Fay Zwicky is considered to be one
of the most original and accomplished poets of Australia. Zwicky's name is
often mentioned amongst the four great West Australian poets, along with Jack
Davis, Dorothy Hewett and Randolph Stow. She is the author of numerous books of
poetry namely Isaac Babel’s Fiddle (1975), Kaddish and Other
poems(1982); Collection of short stories Hostages (1983), The Lyre in the Pawnshop: Essays on
Literature and Survival 1974-1984(1986) , Ask me (1990), The
Gatekeeper`s Wife(1997) and Picnic
(2006).The Collected Poems of Fay
Zwicky was published days before her death on 2nd July 2017. Zwicky has won the
Western Australian Premier's Book Award thrice.She has been conferred with
several awards and honours like the Patrick White Award, New South Wales
Premier’s Award, and the Christopher Brennan Award. Zwicky was declared a State
Living Treasure in 2004 a term she called “repulsive...like being prematurely
obituarized”( Sullivan,theage.com.au).
Daughter of a doctor and musician,
Fay Zwicky was born in Melbourne and raised there as well. Her maiden name was
Julia Fay Rosefield. Having lived and worked for a lengthy period of time in
the 1950s in Indonesia, she arrived in West Australia only in 1961 with her
husband Karl Zwicky. She also lived for a while in Europe and in the United
States of America as well.
Her poems echo her biographical
experiences: her living and growing up in the multicultural Australia with her
Jewish identity, her personal account of her relationships with her
grandfather, her father, her husband and her mother, her reflections in the time
of the Holocaust and Hiroshima during her adulthood, her cross-cultural
encounter during her tour through South East Asia for her concerts as a pianist
with her string playing sisters as the Rosefield Trio , her experience as a
marginalized poet who practiced poetry at a time when it was less preferred .
She was a strong female voice in Australia at a time when Australia was divided
in these two categories: poets and women poets. In her essays she has traced
ways in which the construction of Australian literature has served to
marginalize minority writers and women. She deliberated on the absence of any
place for a Jewish writer in Australian literature. In this connection she
says: “Living and growing up in this country has been an exercise in repression”.
Having been nurtured in a multicultural environment from womb to tomb, she
cultivated her intercultural responses in her creative outputs, and her third
poetic work Ask Me is one of such
responses to her impressionistic experiences she had captured during her stays
in America, China, Indonesia and India. This anthology contains four poems on
Indian pantheon namely: I Ganesh, II Vishnu, III Shiva, and IV Devi .This paper aims to study these
poems through a transcultural perspective. Fay’s frame of reference and stance
on Hindu gods and Indian culture as well as her own multicultural and
transcultural identity at work behind these poems have been addressed here.
Speaking for and about
transculturalism i.e. “seeing oneself in the other”, “reinventing of the new
common culture”, and the intermingling of various cultures; one must not forget
to consider the nexus of identity formation of an individual in this
cosmopolitan axis. One’s sense of the “self” in a multicultural diasporic
background can be best described by what Bhaba calls hybridity i.e. the rejection of a singular or unified identity and
a preference for multiple cultural identities. As Avtar Brah puts it “ ‘Home’
is a mythic place of desire in the diasporic imagination…it is a place of
no-return, even if it is possible to visit the geographical territory that is
seen as a place of ‘origin’”.(Brah192).Such a condition of possessing multiple
identities has given rise to a “real heterogeneity of interests and
identities”(Stuart Hall444).Some critical thinkers like Bhaba and Rushdie
celebrate this state of having multiple identities and prize it over fixed,
stereotypical ones. However this double consciousness is not without
discrepancy. Finding oneself standing at the border of two cultures, they can look
critically at both of them, neither assimilating nor combining any of them.
Abdul Jan Mohammed locates the intellectual-cultural position of these “border
intellectuals” and distinguishes “specular border intellectuals” from
“syncretic border intellectuals” based on the intentionality of their
intellectual orientation” (Jan Mohammed 97).The former finds it difficult to
find a home in either culture and operates in a liminal existence while the
latter is more at home in both cultures and “is able to combine new syncretic
forms and experiences. (Jan Mohammed 97).
Coming to Zwicky again, in one of
her interviews to Hena Maes Jelinek, in 1990, Zwicky describes herself as an
“outsider”. The outsider is more or less always the one who doesn’t feel that
he or she belongs to the place he or she lives in. For Zwicky it had to do with
her being born Jewish. Even though she was not brought up in a particularly
religious family, she felt “…there was an urgency (I mean historical urgency)
that in some way bound me physically to a history which also extended beyond
Australia.”
