poetry in images / bina sarkar ellias
When Seeing is Believing Passionate about the visual arts as she is about the magic of words, these 52 poems and 13 haikus are some of Bina Sarkar Ellias’s poems responding to images over many years. Her canvas spans India, the world and beyond and the book evokes encounters she has had with people, nature, art, photography, politics and emotions. A tapestry of poetry interspersed with paintings by classic masters of impressionist, post-impressionist, cubist and contemporary art, it is woven with perception and sensitivity. In her Introduction, the British poet Agnes Meadows says, “If art is a reflection of life, and poetry is a reflection of the breadth of human emotions, then ‘When Seeing Is Believing’ embraces the whole spectrum. It is a unique palette of observation and feeling you will want to savour by reading it more than once, uncovering new flavours each time you re-read.” This book is supported by the Morarka Foundation and proceeds from its sales will be donated to the Missing Foundation and their effort to mentor and rehabilitate survivors of human trafficking. Supported by Morarka Foundation.
When Seeing is Believing
selected poems by bina sarkar ellias
WHEN SEEING IS BELIEVING Copyright Words by © Bina Sarkar Ellias, 2018 Art by © Individual Artists, 2018 First published in India in 2018 by Mapin Publishing Pvt. Ltd 706 Kaivanna, Panchvati, Ellisbridge Ahmedabad 380006 INDIA T: +91 79 40 228 228 F: +91 79 40 228 201 E: mapin@mapinpub.com www.mapinpub.com International Distribution Worldwide (except North America and South Asia) Prestel Publishing Ltd. 14-17 Wells Street London W1T 3PD T: +44 (0)20 7323 5004 F: +44 (0)20 7323 0271 E: sales@prestel-uk.co.uk North America Antique Collectors’ Club T: +1 800 252 5231 F: +1 413 529 0862 E: sales@antiquecc.com • www.accdistribution.com/us South Asia Mapin Publishing Pvt. Ltd All rights reserved under international copyright conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including
photocopy, recording or any other information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The moral rights of Bina Sarkar Ellias as author of this work are asserted. ISBN: 978-93-85360-57-2 Design & artwork Vagabonds Unlimited Digital works Manjiri Kelaskar and Rajesh Gaekwad Printing Jak Printers Pvt. Ltd., Mumbai, India
“It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.” ~Henry David Thoreau
Dedication It is my delight in the arts that urged me to champion “When Seeing is Believing”, a book of poems by Bina Sarkar Ellias. Her lifetime passion for the arts prompted Bina to sculpt poems that respond to aesthetic images of art and photography. Bina and I are both deeply touched by the spirited project ‘Missing’ initiated by artist-activist Leena Kejriwal, ‘Missing’s mission is to encourage awareness of the plight of trafficked girls, besides facilitating their education and empowerment. Morarka Foundation has supported the publishing of the book; the entire sale proceeds of which will be offered to the Missing Foundation. Morarka Cultural Centre was established by Sangita Kathiwada in 1995 at the NCPA, Mumbai. This was made possible with the help of a generous donation made by pioneering philanthropist Kamal Morarka. As Director of the Centre I have had the unique privilege to follow my own vision in nurturing and enlivening some of India’s art and craft practices. Artists, artisans and the entire creative community are India’s cultural heartbeat. We focus on facilitating creative partnerships between rural artisans and urban designers to produce contemporary work that keep our crafts relevant today. We hope to further support and enrich our communities with the rich cultural heritage of India by funding research projects, organising exhibitions, film screenings, seminars and workshops, besides helping publish art-related books and periodicals. Our mission is to support, preserve and rejuvenate the cultural heritage of India. ——Sangita Devi Kathiwada Director: Morarka Cutural Centre and Melange
4
Acknowledgement Deeply appreciative of Morarka Cultural Centre and its Director Sangita Kathiawada for supporting ‘When Seeing is Believing’, and the ‘Missing’ project. My warmest thanks as well, to esteemed poets Agnes Meadows, K. Satchidananda and Ranjit Hoskote, for graciously sharing their thoughts on the book. This repository of selected poems celebrates the meeting of visual images and stirred words, that become testimonies; into believing the seeing, as it were. When visuals etch themselves into my mind it means they want to be believed. When words flow at will, it means they want to be read. Between visuals and words there is a universe of imagination and a constellation of narratives that sing their own songs. These songs resonate through the pages reaffirming Henry David Thoreau’s contemplation, “It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.” This book is dedicated to young girls who hopefully will read it one day. These are girls whose innocent lives have been held hostage by dark circumstances. These are thousands of girls trafficked every day, who have lost their right to a normal life, to education, health care, a caring family and to dignity. ‘Missing’, founded by artist-activist Leena Kejriwal, is a sensitising and awareness campaign employing art and technology through innovative projects to combat trafficking of young girls. The vulnerable girls are mentored through this project and opportunities created for them to learn skills and pursue education, leading to a safe environment, self-reliance, a sustainable livelihood and ultimately, empowerment. The entire proceeds from every copy of “When Seeing is Believing” sold will be donated to the MISSING campaign.* ——Bina Sarkar Ellias *Registered under Section 12A of Income Tax Act, 1961. Donations to MISSING LINK TRUST are exempted from tax u/s 80G of IT Act.
