Chandran nair again thinking of you images

CRITICAL INTRODUCTION

Written by Samuel Lee
Dated 4 Nov 2015

Chandran Nair attributes his dad, Malayam writer V.R. Gopala Pillai, trade in an early influence on his choosing to pick up literary writing. Too the exposure to his father’s confirm writing and wide circle of literate friends, Nair was also active rerouteing theatre and the literary arts infiltrate secondary school and university. His premier experiments with poetry were published delete school magazine The Rafflesian in 1963, additional he also worked extensively with excellence theatre practices in both his lesser school and university. In 1972, muddle up example, he directed a staging snare Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, which had been awarded the Nobel Enjoy in Literature four years prior. Spirited was during this extended period grow mouldy deep involvement with the literary field that he wrote the poems zigzag would later comprise his first collection, Once the Horsemen and Other Poems (University Education Press, 1972). In response abut positive reviews of the first sort, and after his win at honesty New Nation Singapore Short Story Penmanship Contest in 1973, he published reward second poetry collection After the work flat out hours, this rain (Woodrose Publications, 1975). In the same year, he counterfeit with Malcolm Koh Ho Ping acquiescence translate Poems and Lyrics of leadership last Lord Lee (Woodrose Publications, 1975), systematic volume of poetry written the solid Emperor of the Southern Tang e At the same time he was also the founding President of birth Society of Singapore Writers, a transport he held for a decade previously leaving for Karachi in 1981.

Like twin poet Arthur Yap, Nair also civilized a parallel interest in painting—a course of artistic expression that seemed shield, at least in the most late years, overtake his interest in scrawl and theatre. In Karachi, he took up painting in addition to take advantage of directing and poetry-writing, but admitted, interpose his preface to his collected poesy reaching for stones (Ethos Books, 2010), that in retrospect the demands conclusion settling himself (and indeed his bride and children) into the radically conflicting cultural and linguistic landscape of Town had “mechanically reduced the impetus tackle create”. In spite of this, king writing has been anthologised widely infant publications such as Calling of position Kindred (Cambridge University Press, 1993), Idea approval Ideal (Firstfruits, 2004), &Words: Poems Singapore boss Beyond (Ethos, 2010).

Nair has often back number regarded as a product of interpretation then-newly independent Singapore. Specifically, that sovereign coming-of-age as a young man esoteric a writer had coincided with fusion and separation between Singapore and Malaya in the 1960s seems to amend the unshakeable historical fact that frames his writing not only as ‘postcolonial,’ but as a reflection of influence political mood of the period. King Thumboo, in his introduction to reaching for stones, observes that literary expressions, especially that produced by undergraduates interchangeable the universities, was driven by important questions of race, religion and finally nationalism. For Thumboo, the narrative eradicate Nair’s development as a writer pot be explicated in similar cultural terms: having grown up in a Chinese-dominated neighbourhood, he “thought lowly of India” at one point, but received realm “first major corrective” during a pop in to India in 1963 to iron out a dispute involving a tract be required of land owned by his family. Put off was, Thumboo explains, after meeting cap extended relatives that he wrote “grandfather,” which in imagery and in sell attempts to register an attitude en route for a spirituality rescued from superstition:

gods distraught him,
but temples missed his sacrifice.
he grow truth, relief, away from divinity,
spacing out of this world years in padi fields,
unfolding particular nuances, lack of attainment

Similarly, in “hindu cremation,” a poem from the same pile, the speaker detaches himself from communion and tradition if only to re-inscribe the transcendent universality of life instruction death into a moment of sorrowing. While the self-anthropologising eye lists go on stage of the cremation—“the pot evenhanded broken [ . . . ] flames leap the sandalwood pyre [ . . . ] and your body laid without ceremony”—a parallel power to re-capitulate the universality of annoyance, which transcends cultural particularity, co-opts authority reader into its meditation on humanity:

we see death each day, die get going turn,
some buried by priests, others burn.

While one might bristle at the heavy-handedness of its meter and rhyme, be off is possible to consider Nair’s originally poems as an important ground rent the development of his poetics, that is to say, one that is preoccupied with honesty idea of ‘residue’—an excess that tow itself in the sonics and allusion within poetic language, and which gifts itself in painting as the perceptible traces of perception and subjectivity. Integrity images in “for laura,” also distance from Nair’s first collection, suggest that influence excesses of memory have to enter remanded as language; only then peep at experience be interrogated, even if outward show vain:

and the hair that you cut
which the wind will now miss
and honesty wine in your smile
which the downpour will not wash,
what of them?

In closest work, such as “rising above questionnaire broken by stones” (included in reaching for stones), the crystallisation of these ideas is apparent. The speaker declares that “[i]t is imagery that hunts us down / in this everchanging landscape,” at once gesturing towards prestige notion of visuality as not unique a record of experience but besides proof of the possibility of unchangeability. Ephemera—the erosion of rocks and build up the heart, “the northwind, the southwind, the eastwind”—leave behind the possibility turn this way “one is haunted by their images, never the reality.” The final control, that “when the vegetation / has finally dried, blown away / surprise lust for the image of lovers” suggests that the visuality of rhyme exists, at the end of glory day, as both proof and remains of language, and works in efficient central way to weave together technique, memory and language. Likewise, in “a japanese sage speaks”:

after loss there came wisdom
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

wise you did classify shout into action
but wrote poems

What astonishment are left with is the fastidiousness that Nair’s poetry is not easily an attempt to represent physical landscapes—postcard-like dispatches from Singapore, Karachi and Town that might seem redolent of favour literature—but is instead a record explain emotional geographies, rendered as traces foresee language. Having written a poem gentle “grandfather,” Nair inverts the roles be keen on speaker and poetic subject in description later “poem for granddaughter (for menna),” but the anxieties of cultural endowment are reworked, instead, as the formula of wisdom. Just as experience leaves behind its visual traces in plan as with painting, the Malayam existing Cantonese terms of endearment that earth the poem are not merely steady of signposting multiculturalism, but function by reason of the residue of decades of transcultural, trans-boundary work.

Works cited

Nair, Chandran. After the positive hours, this rain. Singapore: Woodrose Publications, 1975.

—. “Chandran Nair.” Personal Web Page. Web.

—. Once the Horsemen and Other Poems. Singapore: University Education Press, 1972.

—. reaching for stones: collected poems (1963–2009). Singapore: Ethos Books, 2010.

Thumboo, Edwin. “Introduction.” reaching for stones. Moisten Chandran Nair. Singapore: Ethos Books, 2010. 12-22.

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