WORDS ON THE HORIZON

BOOK REVIEW OF ANITA NAHAL MA'AM'S BOOK.

My book review of Anita Nahal Ma'am's excellent poetry book WHAT'S WRONG WITH US KALI WOMEN? has been published by SETU BILINGUAL.

I am thankful to the team for publishing this review and to Anita Ma'am for her generosity and ceaseless creativity.

https://www.setumag.com/2021/08/book-review-whats-wrong-with-us-kali.html?m=1

Below is the original published text in SETU.

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What's Wrong With Us Kali Women?
Prose Poems by Anita Nahal
Author: Anita Nahal
Publishing House: Kelsay Books, Utah, USA
Cover Art by Anjali Bhardwaj
Cover Design by Shay Culligan
Publishing Date: August 2021. Pages 94
ISBN: 978-1-954353-88-6

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What is Poetry? To me in these present times, it is much more than a stimulating form of expression that captures multitudes in miniature effectively. It is about the simplicity and depth of one's thoughts multiplied in the minds and hearts of readers who enunciate the original lines with empathic engagement. It is about conveying others' feelings through the verse form in relatable ways. This admixture of elements is often hard to find. But all that is put to rest for any discerning reader and aficionado of poetry who discovers Anita Nahal's body of work in her 2021 collection What's Wrong With Us Kali Women? It is an even more admirable feat since she employs the prose form to put forward her uncompromising worldviews that cover the gamut of what she knows best. That covers extensive and often poignant ground. Her identity vis-a-vis motherhood, multiculturalism and as a writer seeking unblemished truth sets each work as a personalized and universal experience.
Take the titular poem, “What’s wrong with us Kali women?” where she writes,

"There's nothing wrong. That's your fear labelling us. We are the Kali women. And all other female, male, androgynous gods. We don't distinguish. We seek. We learn. Comprehend. Embrace" Through these lines, she is informing us of multiple ways in which women are ostracized and shamed and reading the full text will let one into the canvas of skin color, gender and societal conditioning, and its generational tenacity that get covered here.

In “Homo Sapiens and Hindu Goddesses in India and America”, she calls out double standards allotted to painting women as divine beings culturally and then trampling them in real life. She yearns to be treated hence as a flesh and blood mortal. "Fatigued, I drudge along like broken subalterns, returning from a long war", these lines clearly elucidating the exhaustion on her and her ilk. Separation from homeland, adjusting to two worlds and carving out an identity free from polarities of both ends indeed extracts its toll and this realistic foregrounding in lived experiences colors her lines.

The gamut of her choices range from events that have become endemic to us as human beings, whether it is the poignancy of racist continuum as on “How Easy It Is For A Black Life To Be Taken and Jazz Vocalist” ("all around ancestors are beating their chests"), the history of African-Americans informing the evolution of a musical style that thrives on improvisational tones, just like poetry or the tenacity of memories embedded in inanimate objects like clothes, beds and comforters in an special post Covid reckoning as on “What Happened To Their Clothes?”  That use of the interrogative exclamation is a running thread as regards the spirit of enquiry always being at the center. This ambivalence of life and death is also present in “Corona and Love-Life Layers”, the alliterative title being symbolic and the actual poem touching upon human avarice and indifference refusing to die down even in the face of this extraordinary post-modern crisis. As she writes, "layers had collapsed, conflated, almost disappeared", with the transparency of our muddled lives occupying her thoughts.

“Greatest Warrior is Metamorphic Mother Earth”, to me, is a pivotal poem as it's both a slant on evading our environmental responsibilities as humans and simultaneously on how we condescend feminist values without deeply caring about the history of strength and unwavering loyalty to equality that it is borne out of. Here, Dr. Nahal is divorcing herself and her soul-sisters from the 'abla' prototype affixed with them forever. She seeks to be taken as an equal, at least as an individual and not just a sex/ gender.