Tomorrow, Someone Will Arrest You
'Tomorrow Someone Will Arrest You" by Meena Kandasamy is the fire that we need to ignite our embers.
Is it a crime to write poetry when war breaks out? Those in power will say, 'Yes!' The sycophants will ask, 'Which war?' They claim, 'We are at peace. India is a blessed country. No war… everything is in harmony.’ But a poet with a conscience can feel the air, can smell the gunpowder and burnt skin. Modern warfare uses different techniques. The rich siphon off 99% while the rest of the Indians jostle for the remaining 1%.
Meena Kandasamy is a poet acutely aware of the war between the rich and the poor, between women and the patriarchal hegemony, and between the fascist state and the oppressed people. She is a poet with a conscience. She bleeds, she cries, she shouts at the warmongers, but she never gives up. Her poetry collection, ‘Tomorrow Someone Will Arrest You,’ is not a passive submission to the establishment but a hard slap on the perpetrators of human rights violations and the throttling of free speech.
The collection has five parts: The Poet, Her Comrade, Her Lover, Her Friends, and Her Country.
In the first part, The Poet, Meena as a wild woman on a word hunt searches:
…find me a word that flinches at the thought of being trapped, a word that shows me stealing time, not men.
She undergoes vilification as a marginalized individual, but this constant attack on her caste identity and identity as a woman does not give her the inferiority complex that the upper caste and upper-class people intend. Instead, she fights back. In the poem, Sapphic Scar she writes,
Being seen as denominational sets me alight, makes me write word after word in rage, leave behind this body of work, so that someday, at another time, someone else will read me and say: she deserved her place.
She is very much conscious of the refugee crisis and the helpless deaths of the people of Syria, she writes empathetically, The Wars Come Home. She is also very much conscious of the fascist attempts to throttle every voice of dissent at home. Every free voice in India is under attack. In a rage, she writes,
Tomorrow, someone will arrest you.
The court, in a rare gesture, will give you the benefit of bail. The police will rearrest you in another case. This will go on and on.
Tomorrow, someone will arrest your children. You will be underground. The police will tell your old mother to consume poison and feed it to the kids.
Tomorrow, someone will arrest you, your partner, your children, your children's children. Some measures are essential to keep a democracy alive.
Long Live Silence.
Daunting, courageous Meena has never been silent. She is rage. Her words are the hammers melting the dead silent and thus becoming one of the very few voices fighting for the idea of an all-equal land. She is not afraid to stand for the Bhima Koregaon activists who are undergoing the trial process which is itself a punishment. She writes,
PROCESS= PUNISHMENT (Dedicated to the Bhima Koregaon – 16) Some activists dreamed of another world, demanded paradise, repeated the same old, the same old: The people want the fall of the regime The people want a welfare state The people want a people’s rule The people want to tax the rich The people want their children clothed & fed & taught... The people want freedom The people want hope
Meena Kandasamy is hope. Though she is punished for being herself and her readers are also punished for reading her, within this unsettling poetic force lies the hope of germination, the hope of the birth of something new, fresh, and just from a supremely unjust, chaotic, hegemonic right-wing system of belief. She writes:
A young friend in Kerala told me his cousin-sister was rejected from a marriage alliance by the man's family who said: ‘She is the kind of woman who reads Meena Kandasamy.
In a country that is quickly sliding into becoming a majoritarian ethnic democracy, behaving like a typical fascist state by allowing lynchers and bulldozers to roam free in the streets, Meena perfectly enumerates the strategies of the state against the poet after she defended the organizers of the 2012 Hyderabad Beef Festival and condemned the subsequent violence. While writing about the plans that the state employs to dissuade a poet or a 'bitch' from eating beef, she ends:
PLAN TWELVE: ISSUE A GANG-RAPE THREAT Tweet @beefeatingbitch: ‘Bloody bitch, u sud be gang-raped n telecasted live, that will be an awesome experience.’ Simultaneously, explore the possibilities of an Islamic-style Hindu fatwa to finish the bitch once and for all.
To counter the fascist endeavors of shutting off a woman by giving her rape threats, Meena Kandasamy minces no words at all. She is the proud owner of her words. In the next poem, she writes,
#THISPOEMWILLPROVOKEYOU This poem is not a Hindu. This poem is eager to offend. This poem is shallow and distorted. This poem is a non-serious representation of Hinduism.
This dare to offend — the most powerful polarizing force, is Meena's forte. She is straight without obscurity and the use of simple language and texture makes her stand out as a poet. When oppression is blatant and obvious, a poet's ability to touch those wounds with plain language is commendable. Every oppression in the name of caste, creed and gender makes her furious. So, in the poem Rape Nation, inspired by the Hathras rape case, she writes:
Manu said once, so his dickheads repeat today: all women are harlots, all women are base; all women seek is sex, all they shall have is rape. Manu gives men a license plate, such rape-mandate. This has happened before, this will happen again. This has happened before, this will happen again. Sanatan, the only law of the land that’s in force, Sanatan, where nothing, nothing ever will change. Always, always a victim-blaming slut-template, a rapist-shielding police state, a caste-denying fourth estate.
Marginalized in many ways, Meena stands with all her poetic armor for Muslims, Dalits, and people of the LGBTQ community, though some see her as 'anti-national.' Meena Kandasamy aches for the lonely death of the people in the time of Covid-19 pandemic. Her poem 'India is My Country' reminds us of the thousands of mass shallow graves exposed by the rains in Uttar Pradesh. She laments the deceased and their near and dear ones.
Only the endless sight of anonymous corpses wrapped in white plastic streaming out from ambulances, a lone relative who builds the pyre with a lot of help, rows & rows & rows of open-air pyres with wood mercilessly piled close together to contain the flames, unrepentant fire and ash, cremation workers moving around in that smoky daze, recycling the wood that has not had the heart to burn.
But while mourning, she also takes a jibe at the government's effort to hide the exact number of deaths and the indifferent inhuman attitude of the state that could not hide the poor health infrastructure that left the people of their own in the face of the raging pandemic:
We mourn for the lost pride that let us say each day, India is my country, and now we feebly add, my country is a crematorium.
Everything is falling apart. Institutions are being hollowed out. Democratic values are eroding fast. Brave voices are being arrested. What is the need for a poet in this time? A poet with a conscience is now the only hope. She can be the witness. And Meena in the collection “Tomorrow Someone Will Arrest You” doesn't fail us — the readers. Meena's poems are alive and witness that everything is not dead yet. She rightly writes:
What is the use of a poet in a season of bloodshed? Tell me, dear ones. Is she the one who grieves? Is she the one who guards the embers of a people’s rage? Is she the one who mirrors your shattered heart? Or, is she the one who speaks to show she is not yet dead.
This poetry collection “Tomorrow Someone Will Arrest You” testifies that she, the poet, is not dead yet and the struggle for the idea of a pluralistic welfare state, is not dead yet either. Meena's poems are the fire we need to ignite our dying embers.
Publisher- Juggernaut / Price- 399 / Pages- 112
Written by Moumita Alam