An archive of one’s own

What does it mean to have a book you can hold in your hands?

It can mean having something to read — as simple as that. But, holding a book can also mean having something tactile to love.

As one friend said to me a long time ago, all books should be pampered-looking, even for debutantes. Now, Itisha Giri is no debutante, but her book, An Archive, has definitely been through a lot of pampering before arriving in our hands.

There is something about the cover that might make you pause. A collage of different items appear on the cover — a lone foot, hands, citrus, marigold, waves, fish and shells and snails. And the more mundane, like buses, tyres, crockery, et cetera. Each, however, is an idea. Each is carried over to the pages of the book.

There is something about the book that makes it an object you want to own, hold, carry, keep. Clearly, credit goes to the good design by Dishebh Raj Shrestha, and the minimalist, but striking, illustrations by Sumana Shakya.

From the first pages you stumble upon a series of puzzles, the first being a crossword. And whether or not you are able to work your mind across the little boxes, the series of half-finished, clueless sentences will put you on hold. But one is not meant to solve all the puzzles that exist, you see.

Also, you already know this is not your regular poetry book. You might wonder if the book is meant to be a puzzle in itself, as you traverse its pages, ambling over the list of consonants. What are these consonants, one might ask. To every reader, it lends a different meaning.

One finds that the way to read this book of poems is not just to hold it straight like an ordinary book, but also to turn it around vertically to read from the margins, inviting a meditative process. The list of consonants are on the margins, deliberately — each one of them a riddle, sometimes statements and sometimes heavy half-sentences, leaving the full story dangling: a good gadfly returns to its prey.

With this process, the book earns a kind of intimacy with the reader. Even as an object to be held, it is like an embrace in installments.

While there is that idea of permanence etched in some of the pages, it is actually impermanence that the reader deals with, as the theme of loss and death permeates the poems — many of them written as eulogies, and some as banter with the dead.

There is a sense of replacement in loss-

I saw him again, after my father died.

He had greyed- the man-child.

Because death does find a replacement, in memories, and among the living. How else would life be livable? And so the poet says:

If he refuses, tell them to tell him

this wake is over.

I must go back to the living.

There is hurt in Itisha’s poetry, but it is also rife with anger and love — or so it feels. We all turn to poetry with our own set of emotions. And, so, it is apt that poems trigger a set of different feelings for different readers, where the folds of skin of someone dying can be like layers of memory.

Itisha moves in memory with a heaviness, capturing moments from the past and recreating them in images like that of a "giant cauldron that holds the polymerised mass of an eclipse". This is not poetry that rests in the softness and beauty of what has passed, but draws from its coarseness, because aren’t moments also made up of "hair, skin, nails and asphalt"? Even if they are linked to awkwardness, to humiliation, or different moments of being stripped of comfort, of grace and of innocence, they must all be recorded.

There is the frontline — where

Human shields are mascots

Of fragile peace.

These lines on the children of war resonate with all of human history. It is pregnant with the darkness of yesterday and a reminder of how humans continue to use our own offspring because it is what it takes. When humans build, in that process of gestation is also the warning of the impending end. So, a city shares its fate with that of every person: we, who are programmed for destruction.

And the thread seems to hold — death, loss and all of them speaking to a feminine memory, bound together by the narratives of the “consonants” the poet supplies. Itisha says pa is to purge and that "one purges herself of pollutants". On one page, "meaning sticks to you like burr", and on another, "an ear thaws under duress", which is a representation of every young woman, who forever thaws in the memory of events of violation.  

And so the book continues to offer these consonants that make you shuffle it in your hands,  during which the book earns a sort of intimacy with the reader-- an embrace in installments.

Some of the most powerful poems in the book are the simplest ones. The Migrant's Wife is about simple lives that stir deep tragedies. The Autopsy of Mr.X reads like flash fiction and somewhat like a spot news report. Only, it is about everyman, again. Probably, the average, middle-class man. Familiarity in the language makes it a seamless piece.

The same language, however, does not work for some of the other poems where Itisha addresses a future daughter and other girls. While the topics are heavy and laden with the seriousness of violation and abuse, the style is a reminder of the genre that has come to be known as 'Instagram poetry' — quite different from some of the other poems that are striking for the language. 

Itisha’s book is not your regular book of poems. It demands the reader to pay attention because some of her poems are stories cloaked in verse. We are all seekers of stories and you might find that you read An Archive in one go, like you were reading a novella. And you might also find that you return to it some nights, to re-read the poems, because with every reading, there is a new light, and new crevices to be broken into.

An Archive

Itisha Giri

Published by Safu

Paperback | 107 pages

Rs400