Contesting Militarized Violence in “Northeast India” Women Poets Against Conﬂict

ESSAY Brinda J. Mehta ......................................................................................... Contesting Militarized Violence in “Northeast India” Women Poets against Conflict Abstract: The northeastern states of India have been positioned as India’s postcolonial other in mainstream politics with the aim to create xenophobic binaries between insider and outsider groups. Comprising the eight “sister” states of Arunachal Pradesh, Assam, Manipur, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Nagaland, Sikkim, and Tripura, this region represents India’s amorphous shadowlands in arbitrary political markings between the mainland and the off-centered northeastern periphery. These satellite states have been subjected to the neocolonial governance of the Indian government and its implementation of political terror through abusive laws, militarized violence, protracted wars against civilians and insurgents alike, and gender abuse. Women poets from the region, such as Monalisa Changkija, Temsüla Ao, Mamang Dai, and others, have played a leading role in expos- ing and denouncing this violence. This essay examines the importance of women’s poetry as a gendered documentation of conflict, a peace narrative, a poet’s reading of history, and a site of memory. Can poetry express the particularized “sorrow of women” (Mamang Dai) without sentimentality and concession? How do these poetic contestations of conflict represent complex interrogations of identity, eco-devastation, and militarization to invalidate an elitist “poetry for poetry’ssake” ethic? ............ Poetry must be raw like a side of beef Should drip blood, remind you of sweat and dusty meridians feminism, race, transnationalism 20:1 April 2021 doi: 10.1215/15366936-8913107 © 2021 Smith College Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/meridians/article-pdf/20/1/53/928158/53mehta.pdf by guest on 02 October 2021 54 meridians 20:1 April 2021 slaughter and the epidermal crunch and the sudden bullet to the head —Mona Zote, “What Poetry Means to Earnestina in Peril” ............ In her poem, “What Poetry Means to Ernestina in Peril,” Mona Zote (2005) from the state of Mizoram establishes the parameters of poetic production from the northeastern region of India, an area marked by the ruthlessness of conflict, the exceptionalism of the Indian state, ethno-nationalism, the marginalization of indigenous people, and unrelenting cruelty against civilians. In such a fraught situation, women have had to bear the brunt of the militarized violence that festers in conflict zones. According to Zote, poetry must exhibit a certain rawness to convey the terror of sustained conflict and adequately express the traumas experienced by a region under siege. Poetry should thereby express its relevance and meaningfulness to “a woman in the hills” who thinks, “we have been bombed silly out of our minds” (66). Each verse should resound with the crunching of military boots and the targeted cracking of the “sudden bullet” as it extinguishes human life unexpectedly and intentionally. Zote is not making the case for using poetry as a form of counter-violence. Instead, the desire for the dripping blood of poetry is a figure of speech to represent and eschew violence rather than to enact it. This poetry makes use of what Cherrie Chhangte (2011: 237) calls the “terror lore” associated with “the reign of terror inflicted upon a nation or society by the dominant political group or a militant group fighting for various causes.” The poeticized “terror lore” chronicles the antiwar stance of these poets fromtheNortheast,makingthemwitnessestothewantondestructionthat has decimated their lands and distressed their people. Their poetry represents a testimonial to time and history and a gendered documentation of conflict, as will be discussed in this essay. These poets represent “word warriors” who use words and imagery to both “image” war in their writings while denouncing the biopolitical agendas of the state and the com- peting insurgencies that seek to control and subjugate civilians. The incendiary power of language represents their best defense against violence and injustice. My analysis will focus primarily on anglophone Naga women poets Monalisa Changkija and Temsüla Ao from Assam, a gate- way state to Nagaland.1 I will also make peripheral references to poets from other northeastern states to provide a more comprehensive view of the powerful literature emerging from this region: “Literature should Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/meridians/article-pdf/20/1/53/928158/53mehta.pdf by guest on 02 October 2021 Brinda J. Mehta Contesting Militarized Violence in “Northeast India” 55 provoke thoughts and reform human beings,” states Changkija in a Naga- land Post article (2018). These authors write in English from postcolonial locations as a result of their imposed colonial education and the oral scope of indigenous languages. “We do not know if the language we speak belongs to a written past,” laments Mamang Dai (2004: 18) from Arunachal Pradesh. Her poem, “An Obscure Place,” emphasizes the “obscured” ori- gins of the region’s oral traditions