Everyday becomes political
Book Title: I’ll Have It Here
Author: Jeet Thayil
From years of having read him, I feel that Jeet Thayil’s writings mirror the pathways of a feverish brain. Sometimes, everything zooms by at an alarming speed, sometimes, time slows down and creates delirious patterns in smoke and when the fever breaks, there is a sense of calm and a willingness to embrace the morbid, the lucid and the very elemental parts of what makes us human.
Coming after more than a decade, ‘I’ll Have It Here’ is a slim volume that packs a big punch. The book carries a dedication to Adil Jussawalla, Arvind Mehrotra and Eunice de Souza and is divided into three parts, each of which brings an aspect of the everyday into focus. As an introduction to his own poems in ‘60 Indian Poets’ (2008), Thayil mentions that the poems therein were taken from his fourth collection, ‘These Errors are Correct’ (2008), “in which there is a wider formal arrangement — ghazals, sonnets, the sestina, the canzone, terza rima, rhymed syllabics, stealth rhymes — of history and grief”. This holds for ‘I’ll Have It Here’ as well. The poems in this book, some of which have appeared in ‘The Penguin Book of Indian Poets’, are a bright burst of colour. There is such variety, such irreverence and such flourish that you may as well be watching a rather spirited bullfight. Thayil crosses several borders at one go, bringing the everyday within the ambit of the political and finally surrendering to the personal.
These poems wear their heart on their sleeve and their use of rhymes makes them even more endearing. In an age where complex poetic structures and obscure references are used to complicate for the sake of complicating, Thayil’s use of end rhymes has made the work seem deceptively innocent.
The first part narrates life in America, encountering racism, gentrification, popular culture, alienation, the dreams of migrants and of dinners with friends. In the second section, the poems remind one of what is wrong with the world in general. But he doesn’t set out on a crusade. In typical Thayilesque, he recognises the incisiveness of subversion. He asks: “Is there anything/more/dangerous than/laughter?” (‘A Futuristic History of India’). The poems in this section are pungent, potent with sarcasm and the poet’s characteristic wit. The titles are in themselves engaging: ‘Dissociative ID’, ‘Self-portrait as Found Stock Market Headlines.’
Thayil writes powerfully, without being heavy-handed. He names those incarcerated in the Bhima-Koregaon case in a ghazal titled ‘December 2020’. In the third section, he lays bare the anatomy of grief, something he has excelled in his previous writings such as ‘The Book of Chocolate Saints’ (2017). The intense vulnerability that he conveys grows with each reading: “It’s always 5 am when/she returns dear wife pale/hands clasped at the window lips/ askew begging to/be let in scarf still/knotted round her neck red/buds yet to flower her face” (‘Late Elegy’). The lightness of tone has an edge of sorrow, a verbal shrug of the shoulder as it were.
‘I’ll Have It Here’ is like looking into an abyss. After sometime, the abyss sniggers back. It shakes your conscience and asks uncomfortable questions. It opens new wounds and nuzzles old ones. Thayil’s book is a rockstar. It’s all there — the mad whoops, the showmanship, the growl, the prowl and then, the beautiful crooning.
— The writer teaches at All Saints’ College, Thiruvananthapuram