Background
The world is now passing through its most critical stage of its existence as the clouds of genocidal war are hovering over the world-horizon. Humans are living in terror and trepidation under the ominous shadow of carnage. The world has already witnessed the devastating and destructive, calamitous and disastrous sides of the two World Wars. The tragedy a war brings in its wake is alarming: a trail of death, destruction and obliteration in such varied forms as disease, famine and starvation, and poverty, mass suffering, ruin and trauma. Grief and tears, deprivation and helplessness remain the daily food of the commoners in post-war dispensation. The war inflicts a grave psychological pain and wound on the surviving individuals. The war, thus-whenever it breaks out –dances its macabre death to the utter detriment of humanity at large!
War has long figured as a theme in poetry. The numerous modern wars of the twentieth century-apart from the first and second world wars-like those that took place in Vietnam, the Falkland and Iraq, and most recently between Russia and Ukraine, between Iran and Israel have produced poets who sometimes choose to concentrate their writing on the horrible effects of war on civilians. The relation between poetry and war is, as W.S. Merwin puts it, old as poetry per se.
Although modern Nepal has not been involved in major war of the global magnitude, yet anti-war themed poems have been scribed by those in sympathy with war victims and unanimously hostile to the war. Nepali poets, too-like other present poets of the world-have aired enough of their complaint, dissent and dissatisfaction against wars occurring elsewhere in the world and made vehement denouncement of it as a universal evil.
Santosh Kumar Pokharel and a Critical Survey of His Anti-War Poetry:
It is against this background that it is pertinent to talk of Pokharel. A lesser known than Samrat Upadhyaya and Manjushree Thapa as a writer but a globally rising poet penning already thousands of poems with already six volumes published and a recipient of multiple international awards and medals to his proud credit is Santosh Kumar Pokharel who easily stands out through and through as a literary luminary in the international readership circle, and who is the proponent of a purely new style and structure of versification popularly called “Pokhrelian Stanza:Pokhreli Knots” which has already started to be widely practiced and employed in poetry writing by practicing as well as established poets from around the world.
Next, Pokharel is not a native speaker of English, but then, so deep is his linguistic knowledge of English and so intimate is his communion between him and the spirit of English literature that no impression of artificiality is created, no loss of natural flow felt and no grace of language impaired.
A Critical Survey of His Anti-War Poetry:
Pokharel’s anti- war poesy has got two tendencies. First, there are the poems that denounce the concept of war in general, and second, there are poems that project an alternative worldview for peace. Readers, from now on, can go steadily through blow-by-blow account, point-by-point description, and subject-by-subject interpretation of each one of the poems contained in his poetry book “The War and Other Poems”.
His poem “A Futile War”-realistic to the marrow and eschewing kicks and blows of heightened refinement of familiar language –presents adark and dreadful picture of the internecine war between Russia and Ukraine, where soldiers from both sides lay dead here and there on the roadsides. Virtually objective style of poetisation with a vivid visual opulence is what instantly draws the reader’s attention to a compelling fact:
There were bodies on the roadsides
Scattered,unattended, and unhid
This poem shows that human beings die like an animal without any value in the war-front, which is a common picture in all wars. Despite Russia and Ukraine belonging to the same age-old root, the root of Slav culture, they fought each other: “each was ready to kill and ready to die” with the result that they had to seal their fate forever and good, that their youthful dreams and desires, zeal and energies were stolen, and that the bond of brotherhood got ruptured to the point of no return. These ill-starred soldiers became the lost citizens of the world by being the prey of mass slaughter.
His another poem “Ghost Civilization and my Cramps”-brings into spotlight very vividly-the bone-chilling, hair-raising, and blood-curdling scenes of the post-war effects:
Destroyed are the houses —all ruins!
Not the people there live in but the ghosts
Human civilization is dead almost
Ghost civilization is evolving
In the deserted settlements, entwins
The dead and debris and the ruins.
By relying heavily on the direct description, everyday language, and all the stuffs available to him, Pokharel presents this anti-war verse as close to reality as possible that succeeds in photographically capturing the grotesque and gruesome experiences and convincingly fathoming the depth of human agony induced by war.
