Of Places and People

Within these poems, place doesn't only mean the literal geographic elements. For example, when I want to talk about this current semester's "Mills campus," I'm not just talking about the architecture of the tea shop of the lawns or the automated gates. I'm talking about the students moving in and out, the faculty, the custodial staff, the admins, the neighborhood around the campus, the history of social movements on this campus, and more--all of us un/consciously interacting together. 

Similarly with each of these poems, to think about the mental levels "place" works within, I have to think about the depicted interactions (or non-interaction) with other beings in the world, the contextual history of the beings that populated the land beforehand, and the words the poet chooses to understand this world around them. There's a deeply embedded and reciprocal relationship between the poet's internal world and their external world. 

This relationship is clearly shown in Toya Gurung's piece. Her poems evoke memories in me of weeks spent meditating at the temple, contemplating the body and its impermanence, practicing the understanding of one's innate connection with all beings everywhere and all suffering. There is a simplicity of living at the temple, which Gurung details so well, "I feel a pride / no matter how troubled I might be / my mind is calm after a turn around the temple" (512). Each turn during a walking meditation brings new awareness to the body. When one leaves the meditation hall to go back home, it's a jarring and overwhelming experience. Gurung notes this as "once I reach the street it seems / that with this joy there comes growing / another torment." Everything is loud and fast and cluttered. 

It is interesting to think about Gurung's poem with a post-colonial mindset. Nepal was not colonized by the British Raj, as its close neighbors India and Pakistan were, and yet it did have to form an alliance with Britain as Britain continued to exert its power throughout South Asia. And it was not an imperial state, unlike its other close neighbor, China (which, I've just discovered, India then later decided to use Nepal as a buffer zone between it and China). With these geographic influences, it's making me think about the shared experience of tension and despair Nepal had with these other nations, on top of dealing with its own internal crises--namely the political upheavals, the civil war, and the recent horrific earthquake. And I'm thinking about how all of this history and shared experience condenses down in Gurung's poem, the "torment" that grows as soon as the meditator leaves their hall to reach a difficult crossroads.

The crossroads is peopled with "the thoughtless man / the other, perhaps with barren heart". It's at this moment here where I feel Gurung's doing something different. She inverts the word "pride." This is a brilliant move, to remove this word's aligned connotation with a nation state, not to align "pride" with the concrete edifices of temple nor with parliamentary building. The speaker describes, "nevertheless I feel a pride / neither of stone / nor of wood / nor of earth". Her pride is based on spiritual connection, an ephemeral location in the body--in the mindheart-- a constant she has cultivated and tended in herself, which has its impact outward.

In Gurung's poem each word feels packed with history, with intention. When I read this poem I felt it was postcolonial in its contextual understanding of place--how one's heart is shaped by location and history, how one reflects their own sense of self outward to affect others in the same area (these "barren heart"s, these "angry red-hot eyes") possibly to heal oneself, possibly to heal everyone. Place, in this poem, became a way of being in a tumultuous world.