An Anatomy of Silence
in K V Dominic’s
“Silence! Silence!!
Grave Silence!!!”
Parthajit Ghosh
The
Poem for Anatomy:
Mansion
like house
Doors
and windows closed
Past
midnight, still lights inside
Sleep
fears to enter
Three
generations reside
Grandpa
reads Bible
Grandma
reads Bhagavatam
Grandchildren
aged eight and twelve
write
never ending homework
Their
dad is drowned in Facebook
Mom
buried in WhatsApp
No
sound from anywhere
Seems
like haunted house
Silence,
silence, grave silence!
None
speaks to none
No
common prayers
No
common dining
No
sharing of ideas
If
anyone breaks silence
Comes
rebuke at once
“Don’t
disturb me”
Goes
to bed on one’s own time
What
happens in one house
never
known to neighbours:
both
comedy and tragedy
Isn’t
it part of evolution
from
social being to antisocial?
(Cataracts
of Compassion 59)
A
Proem to the Poem
This non-metrical but
visually a stichic in twenty seven lines, woven into the matrix of a free verse
in a very easy constructional pattern with simple coherence and cohesion
structure, is a “scriptible” narrative of an evolving suburban society of
twenty first century India; which may have an effect of a monologue by the poet
on the common readers. The poet in Dominic is found apprehended to the manner
of living in his society, a part of which is presented through this poem in the
form of storytelling captures a ‘mansion like house’ where ‘three generations
reside’ a lifeless or mechanical life. And thus, Dominic posits himself at the
place of social reformist thinker a poet, which can better be assessed by the
prototype of contextual analysis.
Silence: A Brief Context
Space is not the only
void. It is the significant extent for an object to have its relative position
and direction. Similarly, silence is not merely the absence of sound; it is
sounded to its own significant waves. Silence is spiritually significant. It is
such a sublime which can only be attained through pure practice of meditation
and through the process of enlightenment. It holds the ambiance to introspect
or to communicate with the infinitude. In the Bhagavad Gita, Lord
Krishna himself says: “of secret things I am silence” (Ch. 10, verse 38;
Prabhupada 478). In Hinduism, there is a belief system that “it is only in the
silence of your mind that you can hear the voice of God. Once that voice is
heard, it is again the silence that helps you to enjoy that sound – to relive
it again and again in the deepest depths of your inner being” (Kumar,
Speakingtree.in). Even Lord Buddha maintained a long silence to get
enlightened, who believed: “words end where truth begins”. To the context of
silence and Buddha, the spiritual leader, Sri Ravi Shankar has nicely remarked:
“The purpose of words is to create silence. If words create more noise, then
they have not reached their goal. Buddha’s words would definitely create
silence, because Buddha is the manifestation of silence. Silence is the source
of life and is the cure for diseases” (Art of Living).Even in the Bible, the Psalm
46:10 says: “Be still and know that I am God.” Silence has thus a great
spiritual connection.
Silence has a big space
even in literature. Yeats yearns to live into the silence at the Lake Isle of
Innisfree from which he claims to have peace: “And I shall have some peace
there, for peace comes dropping slow” (“The Lake Isle of Innisfree”, Poetry
Foundation). Even the great romantic poets like Wordsworth, Keats, Shelly and many others have transcendentalized silence
in various significant occasion into their poetry. The metaphysical poet, John
Donne craves for silence during love making: “For God’s sake hold your tongue,
and let me love” (“The Canonization”, Poetry Foundation). But, in the literature of the marginalized and the
subalterns, ‘silence’ is connoted with fear, suppression and voicelessness.
However, “Silence is a tool that has been utilized in literature to heighten
emotion, magnify suspense or drama, and let a character grow into their own
being” (Das).
Silence
has therefore multiple facets. It is spiritually sublime, poetically
transcendental or metaphysical; sometimes, it symbolizes fear, suppression and
voicelessness.Silence is often the word of protest. Lexically, it is an
ambiance of absence of noise or sound. But in this poem, Dominic is in a bad mood to the silence. He intends to
break the silence to bridge in human emotion what is laid out in the subsequent
discussion.
From
Text to Context
If any jargon like short
story in poetry exists in literary criticism this poem is then the best
example of that. Like a good short story, this poem too is arranged in a
sequence of a beginning, middle and end; built up on a unified plot and
narrated by the poet himself that resembles the heterodiegetic storytelling
technique. The beginning explores the characters like Grandpa, Grandma, Dad,
Mom and two children (three generations) in a ‘mansion like house’; the middle
portrays their action, their daily habits and their practice of keeping silence
to each other; and, the end brings in the poet’s prediction for the impending
tragedy on a society evolving towards being ‘antisocial’.