5
Introduction From the very first poem in this exceptional collection, you will be captivated by the strength and power of Bina Sarkar’s words. It begins with a poem commenting on the hostile nature of life in Kashmir, with each word bleeding onto the page, scratching the surface of our humanity. The collection moves seamlessly from the pain of survival through love, hope, and multi-layered existence. Rhyming, when it is used, is vibrant without being self-indulgent or clichéd. The collection is a tapestry of poetry interspersed with works of art drawn from around the world —— photographs, installations, oils, by masters old and new —— all commented on in a perceptive and emotionally sensitive fashion. Even if you do not know the people or the circumstances the poet writes about, you will want to learn more about them after you have assimilated the collection. If art is a reflection of life, and poetry is a reflection of the breadth of human emotions, then ‘When Seeing Is Believing’ embraces the whole spectrum. It is a unique palette of observation and feeling you will want to savour by reading more than once, uncovering new flavours each time you re-read. ——Agnes Meadows, Poet and writer, London f
6
These works of art and poems complement and enrich each other. It is as if the words of the poems suddenly give flesh to what is in the work of art, and it is hard to guess what came first. The poems can also stand independently as they in themselves constitute a comment on the often painful reality that surrounds us and tries to define our agonised life. Not that beauty is bypassed: there are too, moments of aesthetic meditation that merge into the painting or installation that inspires it. The book has to be enjoyed as a complete experience, a composition of colours, objects, figures, images and words. ——K. Satchidanandan, Poet, writer, playwright and literary critic, New Delhi f
Bina Sarkar celebrates the meeting of the visual image and the lyrical voice with song. The cadences of the poems collected to form her new book, ‘When Seeing is Believing’, seem set to a music of the sense —— to the heartbeat and the rhythm of the body as it transforms itself through dance. What she sees is the depth, textures, and inexhaustible plenitude of the painting, the sculpture, the installation, the video work. What she believes in, is the imperative to sustain one’s sense of beauty and resilience. Hers is the imperative to follow where the imagination leads, to trust its emancipatory impulses. The art works that form the foci of her attention in this collection are, in effect, talismans and guarantees, shrines of such a belief that the aesthetic, far from constituting an escape from reality, is a path into the heart of reality. ——Ranjit Hoskote, Poet, cultural theorist and curator, Mumbai f
7
Missing
for the missing girls of this world she went missing from her home she went missing in the storm of conspiracies that erase your face of conspiracies that kill your grace. she’s seeking light through the cracks she’s seeking trails to bring her back to the body she’d lost one dark day when she was stolen and whisked away. may she trace her footprints back may she trace it to the track where she navigates life’s uncertainty with her head held high ——with dignity.
Missing, 2015-. Installation on Bombay’s sea-front. Metal. Leena Kejriwal
Contents
10
8 13 15 17 19 21 23 25 27 29 30 33 35 37 39 41 43 45 47 49 51 53 55 57 59 61 63 65 67 69 71 73 75
Missing Beneath the Boots Migration 1 Moon Dream a Wish, Wish a Dream City Wraps, City Traps Toba Tek Singh Birds in Your Eyes The Stillness of his Soul A Wild Wind Lighthouse Eyes All Night She Gallops Lovers Peace She Wears the Weight of Centuries We Walk the Earth Irani Restaurant Books Blood Daphne and Apollo Girl Reading a Letter By an Open Window Allegory of Faith Woman at the Window A Solitary Boat Such Was the Lunar Night A Blue Room Starry Night Thus They Fly Why Would a Violin Sing? The Broken Column Morning Sun Castle in the Air Boris
77 79 81 83 85 87 89 91 93 95 97 99 101 103 105 107 109 111 113 115 117 119 121 123 125 127 129 131 133 135 137 139
Picasso at Els Quatre Gats Desert Soul A River of Song Washed with Water Migration 2 Father Mother Tyeb Seven Trails Partition I Am Dalit Ode to Black The House She Never Visits Where Sea Meets Sky I Love New York Scream of Silence Periodo Azul Pensive Crow Keys A Seductive Haiku Lilies Like Lanterns Flying in the Air Self Portrait In the Pale Moonlight Flying in Tandem I See Tears of Rain Blue, Blue Sky A String of Wash Benaras 1 Benaras 2 Benaras 3 How Tranquil the Sun
11
12
Crackdown, 2000. Installation. Wood, fibreglass, mixed media. Veer Munshi
Beneath the Boots
for Kashmir and Veer Munshi beneath the boots the earth recoils here come the guns here come the boys with eyes of steel and hardened hearts they strip you naked they steal your joys. the sun is ice, the moon is fire, the lake is locked in its desire for peace on earth, for tranquil days when fangs of violence do not disgrace the tenets of religious tropes, the quest for reason and hopeless hope.
