NATIONAL 9 (Spotlight Weelky)]

Nepali Poetry: The Point is Silence

By Yuyutsu R.D. Sharma

It is this silence that shall take Nepali literature to the heights it is craving to attain. A great glorious silence. The quiet rhythm of this great Himalayan kingdom has yet to find a fitting expression. It is not just a savage silence whose stabbing vitality the people of the Himal and Terai since times immemorial have been aspiring to explore. It’s not just first shaman’s tom-tom, the flash of the nose-ring that sent a thrill in the heart of a folklorists. It’s also not just the rhyme that the earlier poets tried to master, seeing close reflection of the silence in the eyes of their innocent little poems.

Yuyutsu R.D.

The silence has been heard loud and clear in the turbulent poems of Gopal Prasad Rimal. To some extent, we can feel the throb of this silence in Muna Madan where the hero Madan, like the poet himself struggling to master it, meets a tragic end. Madhav Ghimire in Malati Mangale fumbling to explore the same silence somehow gets dislodged due to extraneous factors resulting from a muddled vision and lack of commitment to the power of silence. In other words, Nepal’s Paterson or even Song of Myself has yet to be written.

I have often been misunderstood as an opponent of metre. But my point is — metre here is just a handicap. Rimal understood it long ago. Bhupi Sherchan conquered it in his outrageous poems. Today most poets exposed to or in a position to understand Western or Latin, Afro-American literature have shed metre have come to write in a form which is democratic, open-ended and accessible to a vast majority. Because metre, as such, is not the point. The point is silence.

Silence. An artistic evocation of the pyramids of this silence, its colorful spectrum, its bluest ranges and the ongoing process of muddling the purity of this silence has gradually evolved to be the bedrock of Nepali poetry. Wole Soyinka’s Death and the King’s Horseman could tell us what to do with our shamans, rhyme, the folklore and obsolete Sanskrit metre.

Shrestha

Like the great vacuum of the 1960s, Nepali literature today has again come to a standstill, Despite decades of struggle it has not achieved the heights it’s supposed to have attained. Of course, cynics can have a good laugh. Narcissists and hacks reveling in cheap metre can dream of a Nobel or Booker Prize. Illiterate obscurantists can reign in the leading governmental posts, ruining major platforms that can be used to promote Nepali literature through regular dialogues and readings. Proud peacocks or senseless frogs from the English or Nepali Departments of the University can continue to sing songs of decadence, remaining utterly hostile to literature that is genuine, non-academic or polyphonic. But I genuinely feel there is a great creative commotion here, with major ‘modernists’ and illiterate obscurantists of the 1960s silent, some of them having written just one or two poems in a decade. Every time they open their mouths, we know the poems they will recite or can imagine the kinds of poem that will come out. The decade following the 1990 democratic upsurge has bought us back to confront the same silence with an urgency that was never felt before.

But, as I said, there is a great creative commotion here. We have poets like Krishna Bhakta Shrestha and Shailendra Sakar writing tirelessly for over more than four decades. Shrestha struggling with his fears, his dream, visions, and vulgar silence of death that he is trying to conquer in his artistically chiseled, highly concentrated dark poems.

Sakar

And Sakar writing fresher works, travelling extensively, amalgamating his experiences with his life lived in the remote Himalayan mountains. Outrageous, outspoken, open to influences, exerting to change the ‘content’ of Nepali poetry to capture the fast changing scenario as the great silence gets muddled due to senseless globalization, making the citizens of this ‘tiny’ nation ‘watch Star TV sitting on a buffalo’s back’. Then there are younger poets working on the fresher versions of the rich complexity of this silence; the interplay of clouds and dried up riverbeds, of brooks that flow in the Himalayan skies, and virgin, untouched galaxies for the first time experiencing the lethal taste of smoke and chaos unheard before. Shrawan Mukarang, Promod Snehi, Rasa, Shyam Rimal, Tanka Uprety, Khadka Sen Oli, Ramesh Chitz, Hangyug Agyat, Rajan Mukarang, Pashupati Neopane and many more. From their confrontation with fresher contexts of this silence would one day emerge a new horizon of creativity that the whole world is waiting to watch.