Ranjit Hoskote is at a moment of reckoning. In Icelight, the celebrated poet and writer’s eighth gathering of poems, there is an imaginary point somewhere on this earth, perhaps an address that most resembles home, where contrasting fortunes are being played out on a precarious knife’s-edge — transience and immortality; belief and betrayal; family and anonymity; faith and fragility. At stake is conceivably everything we think of as our own. Humans, plant and animal life, lived histories, the filigree of memory, perhaps the impending narrative of the world itself.
Divided into six passages that broach the life endangered, Icelight doesn’t shy away from peeling the surface layers of things — be it a nation’s moral fulcrum, the threatened wails and concurrently proud stance of the ecological world, or Hoskote’s own meditations on loss — the loss of family, the relinquishment of a private ideal. We are/ what we’ve lost, he claims in ‘Bed’; a few pages earlier in ‘Noor’, written in memory of the artist, printmaker and minimalist Zarina Hashmi, these words that serve almost as a prescient counterpoint — What we’ve lost/ reclaims us.
A sense of the earth’s ephemerality is never too far. In these days of hurtling climate change and collective human ennui, the poetry at times feels like a clarion call, at others a mark of departure, of things having tipped beyond the tipping point. What if the earth slowed down, pulled off its gloves/ and raised its knuckles to the late spring? Hoskote ponders in ‘Postscript’. ‘What Did I Miss?’ documents a moment of waiting at the breakwater for the big spinnaker to bloom in the east/ coaxing the shaken cantilevered hills/ to link together/ in a final landscape/… No flights land.
In ‘Planet’, the writer offers this warning:
About time
this blunted earth opened up and swallowed
its shiftless sons
its reckless daughters
its steeply tilted lighthouses
Urgent chronicling of life
Poet Ranjit Hoskote
The poet’s recent works have displayed an urgency for the chronicling of things, lest they be forgotten, or worse, rewritten, for the ages that unfurl. Jonahwhale (2018) was three graceful movements encompassing the ocean, the Ganga, and Mumbai’s Marine Drive, bringing the Biblical 8th-century prophet Jonah into the belly of the more contemporary whale Moby Dick and his obsessive hunter Captain Ahab — in the process weaving a deft, rare saga of global trade routes across the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries. Jonahwhale felt like an act of reclamation — of tales, characters, and wreckages from our manifold pasts.
In hindsight, Hunchprose (2021) feels like a spiritual antecedent to Icelight. Through vivid linguistic investigation and often-sardonic humour, the collection contemplated the exigencies of 21st century life — the need for language; our plural existences; the enduring enigma of love and hope; our shared humanity; and most movingly, what constitutes home in the cosmic flux of genocides, viruses, and climate crises.
But it’s Icelight, more than the others, which seems to present Hoskote in entirety. In addition to his life in literature, one of the art world’s most illustrious curators and a cultural theorist, archivist, and writer for museums, galleries, and biennales around the globe, Hoskote seems to be traversing these different paths and roles across the immensity of the collection. In Icelight, he is curating a version of the past and a version of the now to fortify us against days to come. He is archiving the earth’s fractures and the fractures that define family, frequently to poignant effect.
Truthful pathos
‘Bookmark’, simply for “Amma”, observes: From sixty years ago, your notes in the margins/ of your Keats: is that the case? Hoskote almost appears to be drawing a fresh portrait of a mother from cherished instances that belong in a faraway yesterday. In ‘Clock’, in memory of Raghuvir Narayan Hoskote, the poet begins: When I open the door/ to wind the clock/ nine decades of starlings/ fly out. Icelight often does the twin tango of holding on by letting go. In ‘Descant’, ostensibly for his wife, independent curator and cultural theorist Nancy Adajania, this portrait of yearning — Be again/ that girl in blue/ walking down/ the terraced steps/ to the sunken garden.
Hoskote’s dedications, the people for whom they’re written, are telling in many ways. ‘Runner’ is for Steve Reich, a composer and significantly, another minimalist — known for his canons and repetitive harmonic rhythms, creating an oceanic swirl of sound, as it were. For him, Hoskote offers:
Lying among dead owls and cardinals,
he makes signals in shallow water.
Save me, he mouths as the tidemarks
dissolve, from myself.
Be it in the throes of an ethical impasse, while skimming the flimsy latticework of nationhood, casually memorising a portion of chosen mythology, or even navigating the very human mythology of desire, what never deserts Hoskote is his alchemic way with language. A simple, soulful fluidity guides much of Icelight, imbuing shimmering sparseness and evocativeness to the Japanese mono no aware philosophy of truthful pathos towards things (read: people, places, conversations, tragedies). He writes in ‘Rock’ — Its lava magnet heart still casting a field/ through moss and bramble/ the rock holds you in place. ‘Call If You’re Lost’, meanwhile, observes how Rainbows are born/ in broken windows.
In the collection’s closing act, ‘Return’, Hoskote begins:
Open your eyes
to this rain that’s here to stay
Centuries from now hurtling through space
this planet will host nightfog and dayhaze
on screens where once our lamplit faces
had flickered until they’d grown too hard too love
Hoskote as archivist and anarchist
To read Icelight is to stand on the precipice the collection documents — that cosmic breath between myth and mischief, the earth’s remembrances and human amnesia, continents tottering like feeble drunkards, “Bedouin extras” and a shrewd Caravaggio. This is Hoskote as both archivist and anarchist. Setting things — recollections, impotent leaders, forests bristling with nobility, the husk of yearning — on fire, and then documenting the whole thing as some sort of encomium to this glorious, embattled earth.
The common temptation would be to consume Icelight in the sanctuary of a jungle retreat, in the safe recesses of the natural world. It’s understandable, given the collection’s strong emotional pull towards the state of the earth, expressed through Hoskote’s elegiac language. This writer suggests that you don’t.
Step into the city instead. Seek out its more urgent quarters — neighbourhoods of old cafés, distant chatter, and riotous gulmohar. Be one among the crowds and the throb of urban restlessness. It’s here that the collection feels most vital; in the belly of our cosmopolitan beast, trying to make sense of where we are and perhaps finding hope in this haunting ode to our existential crumbling.
Early in the collection, Hoskote writes in ‘Aubade’ — The low earth shakes but the storm/ has not arrived […] The valley into which/ you’re rappelling/ is you. With his contemporary works and this new collection of lucidity and incandescence, the writer is creating one of the most critical poetic legacies of our times. Large parts of the earth and our collective human consciousness lie frozen. And yet, despite everything, the adamancy of this light. In Ranjit Hoskote’s worldview, it’s vital we remember, and commemorate, the latter.
The writer and photographer’s latest book is ‘All These Streets We’ve Known By Heart’. Instagram @citizen.bliss
Published - September 01, 2023 09:52 am IST
