Kunika Yadav End Term Assignment

Prompt 9: Write four poems triggered by your reading of Arundhuti Roy’s ‘The God of Small Things”. You can choose instances, characters, places or ideas from within the novel and explore them further in your poems.

Poem #1 This poem depicts Rahel and Estha’s situation and questions which were left unanswered

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What are we?

What are we-?

Are we a vision or just a memory?

Are we the beginning or the ending?

Are we trying to be something we aren’t supposed to be?

What are we-?

Are we a fight in a situation where we should’ve flown?

Are we somewhere we don’t know or remember who we are?

Who are we?

Are we supposed to drift apart being left to wonder?

What we could be-

A question that needs an answer but yet I cannot find one

A question-

That can’t be answered until it is asked

An answer-

That can’t be heard until it is ready-

What are we?

Poem #2 This poem portrays Rahel’s emotions when she moved to Boston.

The Things about Trauma

 It’s not as easy

 As being something that happened to you,

 A package you opened once.

 You will wake up in a new ZIP code,

 Have to wander your way home,

 Carry a few of the things you love

 To this new place

 You live in now.

 And so you buy throw pillows.

 You put up twinkle lights and have a big celebrations,

 Point at the open windows

 And tell everyone who has ever seen you crying,

 Look how I have not caged myself,

 Look what I have made

 Out of two paint buckets

 And the blessing of my still-here body,

 But, of course, trauma leans into the bar cart

 Spills a drink on the new rug.

 Breaks off the door handle on his way out.

 Trauma sends you letters,

 Without warning,

 For the rest of your life,

 Usually disguised as something else –

 A medical bill, maybe,

 Or a box of photo albums packaged up by your father,

 Just so you remember

  Trauma knows exactly where you live –

  Who do you think built the house?

POEM #3 this poem portrays Estha’s emotions. Ammu’s death left a void in Estha’s life which nothing could ever fill.

Breaking

I feel like I am breaking

Over

And over again.

Encased in darkness

Yet somehow,

I am whole

I don’t understand.

I can’t understand

I want to be free of this body

This mind,

This life

I want to be freed,

But instead I feel broken.

As if pushing through the wall;

I do not disappear.

Instead I crumble and crack.

Only glimpses of freedom,

Broken wings

Trapped beneath my cage.

Nevermore.

Only I

And the void.

Poem #4 Things that Estha and Rahel could have said, when they met each other in Ayemenem after such a long period of time. Being back in Ayemenem brought back a flood of memories for Rahel.

 My Friend

I fear we share the same heart. Once that has been destroyed time and time again.

Yet we know that we let this pain occur, so we accept it.

I fear you are unwell and a little bit stuck, stuck in this pattern where you grow

More unwell and even more disheartened. Yet this is what you know so you accept it.

I fear you are unaware of how much I love you. I want nothing less than pure happiness for you. I need you to know this. So you can accept nothing less.

Self-reflective essay

Words fascinates me. How a string of carefully chosen letters often magically binds together to form an intimate connection with the reader fascinates me. How mere sentences can cause not only ripples but tides of change fascinates me. One can do everything from altering people’s perspective, to making them smile the open, crooked smile that is reserved for the quiet privacy of their room when all of their defences are down, with the shortest or longest paragraphs.

My firsthand experience with graphic novels. Before entering into this course, I didn’t even know that something called graphic novels existed. I never really came across any.  Those images in the graphic novels gives an overview of the story. By looking at the images we get an immediate sense of what is happening. But graphic novels somehow I found moves quickly, the plots are exciting and there is often a good dose of action along the way. And this makes graphic novel exciting to read. At first the novel might seem that it is just a glorified picture book but with a really good graphic novel understanding is only reached when the words and illustrations work together. In Palestine by Joe Sacco, I kept turning back to re-read in order to gain a better understanding. In ‘Maus: A Survivor’s t Tale’ by Art Spiegelman, the language and images worked together to create an interesting story. With so little space for words, they are chosen with a great deal of care for maximum impact. The themes that the novels dealt with, challenged me beyond my reading level.

I always thought that writing a poetry isn’t my thing. Part of my situation is that I can get quite confused when trying to explain something. And writing a poetry where you can only use limited words, makes my writing process more complicated. I have to sit and untangle my thoughts sometimes, a bit like headphone wires, and work out how truly I fell about something. For me, poetry is a way of showing that confusion doesn’t mean I don’t have well thought out and considered opinions. People can truly understand what I feel my issues are. I also learnt in the class that poetry is also a concise way of sometimes bluntly pointing out the flaws in society that others can’t see. Creative writing has allowed me to take the time to process things, write them out into ideas that others can understand - and by doing this, I found that you can get to the root of your true opinions.  And I will always be grateful that this course was offered. I read a quote by William Stafford -

‘Everyone is born poet – a person discovering the way words sound and work, caring and delighting in words. I just kept on doing what everyone starts out doing. The real question is: “Why did other people stop?”

Unfortunately, I am not gifted with such amazing skills to write poems but fortunately, I know its importance. I haven’t really enjoyed reading poetry and understanding its meaning as much as I enjoyed in this course.  There is an infinite amount of words in this universe. Each of us is given a limited quantity, owing to which we all are able to see and feel, and make others see and feel is restricted. I think through writing one can have a safe place to explore and this can be great tool for expressing one’s feeling.