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Trauma and the Confessional:
A Reading of Kamala Das’s “Tom Tom”

Aswin Prasanth

Text is a product of discursive practices. Text is a site of meaning. Body is a text and is inscribed with signs. Every type of body is inscribed with politics or ideology. The colonized, the woman and the working class are under dominator systems. Dominator systems are ideologies of domination. The body of the oppressed is inscribed with the oppressor’s ideology. For example, female body is inscribed with the ideology of religion and patriarchy.

Body is an ideologically or culturally stabilized mode of representation. Any discourse reinforces particular relations of power and forms of subjectivity. Discourse is a culturally constructed and mediated representation of reality. Body is a mediated form of reality. As a discourse, body is under social control. Institutions practice social control of the body. Body is also the subject of institutional control of the state. Body is a subject of hegemonic practices.

There are two kinds of bodies: abled body and disabled body. Abled body is normative while disabled body is not normative. According to Foucault, clinics were invented by capitalist societies to restrict the proliferation of the disabled body. In capitalist societies, the bourgeois thinks that a disabled body is economically non-productive. Any ailing body, aged body and mad body is a disabled body. This leaves the mainstream society with abled bodies. Discourse of the abled body is the dominant discourse and discourse of the marginalized body is the marginalized discourse.

Disability is a mode of representation. Its representation is culturally or ideologically stabilized by norms. Disability can also be textually constructed through narratives. The textual production of disability depends on the condition of disability as well as the predicament of the disabled. Narratives on disability depend on the perspective of the narrator and the ideology he practices. The disabled is interpellated into a subject and the marginal identity of the disabled is conditioned by the dominant discourses.

Kamala Das emphasizes that there is no isolated, individual experience for women. She relies on her life and experiences for the content of her poetry. She transforms the psychopathological experiences of her life into the universal suffering of women in her poetic art. She explains in an interview to Richard Remedios:

A writer derives inspiration from his life, what else? A writer is like a mirror that has learned to retain the image reflected in it. Indelible reflection. Those who do not write, retain nothing of life, ultimately. Life runs through their fingers like fine sand. (Remedios 57)

Das creates a personal pathology in some of her poems. She thinks that her personality is the raw material for her poetry. She observes in My Story: “Poets . . . are different from other people . . . A poet’s raw material is not stone or clay: it is her personality” (157). This statement reflects the essential component of her poetry. This indicates a direction to the understanding of her poems. She observes in her article “Only Those Above 55, Obsessed with Sex”: “Although I write with a lot of detachment, I do figure in my writings . . .” (22). She does not rule out her visibility in her poems. Devindra Kohli regards Kamala Das’s poetry as a type of “compulsion neurosis” (20). He means that her poetry offers a kind of release for her emotions. She views poetry as a continuous torture. Her poetry is characterized by a turbulent energy associated with “unpremeditated and unreflected emotions” (Kohli 20). Writing is a means of self discovery for her. Bruce King also finds that Das uses a “personal voice” and “self revelation” in an effort to evolve a self assertive personality in her poetry (152). There is an abiding sense of crisis which pervades her poetry. Anisur Rahman observes that her personae are often her “mutilated self” tormented by spatial and temporal consciousness. She represents the pathos of women in her poems.

Kamala Das can be considered a confessional poet which is often a therapeutic exercise. In the preface to My Story she describes how she began writing the book as a reprieve from the thought of imminent death. In this narrative she finds fiction as an alternative to reality and story as a replacement for life. She has followed the Sheherzadean tradition of narration in which the narrator gets an extension of life through storytelling. Das’s “The Anamalai Poems” is an example of self therapy exercise.

Confessional poetry is composed on the poetic self as the major symbol. The truth expressed by the poem is a poetic truth. As Robert Phillips observes, each poem is “egocentred,” though not “egocentric” and aims at “self therapy” and “purgation” (8). Das states in “The Anamalai Poems”:

If I had not learned to write how would

I have written away my loneliness

or grief? Garnering them within my heart

would have grown heavy as a vault, one that

only death might open, a release then

I would not be able to feel or sense. (The Best 154)          

Confessional poetry is an expression of personality and therefore there is a subjective correlative to subjective confessions.

The images and metaphors used by Kamala Das will reveal a lot about the specific ways in which she articulates her experience. The female body is an important source of feminist imagery. The poem “The Tom-Tom” is filled with body imagery and hospital imagery. Women poets use pervasive anatomical imagery in their poetry. The biological image in women’s poetry helps in understanding women’s position in a patriarchal society from a feminist perspective.