The choreography of the poem,constructed with the dense piling up of present simple tense, is stripped of zealous war- glorification and lachrymose sentimentality at the same time. The poetic persona fondly wishes for the poet to be able to overcome the nightmare of death and annihilation.
In his three stanza poem “The Heads”, which without so much as resorting to verbal embroidery and jugglery, and witchery of expression, and which caresses and possesses an easy, disarming simplicity of gait and articulation which the galloping lines do not-and cannot-reproduce, its key takeaway is that the war parades on the battlefield like a mad man turning human settlements into a ghost civilization, thus halting a continuation of life and civilization. Starkly unsettling to the reader! The very poem is peppered with ratiocinative technique of versification lending a force of logicality to the realistic presentation of the theme of insidious and insensate forces of war, the stupidity of war:
Divided into groups, they ask me
I am with them or to others bent?
I took to thinking and tried
To understand their intent.
In the seven stanza patterned poem “The Blue Ray” which visibly displays de-familiarization scaffold by metaphor and simile in the process of delineating the ghastly and grotesque nature of war, in the first two lines of the very first stanza, what a reader peruses chills his blood to the bone. The binary division between red eyes and blue ones symbolically pits evil forces against good forces. Amid all the war- ravaged and fear-induced cacophony in human settlements, poets and people in general yearn for peace, long for love, and desperately hope for the end of war in order that poets-who are “the unacknowledged legislators of the world” as per P.B. Shelley-would rain down torrents of poetry singing the victory of love and life to the beatific pleasure of all humans!
What is to be noted here is that Santosh Kumar Pokharel, very much like Thomas Hardy, is always a meliorist, and this poem phenomenally exemplifies and embodies the belief that man can overcome the evils of war and that human life and love will prevail afresh. He holds a faith as always that the world and future can be improved by human endeavors. While kingdoms rise and fall, while powerful leaders come and go, while the ideologies appear and disappear, and while conflicts and wars arise and end, the human capacities for compassion and deeper emotions like love, mutual trust, empathy are real, long-lasting and permanent, and the cycle of life and nature will persist unchanged. Of course, Pokharel –in this somehow elegiac poem-expresses his inherent faith in improvement and amelioration of the condition of men, women, and children. The poet, it can be conveniently surmised, is therefore, quite hopeful that sooner or later peace would come and life must continue despite such an awful tragedy.
We have sufficient stuff to show that Pokharel speaks with“the tongue of time” and with his age in the marrow when he exposes the war’s wild brutality and horrendous barbarity, heartlessness and cruelty in the following lines of the poem “Stop the War”:
I recited my poems for peace
Warships did not listen, rockets and missiles did not listen
Neither the machine guns nor the tanks would me hear
None of them was kind to me appear
The poem entitled “Play a Russian Piano, Sing a Khokhol Song” turns out to be a circuit poem as its beginning and ending consist of same two lines:
I want Putin to play a Russian piano
And Zelensky, sing a khokhol song
It is so emotive and sentimental in its tone and tenor, in its purport and import in as much as the poet has- from very near-realized how fraternal and intimate Russians and Ukrainians were thanks to their identical root, the root of Slavic culture right prior to their war but now at daggers drawn to each other involved in full-scale war trying to finish off and wipe each other out completely. What an irony! How shocking it is! At this, the poet’s feeling soul does feel the excruciating pain and melts out of sheer sympathy with them both. He full well knows “war is a war after all” and “war is a horror!” Whenever the war takes place, killing persists, women get widowed and kids orphaned. Undoubtedly, a land is never bigger and dearer than a human life. And, this is what has happened between these two warring countries. The poet cannot withstand this bitter and embittered antagonism between them; so, he cries a lot, his soft heart becomes shattered, becomes devastated, and becomes withered off! Now, the poet wants both of them to stop fighting and continue their brotherly bond, to reconcile with each other, and rejuvenate and revive their brotherhood anew so as not to let their civilization collapse at the ego and arrogance from their insane power struggles. The poem naturally bears an ability to whip up a favorable response from its readers not simply by virtue of universal currency of its message but due to its tender feelings articulated with utmost lucidity, clarity and transparency as well.