as a result of British colonization and Indian neo-imperialism: “There are no records,” she further bemoans in thepoem“The Missing Link” from her collection River Poems (Dai 2004: 11). These writings are thereby marked by a certain sense of urgency to give voice and visibility to the negated aspects of India’s postcolonial literary history. I raise the following questions: Can poetry express the inexpress- ible dimensions of trauma and conflict by uncovering the very source of violence? Can poetry give voice to the unarticulated silences of history that have camouflaged the murderous intent of the militarized and domestic patriarchies in the region? Does poetry express the particularized “sorrow of women,” evoked in Dai’s (2014: 9) poem of the same title, without sentimentality and concession? These writings subvert any homogeneous representation of a unified poetic experience from the Northeast. At the same time, “violence features as a recurrent theme because the story of violence seems to be a never-ending one in this region and yet people have not learnt ‘to live with it,’ as they are expected to do by thedistant centers of power,” according to Tilottoma Misra (2011: xix). How then does poetry narrate this never-ending story of conflict in verses of resistance, traumatic affect, and protest? As stated by Kevileno Sakhrie: “Language becomes an extremely important site of struggle for it is in poetry that the voices of those who struggle are heard” (2018: xi). The urgency in these writings is expressed by Naga poet Easterine Iralu (2004), who issues a dire warning about the dangers of disavowing the region’s historicity: “The denial of the right to tell our stories violates our humanity. The telling of a story is not only an artistic action, it is a spiritual exercise that is an integral part of the healing of a people’s psy- chological wounds.” Iralu suggests that the denial of the right to tell one’s story is a form of ethnic cleansing brought about by the erasure of history, identity, and cultural specificity. The poet warns against this cultural genocide, a violation that can be best highlighted and documented in verse. In fact, poetry is the medium of choice for these writers, given its oral scope and ability to express raw emotions and horror from the gut: “Poetry has the power to reach untouched corners of the heart in an Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/meridians/article-pdf/20/1/53/928158/53mehta.pdf by guest on 02 October 2021 56 meridians 20:1 April 2021 inexplicable way much more than the printed word and stark images in the print and electronic media and indeed historical records. Poets can sometimes tell us more than the finest works of history,” states Changkija (2013a: 1). Poetry represents the humanizing of history for these poets who write from the “heart” of conflict. Mappings of the Northeast It is important to provide a general introduction to contextualize this poetry both geographically and politically to understand its underlying concerns and preoccupations. The Northeast has been positioned as India’s postcolonial other in mainstream politics with the aim to create xenophobic binaries between insider and outsider groups (fig. 1). Com- prising the eight “sister” states of Arunachal Pradesh, Assam, Manipur, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Nagaland, Sikkim, and Tripura, this region represents what I term India’s amorphous shadowlands in arbitrary political markings between the mainland and the northeastern periphery. This ambiguity has obscured the astonishing diversity of the aforementioned states through essentialized mappings of an indeterminate “northeastern” territory. These satellite states have been subjected to the neocolonial governance of the Indian government and its implementation of political terror through abusive laws and violence. Ironically, despite the diverse peoples in the region, they shared the same fate—British rule in the early nineteenth century followed by the imposition of Christianity as a form of colonial subjugation and, later, Indian dominance when Nagaland, for example, was made the sixteenth state of India on December 1, 1963. Christianity arrived in Nagaland when the American Baptist Mission and English and Welsh missions established missionary schools and churches, which had a profound impact on tradi- tional Naga cultural and spiritual belief systems, according to Sayantan Chakraborty (2017: 111). The colonial and spiritual “reformation” of the Nagas was followed by their neocolonial submission to the Indian state, thereby subjecting them to a triple colonization since the nineteenth century. These structures of power, in turn, created a postmodern imperialism uncovering the intimate connections between coloniality and postcolo- niality through the grid of conflict and militarism. Connected to India by a tenuous two-hundred-kilometer membrane- like “chicken neck” stretch of land termed the Siliguri Corridor, the Northeast region has been maintained in a state of isolation, deprivation, Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/meridians/article-pdf/20/1/53/928158/53mehta.pdf by guest on 02 October 2021 Brinda J.

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