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Rhyme & reason

Pramita Bosea

Zilka Joseph appears quite relaxed even as she reads out excerpts from her collection Lands I Live In at Kolkata’s Bookstore. She comes across as a sprightly young girl of sweet 16 with a pleasing personality, a lively, cordial interactive tone that can at once strike a chord with a dazed stranger at the very first meeting and an equally enlightened mind of a keen observer and absorber of things happening around her.

"I soak in the sounds, scents and sights like a sponge and spread around the same with the written word in context," she says. Sprinkling her gamut of emotions and varied experiences through her erratic stays in India and the American Midwest, Joseph has heart-warmingly woven all in Lands I Live In.

After growing up in the "city of joy" Calcutta then, Joseph and her husband moved to Chicago in 1997 before settling down in Michigan three years later. An astute academic herself, Joseph secured a degree in MFA from the varsity of Michigan only this year in May. Armed with success, she clinched her masters in creative writing with a specialisation course in poetry. Having lived at the congested Park Circus area in Kolkata, Joseph admits that the clocking ages have eroded much of the old-world charm with the by-products of modernisation, yet retained a chunk of its remnants in certain pockets of the cosmopolitan city, even to this day. Shuttling between stations and crossing miles of lands, the poetess says that every individual carries a part of the many different places he/she lives in or pays a visit to at one point of time or the other during their life’s journey. "Our mind is like a camera, constantly clicking images and events as and when we bump into them. They leave an imprint on our minds and we ruminate over them as our favoured pastime. The subtle little nuances of our lives in turn make up for an entire tome, scribbled over the years with care and clarity. The mind is walking along with the racing time, picking up signals from here and there, imbibing the treasuring moments and recording them as much as possible," she says. "Having moved away from my roots of origin in Kolkata, far across this earth on the other side of the global orb, it did instil a sense of displacement within me and consequently, reflected the same in my works. The rickshaw-puller and his tinkling bells, a cobbler in the corner, the ironman, the roadside teastall, streetside food kiosks, the tram tracks, the motion of its wheels, every minute entity finds its way through the metric route of poetry. Wherever you go, you sub-consciously carry the lands you have hitherto travelled to as a part of yourself and tell their stories to the listeners elsewhere," she says.

According to Joseph, human beings are wandering souls, shifting from one waiting room of a station to another to catch trains from the platforms to head for their next impending junction. "That’s the nature of mankind. Even if our feet our grounded, our mind continuously hovers over things that are sublime and exotic in elements. We react to novelty, anything that is foreign," she says.

The human perspectives change with age, wisdom and maturity. The sense of loss creeps in deeply when one comes back to the spot from where he started navigating his tour. "With each passing day, things crumble bit by bit to make room for new inventions to settle before our eyes. This is the beauty of life. Nothing is left vacant. Something or the other occupies the empty space. An aura of delight is there about something that I know is still existent. But what evaporates from our clasp is hard to come to terms with. When I return home, I can sense the same essence of our little bubble of domestic bliss and inhale that smell of "home sweet home" familiarity. In an act of desperation, I try to spend ample quality time with my parents whenever I visit them and make sure to celebrate their birthdays to hold an album of memories close to my heart in solitude while I’m abroad," she says.

Joseph says that new experiences and thoughts are coined to knit a complex web of connected lives and incidents. "The changes that take place in our surroundings only prompt the new order of the era. The changing face of a city is both predictable as well as unpredictable in more ways than one. A place evolves and alters its character, thereby keeping pace with the fast-flourishing times. Its macrocosmic spirit wears a seasonal warpaint that varies in colour from time to time. It fluctuates like the temporal climate with the city’s topography and skyline undergoing a drastic makeover, thanks to the strong impact of globalisation. Dotted with malls, discs, lounges and multiplexes, the cityscape-map is extensively brushed clean and polished to gloss in some posh sectors, while deprived of such post-modern infratsructural burnishes, certain fringes of the city still remain dormant and develop wrinkles, buried under a thick pile of dust, cobwebs and a stinking smell of mothballs, typical of the antiquated caskets. So, this is a case of clear paradoxes. With a steep boom being lodged in the BPO and IT hubs, upwardly mobile, smart young skilled personnel are seen parading their panache at workspheres, not to leave out women who are as much level-headed, competent, smart and outgoing. So, there’s a lot of hope and optimism brewing in the air," she says.

Capped with multiple laurels for her illustrious repertoire, Joseph now renders readings and imparts an array of workshops in Detroit as well as at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Her widely read and critically acclaimed collection, Lands I Live In, was nominated for the PEN America Beyond Margins Award. Besides bagging an MFA from the University of Michigan, she won a Zell Fellowship, the Elsie Choy Lee Scholarship and a Hopwood award. Currently, she is working on a new collection of poems.

Lands I Live In contains a string of amusing poems like the humble, fragrant and savoury dhania patta and the spicy green chillies. It is said that an appreciation of creative cuisine and poetic expression are both nourishment for the body and an inspiration for the soul. Food has been a topic of poetry for many centuries across diverse cultures.

"Food poetry is ingrained with a universal appeal that is invariably sensual in feel and texture. It has an animalistic instinct to put in precisely. When jotted down in words, food poems spice up a mouth-watering platter. I’ve clubbed all my food experiences, be it a phuchkawala or dhaniapatta. There are layers of meaning added to a peppered poem, that unfolds its esoteric essence in every stylised line. One must use his senses to savour a fine food poem. It’s like a painting conjured up with words. The choicest diction of description should enable a listener to visualise the dish. If a person is depicted to be munching a crispy, oiled papad from a roadside stall, then how can one be not tempted to take a bite in the same fashion and atmosphere," she says.

Busy working on her next collection of poems about her life’s journey, especially the days spent in Kolkata, Joseph delineates the snapshots of street life, the flurry of traffic plying on roads in the rush hours, stirring meals under the sun and several other nitty-gritties to shape up the backbone of her book.

"It’s a journey in the wider sense of the term, where a person’s mind, soul and body grow and evolve with time," she says.

Joseph is ecstatic about the fact that a lot of new publishers have cropped up. "There’s a feel good factor, but I wish the publishing world would do away with the paucity in poetry collections and feel the same excitement as they have been while catering to fiction and prose," she says.