The feeling a reader is left with while reading a Marinaj poem is best described by the word ‘whisper’ from the title of the book itself – “Teach me how to whisper”. As intimate as if in the closest of proximities with the listener, as intent with the message conveyed, carrying to the ears of mankind the stories of its brutal ills and its tender triumphs; a Marinaj poem is as sharp and endearing as the gentlest whisper. Here’s a poet who sure knows this art of whispering like the back of his hand. While turning the pages of the ten sections of the book, the reader gets an up and close view of his background — the space and the time that went into the making of this poet, the places he stopped by being a mindful traveler, the imprints they have left upon him. With open arms he leads his readers to his inner world, to the treasures of his wisdom with all humility and compassion.

How his poems treat the readers is best described by the opening lines of the mini epic featuring at the end of the book, “The Lost Layers of Vyasa’s Skin”:

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At the Apsara’s aerodrome their midnight eyes were waiting for me

with more welcoming arms than Ganesha;

In the echoes of silence Parvati and Shiva named me their son 

—jokes about wealth forbidden!

With hearts bigger than their bodies they opened their doors to me

as if they were old books of treasure. … (pg. 175)

Like a pilgrim’s account who feels welcome in a far-off land, this unique poem written soon after his travels to the ancient land of India, takes the reader under its wings much in a way an epic does – most compellingly, to eagerly know where it will lead them to.

Nothing like a typical Westerner’s gaze, who sees India through a first-world prism, Marinaj’s account is replete with his kind erudition, his thorough understanding of the Hindu mythologies, the epics, the Upanishads that are seamlessly woven into the socio-cultural fabric of the society.                                                    

Another Albania-born, much-revered icon of the city of Calcutta, Mother Teresa is on his mind in the visit to the city. Being aware of how a city can impact a person’s mindscape, to the extent of changing the trajectory of life’s path, he writes:

As the tectonic plates part and the fault lines open;

knowing the further I enter, the harder it is to return,

like Mother Teresa who went so far in she never came back,

the trail from human to saint in a cloud of unknowing. … (pg. 176)

The poet seems to embark upon a journey with a sound plan centering his wishes pertaining to his inner search, and just when the reader is wondering why the poet is keen to chart this unconventional route with the Hindu Gods and Goddesses, these lines come as a response to the query:

I will keep Durga’s unruly lion locked in my ribcage

and leash the fierce God’s tiger to my neck;

And I’ll pick out for her at random two more human arms,

put paper in on hand, a pen in the other. 

Since India’s final history never was written, its people unstudied,

Mahishasura can be defeated only with paper and ink. … (pg 179)

Like a poet aware of his responsibility of showing the people the way to true liberation, he mentions ‘paper’ and ‘ink’ and shifts from the unreality of mythology to the dire realities of a developing nation. Yajnavalka from the Upanishads to Sri Gopal Paul – a present day Indian artist working with clay and Subit Kundu, the embroiderer; Marinaj shifts ages with an alacrity that keeps his readers quite at the edge of their seats.

They seem to know, now having reached at the end of the book with this poem, that the brevity of his expressions command full attention of the readers to lap up the richness of their content. He doesn’t let his readers let their hair down neither does he himself does the same, not even physically as we know from the incident where he rushed to save the life of a woman in one of the literary meets he was attending in an auditorium in Calcutta. Gauging from a distance that the lady was in need of some air, he lunged by her side.

I gave her my lung’s air and my soul’s love

Until her heart renewed its gentle beat,

My face the first she saw after that sudden breakage from the world,

and somehow she found strength to smile at me.

That smile then was the meaning of my trek to India,

as poet and a thinker of the day;

Her sweet heartbeat so altered the philosopher in me 

That I tore up the speech I labored over:

The greatest help the world needs is to those closest to us

and next to others further from our way. … (pg 211)

The tone here is of a man certainly to have found the purpose of not just his travel but also of a directive to be led by on life’s path, when choices are baffling enough to not know which is the right one.

The poet sounds sure when he says:

Sometimes it’s enough that a man be just a man

for each saved life is hope for generations hence. … (pg 211)

Like stations to a moving train, the poems in the book come like halts with the poet’s time not only with the marked events of his life but also where he stopped by to reflect, recall and share with his readers what touched him deeply and stirred his inner world. Albanian-born poet, Gjekë Marinaj had to flee his homeland in the wake of a political tumult but as it happens for all immigrants worldwide, the homeland doesn’t leave the heart of its original resident.

The poet testifies for all others with similar plight as his:

But still 

In the wicker hut of my ribcage,

folded in the yellowing images of old book,

I find and find again my neighbor’s transparent love. … (My Neighbors in Brrut, Pg. 3)

Death, as a theme comes in like a frank inevitability in many of Marinaj’s poems:

Oh, life,                                                                                    

Life is an overwound clock,

So what it strikes is death.

