Hunchprose: Hoskote's poems offer a bastion of truth in a post-truth world

In the titular poem of Ranjit Hoskote’s new book, the narrator laments the inefficacy of a poet’s craft in a contest with a rhetorician: “Across from me he strops his fine blade / smooth talker barefaced liar pissfart / teller of tall tales who wraps you up / in his flying carpet and serves you snake oil / carries of the princess every time.” This is almost a scene from a bazaar — or the free market of ideas in liberal thought — with the rhetorician and the poet facing each other in their stalls. Compared to the rhetorician’s glittery wares, the poet can only offer “fraying knots coiled riddles scrolled bones”. There are few takers for these.

Anxieties in western culture about poetry being fiction or untruth dates back to ancient Greek philosophy, most notably Plato’s The Republic and Ion. In the latter, Socrates interrogates Ion, a rhapsode or performer of Homeric poems, and proves that a poet must indeed resort to falsehood to be able to give such elaborate descriptions of different professions, such as medicine, fishing and making war. And, in The Republic, Plato banishes some of the best-known names of ancient Greek literature — Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, and Homer. Not because they were poets, as is commonly presumed, but because they produced the wrong sort of poetry, filled with fiction.

Homer makes a guest appearance in Hoskote’s book, in a poem titled “Homer”, where “he was taken hostage by his own fictions”. (It is impossible to not notice that the names of the ancient Greek and the contemporary Indian poets begin with the same syllable.) The poem refers extensively to The Odyssey, the epic narrative of the seafaring adventures of Ithacan king Odysseus that has served as the inspiration of many poets and writers including Shakespeare, Tennyson, Cavafy, and most notably James Joyce’s Ulysses. Hoskote imagines Homer drowning or lost in the sea of stories of his own making:

He’s been strapped to the mast for this own good.

Tell them no one is safe 

from the hurricane of the story.

The duel between the rhetorician and the poet is not fought with rapiers or repeaters, but with narratives. In our post-truth world, where the difference between fact and fiction collapses too easily, poetry is the last residue of truth, capable of excavating histories or creating new ones.

Hoskote does just that in several poems — the book has a total of 61, including the one that opens the book, “Sidi Mubarak Bombay”. The detailed notes at the end of the book inform us: “The speaker of this poem was born in south-eastern Africa’s Yao community in 1820. He was captured, as a boy, by Arab slavers who sold him to a Bombay merchant. He grew up in Bombay, learned its languages, and eventually took the city’s name as his cognomen.” Erudition of this sort — Hunchprose has seven pages of endnotes, displaying the poet’s varied interests such as history, mythology, art, and ecology — is rare in Indian poetry in English, which is usually engaged in self-indulgent self-reflexivity or the sterile politics of outrage.

Hunchprose

Author: Ranjit Hoskote

Publisher: Penguin Random House India

Price: Rs 499; Pages: 140

The few exceptions are Sohini Basak’s We Live in the Newness of Small Differences (2018), Arjun Rajendran’s One Man, Two Executions (2020), and Hoskote’s own Jonahwhale (2018). In that book, Hoskote drew upon the Biblical Book of Jonah, Moby Dick, as well as nautical histories to create elegies. On finishing it, I was filled with apprehension that Hoskote would not be able to do better — and he has proved me decisively wrong with the book under review, his seventh collection of poetry. (He also has two books of translation and 14 of art criticism, besides other titles.)

In the final poem of Hunchprose, readers are taken to Ugarit — a Bronze Age city in northern Syria, which was destroyed by invaders in 1190 BCE. Rediscovered in 1928, the site yielded clay tablets with cuneiform — “the earliest preserved examples of alphabetic writing in the world”, according to Hoskote’s endnotes. He quotes several poems from the clay tablets, which “may have received their final baking in the fire that destroyed Ugarit”:

No one heard

No one cried when they heard

these baked sounds other hands would draw and fit

into tanner moulds

alpu betu gamu

                                       ox house camel
 

The last line of the poem — and the book — reads: “Save these words”. Not unfamiliar in our digital age, where words are often “saved” for posterity, this is also a different sort of appeal — to preserve history, memory, truth. In the duel of narratives, the rhetorician might call upon armies, equipped with hi-tech firepower or the algorithms of social media, to destroy a poet and to provide currency to falsities. But, in our post-truth world, where the difference between fact and fiction collapses too easily, poetry such as Hoskote’s is one of the last bastions of truth.

Uttaran Das Gupta’s novel Ritual was published last year.