Reversing Sovereignty: Deconstructing State ‘Rights’ and ‘Welfare’ in Jacinta Kerketta’s Poetry

Poetic Resistance to Sovereign Nature of Rights and Safeguards

Born in an Adivasi Oraon community in the West Singbhum district of Jharkhand, Jacinta Kerketta had been witness to injustices of various kinds both inside the family and among her community since childhood. Being fluent in three languages—Hindi, English and Santali and possessing the ability to comprehend Ho, Mundari and Kerketta have established herself as a writer of renown in the vernacular dialect in recent times. She is the author of two bi-lingual collection of poems, namely, Angor published from Adivani, Kolkata, and Jadon Ki Zameen published from Bharatiya Jnanpith, New Delhi. Her poems have also been translated into German by Draupadi Verlag. Apart from these, an interested yet uninitiate reader could take a look at Anumeha Yadav (2016)’s article published online on Scroll.in as cited at the end of this essay for reading the poems analysed here in translation. This will enable them to read this essay alongside the poems for a fuller comprehension especially when it concerns references to lines and/or phrases from the poems.

While Kerketta’s poetry is exclusively influenced by personal experiences over a range of issues, they cease to be merely reflective in nature and scope but emerge as potent sites for transformations of existing socio-political exigencies. In her poem, ‘O City!’, the description of the act of fleeing the village in the event of modernization and urbanization deploys the possessive pronoun with respect to the soil in order to represent a somewhat autochthonous relationship (‘Their soil’). However, a closer look reveals its creation of an ‘in-between’ space of meaning and identification. While politico-legal discourse defines the existence of common lands and public spaces through the lens of the equality of access (as enshrined in Articles 15 and 16 of the Constitution of India), the specific conditions of tribal lands and their historic expropriation found in the discourse of equality an inherent bias in favour of those who are better positioned to exploit legal articulations in their favour. On the other hand, the negation of the status of the soil as public ground as defined in sovereign terms of legal discourse does not imply a reference to private property as is usually implied, again, in sovereign forms of identification and classification from the perspective of the public/private binaries. The possessive claim over the land does not even mention the word, ‘land’, and instead uses a signifier (‘soil’) that is dovetailed with emotional as well as possessive investment. In other words, it transcends the role of private property as accumulative capital and assigns to it the status of personal investment that ceases to be capitalized.

The inherent co-existence of the thanatic and erotic instincts, as Freud’s observations on the fable of the hedgehogs, record (Kapila, 2021, p. 1) finds its poetic manifestation in Kerketta’s poem. The creation of the novel definition of the ‘private’ necessitates the negation of the sovereign classificatory parameters. The critique of the benevolent standard of measuring accessibility as pivotal to the welfare functions of the state is also significant because it exudes a rationale for an emergent critique of the politics of representation which foregrounds democratic welfare. As Spivak writes, the German equivalent of Veretrung defines it as ‘stepping in someone’s place … to tread in someone’s shoes’ and goes on to define political representation as ‘speaking for’ the disenfranchised thereby thwarting the assertion of their presence in critique (Spivak 108). Kerketta goes on to enquire whether the winds of ‘so-called progress’ drift equally over the city and the village. The description of progress in such fashion blatantly exposes its dubious role in the narrator’s worldview. However, the fact that after such a symbolic interplay of words and concepts, the poem tends to hark back to direct and obvious modes of articulation without symbolic adornments or tacit deconstructive ploys needs to be accounted for in terms of a symmetry between the thematic insistence on resistance to appropriation and its aesthetic counterpart. Like Spivak’s imbrications of the urban reader in his complicity with the contentious politics of information retrieval, the reader is introduced here to the critique of essentialist modes of reading and categorization. Kerketta’s poems depict violence in all its forms but in the attempt to cast it poetically does not shy away from literal descriptions of violence to couch it in euphemism. At the same time, it does not simply become a literal documentary of violence and veers into poetic characterization of the literal violent truth to affirm its poetic character. This performs two functions—one, it renders the Adivasi subject as capable of the form of expression long denied to her and also prevents the quick recognition (and hence absolute co-opting) of the poem’s form for the urban reader. Kerketta’s refusal to veil her critique of progress in metaphors or symbolism is a deliberate exercise in literary activism.