And all those deaths bury our souls with scales 

where monsters of the sea still feed

somewhere in the fiery seas of that morning. … (Whispering to Hiroshima, Pg. 78)

Referring to the malady of mankind where big fish eat the small, the poet tenderly describes life as an over-wound clock. But with this striking imagery of the monster still feeding on the souls, the poet hints of no abatement with human cruelty leading to the menacing wars.

In the essay titled “The Wrong Side and the Right Side”, Albert Camus writes,” The great courage is still to gaze as squarely at the light as at death.” Marinaj seems to versify the thought with his bold pen:

Two lives further you will push my body

Away from myself.

You will call all these

A personal experience.

You will convince me that I left

Just to create a theory…

You will label my complaints

As expressions of a subjective point of view. … (My Conversation with Death, pg. 99)

As if the poet is looking at death eye to eye and making all the relevant points to its mightiness, the tone is challenging and the arguments put forth feels invincible. The personal tone in these lines is heard clear and loud:

I will pay for my sins –

For all those unwritten poems

And for the girls that in the name of morality 

Left their love for me to die. … (My Conversation with Death, Pg. 99)                                                           

One of the most hard-hitting lines from the short poem “The Secret of Immigrants’ is:

They scribble maps forever

till comets become their human antennas;

become the ticktock of world philanthropy. … (The Secret of Immigrants, pg. 27)

The carefully placed word ‘ticktock’ feels like a blow to the people everywhere who trivialize the fate of the immigrants, who showcase philanthropy for ulterior motives. If not to ignite our sleeping conscience, to stand up against all that is ethically and morally wrong, what else is poetry for?

The heart of the book lies in the poems where the poet writes about his parents. As Frederick Turner – an academic, author and co-translator with Marinaj for this book writes in the introduction, “Many of his finest poems are precisely about home, about his parents, his village and neighbors and they are full of that Homeric yearning for Nostos, for the smells and kindness of home.”

But who I am, to tell the truth,

can always be planted deep

in the soil under the fingernails

of their hard work. … (Anthem for My Parents, pg.11)

Not just emphasising on how they define much of who we are, this masterful imagery in his wholehearted tributes to his parents, the poet rightly highlights on what needs to be celebrated in a world where discriminations and injustices flow rampantly towards those who make the world better with their toil.

To read a Marinaj poem is to be on a voyage, without a map or any predictability on where it might lead the reader to. The poet keeps awake an element of surprise and his own curious mind, his love for knowledge that is all-embracing of varying disciplines of science and arts both, makes it an enriching experience for the reader. He seamlessly weaves in his own naturalist philosophy with the established schools of theories.

Nothing can conquer unmeasured space 

as long as dimensions go on swelling

beyond the bleary eyes of whatever century this is.

Cosmic rays collide above in radioactive bursts,

and they are probes to show us what we may become                                                                                     

above death struggle of polarized humanity. … (The Spontaneous Energies of Matter, pg. 128)

Marinaj’s love poems stand out for their fine balance of everything that is spontaneous, tender and delightful about this precious emotion and the reflective eyes of the poet who can see through his own vulnerabilities and express them like an honest confession:

And what of us? Where do we figure in love?

I’d say this:

It is to choose the universal singularity.

Where does love figure in us, then?

It’s the reason for existence,

It’s the unique satellite that transmits only sincere voices,

It’s the space where smiles and tears intercept each other,

It’s where kisses become the voice of the future’s outstretched wings. … (We Are Born to Love, Pg 64)

It feels delightful to see how the poet with the mention of a modern day invention, satellite, reiterates his trust on an age-old emotion of love to give meaning to human existence. Not anything like Tagore’s love poems and songs where the demarcation gets blurred with his muses and God, Marinaj’s poems on love feels unequivocal on his inspiration.

Holding the sorrow, the anguish, the helplessness of the troubled times on this planet with the pandemic, the poem “Another One On Covid 19” comes across like an ardent prayer, a promise, a firm resolve from a husband for his dear wife who is a front-liner belonging to the medical fraternity, in the battle with disease:

As you breathe life into almost dead,

love is your best and surest PPE;

if life were but for one, not be shared,

then life here was not made for you and me. … (Another One on Covid 19, Pg 71)

A poem is born to serve many purposes. It can educate, entertain – bring in a laughter of relief, joy; help in grieving, protest and be a voice for the reader to know more truly about the self that feels confused in this quagmire of half-truths and lies that entails human living.

Marinaj’s poems serve all the above-mentioned purposes and urge the readers towards a fearless existence – where fear is not only about battling the external reasons of it, but also from those arising from within, curbing us from attaining the maximum that life can offer.

The reviewer is a poet, editor and literary critic. In recognition of her contributions to poetry, she has been awarded the prestigious “Dr Maheswar Neog Memorial IPPL” Award.

Spotlight

Teach Me How to Whisper: Horses and Other Poems

By Gjekë Marinaj

Syracuse University Press, 2023

223 pages, Rs 3806/-

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