“The Looking-Glass' by Kamala Das: Summary and Analysis

How a Woman Should Behave While Going to Bed With a Man

 

 

In this poem, Kamala Das offers a few suggestions to women about how to get the maximum possible pleasure out of her sexual experiences. A woman, says the poetess, should make no secret of her sexual requirements when she is going to have sexual intercourse with a man A woman should not, for instance, feel shy about admiring a man’s body and limbs when she sees him in the nude. In fact, a woman should stand naked before a mirror and ask her partner also to stand naked by her side so that they can enjoy his feeling of physical superiority over her by virtue of his bodily strength.

A woman should enjoy a feeling of her own superiority over him because her body is softer and lovelier than his. A woman should then note the perfection of the man’s limbs, and should note his eyes becoming red when the water enters his eyes while he is having a bath. She should note the shy manner in which he walks upon the bathroom floor, dropping his towel because of his loose grip on it, and she should note the jerky way in which he urinates. A woman should not only admire the man’s symmetrical and strong limbs, but also his movements including his jerky manner of ending his urination. All these details about the man’s body and his movements should actually please a woman and make her think that this particular man is the only one who can satisfy her fully and in every way when they lie together in bed.

How She Should Behave in Bed

 

 

The poetess then suggests that a woman should give to her lover everything that she is capable of giving to a lover in bed. She should make it possible for him to smell her long hair and the sweat between her breasts; she should let him feel the shock of coming into contact with her warm menstrual blood if she having her monthly period at the time, and she should make him conscious of all her sexual cravings which she wants him to satisfy. There is nothing difficult in doing all this, says the poetess. A woman would find it easy to do all these things if she sheds her shyness and timidity and behaves boldly in the matter.

Her Predicament After the Man Has Left Her for Good

The poetess then points out that the real difficulty for a woman lies in the fact that, if this particular lover, with whom she has had a most pleasurable experience of the sexual act, leaves her, never to come back, she would find it impossible to get a substitute for him. And, if she does not find a substitute, her life would become meaningless to her. Her eyes would keep searching for somebody like her departed lover, but she would not find anyone exactly like him. Her predicament would lead her into a state of total despair so that her body, which was at one time irresistibly alluring, would then lose its charm and would become unexciting.

“The Invitation "by Kamala Das: Summary and Analysis

 

The Persona’s Bitter-Sweet Memory of a Sexual Experience

The persona in the poem recalls her experience of the sexual act with a lover. (The persona is most probably the poetess herself). On a certain day, she felt as if a man’s fist was alternately tightening itself and then loosening its muscles. It seemed to her that the man were forming some firm resolve and then becoming somewhat uncertain. In other words, the poetess was feeling tortured by her memory of her experience of love-making with a lover of hers. The lover had gone away after making love to her, and had not returned. The woman (who, as we have already indicated, could be the poetess herself) knew that her lover would not come back, but she could not forget her experience of love-making with that man because the experience had been a most delicious one. The bitter-sweet of the memory of her sexual experience continued to haunt her.

The Sea’s Suggestion to the Woman to Jump into its Waters and Perish there.

 

Standing on the seashore, the woman got the feeling that the sea was inviting her to jump into its waters in order to perish there and thus put an end to her life. The sea seemed to say to her that she would lose nothing except her miserable life while it would certainly gain something by swallowing her body and thus adding to its conquests. The woman, however, told the sea to mind its own business and to go its own way, leaving her to go her way.

The Woman’s Effort to Dismiss Her Memories from Her Mind

 

The woman then recalled how her lover used to come to her in the intervals of his office-work in order to make love to her. He used to come to her to refresh himself after his tiring office-work, and he felt warmed in her embraces, remaining silent all the time. The woman then tried to dismiss this memory from her mind by telling herself that her lover had gone for good, and that it would be foolish on her part to entertain any hope that he would return.