In the poem, ‘A Madua Sprout on the Grave’, the narrator describes the plight of a family driven to despair and suicide owing to the loss of the sole breadwinner. The ‘madua’ seed which the narrator describes as sprouting from the grave of the husband, Suguna, is shown to be ‘soaked in the life-giving dew’ in order to sprout. On the one hand, there exists a seemingly innocent perception of nature existing in close proximity with tribal customs and life practices. On the other hand, the event of Suguna’s death de-familiarizes this perception by juxtaposing the life-giving connotation of the sapling and the location of the corpse as if to suggest the former draws life from the corpse buried in the soil. By sprouting from the soil to which Suguna has returned, the seed also assumes the role of the parasite which thrives on the life of the human Other thereby confounding the narrative of natural co-existence as mere symbiosis. The ‘madua’, also known in popular parlance in India as ‘ragi’ (finger millet), is a major food crop in many parts of the country. Where its role as the life-giver is affirmed across the nation, the particular situation that the poem describes confronts this national imaginary and holds up the difference in spatial imaginaries, and therefore, refuses to be assimilated in the unequal fabric of the ‘national’.

The American critic, J. Hilis Miller, speaks about the role of the parasite as reflective of the unconsidered and unprecedented ‘presence’ that continues to threaten the wholesome and integral presence of the host while not being visibly antagonistic or adversarial to it (Miller, 1977, p. 442). The role of the ‘madua’ in the poem tends to align itself with the creative role of the parasite in bringing into effect a new conception of co-existence while (in a reversal of Miller’s proposition) reclaiming its annihilating façade—the death-causing aspect of its existence.

The desperation leading to suicide of Suguna’s wife and children uncannily aligns with the non-dualistic nature of existence of the ‘madua’. While bringing about the death and destruction of the family, the explosive potential of the suicide also lies in drawing the attention of sovereign governmental gaze that had hitherto been oblivious of the space peopled by the likes of Suguna, as the following lines powerfully depict:

For dying of hunger, they know too well,

Stirs up no storms, does not sell.

While this forces the state to re-consider its role as the benevolent protector and hence momentarily finds in the death the creative impulse of bringing to light a hitherto neglected domain of relationships, the deepening of surveillance mechanisms and intrusion of the sovereign gaze into the private sphere are its only consequences. The tragic nature of such experiences that attempt to enforce a considerate relationship where it does not exist lies in the vanity of statist welfare at least in its implementation. Shruti Kaplia attempts to locate in her recently published work the creative and subversive instances of the politics of death vis-à-vis some of the principal political thinkers during the Indian freedom struggle across the political spectrum (Kapila, 2021, p. 4). Perhaps, Kerketta’s poems, when read alongside the same, will serve as a delineation of the vain results of such thanatic modes of engagement that threaten to question the unanimous assumption of the glory of individual sacrifice. As a complementary elucidation of Spivak’s response to the uncritical nature of Western discourses of resistance that have in mind ‘the subject of the West’ (Spivak 24), Kerketta implicitly offers a counter-perspective to Kapila’s work on the principal founding fathers of national independence.

The complicated domain of discourses centring on life and death continues to be highlighted in the poem, ‘Six By-Lanes of Deceit’. Referring to the activities of various youth clubs formed in Saranda among the tribal youth community by multinational corporations who use football as a tool to distract the youth from focusing on concrete issues of survival and existence, the narrator writes that the event of birth of every youth in Saranda is immediately accompanied by his induction into some youth club or another. The routine nature of these simultaneous occurrences hints at their ideological stature. The moment of birth is therefore also accompanied by the occurrence of death—the killing of the potential for raising questions and awareness about survival and the problems and issues of everyday existence which could be bolstered through proper education. As a distorted mirror-image of the earlier example of the creative impulse harboured by explicitly thanatic representative modes, this juncture of the poem tends to emphasize the inherently depraved conditions of birth as characteristic of Sananda. While psychoanalytical treatises emphasize the already existing repressions surrounding the act of being born into civilization, the specific conditions of birthing in Saranda embody another level of repressive tactics which cannot be easily comprehended through any universal reference point or example. Closely resembling Marcuse’s theory of ‘surplus repression’ (Marcuse, 1964, p. 35), it strives to posit the effect of an apparently benign act on a potentially ripe yet immature consciousness. The football ‘that is given in each hand’ emerges as the double agent of repression in an already contentious moment of birth. The criticism of ‘progress’ in unabashed language re-emerges in the subsequent lines when the differences in the positions of those who travel on newly built six-lane roads and those who labour away on ‘asphalt and concrete’ are starkly highlighted. While infrastructural developments are held to be fundamental to the development of the ‘nation’, the alienation that it perpetrates locates the abstract metaphor in concrete yardsticks of difference. While the nation represents the ‘absolute space’ of appropriation and utilization, the associations with the space are only relatively defined in accordance with sociocultural and economic positions (Harvey, 2004, pp. 6–9). Where the roads and lanes represent the case of communication and conveyance for those who are not the denizens of Saranda but who rely on its resources (human and material) and their ‘use-value’, the inhabitants of Saranda associate these marvels of modernity with alienating objects which further removes them from the privilege of accessing the equally accessible space in sovereign discourse. Therefore the articulation of the ideas and corresponding metaphors of progress in the metropolitan centres of the liberal nation-state are disseminated differently and have differing resonances across various parts of the nation-state even at the moment of their articulation (Bhabha, 1990, p. 293).