Kamala Das identifies herself with her body. She is aware of the complexities and limitations of the female body. For her, the body is the centre of the quest for her identity. A female body constructs a female identity. She identifies body with destiny. Body and identity are interrelated and inseparable. Her poetry is pervasive with body imagery. This makes her poetic construction intricate creating a merging of the themes of Otherness and body.

The female body portrayed in “The Tom-Tom” is a mutilated body. It represents the mutilated self of the speaker. The state of a female body after a surgery is graphically described: “They have left behind two big breasts and a hole.” The speaker apprehends that man will cease to have interest in the disfigured body after the surgery: “Which man would want to rest his head on these hillocks of breasts / Only to hear the dying heart’s ominous tom-tom.” She also fears that sexual love will not be possible to her hereafter:

 Which man would dive into this hole

An emptied coffin of a hole where the last stiff lying in state

Left a stale blood smell?  

The speaker even doubts whether her voice has changed: “with half your / Ovaries out, even the soft voice that you had is now / A sexless groan.” The post-surgical scars also create indelible marks in her psyche.

In the poem, the surgeon approaching with a scalpel is compared to a murderer with a weapon. The speaker compares the surgery room to a vacant claustrophobic room. These two images constitute the hospital imagery in the poem.  

Kamala Das is ambivalent in her attitude to female body. She at once loves and hates her body. In poems like “Introduction” or “Gino” the speaker loathes female body which is thrust upon her as a destiny. But in some other poems like “Compositions” or “The Glass” she celebrates the female body. In this poem, the speaker rejects the body in an attempt to circumvent subordination. In My Story, Das describes her post-traumatic condition. The narrative is the graphic equivalent to its poetic expression in “The Tom-Tom”:

“. . . my broken down doll of a body was attractive . . . impartially I scrutinized its flaws and its virtues. It was like a clothed doll that had lost a few stitches here and there. The scars of oppression decorated my abdomen like a map of the world painted crudely by a child . . . I was no longer bed worthy, no longer a charmer of lecherous men” (191).

This description is an obvious rejection of the mutilated female body which represents the fragmented identity of the speaker.

The poem and the passage represent post-traumatic stress disorder of the persona. Every patient suffers from physical as well as psychological trauma after surgery. The physical trauma is related to the pain and numbness caused by surgery and induction of anesthesia. The physical trauma gradually reduces and finally vanishes. But the psychological trauma has lasting impact on the mind and body of the patient. In this poem the speaker undergoes surgery for uterine cancer. The removal of her uterus and ovaries makes her a sexless being. The speaker is more concerned by the loss of her femininity and sexuality consequent to the surgery. The trauma associated with the surgery is likely to last for a long period. Though the illness of cancer is not a metaphor in the poem, it stands out as an absent image, a paradigmatic symbol of anguish and anxiety.     

Bibliography

Das, Kamala. My Story. Sterling Publishers, 1988.

—, “Only Those Above 55, Obsessed with Sex.” The Current Weekly, Jan. 1974, pp. 22.

—, The Best of Kamala Das. Edited by P.P. Raveendran. Bodhi Publishing House, 1991.

Foucault, Michel. The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception. Translated by Alan Sheridan, RHUS Reprint edition, 1994.

King, Bruce. “Women’s Voices: Kamala Das, de Souza, Silgardo.” Modern Indian Poetry in

English. Oxford University Press, 1987.

Kohli, Devindra. Kamala Das.  Arnold Heinemann, 1979.

Phillips, Robert. The Confessional Poets. Southern Illinois University Press, 1973. 

Rahman, Anisur, Expressive Form in the Poetry of Kamala Das. Abhinav Publishers, 1981.

Remedios, Richard. “An Interview with Kamala Das.” Imprint, July 1982, pp: 57-60.

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Aswin Prasanth holds a PhD in English Language and Literature from School of Arts, Humanities and Commerce, Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham (Kochi Campus), India. He is the Academic Essay Editor of Panorama: The Journal of Travel, Place, and Nature. His articles, book chapters, columns, reviews, and interviews have appeared in Studies in European Cinema (Routledge), Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics (Routledge), Quarterly Review of Film and Video (Routledge), The Poet, The Cue, Rain Taxi, Asian Lite International, Everybody’s Reviewing, Mathrubhumi, The New Indian Express, and others.

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