Write a note on the sex-imagery in Kamala Das's Poetry.

Write a note on the sex-imagery in Kamala Das’s Poetry.

Comment on the use of imagery that articulates body language in Kamala Das’s poetry.

Ans.

Kamala Das’s poetry abounds in imagery and the imagery covers quite a wide range, even though the subject dealt with in her poetry remains the same. Her favourite subjects are marriage and extra-material sexual relationship, but in dealing with these subjects, she offers imagery which is varied and which is by no means monotonous or boring. Indeed, her imagery greatly adds to the interest by her treatment of the themes of the failures of her marriage and the failure also of the sexual relationships with other men.

In the poem entitled ‘An Introduction’ she gives us a vivid picture of how she grew up from a child to an adult, becoming tall with her limbs becoming bigger and hair sprouting at one or two places in her body. Here she also gives us a picture of her husband, to whom she had just been married, dragging her into the bed-room, closing the door, and performing the sexual act with her in such a rough manner that her body felt beaten, with the weight of her breasts and womb crushing her. This is sensuous, may sexual, imagery, candid and un inhibited. Most readers would enjoy this imagery because of its very candour.

Then there is the poem entitled ‘In Love’ which also contains the imagery of lust and love. This poem begins with a picture of the sun burning in the sky. The burning sun reminds the poetess of the lover’s mouth d also of his limbs which seemed to be reaching out for her like “carnivorous” plants. Then in the middle of the poem, we have a picture of the poetess watching a crow flying “like poison on wings”. –

“The Dance of the Eunuchs’ contains plentiful imagery which is even more vivid. The Eunuchs are here described as dancing, with their white skirts going round and round, and their anklets jingling, jingling, jingling. They dance, they dance till they bled.” Some of them beat their drums, while others beat their sorry breasts, waiting, and “writhing in vacant ecstasy.” There are many spectators watching the convulsions of these poor eunuchs. Then the sky crackles, thunder comes, lightening and rain, a meagre rain smelling of dust in attics and the urine of lizards and mice.

The poem entitled ‘The Freaks’ describes vividly, though briefly, the mouth of a lover which looks like a dark cavern, with uneven teeth gleaming inside. The lovers right hand rests upon the woman’s knee, while the fingertips of the other hand move upon her body, arousing the skin’s “lazy hungers. The women’s heart is like an empty cistern (toilet flush) getting filled not with water but with coiling snakes of silence. This picture is partly concrete but partly very abstract. The woman calls herself a freak, adding that, in order to save her face or to preserve the appearance of a normal human being, she flaunts, at times a grand, flamboyant lust. Here we have an ostentatious image of the woman’s sensuality.

The poem entitled ‘The Sunshine Cat’ again contains some vivid imagery, with the woman clinging to the hairy chests of the various lovers with whom she had slept. Once again, in an image which is partly abstract and concrete, the woman says that her lovers had allowed her to slide from “pegs of sanity” into a bed made soft with tears, and adding that she wanted to build walls with tears, walls to enclose her and shut her in. And then follows the vivid picture of her husband locking her inside a room of books every morning and unlocking the room only in the evening, with the result that cat of sunshine ‘is reduced a hair-thin line while she herself is reduced to a cold and half-dead person, now of no use at all to men.

The poem called ‘The Looking Glass’ also contains some sex imagery, with the poetess urging women to let their lovers smell the scent of their long hair and the musk of sweat between their breasts, and urging them further to let their lovers experience the warm shock of their menstrual blood and all their endless female hungers. The last line of this poem contains a vivid picture of a woman’s body gleaming like polished and glossy brass but subsequently becoming drab and destitute.

After that, love became swine-doer when one went out, another come’, in. This picture is intended by Kamala Das to convey the idea of her anarchic sex-life. In the poem entitled ‘My November’, she says that a lover just pounces upon a woman and grabs her breasts in order to satisfy his lust in a ruthless and almost brutal manner. Fed up with a husband’s rough handling of her, woman seeks extra-marital sexual experiences and, when she finds the same thing happening to her in these extra-marital relationships, she a kind of nymphomaniac whose mind during the sexual act is somewhere else, visualizing some other sexual partner.

In the poem entitled ‘Compositing’, Kamala Das says that she asked her husband whether he thought her to be lesbian or just plain frigid, and that the husband only laughed either because there were no answers to such questions or because the answers must emerge from within the woman herself. In this poem we have a vivid picture of Kamala Das’s fermented experiences as a consequence of her indiscriminate and nympho sexual relationships. Her very freedom to sleep with a lover after lover, she says became her dancing shoes, and she danced so well and so long that the shoes turned grimy on her feet and she began to have doubts. In the poem entitled ‘The Stone Age;, Kamala Das offers another graphic picture when her lover’s hands surveyed ‘like a hooded snake’, and clasped her pubis, she asked why, like a great tree down, he had slumped against her breasts. The poem ‘Ghanshyam’ contains a vivid picture of Kamala Das and her lover playing a husk game, his body needing hers, his ‘ageing body proudly needling the need for hers.”

Thus we see that Kamala Das is unusually frank in her treatment of the subject of sex. In these poems she speaks about the unemotional and the callous manner in which a husband or a lover handles a woman when making love to her. Many of her poems are based on her personal experiences. After having seen the illustrations we can say that Kamala Das imagery articulates body language meaning that through her imagery it is actually a woman’s body which is speaking and expressing its desire for sexual gratification and at the same time its need for love and affection.

Kamala Das’s poetry is confessional, and she makes no secret of her sensuality or of her lust. All the imagery which we have seen about depicts that sensuality or lust; and in addition to that, this imagery articulates her emotional and spiritual needs which become more pressing and urgent in her poems centering round Lord Krishna and the legend of Radha’s love for him.