The Sea’s Repetition of its Invitation to the Woman

The sea seemed to repeat its invitation to the woman to enter its waters in order to put an end to her life. But the woman replied that she wanted to be left alone, and not to be pestered by the sea. Her thoughts again turned to her lover; and she realized that she wanted no other lover but the same who had been sleeping with her and who had now gone away. In bed with him, she used to feel as if she was in paradise. The bed, six feet in length and two feet in width, was heaven for them; and, it was only when they left the bed-room and walked together in the open that they exposed themselves to the much wider space outside where the city was situated.

The Sea’s Invitation, Made to Appear More Attractive

 

The sea spoke to the woman again, urging her to end her life in its waters. The sea told her that, if she waited for her death to come naturally to her, she would have to be cremated; and her dead body would then be placed on a funeral pyre to be consumed by the fire. The sea said that, if she jumped into its waters, she would meet a cool death, and that she would be able to stretch her limbs on the cool sand at its bottom and would be able to rest her head on the flowers growing there.

The Woman, Unable to Shed Her Memories of Her Lover

The woman, turning away from the sea, thought again of her experience of love-making with that lover of hers. Throughout the summer they had been meeting in the afternoons to make love to each other, and, at the end of the sexual act, their bodies would lie listlessly on the bed, with their minds rendered incapable of thinking by the heat of the sun.

The Woman’s Rejection of the Sea’s Invitation

The sea spoke once more, urging the woman to put an end to her memories of her past love-making and the heartache which those memories were causing her. The sea went on to say that it had waited for a long time for the right person, who would also be a bright person, like her, to come and enter its blue waters. But this time the woman replied to the sea that she was still young, and that she still needed that lover of hers to reconstruct her life and then to destroy it. In other words, she had a vague hope that her lover might come back to her even though he might again forsake her. So she told the sea to leave her to herself.

The Woman’s Final Decision

Then, once more turning away from the sea, the woman said that the sea could wait and that she was not yet prepared to drown herself in it. And next she spoke in her imagination to her absent lover and told him that the sea-waves were rushing violently towards the seashore, wanting to drown her. She had been resisting the sea’s invitation but she could not go on resisting it forever. Thus, the woman’s monologue ends with her intention soon to give a practical shape to her desire to commit suicide.

“The Sunshine Cat' by Kamala Das: Summary and Analysis

The Persona’s Feeling of Complete Disillusionment

 The persona in this poem describes her sexual experiences with her husband and with other men, and expresses her feeling of complete disillusionment with all her sexual partners. The persona is most probably Kamala Das herself; and she tells us that, though she had originally loved her husband in the hope that he would love her too, she no longer loves him because he proved to be a selfish man and a coward. Her husband did not love her at all and did not even make use of her as a sexual partner in the right manner. Her husband showed himself to be a keen and relentless observer when, in sheer desperation, she acquired other lovers and went to bed with them.

The Persona’s Failure to Win the “Love” of Any of Her Sexual Partners

 

 It was her disgust with her husband which drove the poetess to have extra-marital love –affairs. But even these other men, with whom she slept, proved to be most disappointing because of their selfish attitude towards love-making. She did her utmost to excite some genuine feeling in those other lovers by clinging to their bosoms on which there was a thick growth of hair; and she clung to their bosoms as if wanting to hide her face in their hair. Those lovers were younger than she herself, and she tried to make them forget everything expect the act of love-making. But each of them told her that he could not “love” her though he could be “kind” towards her. Thus even they provided her with no real satisfaction, and she could only shed tears over her disappointment. She was not even able to enjoy any sound sleep because of her disappointment with those lovers. She wept so profusely that she could have built walls with her tears, walls to hold her like a prisoner.

