 |
| kamala Das’ Candid Attitude: Kamala Das As A Confessional Poet |
A Frank and Candid Revelation of Herself:
Kamala Das has a lot to confess in her poetry, and she does so in the most candid manner conceivable. Indeed, her poetry has no precedent so far as her frankness and candour in revealing herself to the readers are concerned. She has expressed her intense desire to confess in a very graphic manner by saying that she must "striptease" her mind and that she must exude autobiography. Her confessions pertain to her role as a wife, as a mistress to many men, and as a mother. The bulk of her poetry is a confession of her relationship with her husband, and of her extra-marital sexual relationships. The themes of most of her poems are love or lust, and marriage. In dealing with these themes, she hides nothing, and in dealing with this subject-matter, she makes use of language freely, without any scruples, and even unabashedly. The orthodox reader would even accuse her of being immodest, shameless, or brazen in her use of the language through which she lays bare the secrets of her private life. Her poetry is the poetry of introspection, of self-analysis, of self-explanation, and of self-revelation.
Her Confession of Sexual Experience in the Poem The Freaks:
In the poem The Freaks, Kamala Das describes a sexual experience and the feelings which accompanied it. Her feelings, as she lay in bed with a man, were ambivalent. She did experience the gratification of her sexual desire at the time but she felt disappointed by the lack of any love or affection for her in his heart. She felt his fingers moving upon her body nimbly enough but not with the kind of urgency and passion which would arouse in her a yearning for an emotional union with him in addition to desiring the gratification of her lust. This poem clearly shows her frankness in dealing with the subject of sex. She is so frank here as to call herself a freak and to confess that, in order to save her face, she flaunts, at times, a grand, flamboyant lust.
Her Candid Confession of Her Pain and Suffering at the Hands of Her Husband:
Then there is a poem entitled The Sunshine Cat in which she complains about the pain and the suffering which, first her husband, and then the many other men with whom she had had a sexual experience, caused to her. She accuses her husband of having been a selfish and cowardly man who neither loved her nor used her properly but who was a ruthless watcher of her sexual act with other men. She had tried her utmost to please her sexual partners by clinging to their hairy chests, but they all told her that they could only gratify her sexual desire but could not love her. The consequence was that she lay in bed weeping, trying to build walls with tears. As for her husband, he used to shut her in a room every morning which he locked and which he opened only when he returned from his work in the evenings. The streak of sunshine which fell at the doorstep looked like a yellow cat, keeping her company a day. But, when winter came, the streak of sunshine was reduced only to hair-thin line; and, one evening when her husband returned from his work, he found her half-dead, with the result that she had now become entirely useless to men from the sexual point of view. What Kamala Das here means to say is that the hearts of all these lovers of hers had been absolutely empty of any sentiment of love or affection for her, and that she had therefore lost all desire for any further love-making. This poem obviously contains a confession which an ordinary woman in a similar predicament would never reveal anybody.
Her Feeling Desperate at the Departure of Lover after Sexual Gratification:
In the poem entitled The Invitation, Kamala Das recalls that her lover presumably her husband, used to perform the sexual act with her in a casual manner, coming to her in the intervals of his office-work, and then going away. She did feel a certain pleasure during her sexual act with that man so that the bed, six feet long and two feet wide, seemed to have become a paradise for her; but the departure of the lover or his desertion of her made her desperate and she felt like committing suicide by jumping into the sea which seemed to be inviting her to enter its waters and perish.
Her Openness in Depicting A Sexual Relationship between A Man and A Woman:
The poem called The Looking-Glass is even more candid in its use of the language to describe a sexual relationship between a man and a woman. Here Kamala Das urges women not to feel shy or timid when they are about to perform the sexual act with their lovers. She urges women to stand nude by the side of their lovers' nude and muscular bodies, before a mirror, and look at their reflections. She urges them to let their lovers know what they (the women) expect from them (their lovers) when they lie in bed together. She also urges women to give to men all that makes them women: to let them smell their long hair, to smell the musk of sweat between their breasts, to let them experience the warm shock of their menstrual blood, and to let them know their endless female hungers. If a woman does all these things, she would have no difficulty in winning her lover though, when the lover is gone and has no intention to come back, the woman would feel desolate and find it impossible to get a substitute to give her the same pleasure during the sexual act which that man had provided. Kamala Das’ treatment of the subject of sex is, indeed, astonishing and her observations in this respect are undoubtedly based upon her own sexual experiences with men.
Her Describing Unhappy and Miserable Conjugal Life:
The poem entitled The Old Playhouse is most remarkable so far as its confessional quality is concerned. Here Kamala Das describes, in unusually frank terms, the kind of life which she had been leading with her husband. This poem describes, metaphorically, Kamala Das' feeling of suffocation in her husband's home as a consequence of her husband's selfishness, self-centredness, egoism, and exaggerated sense of his own importance. Kamala Das' narrow life of domesticity with her husband, and her husband's unemotional manner of performing the sexual act with her, had driven her to desperation and had made her feel that her mind was like an old theatre-hall which was no longer in use and all the lights of which had been put out. Then she expresses her resolve to liberate herself from this kind of slavery to her husband. No ordinary woman would describe her unhappy conjugal life in such explicit terms as Kamala Das has done in this poem.
Her Using the Words Like Pubis and Pubic Hair Unhesitatingly:
In one of her poems, namely, Composition, Kamala Das goes to the extent of using the words pubis and pubic hair; and, in another poem, namely Substitute, she has described her anarchic sexual life in the following memorable manner:
“After that love became a swivel-door.When one went out, another came in.”
Here is a confession without any reservations and without any hesitation either.
Two Confessional Poems Expressing Her Feelings as a Mother:
Two of Kamala Das' poems contain her feelings as a mother. The poem entitled Jaisurya expresses her feeling of exultation when she is going to give birth to a child and her feeling of pride when the child comes out of the darkness of her womb into this bright world lit by sunlight. During the child-birth, Kamala Das felt that to her at that time neither love was important nor lust, and that the man or men, who had been betraying her by gratifying their lust and then forsaking her, did not matter to her at all. She found child-birth to be a glorious phenomenon. The other poem about her motherhood has the title of The White Flowers.
