Siddhartha Bose
‘The Black Goddess’ is part of a sequence of long poems that will form my new collection, provisionally titled Elegy for Water, which explores the psychogeography of mourning, as well as the ways in which London and Kolkata (once the ‘second city’ of the Empire), reflect and refract each other as sites of historical change. The poem grew over a period of a few years. In the winter of 2013, I was in Kolkata filming material for my play, The Shroud. I was particularly inspired by the area called Kumartuli, or ‘potter’s village’, where artisans build idols of Hindu gods and goddesses. The process itself is fascinating and circular, indicative of the renewal and passing of time. As the poem states, silt is drawn from the river Hooghly (a tributary of the Ganges), and used to sculpt these statues and idols. A year later, these idols are (re)immersed in the river. ‘The Black Goddess’ is a walk through this strange surrealist landscape of Kumartuli, with a specific focus on the iconography, physicality, and power of the goddess Kali, the goddess of death and time. The poem is also a search, as the speaker meditates on the death of his father. This poem has grown out of this process of wandering, filming, and writing. I am specifically interested in using the images of the cityscape as a manner of invocation, a revealing of things unsaid, of psychic states that lie within, and beyond, words.
THE BLACK GODDESS
Kumartuli, potter’s colony,
north Calcutta. Artists
dredge up silt from the Ganges,
mix it with mud, clay, straw.
Build idols of dogs and goddesses.
A year later, when the festivities are done, they
immerse these idols
back into the river.
Clay, silt, water.
~~
An abandoned house
opens like a giant umbrella.
With cherubed porticos, peeling cupolas, imitation
classical columns. The
skeleton of a racked giant.
All around, decay.
Wet palm trees surround the house
—a mirage—and
bury it like a repressed memory.
(Or a corpse)
Tar and mud
bake in the afternoon
heat.
~~
The city belongs to the
black goddess. She is
here.
Her body is
scattered.
Her tongue
boils in the work-
shop of a poor man,
camouflage artist, master
architect of Hindu dreams.
Tigers roam, staring into
green cameras.
All around, giant myths
congregate in cheese and tack.
~~
Saraswati— clay-hands
posed like a dirty lotus, a sitar
curled in her right arm.
Durga, on her
lion. Kali,
black, wild in her
red eyes.
These poor men build to
intimate their own impotence.
~~
Kali dances on
exploding chests.
Kali rips male-hearts with her
shark-fangs.
Kali is dredged up from the
river, your blood, your ash.
(the city is your corpse,
o daddy)
Or rather, you are a
floating bubble in her
oozing body.
Clay, silt, mud.
~~
Did she visit you in a
dream, the black goddess? Did she warn you of
death and time?
She is a patchwork of a dress, a
straw scaffold. Strains of black mud.
A man in a smudged, oily vest,
wearing a checked dhoti,
scoops up wet clay from a gray bucket,
layers it lovingly onto straw, with thick
palms, polishing.
Other small, bare-bodied men—
squirming insects in the tawny,
radioactive heat—in shorts
carry dirty water in broken,
yellow gasoline cans.
(Two large cans
speared with a bamboo pole,
carried on shoulders)
Their women chew paan,
spit, sell tacky statues for a pittance.
They smell my acid wonder.
A radio blares.
~~
Around, the
clang of hammers, the
fire of a Bunsen burner, the steel
caning of a chisel.
I ask one how long he’s been
doing this, sculpting
divinity.
‘Since birth,’ he replies, mockingly.
He is not one, he is many, like hands.
He speaks for his red comrades.
He knows, despite my language,
I am a foreigner.
I ask him for directions to the river.
He doesn’t reply. He goes back to his work.
~~
Tea boils in scratched-up
steel vats. When it
froths, it looks unhealthy. I
drink in a tiny red-earth urn, slurping.
‘How do you like our Kumartuli?’ a short man in
glasses asks me, fiddling his nose.
I say I like it well enough.
I say I am looking for you, holy
motherfather of god.
He lifts in a belly-laugh.
A half-finished Ganesh
spills onto a burning
can of petrol.
Flames gather all around.
I see your ghost, dear father,
howling in the fire,
blackened by Kali
taking her revenge.
You explode with the
radiance of a thousand
burning brides, sati-voiced,
lit by the city’s red scorch, its
pagan famines, its jagged
tongues.