Assistant Professor

Department of English

Aliah University

Kolkata  West Bengal India

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.

References

1. Brah, Avtar. (1997). Cartographies of Diaspora: Contesting Identities.New York:Routledge.
2. Hall,Stuart.(1996). “New Ethnicities”. Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies.(Ed.)David Morley and Kuan Using Chen.London: Routledg.442-451.
3. JanMohamed,Abdul.(1993) “Worldliness- Without-World, Homeless-at-Home”.Edward Said:A Critical Reader.(Ed.)Michael Sprinkler.Cambridge:,Wiley-Blackwell.96-120.
4. Kinsella,John2017, “Poet Fay Zwicky was a Rebellious West Australian Voice”,The Australian,Viewed.9December2017,http://www..The australian.com.au/22July,2017/contents html.
5. Smith,Ali2017, “Becoming Fay Zwicky”,Sydney Review of Books,Viewed.9 December 2017,http://www.sydneyreviewbooks.com/1November2017/contents html.
6. Sullivan, Jane. "Writer's solitary life interrupted by award".theage.com.au, Nov, 12, 2005. https://www.theage.com.au/entertainment/books/writers-solitary-life-interrupted-by-award-20051112-ge1858.html
7. Zwicky, Fay. 1990, Ask Me, University of Queensland Press, St.Lucia.
8. _________1086,The Lyre in the Pawnshop, UWA Publishing, Perth.