This write-up is an apology in favor of a recent argument that has gained wide currency in Nepali poetry: Nepali poetry should turn towards local resources for freshness. The argument is double-edged. In one hand, it questions the claim of originality in those poems that have fished metaphors from the global sea. Second, by arguing that poetry shall find a safer and fresher stay in being rooted in the domain of indigenous episteme, the argument calls for better research and understanding of what the ‘local’ is, in the era of globalizations. However, there are a couple of important theoretical risks associated with this claim, and as a supporter of the idea, I hereby undertake to defend the claim in anticipation of the possible rejoinders.
Metaphors, perhaps, are among the most overused elements in poetry. By metaphors, I do not merely mean the direct comparison as is commonly understood when this figure of speech is talked about. Metaphor, more broadly, refers to a wide array of ideas. For help, we might refer to Jacques Derrida and subscribe to the notion that “concept is a metaphor, foundation is a metaphor, theory is a metaphor; and there is no meta-metaphor for them.”
Veterans of ‘content poetry’ argue, poetry survives in its ‘argument’, rather than in vehicle, tenor or field. As long as a poet has a ‘new’ argument to make every time he picks up his pen, this is an unbeatable criterion for freshness. But this is a fact as true as an egg is an egg—whether it is acknowledged or not—that all poems in the world, or all poems by the same writer, do not always make a new argument. For example there are hundreds of poems that celebrate the primacy of a mother’s or a lover’s love, or patriotism, or natural beauty, or the need for a revolution, or frustration in life, and absurdity of birth and so on. But their poets still claim newness in the ‘way’ the expression is affected, and the choices of metaphors often do the service. Metaphors, however, run out of sap if overused, and this translates them into anemic metaphors.
Metaphors become anemic in two cases. First, when a poet is over-conscious about the inevitable pervasiveness of his poetry, he tends to pick up metaphors that are more or less known very average readers in the world. Such metaphors either come from the most famous icons of a country, or are borrowed from a larger body of global knowledge, to which majority of the readers have access. For a Nepali poet, for example, Mount Everest and Buddha are those clichéd metaphors, which can no longer give a sense of freshness, unless they are resurrected from their classical semantic domain, and inoculated with some sorts of freshness, and I cannot honestly suggest any methodology for the same. At this poem, I seek apology from my readers for the simple reader that my indolence can, if not theoretically scrutinized, be judged as the expression of a quisling, a traitor. That is not the case, however. Second, writers pick up universally acknowledged metaphors, and run a double risk of being tautological and stale. Overused references to Sisyphus, Prometheus, Phoenix, Sakuni, Ravana etc. can hardly suggest anything other than some clichéd connotations, and poetry has a really very meager call for freshness. There is not the slightest degree of hesitation in me in claiming that much of modernist Nepali poetry is strewn with such clichéd universals as far as metaphors and metaphoric figurations are concerned, and that most probably is one of the reasons why many poets of that time failed to draw global attention though they had been extensively translated. The story of failure has continued since then to our own era, simply because, the inherited slip—namely the obsession with the universals—has lingered to our own era.
Why does a poet pick up such ‘universal’ metaphors—the universal being used in a pejorative sense? One of the most obvious reasons is that a poet considers it an intellectual risk to bare down to the local, for fear of being misunderstood a naïve and ill-informed, and secondly, most poets bear an obsession for ‘universalization’. This obsession, however, is dangerous. The most immediate stake is that, in such a bid, a writer becomes not only redundant, but also incongruous, because the metaphors wear and tear, and with time, lose their sap. Most poets, in their run for the universals, often do not see this fact.
This calls up the idea of ‘wear and tear’ of a metaphor, as Derrida would contend in his famous essay “White Mythology”: ‘It was necessary to subject this notion of wear and tear to scrutiny, for it seems to be systematically connected with the metaphorical perspective. It is to be found wherever the theme of metaphor has a special place. It is, moreover, a metaphor which carries a pre-supposition of continuity: according to it, the history of a metaphor would not proceed like a journey, with breaks, reinstatements in a heterogeneous system, mutation, unmotivated detours, but like a progressive erosion, a regular semantic loss, an uninterrupted draining of the primitive meaning.’
Metaphors, therefore, are like starts that take birth, illuminate themselves and the space, and die out. Their existence is determined both by the literary and cultural forces that affect their value-laded metaphorization, and we would therefore agree with Saussurian and Derridian idea that the question of metaphor belongs to a theory of value, and not merely to a theory of meaning: “The trope of metaphor always implies a sensible kernel, or rather something which, like what is sensible, may always fail to be present actually and in person.”
Whatever metaphor a poet chooses, it needs an intellectual and empirical abstraction to make it poetic. Intellectual abstraction is a task of the reason; a poet needs to convincingly persuade that a metaphor is compatible in a poetic environment. For an empirical abstraction, the lived experiences of the local cultures, from which a local metaphor is being fished, needs to be taken into consideration. The local becomes universal in spite of its obscurity, if placed well in the environment of a universal language, and one might see how Chinuwa Achebe was a master of this art of universalizing the local.
There are two more things a poet should consider while undertaking this risky feat. As Schleiermacher would suggest, modern poet should look for elements that deliberately ‘foreignize’ the poem. This can ensure a freshness, and draw better attention, though this might call for elaborate footnoting and glossary! So what! All epoch-making poems have done this. Secondly, the idea that by working midway between foreignizing and domesticating one can perform an act of mimicry—as Homi K. Bhabha would contend—does not always hold good for a non-colonial space like Nepal. For us rather, distancing from the universal metaphors and moving more and more towards the local—in a way, performing in a troupe opposite to Bhabha’s mimicry and hybridity—gives a stronger impression in the poem.
The local, therefore, is the global. With metaphors, the feat can make the strongest sense in poetry. New generation poets in Nepali literature should therefore learn from the modernists’ obsession for the universal, and their ultimate reduction into non-impressive poets. Time now calls for foreignizing, and turning to the local—history, myth, folk experiences and indigenous culture—as sources of unexplored and unwritten metaphors can give our poets a better space in the world. In other words, these metaphors that are in existence but in a state of dormancy—for lack of use—need resurrection. That will give them currency, and to some, a new life.
[Paudyal teaches at the Central Department of English TU, and is himself a poet and a critic.]
