Heggar by Aleyamma Korah

Aleyamma K M>poems> Heggar

By  the valley of Hebron

From the secluded cave of the Macpela

The guardian of death

Finally makes a retreat.

Before the grave of Sarah

Among  the dancing shadows of the  date palms

I stand alone

The funeral procession from Kirytharba To Memra (Hebron Valley)

Was so poignant to watch

Lyres were singing heart breaking songs

There was Abraham weeping

Isahak the stoic self

Guarded by the people,the janapadhas.

Would he be thinking of Ishmael

His eyes looking for his brother torn away?

Sarah,

When we started from Mishraim

I was just so young

Like a shadow I followed you

Forgetting the house, kin and all .

After the valleys of perfumes

After the never found flowers

I have roamed around gardens

To wrap you up in feminine charms

So intense was the days

The pain was so lingering…

Do you remember the day you came from the house of Pharaohs

So distraught ,your hair dishevelled, dress torn

You were shouting at Abraham

Throwing away the royal gifts

Cursing the beauty that was you

Sarah,

I have loved to tend your babe

And prayed before Jehovah .

In the altars among the perfumes covering up the seat of god

A fertility ritual was offered

Haggar was the offering you made ( To Abraham)

For which my son and me were banished

The first taste of dispossession

A soul mate should not have done.

The day when the breastfeeding of Isaac was over

The oldman came and given bread to is son weeping

And asked us to go away to the endless nights and days of the deserts

From the innards of the courtyard

Sweet lullabies spread its magic halo around

But there were no calls

There were no steps to call us back…

In the berseba desrt

Where it would punch even the last bits of life

Me and my child were roaming seeking mirages

Of nights and days…

In the oasis the last drops were lost

I closed the eyes unable to watch him die

In the oasis in the lap of the small shadows I left him

And wished why god doesn’t send sulphur and thunder to end the world.

Suddenly the desert rend into two

And new springs came up bathing us in the beauty of life and god

From the shores of the death he came out

Shining like a god armoured

It has been years since

The pain has been forgotten

The loss and the gain

The fear and the curse

Only at the moment of death

My sister of love

I have come here alone to offer my homage

In remembrance of what we have loved and lost

Only a moment between you and me

I

Translation >Aleyamma Korah > poems >Bathsheba

Aleyamma K M > poems >Bathsheba

David,

Me , Bathsheba

The beloved wife of Uriah ,the Hithyan

The widow of the slain warrior

You were my fond memories from the childhood

Wasn’t I madly in love with you?

But today I wish not to see your face

The hands that were splattered with the blood of Uriah

Dream of my teens, love of  my tender age

Do you remember the day when you won over the philistine?

We made it big celebrating it with trumpets

Receiving you like an ancient warrior

I danced for you

Coloured in the brightness of the dusk

And enveloped in the soft odours

From the valley of the flowers

But you seem not to have noticed me…

You were forced into exile

You were driven out of the kingdoms

In the depths of the caves where you hid

You wished for soft touch and sweet food

The soft murmurs of all that you loved

The clasp and love of the land you adored.

Suddenly you returned to the land

An emperor in new clothing

A new Jerusalem

Seeking another era.

I have always opened the interiors of my doors

To hear you sing eternal psalms.

When you your lyre pour out

The unnatural softness of the music

When the lead of the choir made

Enchanting music out of you

Like a bird enamoured of the dreams

I stood there mad watching wishing for a glimpse of you

The day you found me

The innate softness of me

The radiance of a falling star

The sudden surge of all that lovingly

I have lost myself in the music of your lyre

The songs have me in a trance

Sudden praise for the deeds of Uriah in the warzone

But you played it hard and soft

In the sweet silent cold nights

We rode over hells of ecstasy and sadness

Forgetting the woman that I was

But suddenly all changed

How could you be so cruel

To one who was all to you

How could you let off the guard

Amd let him be kileed

The man who stood for you night and day

In love and despair?

I have lost my womanliness in the night of such cold betrayal

I have lost love and pleasure in the secret moorings

I have become a ghost bereft of emotions

My body has become a vassal of vice

David,

 I am carrying your child

Which is crying in the depth of the nigt

It may not be able to with stand the pain and the scorn

The fruit of the irreparable sin mocking us

David ,

I cannot even ask you

What am I before you?

But if you are left with a trace of fear or feel of guilt

Sing again

A song for uriah ,a psalm of sorrow

In pristine voice

Unaffected by the highdeciblel play of trumpets or lyre

Sing for uria a song of sadness

A song of deep sorrow

A psalm from the depth of the heart .

