Robin S Ngangom

Robin S Ngangom who was born in Imphal, in 1959, studied literature at St. Edmund’s College, Shillong, and at the North-Eastern Hill University, Shillong, where he teaches literature at present. He has three collections of poetry and his poems have appeared in The New Statesman, Verse, Planet: The Welsh Internationalist, Chandrabhaga, and Kavya Bharati. He also writes in Manipuri, his native tongue, and has translated poems and short stories from Manipuri.

My Invented Land

(after Mario Meléndez)

My native soil was created from tiny sparks

that clung to grandmother’s earthen pot

which conjured savoury dishes

I’ve been looking for

all my life in vain.

My homeland has no boundaries.

At cockcrow one day it found itself

inside a country to its west,

(on rainy days it dreams looking east

when its seditionists fight to liberate it from truth.)

My people have disinterred their alphabet,

burnt down decrepit libraries

in a last puff of nationalism

even as a hairstyle of native women

have been allowed to become extinct.

My native place has not been christened yet

my homeland, a travelogue without end,

a plate that will always be greedy

(but got rice mixed with stones)

My home has young people

who found their dreams in a white substance

and the old that transplanted their eyes,

it has leaders who have disappeared

into their caricatures.

My home is a gun

pressed against both temples

a knock on a night that has not ended

a torch lit long after the theft

a sonnet about body counts

undoubtedly raped

definitely abandoned

in a tryst with destiny*.

*A reference to Nehru’s famous speech delivered on 14 August 1947, on the eve of India’s independence.

After ‘Jashn-e-Azadi’

(a film on Kashmir by Sanjay Kak)

The kite transforming into smoke lacing

The chinars is not a symbol.

The rose has migrated from the garden of paradise.

Freedom will never come

Poured into goblets waiting to be raised,

Martyrdom is a handout from god the hagiographer.

Only poetry of ruins is real.

The incoherent rose still blooms

From some beloved breast torn open.

Houses

(after Cavafy)

We believe we own them but

In the evening of a street not a soul will be found.

Only a few stars shuffling in the oily sky and

Orange trees for neighbours.

Here, they’ve lain huddled in December waiting

For Christmas to rock them on its pinewood floors

And in blue afternoons

You can see them drowsing in the barber sun.

Relentlessly, a dream has hemmed me in these hills

While the future has cast me as a bleak interpreter of signs.

And so many things to finish

That I did not pay any attention to their birth,

There were no labour pains,

And they have shut me off from their hearths.

15 August 2008, Northeast India

Having lost my independence

How could I celebrate it

Though I’ve sewn flags on cockeyed schooldays?

Margins are superfluous in the big centre’s book

Although memory is not silent and speaks up at times.

Now the periphery (of which I’m also a guilty part)

Is scrawling a unique history on delusive margins,

Mischievous like a collage by brawling painters.

Once lebensraum has sunk to pogroms

The periphery can kill too

And then deal cards on the peace table

Or hoist a nation’s flag in driving rain.

On the continuum of farce

It doesn’t matter if we’re moving forward or backward

Or if a government is serving rats on its menu,

The morning passes with a prime minister orating

From the ramparts of a fort,

“Make the borders irrelevant,” he said over a year ago.

But then “military factories would close

And fence makers would have nothing to fence in or out”.

It never occurred to him to disguise himself and ask

The man on the street of his unhappiness.

It seems we are preparing for happiness tomorrow

At the price of misery today.

On the road outside shut down by insurgents

Aimless now in its nonplussation

Trees and lamps are breathing fog and a light rain.

This day passes between surfing for news of the outside world,

Statistics of farmers committing suicide on the weaver belt

And the poor waiting for paper to translate into bread

And 50 years of discrimination festering in the periphery

With another anniversary of murder and disappearences.

I’ve been told that I live on the edge

By intellectuals who also teach me

The history and politics of far away countries.

I have to take their word on faith, being so unread.

I don’t know if I’m shallow with little inner life.

I try not to book a flat in the city of the sky

But meditate brokenly on love and its players

Although it gave me a terrible fright the other day,

I had silenced her shame with my mouth

And remain a freeloader of passion and its web.