Her Husband’s Cruelty to Her

 

The poetess’s husband was so cruel to her that he used to lock her in a room containing books every morning and used to unlock the room only when he returned home in the evenings. A ray of sunshine fell at the door of that room; and this ray of sunshine was the only company she had. That ray of sunshine looked like a yellow-coloured cat; and that was the poetess’s only companion. Time passed; and, when winter came, the sun’s ray lost its brightness because of the cloudy skies. The sun’s ray was now reduced only to a thin line, as thin as a hair. And the poetess herself had now become so emaciated and thin because of her chronic depression and despondency that she felt herself to be half-dead and, therefore, no longer an object of sexual desire on the part of any man.

“A Hot Noon in Malabar' by Kamala Das: Summary and Analysis

The poetess recalls some of her experiences in her home in Malabar. She thinks of the hot noon-time when all sorts of persons used to pass her home and to pause and to stop there in order to sell the wares which they carried from place to place. She first thinks of the beggars who used to come to her house to beg alms in their characteristic voices expressive of their discontent with life and their need for charity. 

Then she thinks of the men who came from the hills with parrots in a cage and fortune-cards, all stained because of the long time during which those cards had been used again and again. She thinks of the brown-complexioned girls who belonged to the class of basket-makers and manufacturers of bird-catching traps. These girls were palm-readers who offered, in their monotonous voices, to read the palms of those who wanted their fortunes told on the basis of the lines on their palms. 

 

The poetess then recalls the bangle-sellers who had walked miles and miles of the dusty roads in order to sell their bangles of various colours (red, green and blue). Next, she thinks of the strangers who used to come and peep into her house through the window-curtains but were unable to see anything because the rooms of the house were dark while their eyes carried the heat and the brightness of sunlight in them. The strangers were suspicious about how they might be received and what treatment they might get from the inmates of the house. These strangers remained silent most of the time but, when they spoke, they did so in voices which were wild like the sounds that are heard in a jungle. 

 

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The poetess then expresses the view that noon-time in Malabar was not only a time for the visits of wild men but also for wild thoughts to enter her mind, and for a wild desire for love-making to arise in her mind. The poetess laments the fact that she is now living so far away from her Malabar home. She experiences an intense longing to go back there and to look at all those men at whom she used to look during her life there. The feeling that she is now so far away from that home is a torture to her.

“My Grandmother's House' by Kamala Das: Summary and Analysis

The Poetess’s Recollection of Her Childhood in Her Grandmother’s House

 The poetess recalls the house where she once used to live with her grandmother who was quite fond of her and from whom she used to receive a lot of love. The grandmother had died; and the house had then ceased to be inhabited by anybody. The poetess was in those days a little girl and did not even know how to read the books which lay in the house. The death of her grandmother had robbed the little girl of her capacity to feel. It had seemed to her that the blood in her veins was no longer warm but had turned cold, as cold as the moon.

The Deserted House After the Grandmother’s Death

 The poetess now often thinks of going to that house in order to look at the things inside it through the windows; but the windows being closed she would not be able to see anything lying inside, and would be able only to experience a feeling of utter hopeless, and then to gather some of the darkness from that place and bring it with her to her bedroom where she would merely lie down to meditate upon her memories of the past.

The poetess’s Desperate Need of Love

Addressing her husband, Kamala Das says that he would perhaps not be able to believe that she had lived in such a house, had felt proud of herself, and had received the love of someone (namely her grandmother). She tells her life and because she no longer receives any love from anybody. Now she seeks love like a beggar from strangers; and she would feel consoled even if she gets a small measure of love from somebody.

 

The Old Playhouse by Kamala Das: Summary and Analysis

The Old Playhouse, published in 1973 in The Old Playhouse and Other Poems, is a poem of protest against patriarchy in which  Kamala Das voices against the domination of the male and the consequent dwarfing of the female. The poetess expresses the common expectations of the male-dominated Indian society. In a male-dominated society, a woman is expected to play certain conventional roles, and her own wishes and aspirations are not taken into account. 

The poem is written in the first-person point of view. The persona in this poem is a woman, who gives an account of her unsatisfactory and disappointing conjugal life with her husband. She compares herself to a swallow and her husband a captor who wanted to tame her and keep her fully under his control by the power of his love-making.