The persona in the poem “The Pow” is afflicted with the raw emotions of agony and pain when he is held as a war captive by the enemy. He hears nothing but the sound of bombs and the people’s shrieking scream on a daily basis. That is when he awfully misses his dear wife and baby; misses his home, his village and his town, all the while being hunted,haunted and hounded by homesickness and nostalgia, and suffering thereafter a psychological death wrecked by nonsense war. He-intuitively and which is true also-comes to the eventual realization that it is not he alone, his enemy who is in military dress and boot, too, has this war trauma, compassion and heart-breaks as the latter must have lost his friends, relatives and neighbors to the bhasmasur war, and must have been away from his loved ones. Both of them are under the obligation to endure the terrible affliction, pang and suffering which is why they both whine and whimper under its weight:
An enemy striking his boots appeared
I saw the compulsion on his face
He must have lost his race
There could be no woo and no boo
I cried,he cried too.
The title of this very poem is intensely pregnant with meaning because of the fact that on the one hand the word means prisoner of war in its full form and on the other hand it expresses the sound of an explosion such as a gun firing—both of which in fact find their best expression in the poem, enhancing its overall impact. It is, in a way, a pun indeed from the perspective of literary theory.
In the poem “The War”, the poet presents the wholesale report of ongoing war in a series of impassioned images giving the dreary, eerie and scary impression:
Introspectively employing a poetic logic in the poem “Relieve Tension at the Border”, Pokharel takes a pacific stance by citing a laundry list of insidious harms occasioned by monstrous war to the humanity in general, Russian and Ukraine in particular:
A deserted land is a dead land
Wars fought are lives lost
Soil moistened with human blood
Is an asylum for the ghosts.
The poet indirectly pleads for brokering a peace plan here as a peace-maker, as a peace-negotiator between warring sides. Additionally, and at the same time interestingly, too, his John Donnean wit and conceits peep through the casement of his poetic monologue with their infectious smile:
- a) Wars fought are lives lost
- b) Graves are ugly wars
When sanity, humility,integrity, maturity and wisdom prevail and will always prevail among the ego-inflated and megalomaniac leaders, tension gets relieved at the border; ceasefires and negotiations take place, and peace in turn naturally follows. This highlights and intensifiesthe significance of the role that ant-war poets have during wars, and among them is Santosh Kumar Pokharel.
The poem “Martyred Soldiers and the Pastor”, that also got published in Portuguese language by Marcia Batista Ramos-a renowned Portuguese poetess and columnist-betokens and bemoans the scourge of fratricidal war in which both the warring sides have their truths for them but generally truth should be one. So, warring sides are ultimately untruthful as they kill lives. Pastor’s mental state of how to pray for the deceased soldiers’ liberation and redemption is in a fix, oscillates in quandary. There is no gainsaying the fact that:
The motives were different,
The truths were different,
The truth of one was the lie of the other
There was a loot of truth and falsehood
A smash hit and structurally partitioned into four stanzas, the poem “The Earth Shall Be Clean” –though amply reach in its inner rhythm, in its war imagery and in its powerful encapsulation of the emotions of anger, sadness and optimism all simultaneously – is bereft of any immediately visible rhyme schemes. The anti-war poem airs the grievances and grouses of the poet exponentially to the readers. Yes, the states have gone mad and insane. The soldiers and unarmed populace have lost their precious lives for no fault of their own. They have fallen preys to gunpowder for the sins they have never committed.
Peace-loving poets from around the world do shout, but their voice has, however, got drowned into the ear-deafening noise of darting missiles and flying fighter jets. Their sacred appeal for enduring peace and lasting development falls on deaf ear of war-mongers, and the egoistic and arrogant and belligerent rulers who see no humanity, no fellow-feeling, no love. They are stone-hearted demons who revel in the blood of humans, in the tears of crying victims. They are blinded and blindfolded by power-mania and arrogance, and ad infinitum and ad nauseam relish thriving at the cost of humanities.
The poet is, nevertheless, highly optimistic in such a way that in future peace would be back in that not all are monsters, there are also figures who staunchly plead for peace and unremittingly work for the greater cause of world brotherhood, love, peace and plenty.
We must pray for the hopeful rays
Not all have turned demons yet
We are still here.
The earth shall be cleaned.