The image and the reality

 The image and the reality

It has always baffled me why there were no art depicting Sree Narayana Guru, one of the few renaissance men Kerala has produced. Looking back we could see a sea of paintings and art woks inspired from the life of the man called Jesus ,the Nazrane, from where nothing good come. We do not know how Jesus looked like but there was a BBC story on him depicting in black and much removed from the hallowed look he has been bestowed by the western artists. Of course every god is painted according to the view of the devout and what we see may not be the real Christ .Our view, our love and devotion shape the image of god to the common being. Iconography has been built around the principle colours dress and everything was woven around it. Christ and his image and image of his followers are captured in its pristine purity from the earliest times to today. Works of Leonardo or Da Vinci or Caravaggio are classics which depict the life against a different back grounds. Even the finding a  new Da vinci work Sebastian is treated with great reverence and hailed with fanfare. Andrie Rublove, the greatest of the iconographers ,made more famous by the film on him by Tarkovskey ,was one among them. His name stands till now as one. In the film there is a very poignant line uttered by Theophilies who has failed as a painter : why  are you not painting where as we could not paint? Of course one  might be having the technique and the paint and the time and devotion but it requires greater genius to paint .The question of  creativity is of paramount importance in the works of Tarkovskey and is still relevant here. What is art and the feel to capture life and images?

We would have expected a flowering of art around Sree Narayana Guru, one of the bold revolutionaries in the modern era in Kerala. His call for negation of caste, his installation of a mirror as an idol ,his fight against the orthodoxy are tales always bringing in cheer to every human being if he loves human being irrespective of caste and creed . But it has not happened.

When I asked the question to M V Devan renowned artist and art critic , he replied: Gurus idol was done by an Italian artist who has created a very robust guru which was replicated and many didn’t dare to break the tradition. If other artists have done or visualized guru as he is seen in many of the photos of him , it would have created a new iconography, a new rich panorama of the guru and his life and after..

 Riyas Komu has done that thing in his depiction of the guru . Here the image of the guru is serious, scarred by the life around him. Solid and serious . like many of the Buddhas reincarnated through the Gaandhara and Chinese art. It’s a real homage to Guru as I see him, as Kerala looks at him

Those who are against such a solid creation are doing a disservice to the memory of Guru who needs to be reinterpreted through different types of art and instill in us a feeling for what Guru has stood for

I hope there would be more images of Guru looking at life with scars the world inflicted on him

He is not a god running away from life .He is a part of Kerala ethos which nobody can deny

A Buddha Kerala has offered to the world.

The decaying and the revival

The decaying and the revival 

Woman is the beautiful expression of the world. H2 So is an artistic look at those faces which have radiated the world much before those faces become stories of pain ,deformation and decay asking us questions on human cruelty in sheer portraits of grief recaptured. Their will and resilience haven’t been undermined by the fury of the sulphuric acid which has washed away their faces. Perpetual decay which has alarmingly real proportions in life finds an artistic expression in Dinesh`s  works, a dedication to the victims of the acid attacks in India. Looking  at the pictures would bring back to our mind the ashes of their dreams and desires which has been etched in pure charcoal .Dinesh took two years to finish this works which would be a rare commitment to life and beauty

I have seen Dinesh flowering as an artist by his so magically coloured cats and patterns of beautiful pleasing colours .Here colour is abandoned for the raw feelings it evokes .Whether it is Lakshmi or anybody, the paintings speak of the anguish of thousands of women in India. Glancing through the paintings done in deep charcoal against the white back ground those images become at once becomes hazy and painful in P G Dinesh`s works.

H2 So a variant of the magical waters  human beings cherish .Even waters can be used to suffer and silence. Only art is the antidote to the pain and decay it sets in.

P S Joseph

25/10/16

A game of thrones

A game of thrones

Ozhivu divasathe kali or An off day game by Sanalkumar  Sashidharan

Against the sounds of an election day presented through the campaign shots of an election and its narration through the tv set from the known and unknown cast of presenters, the players set off in a very remote area of the capital city with booze and meat and an occasional glimpse of a woman not sexy nor alluring ,a play starts within the bigger canvas presented through natural shots in a pristine forest drowned in heavy downpour .

Like Sathrang ke khiladi of Sathyajith Ray or the chess players of Prem Chand on which it is based , the players are cut off from mainstream political activity or take a leave from it when they are supposed to cast vote .Even if their votes were for nota, it should have been cast but here they are keen to have booze and jokes and if possible a shot at sex itself. Mostly they belong to the middle class and salaried too who are pleased with the small pleasures of life and belong to the various strata of life ordained by the society. They are  not practitioners of caste or creed but involuntarily their actions are predetermined by the social milieu in which they live.

