This week's poem, "Beware," comes from Shanta Acharya's fifth poetry collection, Dreams that Spell the Light, published by Arc in 2010.
Shanta Acharya was born in Cuttack and educated in India, Britain and the US. She has lived and worked in all three countries, and is currently based in London. "Beware", a poem in two parts, reflects lucidly on the complicated differences and resemblances of two unidentified, partly symbolic "nations".
A sensuous and colourful writer, Acharya here limits herself to a minimum of figurative language. The poem is presented with the clarity of a black-and-white movie, though not the nostalgia. Although the societies are seen as distinct, the ideas about their structure are balanced playfully and conjecturally, avoiding simple thesis and antithesis. The experience of living in either nation seems precarious, but in neither are the disadvantages or advantages quite predictable. The poem offers no conventional wisdom about the blessings of democracy.
Clearly, one country is poor and the other rich, a situation signalled by the absence or "surfeit" of price tags and street signs. Another possible interpretation is that the two nations are one and the same, divided according to the observer's vantage-point. The rich and poor may experience different economic laws operating in neighbouring streets. The lack of price tags (and goods) also brings to mind some old Soviet bloc economy, with its striking, and, for a western visitor, rather beautiful absence of advertising. Secretly acquired skills of barter were vital to survival in such economies. In fact, skills themselves could be the objects of barter.
Information is what's bartered by the people in the poem. There's an interesting ambiguity abut the phrase "intelligence gathering" because, earlier, intelligence is related to cognitive talent ("It could also be that the people are simply super-intelligent"). Perhaps "intelligence" connects cognition to sedition. Psychic ability is also part of the intriguing mix.
The poem doesn't question the desirability of freedom of information, but it knows this is not the only freedom. To be uncertain whether you're coming and going is to be utterly confused, and the people in the last stanza of the first section, unlike the crowd in the second, "coolly coming and going", lack the well-mapped paths of a stable society. But there seems to be a creative dimension to their confusion. It has its own internal logic, emphasised by the internal rhymes, flowing, going, knowing. There remains a kind of exuberance in the way the people, forced to think everything out for themselves, conduct their business. And, later, it will be suggested that those who "coolly" assume they know what's going on are the most deceived.
The superficially more privileged society of the second part is still one with "no real Freedom of Information". Its sinister governance opposes "communication" and "social cohesion". The politician's utopian clichés conceal their opposite. This experiment deliberately flatters complacency. Surprisingly, like the less-privileged people in the first poem, these citizens "remain illiterate…" Perhaps this illiteracy is metaphorical. Or perhaps the poem is showing us a cynically under-educated population, deprived of the verbal skills that would allow it to challenge its rulers.
The tone is ironic in both portraits. The speaker knows that probably neither society represents a "massive experiment in progress" (and this, of course, rules out the likelihood of an ex-communist country in the first section). But the phrase plants the idea that manipulation of other kinds is going on.
Perhaps the biggest irony, in both poems, is the preludial warning, "Beware of living in a nation/ with…"(etc.) The tone is knowingly hollow. Most people, even the better-off, have limited choice over the nation they inhabit, and no one chooses where to be born. Yet there's no question that we are moulded by our rulers, even in the degree and kind of intellectual power we acquire.
"Beware" is a poem of ideas. There are many questions circling and threading through its lines as the speaker, apparently even-handed, weighs up the putative "experiments in progress". The first society, with its stress on genuine "intelligence gathering" as opposed to "information processing" offers more hope, but, if it flourishes, how will it avoid turning into the second? The very structure of the poem underlines that possibility.
For both governments, it seems that anything goes as long as "it keeps the economy flowing". The only hope is that people, confused or confident, rich or poor, recognise and resist any authority that tries, whether through tyranny or cosseting, to suppress their independent-mindedness. It's a timely warning, and always has been. Perhaps we should at least be glad that, during an economic crisis, there's little hope of excessive comfort – except for the excessively comfortable. Anyone for revolution?
Beware
I
Beware of living in a nation
with no road signs or price tags in shops
and certainly no Freedom of Information.
It could be a massive experiment in progress
by the rulers to improve verbal communication,
as the government is bankrupt and its people illiterate.
It could also be that the people are simply super-intelligent,
psychic, lateral thinkers who excel in problem solving
and instinctively know how to figure things out.
It possibly encourages enterprise and intelligence gathering
as individuals ferret out ways of bartering information.
It certainly keeps the economy flowing, and prevents people
from knowing whether they are coming or going.
II
Beware of living in a nation
with a surfeit of street signs and price tags in shops
but still no real Freedom of Information.
It could be a massive experiment in progress
by the rulers to discourage communication
among its citizens for fear of increasing social cohesion.
It could also be that people lack intelligence,
always in need of nurture; someone to hold their hand
as they remain illiterate and incapable of figuring things out.
It discourages enterprise and any form of self-knowing,
engaged perpetually in information processing,
leaving little time and energy for thinking.
It keeps the economy flowing, gives people the illusion
they are in control of their lives, coolly coming and going.