Silence is, however, personified as an
antihero all through the narrative in this poem. The very title which is
tangible to the poem and seems to be the beginning line is the repetition of
the word, ‘silence’, of course, with an emphasis of negative exclamation. Here,
an ambiguity lies in the use of the word ‘grave’ before silence. Is it simply a
lexical alternative for ‘serious’ or ‘crucial’ or ‘dangerous’ to personify
‘silence’; or, a desperate attempt to signify silence as death since the word,
‘grave’, is often used as an allusive term for ‘death’? But, irrespective to
this ambiguity, the title clearly captures the negative emotion of the poet who
refuses silence spoiling the bond in a family.
The family projected in
this poem lives in a ‘mansion like house’. The simile of house here implies the
snobbery of the affluent class which is addicted to live a life of showing off
than the life of necessity. Dominic has, as if, revived the essence of ‘comedy
of manners’ to depict the artificial life of a section in his society. A house
is a necessity; a ‘mansion like house’ is the pretention of the high economic
class to that necessity. On the other hand, this expression, ‘mansion like
house’, may be used to juxtapose the contradiction between the wideness of the
periphery of the house and the miseries of the people who dwell inside that
house completely ignorant or disconnected to each other. Probably, it is a
tactful attempt of Dominic to represent the triviality of the material world.
No material gain is significant unless it is purposefully utilised.
The first four lines
however portray a visual image of a gloomy and ghoulish house where the doors
and the windows are closed. The closed ‘doors’ and ‘windows’ here insinuates an
extended metaphor linking up various intertextual references. However, ‘Doors’
and ‘windows’ are frequently used as metaphorical elements in the literature
dealing with the human body mystery. The nine openings in a human body (the two
eyes, two nostrils, mouth, two ears, the anus, and the opening of the generative
organ and for urination) are mentioned asnava-dwara-pura (nine doors) in
The Bhagavad Gita. The great Bengali mystic poet, Fakir Lalon Shah
composes his folk song on the mystery of human body by comparing it with a cage
and assuming its structure built with eight cells and nine doors:
How does the strange
bird
flit in and out of the
cage.
If I could catch the
bird
I would put it under
the fetters of my heart.
The cage has eight
cells and nine doors
with latticed openings
here and there,
Above it is the main
hall
with a mirror-chamber?
(Songs of Lalon Shah 36)
If Dominic’s this ‘mansion like house’
is perceived as a human body then also it is a dead body, a morbid land what
Dominic himself confirms by saying it as ‘haunted house’. The openings in a
human body are the means of input and output of the body; the body is alive
till the openings are open or functioning properly. Doors and windows are the
means of exit and entrance. The closed doors and windows here highlight the
detached, stagnant and decaying life of the people in this house where sleep
fears to enter till mid night. ‘Sleep’ is here personified to show the
restlessness of the residents of the house for almost no significant reason.
The subsequent lines
till the last five ones capture the three generation residing under the same
roof without the subtle bond of living. They are so self-engrossed that they do
not have any common space, any common prayers, any common delicacies to enjoy
and any thoughts to share.
Keeping silence to each other is here
the only rule of living what is not at all a bliss. Dominic has drawn three
devastated generations. The childhood does not have any space; it is under the
threat of ‘never ending homework’. The parenthood is under the threat of social
media addiction and the grandparenthood under the search of religious
knowledge. Although the characters in this poem narrative are ignorant and less
sensitive to their family members Dominic holds the continuum approach in
portraying them. Among the growing nuclear family culture in India this family
in Dominic’s poem is an exception where three generation at least reside under
the same roof. Dominic is an Indian poet who has written this poem at such a
time when religious nationalism heads up into the narrative of power politics.
But, Dominic has discreetly built up a secular ambience through the grandfather
reading Bible and grandmother reading Bhagavatam. The poet has made a balance
in characterization; and thus, has made his poetic intention loud and clear.
Dominic
passes his own judgement through the concluding five lines of this poem. He
finds it comic the way of living as depicted in this poem and this erroneous
habit will surely bring tragedy in their life. The transition of human life
from animal to the civilized one is the matter of huge evolution through the
centuries. This hard earned human civilization can only be sustained through
the best practices of being human with the feelings of community culture,
empathy, sensitivity, caring, compassion, kindness, sacrifice and many more
such positive attributes. The way of living depicted in this poem is the threat
to those basic human attributes; and therefore, the poet apprehends for a sure
downfall in civilized culture. The poet concludes with a question to his fellow
beings to analyse; and thus, warns them for an impending disaster from the
unexpected evolution ‘from social being to antisocial’, from human to inhuman,
from the light to the darkness.