Poets from across the universe are still out there standing up in solidarity against war mongering mindset – to end wars, to stop the system of selfishness and exploitation that causes wars, to “be heroes in an army of construction” as Helen Keller thundered long, long ago on January 5, 1960 when delivering her speech on the issue “Strike against the War” at Carnegie Hall, New York.
In this way, the poet adopts a meliorist ideology in the poem!
In “Abode of Peace”, Santosh Kumar Pokharel appears whole-heartedly peace-loving and doggedly seeks peace in a world riddled with the dragnet of conflicts and wars as he is fully aware that peace and development are sine qua non to each other. Without peace, no development takes place, no achievement is had, nor do even family life, love and intimate chats become a possibility! It is at this backdrop that the poet is out on a search for peace and plenty, out to bedeck the world with inner and outer pleasure and calm, out to generate harmony and close-knit bonding among humans only. For it, he is wandering far and wide, to find out the abode of peace. He asks mountains, rivers, sea-shores, sky, social norms about the whereabouts of peace as if they were human beings, as though they were in the know of the address of peace. Somehow, he locates the peace in the renunciation of egos and vanity at the pain and sufferings of the common masses and in the serene fragrance where souls dance unrestrained and unbridled and in loving care of living beings. That is where genuine peace resides according to the poet. Peace is where life radiates and in peace only can we celebrate life!
The poem is –from critical stylistic perspective-pretty arresting; first because it is packed and jam-packed with an overdose of personifications, and secondly because the poet has used the verbal word” Listen “in the form of an imperative utterance sixteen times in the very course of addressing and then urging his audience that are living and non-living things alike.
In this current context, the role of anti-war poets has grown even more exponentially. And, Santosh Kumar Pokharel has come forward forthwith on the literary scene with a cudgel on behalf of peace, human rights, world fraternity and justice, and has raised his voice ferociously for solidarity against wars and terrors—all through his anti-war poems! Marlene Pasini, president of the Mexican Academy of Modern Literature, Mexico, passes her striking verdict on him as a polyglot world poet in the following words:
“…the great poet of Nepal, Santosh Kumar Pokharel, with all his human sensitivity and lyrical transcendence, has been seen tirelessly dedicating numerous anti-war poems to this issue, leaving the message for the world that that war can never be a solution to problems. He tirelessly calls on the warring countries to end the futile war.”
A General Estimate of Pokharel as an Anti-War Poet
Pokharel’s estimate as a poet is reliant upon varied factors which are to be enumerated and elucidated in the light of his versification style,and thematic treatment.
Realism: Realism is a key quality of Pokharel’s depiction or criticism of war in his poems. There is no denying the fact that a wholesale realism gets projected through the pen-picture of war-front well-nigh objectively. His poetry is characterized –in general course of life-by his heavy reliance on “prosaic narrativity” that makes use of monologues without references to specific persons and events. His poetry is the transcript of war-horror! That is to say, his poetic work truly reflects the spirit of our post- modern time crushed into crisp by raging violence.
Realism: Imagification of the scenes and sights of war and war-zones dominate, in full measure, the Pokharelian anti-war poems. His poems are, in another word, interlaced with rich and fertile images aiding and assisting to vivify and ossify his ideas on denunciation of and vigorous resistance to war, war-cry and in sharp contrast to it on his pacifist approach. His imagery is functional rather than decorative in that it possesses full range of expressive power and refuses to be cribbed and cabined, crimped and cramped in any way within the ambit of technical analysis.
Theme: He makes no bones about dealing with the full range of the experiences of excruciating pain of uprooted and displaced populace. He plays with words, images, figures which contribute to a poem’s truth but not to beauty. Repetition and recurrence of more or less the same theme camouflaged by matter-of- fact presentation of war-torn,hideous global situation in all its highlights and aberrations, and his unwavering and unshakeable trust in peace, human life, human spirit and international brotherhoodare what go on to form the thematic messagein the entire gamut of his anti-war poesy.
Diction and Language: As for diction and versification technique of communication, his poems are not moving toward song. His poetry is a poetry moving toward talk. Conceptual words made into sentences produce a kind of poetry at times called “poetry of direct statement” or a common speech. The phrase is used for a sentence bereft of figurative speech like allegories, symbols, metaphors, and other rhetorical devices. Such poetry of direct statement tends to be prosaic, flat and dull.