 

The husband wanted to make her forget all those comforts which she might have enjoyed in her home before being married; but, in addition to that , he wanted also make her forget her very nature and her innate love of freedom by keeping her in a state of subjection to him. 

The speaker says that she had come to her husband with a view to developing her own personality. But all she has had from her husband are lesson about him. Her husband, who is a self-centered person, makes love with her and he feels pleased by her bodily response to his love-making. He approves her state of mind and her mood when he makes love to her and he feels pleased by the tremors of her body during the sexual union. 

He, however, fails to understand that her response to his love-making is purely physical and ,therefore, superficial because she never experiences any feeling of oneness with him. According to the speaker, the notions of love and affection mean nothing to her husband. To him she is nothing but a plaything, a sexual partner and a housewife. In the course of the sexual union, he kisses her very hard , pressing his lips against hers and letting his saliva flow into her mouth. He presses his whole body against hers with great vehemence ,gratifying his sexual desire in this process. 

In this physical union, her husband is successful as he is able to penetrate every part of her body and make his bodily fluids mingle with hers. But he never realizes that she is still   emotionally unsatisfied and hungry. In the emotional and spiritual sense, he completely fails. 

The Old Playhouse

You planned to tame a swallow, to hold her
In the long summer of your love so that she would forget
Not the raw seasons alone, and the homes left behind, but
Also her nature, the urge to fly, and the endless
Pathways of the sky. It was not to gather knowledge
Of yet another man that I came to you but to learn
What I was, and by learning, to learn to grow, but every
Lesson you gave was about yourself. You were pleased
With my body's response, its weather, its usual shallow
Convulsions. You dribbled spittle into my mouth, you poured
Yourself into every nook and cranny, you embalmed
My poor lust with your bitter-sweet juices. You called me wife,
I was taught to break saccharine into your tea and
To offer at the right moment the vitamins. Cowering
Beneath your monstrous ego I ate the magic loaf and
Became a dwarf. I lost my will and reason, to all your
Questions I mumbled incoherent replies. The summer
Begins to pall. I remember the rudder breezes
Of the fall and the smoke from the burning leaves. Your room is
Always lit by artificial lights, your windows always
Shut. Even the air-conditioner helps so little,
All pervasive is the male scent of your breath. The cut flowers
In the vases have begun to smell of human sweat. There is
No more singing, no more dance, my mind is an old
Playhouse with all its lights put out. The strong man's technique is
Always the same, he serves his love in lethal doses,
For, love is Narcissus at the water's edge, haunted
By its own lonely face, and yet it must seek at last
An end, a pure, total freedom, it must will the mirrors
To shatter and the kind night to erase the water.

'The Freaks' by Kamala Das: Summary and Analysis

The Freaks by Kamala Das

He talks, turning a sun-stained

Cheek to me, his mouth, a dark

Cavern, where stalactites of

Uneven teeth gleam, his right

Hand on my knee, while our minds

Are willed to race towards love;

But they only wander, tripping

Idly over puddles of

Desire……. Can this man with

Nimble finger-tips unleash

Nothing more alive than the

Skin’s lazy hungers? Who can

Help us who has live so long

And have failed in love? The heart,

An empty cistern, waiting

Through long hours, fills itself

With coiling snakes of silence……..

I am freak.  It’s only

To save my face, I flaunt, at

Times, a grand, flamboyant lust.

Summary:

'The Freaks', a short lyric written in the confessional manner, is written in the first person point of view. The poem gives expression to a the speaker's (the poetess) feelings as she lies in bed with her husband, when both of them are waiting for the commencement of their physical intimacy. Though they are waiting for their physcial union, the female partner is a bit disgusted and scared. She finds her husband to be rather slow in moving his fingers over her body in order to enjoy the sensation of his contact with her. 