A
Portrayal of Social Crisis
A
house of four walls does not make a home. A house becomes a home in love, care
and affection of the people who reside in. A healthy home is important for a
healthy human society. The way of living captured in this poem is definitely a
threat to the man as social being in the pursuit of the sustainability of hard
earned human civilization. The technological advancement may replace many manual
efforts but not the human emotions. It is human emotion and dialogue which
makes human a social being. In the absence of the practice of which the man as
social being turns into antisocial. Dominic has entered the epicenter of the
crisis by depicting a family practicing silence for no significant reason, and
thus, damaging the family bond. A damaged relationship in a family is the
bigger cause of crisis in a society since home is the breeding ground of
sociality.
Dominic
tries to put an emphasis on the issue of generation gap, one of the major
social crises today. In this age of rat race, all are running behind but
reaching nowhere. People are so busy that they don’t have any family time. If
the family time is compromised there will definitely be a lack of understanding
among the persons in a family. This lack of understanding indulges man being
nonreciprocal, insensitive, disrespectful, and most importantly, inhumane. A
society collapses when a domestic ambience of a house is damaged by such practice
of living. Dominic magnifies the issue through his poetic observation to warn
his fellow beings.
Dominic’s Attempt in Breaking Silence
A
wizard can foresee the future; a doctor can save life with his medical
knowledge; a scientist can discover something to solve problems in his society;
likewise, every professional does for one’s society as per one’s expertise and
acquired skills. Dominic is skilled in poetry and his purpose of writing is the
weal from the crisis in his society. Through his fine observation, he captures a
part (a family) to replicate the bigger issues like growing damaged family
relationship and its consequence, generation gap, indulgence of stand-offish
nature and more a like fretting malignantly in his society. It is said that ‘charity
begins at home’. A bigger social change starts at the threshold of a little family.
The last two lines of this poem are just clear enough to understand Dominic’s
endeavour for bringing change in perception.
If
this poem is symbolically interpreted, then also, Dominic is found significant
in advocating for religious harmony in his nation. ‘Themansion like house’
symbolizes Dominic’s country, India; the characters in this poem are the
different cultural provinces of the country; the context of reading Bible and
Bhagavatam is the indication of different religious practices in the country;
whereas, ‘silence’ stands for the lack of interreligious talk for national
integrity and cultural prosperity. The act of silence is the act of practicing hatred
and anger for each other. Dominic probably attempts to break that silence for a
peaceful and an integrated nation.
An Extractive
Dominic tries to find
out rational solution of problem in his society through this simple poem
narrative. If the great romantics find solution in ‘back to nature’, Dominic’s
call definitely be then ‘back to humanity’. This poem in free verse is
undoubtedly a piece of art by a postmodern humanist in Dominic who is very sincere
and careful about his society and has consciously played his role by showing
his concerns for the impending tragedy on a society evolving towards being
‘antisocial’. This poem can set the best canonical relevance with the studies
like Posthumanism and Anthropocentrism with an undercurrent of the poet’s urge
for a humanitarian society. If poetry preserves power this poem is definitely
then an embedding vector into the hearts of introspective readers.
Works Cited
Das, Dee. “Words Left Unsaid: The
Role of Silence in Literary Fiction.” BOOK RIOT, 28 Jan. 2022, https://bookriot.com/silence-in-literary-fiction/#:~:text=Silence%20is%20a%20tool%20that,a%20thousand%20words%20ever%20can.
Dominic,
K. V. “Silence! Silence!! Grave Silence!!!” in Cataracts
of Compassion.
By Dominic. Authorspress, 2018, p. 59.
Donne, John. “The Canonization.” Poetry
Foundation, Poetry Foundation, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44097/the-canonization.
Kumar, Vivek. “Some Loud Thoughts
about Silence.” Speakingtree.in, https://www.speakingtree.in/allslides/some-loud-thoughts-about-silence.
Prabhupada,
A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami. Bhagavad Gita. The Bhaktivedanta Book Trust, rpt.
2016.
“Psalm 46.” The Church of Jesus
Christ of Latter-Day Saints, https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/scriptures/ot/ps/46?lang=eng.
Rushd, Abu.
Songs
of Lalon Shah.
Bangla Academy Dhaka, 1990.
Shankar, Ravi. “Buddha Is the
Manifestation of Silence.” Art of Living, https://wisdom.srisriravishankar.org/buddha-is-the-manifestation-of-silence/.
Yeats, William Butler. “The Lake
Isle of Innisfree.” Poetry Foundation, Poetry Foundation, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43281/the-lake-isle-of-innisfree.
Dr. Parthajit Ghosh teaches English at a government school in the State of Chhattisgarh for living. He is passionate for Indian English Poetry. He tries to contribute in that field with his research works and writings. His poems and research articles have been featured in various national and international series and numbers. He believes in poetry which speaks for cure, love and peace. He is a review editor of both Writers Editors Critics (WEC) & International Journal on Multicultural Literature (IJML). Email: parthajitg@gmail.com
