Nair,Chandran
Once the Horsemen other
Poems.
Singapore, University Education
Press, 1972
When I was given this book to review I took one look at the jacket (that awful horse!), read the blurb and thought to myself: Chandran Nair should stay with his fish and leave poetry-writing to those who have, at least, studied poetry. Well, thus spoke the product of an Oxbridge-type English Department--as usual, too hastily, and as I eventually discovered, very, very erroneously. Chandran Nair's poetry is as full of flaws as a critic could ever delight in picking upon. . . .but , once one gets deeper and deeper into his writing, these become piffling and not worth bothering about. Because Chandran Nair's poetry is good---amazingly good.
First, even from a purely sociological point of view, one sees through his imagery all the varied influences on this Malaysian/Singaporean Indian, and watches as the influences struggle to form, not a "Revolving Man", but a real person. One sees the background of Hinduism work side by side with Christianity; one watches the Chinese, Malay, and "Other" influences on his Indianness, from page to page and from poem to poem. It is very interesting reading--but even more, it is so forcefully well-written. I could be pedantic and tell you here about the influence of the earlier Malaysian/Singaporean poets on Chandran Nair, and talk about Wong Phui Nam and Edwin Thumboo etcetera: but I prefer to discuss Chandran Nair's poems as Chandran Nair's poems and leave the rest to scholars and posterity. So here they are.
The poems "Sincerity (for Mohd)" and "Monsoon" are topical, and would be understood mainly by the people who live in these regions. They are both very feeling yet simultaneously very well-written poems: which is something which sometimes become rare in Chandran's poetry--when his emotions get the better of his craft. This one finds in "No love for snakes, and this being posionous". The poem has moments of real beauty, but one sees his thoughts and his emotions struggling for equal expression and unfortunately the latter wins in the end, when one is left with a Wastelandish irritant, of wanting to ask the poet for footnotes to explain his imagery. 'Inchoate--and oftentimes incoherent'--are the descriptions one longs despairingly to label the poems in this collection. And yet, precisely at such moments, one comes across lines like
. . . . .in this photograph
time is locked away for centuries, till on the wall
an instant exposure of mind shatters:
the picture overexposed because
I opened the shutters of my heart too wide.
(from No love for snakes)
whose lucidity and intensity drive one on by their own momentum to read more and yet more.
And so one discovers the thought-provoking address to a dead poet who he admired:
Your house was infirm, built of poems. . . .
What were you like, mad lover,
Nationalist, poet, fiancee, man?
Yesterday I read your poems
Wished them mine
(from Burst Eardrums)
This is something all poets feel, and ask themselves at sometime or another--what's it all about? and am I only 'shedding my sicknessess in books' or is there more to writing poetry? Who knows? But Chandran speaks for most of us here when in this same poem he says:
I am dead too, ancestors forgotten,
no identity awaits my homecoming
no ideals throb my decadent veins,
so I turn words, confuse my images,
burst the torrents into veins.
Then the poem "City": here is something not just for Singaporeans to empathise with (though we spontaneously do), for here, as elsewhere, Chandran speaks not only for and to Singaporeans, but for the world of today, our world with its crumbling beliefs and its search for new gods: and , like all young men today, he seems cynical when he concludes that:
Now the traffic of our veins has stopped
Quick a transfusion.
They poured in chevrolets but it made no
difference
the city died.
(from Revisions)
and ends his "Revisions" with
---these are no roses
the bones defleshed, eaten long ago
the cannibalistic mind eats the rind of yesterday
saving only the rotten core.
'Groo' one might say, 'how macabre!' But this poet who 'sees the skull beneath the skin' also sees (and more important, realizes) that
outcast and wandering from this happy land
in far places without flowers, without rain
far from the sea, the eyes would soften
till the mind mending, it was possible
to pick flowers without yearning.
(from Life Story)
"Life Story" in itself is important because its imagery reflects very clearly both Chandran's varied Singaporean/Malaysian background, as well as his intensive and eclectic education (all those alkaloids among the wind blown flowers). Is this kind of education typical to Singapore? I don't know, but I haven't encountered it to such an extent elsewhere.
Then, as one meanders through this volume, increasingly and suprisingly, one encounters lines like
sadness which becomes part of sleeping
I know best
(from The Second Confession)
or, especially,
In the dark I too stretch
wish that love could be . . . .
. . . . a gross exaggeration,
every act of faith is guilty.
Life can be more than tangerine
Acrid memories souring the taste,
We do not forgive the night's lie
When we make unbreakable words.
(from Torn Words)
It takes a brave man to write like this, most especially in the tiny English-educated minority of Singapore where everybody knows everybody else, and Chandran Nair, unlike young poets of the West, cannot remain anonymous.
In "Once the Horsemen" (for Edwin Thumboo) the poet comes down to the nitty gritty of all the Singaporean/Malaysian poets who paved his way, and made his writing that much easier to begin. Yet, here one senses Chandran's disappointment (?) in the poets who wrote before he began:
The world broke your mould
restyled softness into tensile strength,
stretching visions into this thin thread logic.
, calculating the abacus movement of hours
because he concludes with
now I follow your plumed horsemen
of confused human voices, waiting for one
horseman to plunge his lance
into a splurge of new creation.
Chandran Nair is still a young, new poet, and his poem "Waiting" seems to epitomize both his poetry and him---the imagery here is delicate yet strong and musical, and the fern in the first line turns, in the reader's mind with the inner logic of this trenchant poetry, into a snake destructively chasing its own tail. "Waiting" too is cynical ('the lie of living?'), but beneath (or above) everything else one sees so clearly in the poet's truthfulness:
Waiting for maturity
the gradual uncaring
and the urge to stop pawning poems
and friends.
Is he perhaps suggesting here that someday he too will follow the well-trod path of most poets here, and allow 'wisdom and rational explanations (to) turn the dream fitful'? ("Once the Horsemen"). But the depth of feeling this volume of poetry reveals makes it difficult for me to believe that this could happen to Chandran Nair, to believe that one who at 27 can still feel that
if all is told, what is left?
after loss came wisdom;
things move and move to maintain the same
Wise, you did not shout into action
But wrote poems.
(from A Japanese sage speaks)
would cop out to our country's 'moneytheism', join the rat-race, and become a fat-cat. Perhaps I may be wrong, but if that were to prove so, it would be a great loss to our country which more so now than ever before, needs voices like Chandran Nair's.
BY NALLAMMA JENSTAD
This review appeared in "Singapore Book World" vol
3,1972