The metaphor of the road is also potent in its critique of a theory of modernism as ‘motion and dissonance’ (Kalliney, 2016, p. 19). While the linkages across local and global spaces symbolize mobility, the lack of contemplation in a climate of obsession with utilitarian mobility gives birth to its corresponding anxiety. In the narrator’s understanding, this is further complicated by the opposing standards of mobility itself that modernization brings forth—namely, the seamless movement forward on concrete roads and the displacement of populations and their subsequent relegation to the toiling space of the ‘asphalt and concrete’. Owing to the differing ramifications of modernization itself, the need for a contemplative critique is more ‘visible’ and unconcealed in nature in the case of tribal existence than in the case of urban anxieties and apprehensions. Despite such anxieties, the linguistic potency of the poem attempts to uncover the concealment of repressive mechanisms by de-familiarizing the terrain of the concrete and familiar such as the dichotomies of birth and death. In other words, the poetic activism of Kerketta lies in the appropriation of the status of the un-moulded and the raw (‘asphalt and concrete’) thrust on the tribal worker in order to build a new politics/poetics of the un-concretized that reveals the concealed contradictions of the concrete. The poetic thrust therefore attempts to ‘dialectically overcome’ the hierarchical relationship between the client and the worker by enabling a recognition in the former (and his alias in the reader) of the creative potential of the un-moulded and the latter perpetually associated with the same—a reciprocal recognition that is prerequisite for any ethical action (Kojeve, 1969, p. 184). The novelty of critique accompanied by its creative intervention through the conception of discourses that are not allowed to be revealed in a simplistic dichotomous reading (mimicking the bureaucratic clarity that legal action requires) also presents themselves in the poems, ‘Ears of Paddy Tied Bound By the Dams’ and’ ‘Closed Door’. The discourse on light and darkness in both these poems seems to create binaries between the natural source of light represented by the sun and the artificially engineered light produced by hydroelectric innovations as represented by the shining lights of the town on the other side of the dam in ‘Ears of Paddy’. Both poems are characterized by a violent turn of action in their concluding sections—the violence being representative of the aim of destruction of all existing inequities and levelling of the situations of those who explicitly benefit from engineered projects sponsored by the state and those who are perpetually alienated from the same. The second poem entitled, however, has the domain of the domestic sphere as its setting. This difference symbolically represents the redundancy of the practice of differentiating between the private and public domains. This is further made explicit by the interpretative confluences between the two poems in terms of the question of reconfiguring the discourse of the public sphere. The direct and unabashed recourse to violent action as the concluding themes in both these poems, if viewed explicitly in terms of the physicality of violence, would tend to occlude the more potent and poignant case of epistemic violence which the narratives actually engender.

Describing the plight of the tribal inhabitants displaced from their lands owing to the construction of the dam, Kerketta highlights the violent encroachment of technological modernity not only on the territories of the Adivasi but also on the terrain of traditional livelihood forms. The concluding section of the poem rests on a proposal of the reclamation of both these territories—one of space and the other of modes and forms of livelihood. Although the lights in the homes of the shining towns are a symbol of allurement, it is not a claim over these symbols of privileged existence sponsored by statist agency which guarantees the narrator’s perception of what constitutes the good life for her brethren. Instead, the primary cause of unease seems to lie in the exposure of the practical consequences of the implementation of a constitutionally guaranteed proposition on ‘public property’ and the nature of the state as a welfare state in politico-legal discourse. As a ‘sovereign, socialist, … democratic’ state, the legal guarantee of equal accessibility of public property is constitutionally enshrined and incorporated. Nevertheless, as a representation par excellence of the nature and character of public welfare, the dam seems to question the very nature of such discourses of statist welfare insinuating, vide the unequal character of its utility, the fissures that lie deep within the sovereign legal enshrinement of rights and public welfare.