This “outsider” identity helped her
link her sense of connection to European culture and her rejection of cultural
relativism. Zwicky found America going through the same cultural struggle that
Australia did, doing evidently better- where outsiders felt at home. Now this
can be debated to be something like grasses are greener on the other side. For her America meant freedom. She had always
felt a foreignness in Australia where she criticized the young poets for their
holier than thou attitude in a specular border intellectual way. Here I would
like to draw on Saussure and Lacan. Saussure has shown that our understanding
or defining or describing of a thing depends on two processes: difference and relationality.
A cat is a cat because it is not a bat or a rat or a hat or a mat. And we can identify something or denote
something only when it is positioned against its relationality with the others.
Similarly in the Lacanian transformation from the mirror stage to the symbolic
order, it is the acknowledgement or knowledge of the other that helps in one’s
formation of the notion of his/her self. It is Zwicky’s sense of otherness that
leads her to find relationality on a broader level to similar ‘others’ and
thereby celebrating her difference or otherness. Zwicky had rather a keen urge to look at
other cultures and that gaze had nothing cynical about it. Her own sense of multiple identities and her
Jewish background in a predominantly Christian surrounding had seasoned her
enough to scrutinize other religious philosophies with a transcultural and
cosmopolitan approach. In 1988 Zwicky travelled China and India and her Ask Me is the outcome of her exposure to
these cultures and the experiences she procured. She looks at non-Christian
religions with a rather syncretic attitude. Her poems are marked by her usual
integrity, conceit and irony. Zwicky
believed in the notion of being quietly religious in a way she calls “getting
closer to God without God''. Zwicky finds 'God' puzzling in his presence and
absence and for being in the individual life as well as collective lives of
humanity. It is this sense of collective humanity that defines her approach to
religion and spiritualism .This universal and cosmopolitan perspective enables
her to look at different religions not with the holier than thou gaze but with
a more encompassing and inclusive orientation.
The four poems on Indian Pantheon
that Zwicky composed are reflections of her studious enquiry in the Hindu
religious philosophy inherent in the religious myths and her own way of
interpreting them through her poetic composition. In the poem I Ganesh, Zwicky tries to interpret
“faith” in several ways.
“Faith is the sound/ of a man
breathing alone in darkness emptied.
Faith is his patience tenure on
foot-fastened stone prayer to an absence
To learn the emptiness of the bare mind
Without knowledge...
Her questions on blind faith is not about the
absence of God, rather the belief on something larger-than-life with patience.
In the lines she italicizes in the poem “To learn the emptiness of bare mind
without knowledge”, she puts up the fundamental question of religious faith
from a transcultural perspective. Notwithstanding the diversities of approaches
to religion as there may be, the truth remains central to them all. She goes on
to ask
Is truth so bald
so stark
so dumb as temple stone?
It is not that she is cynical
towards that faith. The truth she sets out to explore is the ambiguous nature
of gods who may
Hate their wives
their children
As the myth goes, Ganesha was
beheaded by Shiva. She calls Ganesh “Elephant crowned runt of jealous Shiva”.
Zwicky draws the conclusion that “Affliction fathers gods and men”. In this
poem as can be seen Zwicky describes the temple, the rites and rituals, and
iconographic details of Ganesha vividly.
Indra`s goad
Padmavati`s lotus
coloured inks from Swarasati
a tiger skin from father Shiva
a sacrificial thread from roaring
Brihaspati.
And from the goddess Earth, a rat
to draw his stunning chariot
This proves her indulging interest
and studious scrutiny. Her attitude to a different religion is to find parallel
to her own faith and belief. She tries to find universal significance and
philosophy underlying in the myth of the pantheon. In the subsequent lines
His fine molested grace remembers
promises of love
toward his difference
Now it becomes imperative to
contemplate what kind of difference is being hinted at here. At one level it
has to do with Ganesh`s being different combining the traits of an animal as
well as those of a man; on a deeper level it can also mean the celebration of
difference of having multiple identities, of being the ‘other’.She holds that
that difference itself is a promise of love. In the face of the larger
universal ‘now-fathering force’ (Ganesh, once a victim of his father has become
a fathering force as a god) she finds human existence to be ‘small like
crippled children’.
