Benu P Dahal's Profile

The two poetry collections I often come back to are Gopilal Acharya’s Dancing to Death and the great Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer’s The Half-finished Heaven. I re-read these poets for several reasons. First, they are both brief and tell what they need to with as little embellishment of the language as can be possible. Brevity, I think, is a sign of knowledge; someone who knows his topic can talk about it in brief while touching sufficient depth. Second, both these books are slim. Third, they are both beautifully designed. The design definitely adds to the pleasure of reading. Fourth, both the poets touch what we call the human condition with quite a casual ease. Here I’ll talk only about the aspects of Acharya’s poems. I am writing a note on Dancing to Death after all.

This book is almost autobiographical. But autobiography not necessarily of the author but of any person (man or woman) who is asking of the self some fundamental questions. The poems speak for a sensitive person who is confused, and every sensitive person always is. I have this image for the poems: a person is facing a host of answers, arrayed in a single file like criminals at a firing squad, for his question. His method of choosing the right answer is by shooting arrows at them. One answer is caught by the arrow, but that’s not the answer. Second…that isn’t either…third…fourth… nth…not one’s the answer. The options are empty themselves, as the questioner is. All the options die. They are alone, the question and the questioner. "I asked the question/And the question asked me".

But the question looks beyond the questioner; it looks at history itself. The poet, however, doesn’t bring history to suffer at the witness stand; he merely lets us know that history had always been here, pursuing us at our heels. "But the darkness was here always/and probably that distant beauty too/just the history went unwritten/and unnoticed in this part of the world". The title poem, from which the preceding excerpt is taken, possesses a quaint beauty; a man is propped up into life by the questions he has. Unanswered though they are, these questions make up the totality a person is. That I think is the unifying theme in this collection, though there are other themes, too.

For the poet, love, music, death (all of which are anchored on the formidable wharf of alcohol) are the prime movers of life as is presented in the collection. These give rise to the essential questions. Whether you are in love or out of it, whether it is love realised or thwarted, it has the ability to touch the subterranean details of history and existentialism. Death is another force the poet places adjacent to love. These two represent polarities, but with a bit of help from alcohol, these two can very well sit at a table, almost dating. This cuts a comic image, but it presents other folds at the same time. This duality is inescapable. The guys with the philosophies will tell you so, too.

Carver, Jazz, Byron, Dylan, and alcohol — this maddening congregation lurks about conspiringly in the poems. If you have read your Murakami like the poet has read his, you’d find another man who can create situations, confusions, and dilemmas and call in whispering allusions to the greats and the commons in the way of the great Japanese.
The collection with 49 poems covering about 70 pages has rich wealth in it. The poems ask dangerously infectious questions — they could infect and leave you questioning yourself. The poet presents life in its full complexity. You are being questioned so thoroughly that the question and its subject almost lose identity and merge. You become the question: historical, existential, and spiritual. You are not in for that sort of philosophical innuendos? The sheer lyricism of the poems itself does a sufficient job expected of poems. The casual ease with which the poet writes is evident in the fact that you will never have to run to a dictionary. The words are everyday words. The wide range of possibilities the arrangement of common words creates is unsettling to me.

I have mentioned the poet asks many fundamental questions. But if you are expecting to find answers, too, then you should lower your expectations. The poems leave you confused, the same way life does; but in the end, you have more questions and probably fewer answers. What Byron does to the poet, the poet does to me ("after 30 minutes of reading Byron/Byron leaves me more confused). After every reading, this poet leaves me confused, too. This confusion is a part of life. We ask questions, the questions, ever the more persistent, ask us back and turn us into questions. These strict bargains we pursue in life betray "a chink of clarity". These are what we call experiences. The poems are about such events or are events themselves.

I love this book. You’ll, too.

Gopilal Acharya’s Byline, a collection of his journalistic work between 2001 and 2019, contains a fascinating range of essays — a juicy love letter to ema datsi he wrote for CNN, cleanly described idyll of the country in his travel writings, nuanced arguments on policy matters, and some reflective personal pieces. As the title suggests, most of these writings previously occurred in the national and international media and journals. The collection is immaculately divided into seven categories — People and Society, Politics, Economy & Media, Travel, youth and Education, Mental Health, Award Winners (writings that won him national awards), and The last of the Lot.

The author says that he got the idea for the collection from Ernest Hemingway, the great American writer who published his journalistic work under the title Byline, and M. J. Akbar, a noted Indian intellectual and writer. Although the author says he does not measure up to Hemingway or Akbar, I would argue that man is a Hemingway in his own right. At the centre of these essays is a thoughtful writer who carefully chooses his style to get his ideas across. He uses the language for the sake of ideas only (perhaps a trait he took after Raymond Carver, one of his favourite authors) and makes little allowance for emotions and prejudices to colour his narrative. A remarkable display of this controlled style is reflected in Caged in Phanas — a heartbreaking story of a mentally ill woman who, lacking medical care, had been put up in a makeshift cage at her house for the last 23 years. Such brutal realities make up the grains of what we call in the grand idiom the human condition. The author has occasionally picked these grains of the human condition and dispatched them to the readers stamped with the mark of a serious writer.

I do not want to get into each piece and discuss them here; he does that best himself. And given that the pieces are generally short, there is no need for a summary. Although most of his pieces are relevant and give a glimpse of the Bhutanese society as it is (that is stripped of its glossy articles it has been forced to wear as a supposed Shangri-La should), my favourite pieces are from the travel section. In Slow Drive to Sipsu, his gentle prose carries the idyll of the bucolic south, then shifts its momentum to catch the life that is there, then pulls over at a good spot — deftly placing nature, people, and history as driving forces among themselves. In men without women can have fun, too, he recounts his travel in Goa with two other journalists from Nepal and the Maldives. An interesting story about the exploits of an all-men team is suffused with Miles Davis and booze, the motif in his poetry and fiction too.

The book offers carefully sampled glimpses of Bhutan and her issues. Both casual readers and the serious lot can find stuff of their interest in the book. I read the book with pleasure and profit. I am flattered to say that the author presented me with an autographed copy of the work for the earlier honour that was given me to be one of the guys to read a pre-published version of the work.