Like the old play for which the laws are written in a very designer board in calligraphically beautiful letters, once you enter the play your actions are predetermined .The fifth one who is outside the game is supposed to be the arbiter of the crime and others are policeman and the thief  hiding among the king and the minister. Perhaps by a stroke of fate or intentionally the players don the predetermined part with vigour

They are ordinary man even afraid to kill a chicken and gets offended at the words of abuse on ones wife Liquour and fun unite them ,for which they are ready to go to any hell on an election day and magnanimous in pouring liquour to the help who is a mute witness and unconscious to the end and oomight end up as the accused in a trial by the public ,later . The gulf returnee, the organiser of the event is after the woman cook who spurns him with the sickle .

That rankles him and when the play begins a seemingly good order is restored where the man with the money ,the gulf returnee enjoys in his beautiful avathaar .Of course rationally or irrationally or at the influence of booze ,the old drama is played again where the black man is the victim. i am black, he sings and feels he is alienated among the glorified cast.

The play is not natural in the sense that it is somewhat predetermined and characters behave in the set pattern centuries have made. But it doesn’t end up as as a clichéd version of the casteist fights The mention of murder  or the fear  of it doesn’t prevent from them their preconceived notions. We are again on a plane in an earlier order where killing or dispossessing ekalavya is not a crime.

Much of the action is happening in a very idyllic world untouched by the world outside .The rain and the deep waters add an eerie feeling to the old bungalow which is the location .The film capture the natural voices and the locale in an unassuming manner. The woman is just a part of the surroundings and her reactions are natural to the hilt

Though its a play internally the strife is more as the players are grappling with the inherent contradictions in their characters moulded by years of hierarchical behaviour .They might be subued when doing menial jobs in the gulf or working in an office but the play provides them the necessary provision for flowering of the black magic.

There is no feeling of guilt nor even the necessity to hide the evidence . It is the mass and Barnabas as against the Christ like figure whose life is sacrificed in the public altar. The witness is there to end up as another crucified which is the most poignant feel of the end scene.

The film on a shoestring budget has achieved the impossible in its symbolic suggestions and building up of new tones unexplored by the original writer Unni R.But the uncharacteristic ending of the original is missing here as the directors’ idealist views gets prominence. Story is Unni`s ,the feel is of Sashidharan with deep political commitments, making it predictable But it doesn’t prevent it from a good movie

Internally the drama is intense and words and actions of the actors who are amateurs on the screen give it a more than violent coluring as nobody is afraid to play out his part . They are the players ordained by a great book ,really its a directors film ,an ushering of  new wave in Malayalam.

Remembering Dr M M Alex

Remembering Dr M M Alex

The earliest image of Dr M M Alex, who had been my college mate in C MS college Kottayam in the seventies , is of a lean boy dressed in Kaavi, an affinity he has kept till his end .He has been then seen more with Aravindhan or Sethu. We parted company  for several years. Then  suddenly he makes an appearance in Madras  as an actor in Tamil and Malayalam >By that time he had  some  memorable roles in raajavintxe makan and thoovanathumbikal I remember him introducing me Lohithadas , who as a playwright has  just won  an academy award winning  playwright . Three of us walked from the lanes of Taj to Gemini. Lohi made history with his scripts and cinema. Alex left altogether cinema

 I think he did the wise thing at an young age .He has then started working on a video cassette on shabarimala Ayyappan, one of the first in the direction He started immersed in vedic literature and ha s established Vedik India society. It seems his lectures on Hinduism were a hit in the Us universities.

He was not only guru to heaven seekers but was in the company of parliamentarians, judges and industrialists. I remember him ordering   a ship of coal to Chennai when a company wanted it badly. Though he could dabble in the money making game he cut it short. I remember an occasion when he refused crores worth of an offer if it  materiliased , a lesson I have also imbibed

He knew the intricacies of the labyrinthine paths in politics and religion and business and coursed through it effortlessly which many could not do .Many become a prisoner of money or power or fame.

One thing  kept him preoccupied . His passion for cinema .He was a notable villain in the eighties and could have made some films but he has turned his mind to otherworldly pursuits a change I have observed every morning during our walks through thiruvanmiyur beach, Chennai. I also remembr him actively campaigning for special jury award for jyothirmayi for he brilliant performance ,as a jury member of the national film awards. He got married and have two successful kids

He enjoyed life and extorted everybody to do the same. A passion he has had till his last moments,which many shared this day

My pranaaams