not My Demesne
Nabarun Bhattacharya
Translated by Megha Bhattacharya
Our freedom and its daily sustenance are the colour of blood and swollen with sacrifice. Our sacrifice is the conscious one ; it is in payment for the freedom we are building — Che
I despise the father who trembles in hesitation to identify his son’s corpse.
I despise the indifferent brother, in all his “normalcy”.
I despise all those teachers, academicians, and intellectuals, who have no desire for vengeance.
I despise them all.
Eight corpses
Lie across the alleys of my consciousness.
I am turning into a madwoman.
I want to scream, scream like a lunatic.
Those who call me to their hallowed clearing have chosen the wrong time.
I’ll go insane.
I’ll seek self-annihilation. Suicide.
I’ll do whatever it takes.
This is the time to make art, write poetry, make love.
Across walls and manifestos, with festering stencils.
Let us write, and paint, and make collages, with our blood and bone and skin and sinews.
This is the time to make art.
Right on the uncountable faces of pain, sticking to our bodies like murderous leeches with ugly, distorted faces, leaving us immobilized.
Standing face-to-face to the shadow with the face of terrorism, looking eye-to-eye in the headlights of their police vans.
Let us throw poetry at them,
Let us ignore their homicidal glares,
Let us live, and love, and read poetry, and make art.
In the freezing lock-up cells,
Refusing their farcical inspections,
In front of the jury of murderers,
In the schools of ignorance,
In the nation of discrimination and injustice,
In midst of their military terror,
Let us scream poetry.
Let us, poets of India, get prepared,
Prepared as Lorca was.
Prepared to be breathless and disappeared corpses.
Prepared to get conjoined with stengun bullets.
Yet, we will surround your unsparing metropolises with our verdant pastured of poetry.
This dell of death is not my demesne.
This bloodstained slaughterhouse is not my nation.
This revelry of butchers is not my reality.
This never-ending graveyard is not my country.
This dell of death is not my demesne.
I will seize back my nation.
I will, once again, inhale the damp autumn breeze,
The Dashami dhaks will once again make my heart beat.
Fireflies will surround me, like forest fires.
I’ll adorn my heart with our native crops, mystic rivers and river-men.
I’ll name stars after our martyrs.
I’ll accost those lonely breezes, those lakes that sparkle in the sun like a mermaiden’s song.
Love… love that seems as distant and intangible as a call from a thousand years away;
I’ll have him by my side too, once the day comes.
I’ll do whatever it takes.
Interrogation! Thousand watt bulbs on my eyes, day and night, night and day.
I deny!
Needles in my nails! My back freezing on ice!
I deny!
Nosebleeds from hanging upside down, till eternity.
I deny!
Boots on my face! Burns on my body! Blisters on my feet!
I deny!
Electric currents through my naked body! My hymen and foreskin at their mercy!
I deny!
Beaten to death! Bullet through the head!
I deny!
I defy!
I detest!
I protest!
My poetry knows no bounds.
My poetry is free, my poetry is boundless, my poetry is undaunted.
Look at us! Look at us, Mayakovski, Hikmet, Neruda, Aragon!
We did not let them defeat your poetry.
We are writing an epic instead, throughout our subcontinent,
With rhymes of dissent and lines of guerrilla warfare.
May tribal drums beat as our hearts beat.
May our little villages light up like coral reefs.
Let us raise our scythe and sickles.
Off with all the heads of many-headed fascism.
Let us make the sun blind with our anger,
That will sound like their death knell,
As the notching and loosing of Gandiva sounded to enemies, destined to fall.
Let us flash sticks and branches against their guns.
Let our tribal totems resonate with Dhols and Madols.
Oh!
Even we can start convoys,
Rallies of cranes and bulldozers,
Dynamos, turbines and engines,
We can glare out of the darkness of coal mines,
With burning, swollen eyes.
We can create barricades,
Joining hands across jutemills and docks.
You know what, death is now nothing to me but a lover’s embrace.
If you kill me,
My life will light up a thousand pradeeps across Bengal,
Across my motherland.
You can kill me, but you can’t destroy me, not anymore.
I’ll live through my countless progenies.
I’ll live through my native-tongues.
Sylheti, Bangla, Santhali.
Prepare your guillotines ,
My head will turn into a burning bubble,
Racing to kill you.
My little seven boats will stop your seventh fleet.
We will deafen you with trumpets and horns,
Declaring war against you all.
Kutch to Sundarbans is thirsty for justice.
My cries of birth have turned into cries before death.
What now?
What doubts?
What fear?
Eight souls touch me,
In eclipsical darkness, they tell me of your patrols.
Their voices sound like the whispers of sea breeze and cries of constellations,
Free to run free,
Across this cosmic model.
My poetry will strike across this barrenness thirsty for fire,
My flaming torches of poetry,
My Molotov cocktails of poetry,
My shells and bullets of poetry,
Will strike.
Nabarun Bhattacharya was born into a family of writers, filmmakers, artists and academics—his father was playwright Bijan Bhattacharya; his mother, writer and activist Mahasweta Devi. A journalist from 1973 to 1991 at a foreign news agency, he gave up that career in order to become a full-time writer. Herbert was published in 1992 and won the Bankim and Sahitya Akademi awards. Some of his best-known works are Kangal Malshat (2003), Ei Mrityu Upotyoka Aamaar Desh Na (2004) and Phyataroor Bombachak (2004). Novelist and short-story writer, he was also a prolific poet and, from 2003 until his death, editor of the ‘Bhashabandhan’ journal.
Megha Bhattacharya is a student at Presidency University, Kolkata.
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