The poetess thinks that her partner is not passionate enough or not skilful enough to be able to arouse in her a really intense desire for sexual union. She then realizes that her marriage with this man had failed and that , even though they have lived together for a long time , they vane not really been able to achieve any conjugal happiness. She thinks herself unhappy and feels the 'coiling snakes of silence' or emptiness in her heart. At the end, she calls herself a freak or abnormal person who makes a show of being lustful in order that she may be regarded as a normal person.   

Analysis:

Kamala looks very determined to revolt against the conventional society’s definition of womanhood. Even she challenges the traditional sex roles. In many of her poems, she brings out the emotional emptiness and sterility of married life and the intensity of misery of the wife who surrenders to her husband who is repulsive, and with whom she has no emotional contact at all. 

The poem 'The Freaks' begins with a slow movement,representing her indifference to sex and ends on a n impulsive note, in keeping with the compromise. She must not only surrender herself to his love making however she hates it, she must also pretend to like it. Her self-respect insists it; the social customs require it. This is a male dominated world.

A married woman cannot articulate her voice to the filth of her experience. She must follow the social rules which man has made in a world. She is his subordinate, his property, an object; she has no right to raise her voice. Kamala Das`s poetry proves that Indian woman has irritated the typical male sense of courtesy and modesty. Kamala Das initiates a new age for woman poets by accepting new idiom, a new standard and new way of expression which reflects a entire denial of the conventional form of poetic expression of the male dominant culture.

Kamala Das is honest and at times full of anger when she projects andattacks on male domination. She is a poet of the modern Indian woman, giving expression to it more openly than any other Indian woman poet.

The motivating force of her notion is love that is frustrating experience. All her efforts to establish meaningful relations with other show to be fruitless. In Freaks, poet depicts the disappointment, senselessness and the torment of a woman who longs for true love but it is denied by her husband who is insensible to her psychological desires. She is revolted by cruelty of her companion. She feels trapped by her male ego. Therefore she refused to play the traditional role as a wife. It is natural that her poems represent a rebellion against male dominated social system .It shows that in a male dominated world she has courage to emphasis her feminine sensibility and to revolt against the system. She is proud of her femininity and does not fail to claim it.

She is conscious of a primary need for true love, psychological need and a desire for liberty within the family system. In this sense, she is truly liberated woman and a representative of modern woman who identify her right to sexual fulfillment and psychological security.

'Dance of the Eunuchs' by Kamala Das: A Short Summary and Analysis

The Dance of the Eunuchs

It was hot, so hot, before the eunuchs came
To dance, wide skirts going round and round, cymbals
Richly clashing, and anklets jingling, jingling
Jingling... Beneath the fiery gulmohur, with
Long braids flying, dark eyes flashing, they danced and
They dance, oh, they danced till they bled... There were green
Tattoos on their cheeks, jasmines in their hair, some
Were dark and some were almost fair. Their voices
Were harsh, their songs melancholy; they sang of
Lovers dying and or children left unborn....
Some beat their drums; others beat their sorry breasts
And wailed, and writhed in vacant ecstasy. They
Were thin in limbs and dry; like half-burnt logs from
Funeral pyres, a drought and a rottenness
Were in each of them. Even the crows were so
Silent on trees, and the children wide-eyed, still;
All were watching these poor creatures' convulsions
The sky crackled then, thunder came, and lightning
And rain, a meagre rain that smelt of dust in
Attics and the urine of lizards and mice....

Included in the collection Summer in Calcutta(1965), 'Dance of the Eunuchs' is one of the most remarkable poems of Kamala Das. This is another autobiographical poem written in confessional style that symbolically portrays the poetess's personal melancholy in her own life. 

