Reading ‘I Will Not Bear You Sons’ by Usha Akella

by: Neela Bhattacharya Saxena , December 13, 2021

Usha Akella’s new volume I Will Not Bear You Sons is stark poetry of the most beautiful kind; it is also the voice of ancient wisdom calling out for justice. The book cover is a stunning carnival of shades of India and its contradictions. In a riot of colors, we see two hands clasping each other with one index finger stamped with the Sri Yantra, the supreme symbol of a Shakti tradition that reveres feminine energy and its redemptive power. This powerful poet takes ‘back the dark feminine’ (Akella 99) and serves us deliciously intense ‘poetry in spicy mango gravy’. (48) This collection is a celebration of life and its epiphanies as they descend upon the poetic heart of a sensitive woman with a magic quill which she employs to fly high, beyond all the terrors and joys she weaves into her poems. 

Usha’s volume is a reminder that women need to value themselves enough to fight against the devastation patriarchal systems have wreaked upon the world, yet the book itself is a riot of Indic sounds, colors and images flowing from the pen of one of our best contemporary poets. It does not simply catalogue the injustices, cruelties, and horrors faced by some Indian girls, although it unapologetically indicts Indian patriarchy. Neither is it just about the gut-wrenching realities of women around the world. Moving from the I to the We, the collection expands into a global kaleidoscope of women with the clarity and precision that words can paint. The voice in Usha’s first poem, called ‘Ka Ba Akh,’ says: ‘I wanted lakes to drink from and they took the moisture from my body.’ With the very first poem, with the vivid imagery of a figure being mummified and the haunting lines, ‘you need not be Egyptian they said woman is enough to be wound’ (3), Usha takes us into the world of women across time, space, and varying cultures on the wings of her magical poetry. 

It is also a complex volume with no easy binaries. Usha, an activist poet who founded the highly acclaimed South Asian poetry festival Matwaala, is aware of the internal contradictions we face. A father in law’s apparent blessing is a demand for a grandson that ‘can be a Sudarshan chakra shredding you’ (17), but women themselves, victims, and victimisers, in their unconscious fury would yell, ‘who gave you permission to write of us’. (19)  In her book we see the most intense denunciation of violence against women, often by women themselves. Yet the volume emanates a woman’s wrath, like Amba/Shikhandi’s vow that decimates Bhishma in the epic Mahabharata, in Usha’s lines, ‘I will live to see your bloodline cross over with you to the other side, now the blessing from your lips is your execution’. (20)

Why have we collectively created such a world, where women of every hue are pitted against a system that creates the cauldron from which Usha’s poetry emerges? Poetry, after all, can quell our sorrow in its supreme capacity to give us, as Robert Frost had it, a clarification, nothing grand but ‘a momentary stay against confusion.’ I think of a contemporary African American poet, Darius Daugherty’s ‘What Can a Poem Do’ that asserts, ‘a poem cannot save a life…cannot make you less woman/or less poor/or less Black/and/thus/treated equally’ but  ‘a poem can love…and scold you at the same time/a poem can rip away the untruths that have cocooned us.’ (Daugherty)

Usha’s poetry does this with supreme elegance and forces us to see what most of us are too fragile to acknowledge. After all, we are not quite equipped to ask what the voice in her ‘7.8 Billion Caved’ asks, invoking the pandemic: 

[w]here do we send our unclaimed sorrow? 

The unlabeled debris of life? 

The racking cough of unprocessed wounds? 

There is no island to send them off, be done, be free. 

Like those lines of caskets in dirt in Hart Island, 

where New York City is belching unclaimed bodies, 

its gut overflowing. (9)

‘Darbar of Frogs’ structures a different kind of form where the swan’s resistance to the ‘green amphibians’ with ‘slimy toxic skin’ exposes the vicious trappings of a fossilised ‘Sanatan Dharma,’ a Hinduism that has forgotten itself. After all, ‘Manu, the head priest was a very busy frog these days’ (56) presiding over the plucking off the swan’s feathers to stuff the pillows of a hypocritical ‘dharma.’ But to no avail because the swan, like all these women, ‘lived in pain but sprouted quills to write her songs’. (59)

A poem like ‘Ordinary,’ a veritable stockpile of brilliant imagery, mocks the heady and greedy excesses of consumer cultures both East and West, leading to what Akella calls ‘the onomatopoeia of psychosis.’ This psychosis of mindless and unconscious consumption takes us to ‘the destination wedding/the divorce post-wedding’ where among other stuff love too is ‘contracted, renewed and voided’. (28) In the ‘We’ section there are mythic, historic, poetic voices of women redefined by an eternal surge of desires to scale the limits of their humanity. From Jyoti to Malala, from Anne Boleyn to Kamala Harris, we enter what one poem calls ‘Joysmos,’ because it is a darbar/court of dialogue with poets from both home and abroad. A poet from medieval India, Meerabai talks to Manuela, mistress of Bolivar, and the communion of women worldwide takes shape in the deep tenderness of a mother daughter dance in a poem dedicated to Anannya because a daughter is ‘my footsteps gone ahead of me’. (109)

‘Rise’ is for Turkish women immigrants; images in this poem capture the richness of the volume, ‘the room is a manuscript of many longings’. (100) I am reminded of Japanese poet Rin Ishigaki’s almost Zen like poem ‘The Pan, the Pot, the Burning Fire I Have in Front of Me’ as I hear the voice speaking of ‘the things women know’ that ‘Time too is like this—flaky filo sheets’. (101)

Usha meets ‘her poems in the desert behind her eyes’ (60) and lovers of poetry will delight and despair in her portraits.  But the hope, as Anne Waldman tells us on the cover page, is that ‘this poetry can help wake up the world to itself.’ Perhaps women will love themselves, their children and each other because voices like this startle us with the capacity of words to transcend the human, and perhaps our current posthuman, condition. Perhaps more people—women and men alike—will speak out, because as Marianela Medrano’s blurb states, ‘[t]he poet demands that we speak.’ I Will Not Bear You Sons is a volume that invites deep contemplation, joy, rage, and sheer thrill in a poet’s capacity to engulf us in the deepest longing of the human heart, to be heard because ‘She’s Speaking’. (124)