the valley weeps, its children bleed, the hills are stricken by the army’s greed. beneath the boots the earth recoils at man’s inhuman lust for spoils.
13
14
Everything is Inside, 2004. Installation. Taxi, bronze. Subodh Gupta
Migration 1
for Subodh Gupta yellow-black and a stack of memories on a rack how far will they go? how far to know life’s journey is back to back.
15
16
Infinitum (here after here), 2014. Single channel video. 6 min. Jitish Kallat
Moon
for Jitish Kalat crescent moon, quarter moon, half moon, full moon, once in a blue moon, blood moon, silver moon, gold moon, Jitish Kallat’s roti moon—— where time and the moon commune comrades of convivial boon humming their celestial tune. how soon, how soon, will they colonise the moon?
17
18
Mute Migration, 2008. Installation. Mixed media. Hema Upadhyay
DreaM a Wish, Wish a DreaM for Hema Upadhyay and they rise like sturdy saplings through the earth past their reckoning from bleak bellies and vacant eyes to a kingdom of survival. and they rise from the gutters sweating pearls of canny wisdom that fetch more than half a bread in the kingdom of survival. and they rise like morning stars from the grime of life’s imbalance to challenge destiny to dream a wish and wish a dream in the kingdom of survival. 19
20
Performance at Shivaji Park, 2010-2012. Shakuntala Kulkarni
City Wraps, City traps
for Shakuntala Kulkarni her body trapped in a city wrapped with urban chaos that cannot be mapped. here life is cheap and the authorities’ sleep while your soul is looted by the king-pin’s keep. she navigates the streets with her uncertain feet and a baggage of fear in her pulse beat. and our eyes never meet.
21
22
Remembering Toba Tek Singh 1998-99. Video installation. Photo: Š Gert Jan van Rooij. Nalini Malani
toBa tek singh
for Sadat Hasan Manto and Nalini Malani the lines were drawn defining them and us erasing love born outside the barbed wires of religion. the lines were drawn with the blade of a sword blunted by the myopia of war—— it cleaved us in three. our severed arms became Pakistan~ east and west, and thousands across the lines succumbed to the commitment of hate. Hindus, Muslims, politicians, families forever handcuffed by a legacy of intolerance. and there he stood between barbed wires—— a requiem. Toba Tek Singh unbelonged. 23
24
Self-portrait. Serigraph. Jehangir Sabavala
BirDs in your eyes
for Jehangir Sabavala you left too soon with birds in your eyes and a brush in your dreams. you left with the calm of your gentle palette; those courteous colours soothing weary eyes. you left with your grace and your Dali-like face easing into that soft smile. you left too soon with your brush still wet and an unfinished canvas left bereft. 25
26
Untitled, 1953. Watercolour and ink on paper. VS. Gaitonde
the stillness of his soul for V.S. Gaitonde four walls and within—— books scattered, forgotten. four bottles and within—— old secrets, forsaken. four colours within four coconut bowls, wait with the stillness of his soul. four walls and within—— a dust-skinned trophy, a frayed curtain and cobwebs and paint-peeling history. Schubert like a sailboat turning around and around—— in the stillness of his soul.
four walls and within—— an artist in flight, soaring and soaring and touching the light, touching the light that gently glows—— in the stillness of his silent soul.
27
28
Untitled, 1989. Charcoal on paper. Jatin Das
a WilD WinD for Jatin Das
a wild wind flew through the forest of words singing in my head sweeping syllables into the spring air for nomad birds to catch and conjure into liminal notes that float with wayward clouds to fall in a drizzle of rain on the arid plain of my skin.
29
lighthouse eyes
for Sudhir Patwardhan he scans the city with lighthouse eyes. his paint is the sweat of blue-collar toil his canvas a mosaic of mundane lives——
of grit and grime and scattered dreams a throb of slums and glut of high-rise.
a speedway sweeps through the clutter of each day its serpentine path skims the city’s sighs.
the city’s pulse beats in his blue veins, his narratives are mirrors, his brush never lies. he scans the city with lighthouse eyes.
