Visuals of the Delhi riots kept many across on tenterhooks. People despaired and felt distressed. Frantic calls were made to ensure safety of friends and family. Social media rituals of ‘like’, ‘dislike’, and ‘share’ were duly performed. Witnessing the frenzy increased our sense of helplessness. During occasions like these, one wonders what we can do to help. Is it good enough to just write and bemoan the troubling state of affairs? Can anyone really benefit from that? The heart-breaking visuals that emerged from the riots and the poignant, relentless accounts remind us of W.B. Yeats’s much cited poem, ‘The Second Coming’, where he says, “The best lack all conviction, while the worst/Are full of passionate intensity.”
Dealing with agony
In the times we live in, violence is being normalised in the most grotesque way. As a result, people resort to different ways of dealing with their agony. Some might take to writing to capture the terror that was unleashed on the streets of Delhi. Writing serves as a document and gory reminder to what transpired and how. Writing captures memory, safeguards it for posterity for future action and recall. But writing in times of distress is easier said than done.
Some might even deem it escapist. They might think it doesn’t take much to write in the comfort of your home when war is being waged on the street outside. Writing is a comfortable option in comparison. And it cannot prevent genocide. However, I am sure many would agree if I say distress derails writing. It makes the act of writing difficult, often perilous.
The writer struggles for the exact word to justly quantify her enormity of grief and desolation. Distress creates perplexity. You wonder if there’s any purpose to it all, to all that you write, read, compose, paint. Does anybody care? While ruminating over these questions, I chanced upon a video of vocalist Shubha Mudgal singing Habib Jalib’s famous nazm, ‘Main nahi manta (I do not accept)’ at a protest site and it made me realise that every such gesture matters. It restored an individual’s faith in what they do. Perhaps all purpose is not lost.
The Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish wrote extensively about and in distress. So did Qurratulain Hyder, Krishna Sobti and Saadat Hasan Manto and many others. Faiz Ahmad Faiz’s Hum Dekhenge, which became the protest anthem across recent demonstrations in the country, lived perennially in distress. Writers like Mirza Waheed, Salma, and Perumal Murugan have given a face and body to distress in their writing. Svetlana Alexievich’s Nobel Prize is a recognition of the memorials to distress she has built in her writing. Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking (2005) is a heartwrenching narrative about living with distress following the death of loved ones. Distress is political but it is also personal. It comes from a deeply felt sense of compassion and heartache. Distress has birthed newer forms of writing and artistic expression. Distress is an institution, a laboratory of ideas to genesis further writing.
A challenge for writers
However, the creation of widespread distress, mayhem and disturbance is, in a sense, a conspiracy against writing. It ensures that writing becomes difficult. But that is exactly the challenge that writers must overcome. The oppressors don’t want them to write. In such a scenario, there would be one kind of story, a single narrative written by the oppressor about the oppressed. And it is everyone’s knowledge what that story would be. In writing sometimes, the wrong can become the right. It is this appropriation that our writing must resist. Despite insurmountable challenges and an all-pervasive ennui, distress shouldn’t prevent us from writing. In fact, it should, ideally, spark off collective action to further the spirit of resistance.
Kunal Ray teaches literary & cultural studies at FLAME University, Pune