The second poem of this seriesII Vishnu concerns itself with Lord Vishnu
and his avatar Krishna. In this poem, Zwicky incorporates lines from Theodore
Roethke’s “The Partner” and “The Apparition”.In this short poem she has
beautifully captured Krishna's leela with the gopis of Vrindavan and their pining for his love, Krishna's
lifting of the mountain ,his tricks and turns that take milkmaid,cowherd,flower
girl,goddess all as one.Vishnu is the Lord of the wheel of time who has
“million and million years to go”. Vishnu conceals all the mysteries of the
creation as with a sparkling smile and silence
He smiles to think how once
a slippery blue-black boy leaped out
of swaddling
into sunlight,becoming fish,wild
boar,a million magic shapes…
The poem III Shiva again begins with an epigraph of Roethke’s The Dance:
“Though dancing needs a master
I had none”.
Shiva is the Nataraj
indulged in his Tandava, the divine
dance. “Eternal joy out leaps the flame-spoked wheel”.His voice rolls out in
thunder claps forked the lightening of his weapon's flash.Shiva is both the
destroyer ( Rudra) and the creator( Ananda).In his childish rage he rends
and grinds the earth. But the poet is drawn towards the “Eternal joy” that out
leaps the flame- spoked wheel”. Shiva is truth, he is the ultimate, the
eternal:
Going I stay
staying I go
The surging segregation of devotees
with candle flames, smoking censers and tinkling bells mark their faith upon
the cosmic cycles of creation and destruction, the daily rhythm of death and
birth.
Zwicky's poem IV Devi is Ganesha's mother. She describes
Devi as:
Ganesha’s mother
mother of life
mother of death
sealed in man's misgivings
Her “moving presence” is blended in
the beauty of nature.She is the “gentle angry mother”.On one hand she has
alluring charms; the symbol of fertility and creation, on the other, she has
the destructive darker side.In her rage “Her bowels turned brass and iron
breasts burst with bitter milk”.She is the incarnation of nature in both its
creative and destructive forms. She is nature, woman, mother, “girl man knows
nothing of”. She has a meditating head from Shiva , arms from Vishnu's vigorous
fires.She is everything that a man is capable of . Marvellous features of
different gods have combined into her being. She is the symbol of women
power.Every greatness is born of women, the source of creation. Zwicky's
keynote in the poem is “God and men have mothers”. In this patriarchal
hierarchy of God’s, Devi is indifferent. But she is the life-force of
everything, she is motherhood incarnated.
The four poems on Indian Pantheon
penned by Zwicky venture on her quest she had earlier confided as her
historical urgency to explore beyond Australia. The sense of otherness or
alienation she felt as one torn between one’s inherent identity as a Jewish in
a predominantly Christian surrounding and the cultural practice she found herself
within. The difference or otherness however is something she feels should be
celebrated. The sense of self and the urgency to establish a history for the
same has to be done by the way of decentring the centre. This is why she
explores cultures beyond Australia to celebrate differences. Paganism and
Christianity are considered opposites. The celebration of other philosophies
and finding deeper meaning in them or making sense out of them is not only a
defense mechanism to celebrate her difference or otherness, but also a
syncretic effort to embrace a universal meaning behind apparent differences.
The universal cycle of destruction and rebirth , the afflictions of gods which human beings are subjected to in
Aschylean terms, the revolutionary female warriors; all such issues which Fay
Zwicky had been stressing in her works , have been addressed in the poems in
this series. In a cosmopolitan, transcultural backdrop, where one’s identity or
multiple ethnic identity such as Zwicky had, can make one think in a broader
perspective of being a citizen of a global village where one’s identity is not
defined in terms of one’s narrower demographic existence, rather it can be
celebrated in multiple ways and transcultural identity is another way of
looking at this. Celebration of difference and the eagerness to find a
universal code or oneness notwithstanding difference is the key to it. Zwicky’s
interpretation of the mythical and spiritual philosophy of Hinduism in these
poems reflect her understanding of the culture/s she had shown her keenness to
learn and understand. These poems are at the same time specific to a culture
and general to the human predicament and their ultimate surrender to their
respective faiths which they try “to learn with the emptiness of bare mind without
knowledge”. This lack of knowledge is not the paganism to be sneered at; for
Zwicky, it needs the leap of faith to believe without understanding.
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