Richard Jeffrey Newman

Let’s get the obvi­ous, by which I do not mean incon­se­quen­tial, out of the way first. When a writer chooses to use her art to give voice to those who might oth­er­wise be voice­less, that choice deserves to be rec­og­nized for its neces­sity, because bear­ing wit­ness is a choice that all too few writ­ers, and per­haps espe­cially poets, make. In her intro­duc­tion to No Ocean Here, which was pub­lished this year by Mod­ern His­tory Press, Sweta Sri­vas­tava Vikram makes clear that bear­ing wit­ness is what the vol­ume is all about. Based on inter­views she con­ducted, she writes, the poems in No Ocean Here take on the fact that women in many coun­tries through­out the world, “are stripped of basic human rights,” often start­ing life “with­out ade­quate means of nutri­tion, learn­ing, and pro­tec­tion.” Vikram goes on:

I decided to write this book because lis­ten­ing, telling, and writ­ing the sto­ries of those who can’t write them will cre­ate aware­ness.… I can only pray that the book urges read­ers to empathize, and help.… If the book can pro­vide even a hand­ful of women, in unfor­tu­nate sit­u­a­tions, strength and courage to say NO, I would be humbled.

That is a tall order for any book, much less a book of poetry, given how few peo­ple gen­er­ally read poetry, but it is impos­si­ble not to applaud Vikram’s com­mit­ment to the sto­ries she has gath­ered, the women who have told them to her, and the lan­guage of poetry with which she has strug­gled to bring them to life. Nonethe­less, once you have acknowl­edged the value in Vikram’s moti­va­tion and rec­og­nized that the sto­ries she sets out to tell do still need to be told (because it would be dis­hon­est to pre­tend that these nar­ra­tives of women’s oppres­sion have not been told before), you still need to ask what her poems actu­ally accom­plish, not merely whether they suc­ceed as art – though since they are art, that is the first and most impor­tant ques­tion – but whether they bear wit­ness in a way that makes a difference.

Over­all, I wish Vikram would learn to trust her lan­guage more. There are moments of real, and some­times painful beauty in these poems, metaphors and snip­pets of nar­ra­tive that illu­mi­nate the lives of the women Vikram writes about and that do, I think, have the power to change people’s per­spec­tives in the way that only art can. Too often, how­ever, those moments are under­cut by writ­ing that is pro­saic, self-consciously didac­tic and some­times mired in unfor­tu­nate cliches, as in these lines from the con­clud­ing stro­phe of “Her Wounds Are Mysterious:”

Her wounds are mys­te­ri­ous
like the Congo; the depth unseen
to the world but home to insects
rarely heard.…

The ref­er­ence to the Congo is both cliché and evoca­tive of a racist impe­ri­al­ism that is all too sim­i­lar to the het­ero­sex­ual male pre­rog­a­tive that wounded the girl the poem is about in the first place. Still, you can see the poten­tial in what this stro­phe might have been like if it had been revised a lit­tle more. “Her wounds are home to insects….” is a metaphor that far more pow­er­fully cap­tures, I think, the hor­ror and the dam­age inflicted by the men in the poem. Indeed, read­ing No Ocean Here, I found myself think­ing more than once that one more revi­sion would have strength­ened the vol­ume con­sid­er­ably. Notice how much stronger the poem “Honor Killing” would have been with­out the final three lines:

Dead, she stares at the sea
as it car­ries her bones
thrown by guards,
smok­ing water pipes.

Her mother’s mouth fills with sand,
her father and broth­ers’ hands are cov­ered
with gloves to cleanse the stains
left on the walls of their fam­ily
by a man who spread her legs,
tore her apart like a coyote.

Right before her mur­der, she didn’t see
the sil­hou­ette of her face
in her grandmother’s heart.

Appar­ently the family’s pride lies
under­neath her skirt,
in the space between her legs.

That second-to-last stro­phe is beau­ti­ful and heart­break­ing. It would have made a fine end­ing to the poem, and I am happy to say that there are many moments in No Ocean Here that live up to the poten­tial in those lines. The first cou­plet of “Her Wounds Are Mys­te­ri­ous,” for exam­ple, gives us a girl who “wasn’t always a fallen leaf,/she danced;” and in “There Is Some­thing Wrong with the World,” women “who are com­pelled to kill their own youth/become invis­i­ble like soot inside chim­neys.” The poem “War” deals with rape as a weapon of war in images that are hard to forget:

All cav­i­ties of the women’s trust were emp­tied out
when each man selected a victim:

her mother’s body, stuffed inside soil,
was stomped by feet and ques­tions,
her sis­ter dragged by her dark breasts,
and she was turned to debris and dust.

One of the strongest poems in the book, “Care­taker of Graves” takes on the sub­ject of female infan­ti­cide, but from a mother’s per­spec­tive, and ends with what, for me, is an absolutely dev­as­tat­ing image:

The sun doesn’t sink until 8 p.m.
but she sees dark­ness of bats all day.

Tidal waves of melan­choly mix
with seeds plowed in her every year.

Mouth filled with muf­fled cries,
hos­pi­tals and con­spir­a­tors in doc­tors’ clothes
shadow her through­out mar­ried life.

Frogs get used to the air at night
but her mur­dered womb mourns scars.

No Ocean Here is an uneven vol­ume, but the moments of power and beauty it con­tains make it worth hav­ing and Vikram a poet worth watch­ing.