'Dance of the Eunuchs' vividly conjures up the atmosphere of a hot, tortured, corrupt, sterile and barren world through vivid symbols and images. The dance of the eunuchs whose joyless life reflects the poet‘s fractured personality is a noticeable piece of autobiographical poetry. Kamala Das has vividly visualized the world of ―vacant ecstasy and sterility through numerous functional images and symbols in her poetry. In fact Eunuchs try to eke out a livelihood by dancing. Their dancing is mechanical and painful. The conditions and the climate are forbidding. The spectators are merciless. Even God seems to add their woes. The eunuchs‘ voices are harsh and their songs are full of melancholy. The themes of the songs are those of lovers dying and children left unborn. Some beat their drums while others beat their flat breasts and wept. The joy on their faces is only a mask as they writhe in pain and their faces are really vacant. The atmosphere of heat and sterility is, first of all, expressed through ―fiery gulmohur‖ and ―the jasmines in, their hair‖ could not provide them with a soothing effect. 

The image of ―'Their sour breasts' again suggests their sterility and barrenness because they belong to neither sex. They are destined to remain unfulfilled. In fact their personality reflects the psychological outburst of the poet. It can be examined on the lines of abjection theory developed by Julia Kristeva ―The abject is that which is rejected by social reason- the communal consensus that underpins a social order . ―The abject exists accordingly somewhere between the concept of an object and the concept of the subject representing taboo elements of the self barely separated off in a liminal space.

 According to Julia Kristeva- ―The abject is situated outside the symbolic order, being forced to face it is an inherently traumatic experience, as with the repulsion presented by confrontation with  filth, waste or a corpse- an object which is violently cast out of the cultural world, having once been a subject'' Similarly the highly suggestive images of: …………………… a meager rain that smelt of dust in Attics and the urine of lizards and mice….highlight the depressed and dejected mental state of Kamala Das. According to Kristeva‘s theory of abjection, fear is the dominant/operative word. Making a connection between language and phobia, Kristeva claims that ―phobia does not disappear but slides beneath language and ―any practice of speech, in as much as it involves writing, is a language of fear.

 Similarly the heightened sensibilities of the poet through the picturisation of

the external factors forge the image of the psychological state of the poet herself. ―It is a poem that successfully delineates the contrast between the superficial joy and the inner depravity. The eunuchs become the objective correlative of suppressed desires.

'Nani' by Kamala Das: A Short Introduction

Nani

Nani the pregnant maid hanged herself
In the privy one day. For three long hours
Until the police came, she was hanging there
A clumsy puppet, and when the wind blew
Turning her gently on the rope, it seemed
To us who were children then, that Nani
Was doing, to delight us, a comic
Dance.....The shrubs grew fast. Before the summer’s end,
The yellow flowers had hugged the doorway
and the walls. The privy, so abandoned,
Became an altar then, a lonely shrine
For a goddess who was dead.

Another
Year or two, and, I asked my grandmother
One day, don’t you remember Nani, the dark
Plump one who bathed me near the well? Grandmother
Shifted the reading glasses on her nose
And stared at me. Nani, she asked, who is she?
With that question ended Nani. Each truth
Ends thus with a query. It is this designated
Deafness that turns mortality into
Immortality, the definite into
The soft indefinite. They are lucky
Who ask questions and move on before
The answers come, those wise ones who reside
In a blue silent zone, unscratched by doubts
For theirs is the clotted peace embedded
In life, like music in the Koel’s egg,
Like lust in the blood, or like the sap in a tree....

Nani, the maid servant, commits suicide by hanging. The poet who was a child at that time imagines as the dead body turns round on the rope that she (the maid servant) was doing, to delight us a comic dance. In course of tie the poet’s grandmother forgets all about Nany but Kamala Das does not. Perhaps the old woman does not want the child’s mind to be haunted by the thoughts about the dead. The ‘deafness’ on the part of the grand mother is designed as it is also a conscious attempt to forget the dead. Paradoxically the deliberate attempt to forget all that is unpleasant in life makes us all the more conscious of it. The very act of forgetting leads us to the reality of remembrance which cannot be easily put out of our minds. She emphasizes that “a truth forgotten, a fact overlooked is what makes the truth doubly memorable”. It is this “designed deafness” the turns “morality into immorality” the “definite” into the “soft indefinite”