Sutanuka RoyTitle: What’s Wrong with us Kali Women?
Author: Anita Nahal
Page: 94
ISBN: 978-1-954353-88-6 (Paperback)
Edition: (2021)
Published by Kelsay Books. 502 South 1040 East, A-119. American Fork, Utah, 84003.
Reviewed by: Dr Sutanuka Ghosh Roy
The history of Indian women is long, varied, and complex, ranging from semi-draped half-fed women to women who are achievers who touch the sky. Women and their lives seem to have been the principal fount of Anita Nahal’s third collection of poetry What’s Wrong With Us Kali Women. Anita Nahal, PhD, CDP is a professor, poet, flash fictionist, and children’s writer. She teaches at the University of the District of Columbia, Washington DC. Besides academic publications, her creative books include two volumes of poetry, Initiations (1988); Hey, Spilt milk is spilt, nothing else (2018) and a collection of flash fictions, Life on the go-Flash fictions from New Delhi to America (2018); and four children’s books: Cashew, Vashew & Other Nursery Rhymes (2020), I love Mummy and other new nursery rhymes, When I Grow Up and other new nursery rhymes, and The Greedy Green Parrot and Other Stories (1993–1995). Nahal is co-editor of two anthologies, In All the Spaces—Diverse Voices In Global Women’s Poetry (2020) and Earth Fire Water Wind (2021). She is also the co-editor of another anthology, Nursery Rhymes & Children’s Poems From Around The World—You May Not Have Heard (2021).
In What’s Wrong with us Kali Women? Prose Poems Nahal depicts the dynamics of her/women’s changing relationship with a patriarchal environment. She writes “I recollect the nervous heartbeats, the terrified footsteps, the hands that broke, the mouth that howled. As patriarchy douses kerosene on many love dreams, the fires that seethe are of odium. As patriarchy stands at the door, unclothed and cruel, escape is livid and stealthy. As patriarchy skins her wetness, it can only scald him, and he’ll forever stand rejected. Feminism is not a child of half a seed” (“Diasporic Feminism Lovemaking”, 23).Women/(man) she has here depicted juggling—quite literally –children and amidst family; while being a part of a domestic whole, they/she are/is also complete in themselves. The title has a specific focus, exploring the portrayal of veiling the expressions of Nahal’s women—Draupadi, Kali, Durga, Laxmi, Saraswati, and all other women.
There is a marked Indian essence about the woman in What’s Wrong with us Kali Women? The woman’s face is lined with varied emotional creases: sorrow, pain, anguish, anger, exploitation, loneliness but not defeat or hopelessness. “I became all the goddesses when my son was born. I became all the goddesses when you tried to snatch him from me. I became all the goddesses when you insulted me in public. I became all the goddesses when I rejected you. I became all the goddesses when I decided we must leave. I became all the goddesses when I fended alone for my son. I became all the goddesses when I did not compromise anymore. I became all the goddesses when I did not cry anymore. I became all the goddesses when I signed on the dotted line of the divorce papers in my America” (“Homo Sapiens and Hindu goddesses in India and America” 16). “Inspired by the strength of Hinduism’s many female goddesses, especially Kali, and by the author journeys across the world, Nahal’s poems portray the perceptions of a diaspora Indian woman on immigration, domestic abuse, rape, aging, Covid19, single motherhood, love and sensuality, death, racism, sexism, environment, alien life, environment, poverty, and much more”(Introduction 9).
Nahal’s poetic lines and the veiled or obviated gaze of the women/ (man) she etches offers scope for imaginative interpretation. As one goes through the lines the language of the(se) prose poems women/(man) evokes a sense of power even though her/their form(s) is/are bent with the everyday indignities. Nahal’s powerful drawings, enhanced by her clear vision combine the elegance of classical poetry with the simplicity and earthy innocence of the women/ (man). In this collection, one finds two portraits by Nahal— dissimilar both in style and mood. There is the immaculately groomed liberated woman—with a mirror in her hand seemingly all’s well with her world. Then there is the other woman, a gaunt face covered in the shades, one who douses her emotional flames in her showers, is she the reflection of the woman gazing into the mirror that she holds? “The baggage accrued in life seemed to weigh me down and also allure me to freedom. Letting my lehenga fall I checked my breasts for any signs of a lump. A deep sigh filled under the steaming water as I finally showered” (“Finally I showered” 41).
In poems like “Tequila and spice memories” (44), Nahal conveys a sense of gentle, inviting, wholesome femininity. Here the woman’s identity is well-integrated, her sense of self at perfect ease with her social role. The narrative around her has a comforting composure because the woman embodies a positive domestic beatitude, not anxiety or conflict that unfolds on the other prose poems in What’s Wrong with us Kali Women? In other poems like “Blues of a resilient Indian woman in mid-America small town” (45) Nahal outlines the female form “The scene seemed clueless as I took a remembrance picture of a resilient Indian woman having another of her blues in between some greens and yellows too”. Here her body speaks in silence. She carefully places her against an empty background, refusing to elaborate on either place or environment. She interprets the female form as attenuated, fragmented, reconstructed, rephrased, and simplified, thereby intensifying its conceptual expression.
Dr. Gerrit Dielissen, Professor of Sociology, Utrecht University, The Netherlands, says in one of the many fantastic blurbs on the jacket, “Anita Nahal’s third volume of poetry is her best till date, a monument to her astounding ability to create an infinity lemniscate, a myriad of overlapping worlds, dazzling us in and out of micro and macro universes of our most personal intimacies to burning societal issues of our time. Nahal’s work resonates C. Wright Mills adagio that no understanding of personal challenges is possible without bringing them into the wider circle of society. No bedside table, no college or university shelf that aims at opening minds to the interlinkage of important personal and societal issues should be left without a copy of Nahal’s enlightening prose poetry.” Indeed, What’s Wrong with us Kali Women? needs to be an essential addition in university and college courses on gender, immigration, and society. Utrecht university also has two of Nahal’s previous books as required readings in its course on multiculturalism.
Nahal “generally lives at intersections thereby not limiting herself to one space or manner. As such her poems reflect variously, impressionist, realist, romantic, confessional, and surrealist styles. Looking at life from the prism of tenacity, sensitivity, and survival Nahal’s poems display imagery that is starkly varied, vivid and robust”(Introduction” 9). What’s Wrong with us Kali Women? is an open invitation to reconnoitre how a creative artist imagines and perceives a woman, as a role model, and also as a matrix to capture the wide range of aesthetic emotional responses that course through her society and body. With What’s Wrong with us Kali Women? Nahal is ready to take on the world.
*Durga: Goddess of war, strength, and protection
*Kali: Goddess of the destroyer of evil
*Laxmi: Goddess of wealth
*Saraswati: Goddess of learning
*Draupadi: The doomed heroine in the Hindu epic Mahabharata
*Lehenga: Indian ethnic dress
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