Mumbai Proverbs, 2013. 5 of 7 panels. Acrylic on canvas. Sudhir Patwardhan
32
All Night. I Shall Gallop, 2007. Mixed media on paper. Anju Dodiya
all night she gallops for Anju Dodiya
she haunts the labyrinth of your fertile mind like a persistent echo; she who is you—— the sepulchral you, yearning a floating life within the solitude of a stretched canvas. she yields to the shifting frontiers of her
secret world like an elastic band; all night she gallops—— and through the prism of her other-world eyes, a stage is set; an act choreographed; a life turned around—— and a narrative is urged, with room for erasures.
33
34
Lovers, 2000. Serigraph. Edition 67/125. Lalu Prasad Shaw
lovers
for Lalu Prosad Saha she sees his eyes they are not wise she cannot trust those pools of lust cloaked in a gaze that will not faze her need to find a love that’s blind.
35
“The red kani shawl flying in the sky, casts a dark shadow over the gates of paradise. The kani shawl is a metaphor for the crafts persons’s lifetime labour of intricately woven creations. It is a fabric that has covered the wounds of Kashmiris for generations. Its red colour is symbolic of bloodshed, death and destruction in the valley.” ——Masood Hussain
36
At the Gates of Paradise, 2014. Oil on canvas. Masood Hussain
peaCe for Agha Shahid Ali & Masood Hussain Peace? have we met? do I know you? are you the proverbial lull before the storm? are you the virgin before… the rape? ...silence before the scream? are you a bird song on a tranquil morning singing softly before you transmute into a screeching hawk? are you the rationale of dialectics before strident speeches of fascists, bigots and unreason tear our sanity apart?
are you grandma’s tales of honey and pickles of halcyon days—— before you are stolen from innocuous jars and mutated into narratives of war? are you idle chemicals before you catalyse into deadly weapons of mass destruction? are you a placid drone morphing into a menacing toy for the world’s warmongers? are you the chrysalis concealing and nurturing seeds of benign faith that flower and proliferate—— that stealthily become venomous weeds of xenophobic hate? are you paradise in Kashmir, before it becomes hell—— of a flaming battleground for scheming politicians?
are you a child waking to life in Afghanistan or Syria before a bomb bludgeons you and your village? are you the wings of dreams before they are burnt so you don’t fly? Peace? have we met? do I know you? “are you the desolation called peace?”* *Agha Shahid Ali
37
THE AUTHOR
140
Bina Sarkar Ellias is founder, editor, designer and publisher of International Gallerie, an award-winning global arts and ideas publication from India. Since 21 years of publishing, she has been committed to encouraging critical awareness and appreciation of cultural diversity through excellence in the arts. She is a poet and writer, published in Indian and international anthologies and online sites. Her published books are the chapbook ‘The Room’ (Aark Arts, UK), and ‘Fuse’ (Poetry Primero, Poetrywall, India). ‘Fuse’ has been taught at Towson University in Maryland USA & translated into Urdu, Arabic, French & Chinese. As art curator, she has curated several shows of Indian artists, besides having curated the 2010 online show for Pen and Brush, Inc, New York. She recently curated MIGRATION, an exhibit of photography, films, art and poetry for the Pune Biennale, 2017. She has given talks and participated in panel discussions on art and social awareness at several venues in India and internationally. Engaged with socio-political and community building issues, she received a Fellowship in 2007 from the Asia Leadership Fellow Program and Japan Foundation for the project: Unity in Diversity. Envisioning Community Building in Asia and Beyond, the Times Group Yami Women Achiever’s award in 2008, and the FICCI/FLO 2013 award for excellence in her work. www.gallerie.net
GENERAL
When Seeing is Believing Poetry in Images
Bina Sarkar Ellias 140 pages, 69 colour photographs 5 x 7” (127 x 178 mm), hc ISBN: 978-93-85360-57-2 (Mapin) ₹750 | $17.50 | £15 2018 • World rights
If art is a reflection of life, and poetry is a reflection of the breadth of human emotions, then ‘When Seeing Is Believing’ embraces the whole spectrum. It is a unique palette of observation and feeling you will want to savour by reading more than once, uncovering new flavours each time you re-read. Agnes Meadows, British poet and writer
This book has to be enjoyed as a complete experience, a composition of colours, objects, figures, images and words. K. Satchidanandan Indian poet, writer, playwright and literary critic
What she sees is the depth, textures, and the inexhaustible plenitude of the painting, the sculpture, the installation, the video work. What she believes in, is the imperative to sustain one’s sense of beauty and resilience. Ranjit Hoskote Indian poet, cultural theorist and curator
ISBN: 978-93-85360-57-2 Price: Rs 750
.
US $17.50
.
Euro 12.95
*Registered under Section 12A of Income Tax Act, 1961. Donations to MISSING LINK TRUST are exempted from tax u/s 80G of IT Act