Pokharel is for the most part direct and conversational. In most of his poems, he has used the language as spoken by men- the common speech, where diction is simple and unvarnished, where the aim is neither decorative nor pedantic, but always functional; yet the words and phrases conceal the art of his fastidious selection. They are woven into the very texture of the sentences and stanzas that animate his language, impart to it liveliness or excitement in their own peculiar way; in short, Pokharel lends to it an “emotional charge” by arousing the emotions of the readers and increasing its expressive range and vigor.
There is no high-sounding and high-flown language whatsoever, no remote and artificial language; no ruggedness, no obscurity in their phrasing and tongue. His poetic sentences are also shorn of omnivorous, long lines. They are not weighted under punctuation altrapezium, nor knotted with typographical acrobatics. His poetry, in point of fact, boasts of unpoetical, uncomplicated and unpretentious phraseology and vocabulary of the daily speech- maturing into naturalness, blossoming into naturally flowing quality rather than effusion, and developing into immediate intelligibility and effective results! He essayed them all; and with his verbal felicity, he has normally succeeded as well. In so far as the poetry of direct statement is concerned, Pokharel is our doppelganger of Walt Whitman and W.H. Auden from western literature and another avatar of Gopal Prasad Rimal and Bhupi Sherchan in the perspective of Nepali literature.
Pokharel’s Shortcoming as a Poet:
But his faults as a poet are also glaring and any impartial assessment must take these faults into account. First, he is not a painstaking artist in as much as there is an acute lack of artistically chiseled words in his poetic creations. That is, he as a poet suffers from artistry-deficiency, from the sheer want of embellishment and embroidery in his poetic creations. A stark shortage of meticulous arrangement of words and mathematical precision of syllabic rhythms! No steadfast adherence to conventional meters. This very weakness is, however, in front of the poet’s iridescent and luminescent flashes just nominal, very –very trivial, and even nothing at all, for, all his anti-war themed poems manifest his first-rate poetic sensibility and sensitivity couched in his deft presentation of deadly and destructive power of war that does not exclude anyone, and makes a human being’s soul dirt cheap, and grounded in his earnest hope for love and peace for the sake of a decent life.
Conclusion: Santosh Kumar Pokharel’s is an anti-war poesie that always ever foregrounds and exhibits the holocaust of humanity and unremitting quest for the Mother Earth without war and beyond bloodshed – encouraging poetic hearts to confront a profound exploration of human perceptions of violence and battle. It is not “emotion recollected in tranquility“, but recollection emotionalized and rhapsodized in an untranquil moments that appears to be the driving force behind much of his anti-war poetry. His anti-war stand transcends beyond the boundaries in the forms of poetry to ignite the light of peace and stability, raising the voice of humanity and serving as a testament to the resilience against the war, war-lords and war-mongers; all his verses converge and merge into the songs for peace, shunning all the hatred and hostility.
His poetic language is characterized by simplicity, lucidity and clarity in expression; by current, colloquial, conversational tone; by exploitation of concrete, vivid and pictorial imagery; by cohesion and coherence firmly backing each other up with an approximation to the poet’s ‘mind style’(meaning that they reflect and represent his world- view and mental self),and lastly by the use of monosyllabic words that predominate his verses with disyllabic ones following the former remotely-barely producing monotony though. The swing of the rhythm is naturally insistent and unmistakable in the whole of his poetry whose lines are endowed with an appealing abundance of a natural flow.
Santosh Kumar Pokharel is – beyond any shadow of doubt-an uncompromising spokesman of peace and world brotherhood; he is truly a leading representative poet in that he represents and has distilled the very spirit of the current era giving us a bird’s eye-view of the very heart of the immense panorama of futility and absurdity which is contemporary civilization and history; he is, in a way, our mini-Buddha spreading the sound of peace, compassion and amity under the sun- via his poetry! Indubitably, he is a fire-brand anti-war activist.
(Rabindra Raja Shahi is an Associate Professor of English at Triyuga Janata Multiple Campus, Gaighat)
