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Journalism of Courage
A clue as to what the poet Jonaki Ray intends with Firefly Memories, her poetry collection, is in the title itself. Each poem in this book is lit from within, powered by recollections from the vast canvas of the past — her own and that of all humanity — bringing with them little spots of illumination, much like fireflies on a dark night. Neither the poems, nor the fireflies can dispel the darkness entirely, but one can still find in them some respite and beauty.
This slim volume is divided into four parts. The first and the last draw upon Ray’s own life and that of her family, while the middle section of the book is inspired by observations from her travels. It is an interesting structure — rising from the familiar to range over the larger, more unknown world and finding, or hoping to find, some connection to the known, before finally returning, in a sense, to home base.
This structure has resonance with the overall theme of the book, of what it means to belong or not, of how one finds and loses connections. The experience of migrants, legal and illegal, and refugees is directly described in poems such as ‘The Secret to a Good Biryani’ and ‘Two Hundred Thousand’. In the former, an uprooted South Asian, homesick for maa ke haath ka khaana, tries to recreate the flavours she grew up with. As the trope most associated with memory, food is easy to fall back on, but the parallels that Ray suggests between the process of cooking biryani and the attempts that an immigrant might make to integrate in a foreign land are both surprising and astute. The invocation of saffron, cardamom, ghee etc — bringing instantly to mind the unique sensory pleasures that each presents — blunts the often sharp edges of an all too familiar sense of loss. ‘Two Hundred Thousand’, on the other hand, is much starker in the images it conjures up, recounting the often dehumanising treatment that is meted out to refugees, illegal immigrants or deportees in the liberal west: “Undress. Bend. Spread your legs/ Squat. Cough. Spread your legs more/ Answer questions; Why are you here?/ Never receive answers: Why am I here?”
While there is a greater rawness of emotion in these poems, Ray’s ambition soars in the middle section, as she draws connections between different places and memories, slowly weaving a tapestry of displacement, grief and violence that envelops the world. Ray succeeds in bringing out both a common history of strife and of humanity.
