Runa Bandyopadhyay's Nocturnal Whistle is a brave creative, an extraordinary work to reach the potential creation level against traditional literary criticism.
REVIEW
The Radical Feminism of Runa Bandyopadhyay's English Syntax
What is the essence of Runa Bandyopadhyay's English syntax? Prioritizing the "illicit" "random" processes of the mind—consequently, seeing language as a water-stair—over the standards of logic and taste an objectification of syntax puts on it, creating an illusive mirror of life. In Nocturnal Whistle, the physical is one with the symbolic, the exterior reflects the interior—in a fluid movement, the "restless," static "melts" into the motions of becoming. The majestic final lines of the poem, “An open call from beyond the boundaries/ Ferriage on finger/ World is ready to take ablution...” Through the ablution of a "ferriage" of words, water becomes idea. Pollen becomes light. The lines are saturated with Hindu and Buddhist iconography. But Runa Bandyopadhyay's lines "remakes," bends the masculine lofty meaning of its symbols into a dark vision of open, "imperfect," feminine liquidity contrary to the ritualistic determinism of its originals. Seen also as translations of six Bengali texts into English, Nocturnal Whistle is a book of translation. In that dimension, the distance the poem has to "cross" is linguistic, which it does through a writing which is "against the grain" (a phrase the American poet Jack Spicer uses to describe how he records poetic radio communications he receives from Mars.) Nocturnal Whistle does it, as if entering a Hindu temple, through a "ferriage of finger" in an "ablution of words" in the anti-gravitational progress of a water-stairs poem. When Spicer uttered his poetics of Martian reception during his "Vancouver Lectures" in 1965 just before he died almost nobody understood him, turning his words into something already familiar, what Spicer calls "changing the chairs on the deck of the Titanic." Half a century later, Nocturnal Whistle is a poem written totally in the radical vision he is evoking. He did not know the audience he is addressing is at least half a century away and somewhere half way on the other side of the world. "Distance" is the primary underlying concern in Nocturnal Whistle. It expresses itself in three dimensions: as space (parallel lines joining in the glimmer/or black hole of infinity); as language (crossing from Bengali into English); and as spirit (symbols "kept in aloof plantation" being liberated in the infinity of the dark-cage, as "pollens of light," into a seminal, open-ended, feminist vision of uncertain imperfection.
Murat Nemet-Nejat
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