Heidegger’s distinction between the ‘World’ as the signifier of the disclosure of the meaning of all that appears before the thinking-consciousness (Dasein) and the ‘Earth’ as the space unblemished by semiotic occupation but also pregnant with myriad meaningful possibilities (Heidegger, 2008, p. 174) are useful points of reference in this case. In ‘Closed Door’, the narrator describes the plight of a housewife who feels stifled in the confines of her home marked by ever-amplifying darkness in stark contrast to the bright sunlight of which she is able to catch only a slight glimpse through the door left ajar. As a natural source of light (in contrast with the marvels of modern engineering and technology as in the earlier poem), it presents a possibility of appropriation by statist discourse on both the nature of public and private property. Thus, laying claim over the sun’s light as the entity that symbolically represents a genuine example of the equally accessible as opposed to the manipulative ‘World’ of ‘public’ property, the narrator associates the natural with the untarnished image of equity. The apparently innocuous statist reflection on ‘public’ property is therefore represented as the technological manoeuvre that aims at the systemic negation of any case for promoting equality. Thus, the natural co-existence between the tribal individual and ‘nature’ is acknowledged here but not in the terms in which a metropolitan imagination of tribal simplicity looks upon it. Rather it is modelled on the idea of re-configuring ‘nature’ as the un-appropriated realm of meaning and all meaningful possibilities (Heidegger’s notion of the ‘Earth’) in opposition to the ‘public/private’ delusion of demarcating commodities. The act of breaking open the door to allow sunlight to penetrate the room represents the true nature of the claim made by the poet-narrator through a new model of equal accessibility. The deep-seated suspicion of human agency (the state is also a human(ist) institution in its welfarist guise) and the relegation of truth to the domain of nature also constitute the critique of human agency and locate the posthumanist impulse of Kerketta’s poetry.

In direct contrast to this, the violent destruction of the dam in ‘Ears of Paddy’ does not necessarily imply the appropriation of resources and possessions that belong to others but represents the negation of the sovereign narrative of equality. By not subscribing to the idea of snatching away private possessions (such as the lights of the urban homes) or unlawfully appropriating the gifts bestowed on others through the process of modernization, the narrative resists its being co-opted by the prevailing discourse of modernization or its characterization as the ‘illegal’ in the lens of sovereign understanding of criminality (theft, pillage or illegal acquisition—the last of these being its own charge against statist measures). Instead, it gives birth to a new discourse of rights and a new narrative of survival where the natural order of existence remains untainted by manipulative statist models of property rights. In other words, the radical nature of its articulation lies in its ability to avoid a glib mimicry of the sovereign norm of acquisition and displacement. The lacunae that it opens up in the existing paradigm of the ‘legal’ and the ‘illegal’ marks its radical intervention and is pivotal to the nature of epistemic violence it perpetrates vis-à-vis the question of natural rights, public property, and the right to life.

Conclusion

In conclusion, it could be said that Kerketta’s poetry while being circulated across all mainstream channels of reproduction and while being translated globally, carefully presents a self-reflexive stance regarding the politics of appropriation and representation. While one paradigm of global literary representation fails to conjecture the inability of certain discourses to emerge in the ‘global’, and another precisely conceives this inability as a testimony ‘against world literature’, Kerketta demonstrates a third stance global representation with a steady and unflinching vigilance against simplistic categorization both aesthetically (through visible differences from various models of postcolonial representation) and politically (through the questioning of statist sovereignty). While representation is not an easily avoidable issue amid the myriad networks of global circulation, Kerketta’s narrative seeks to represent the already existing politically normative forms of representation of Adivasi plight. It does so with its ‘eventful’ stature of situating its reasoning outside the boundaries of statist discourse of political conflict and resolution. Where Suguna in ‘A Madua Sprout on the Grave’ through his death, and Phulo in ‘Ears of Paddy’ are unable to resist the appropriative gaze of statist benevolence despite the initial radical impulse of the politics of death and destruction, Kerketta takes up their cause to discursively unveil the fissures in sovereign narratives and hence presents them in a potent light. She thus represents the radical sphere of political action in her quest for the representation of subaltern struggle through her globally circulated poetry. It is her literary activism and its concomitant ‘violence’ that urgently needs to be brought out in critical reflections. Perhaps this could serve as a standalone rationale for the global circulation of such critical essays on the same.