MIT International Journal of English Language & Literature, Vol. 2, No. 1, January 2015, pp. 33–38
ISSN 2347-9779 © MIT Publications
33
The Confessional Element and Tone in
Kamala Das’ Poetry
Dr. Sushil Kumar Mishra
Associate Professor & HOD of English
SRM University Sonepat, Haryana, India
Abstract
Indian poetry in English obviously began under a curious historical accident namely the arrival of the Britishers
and their gradual mastery of the Indian people under the annexation of India by a law of parliament in Britain.
However, a small group of Indians used language for poetry and for creative purposes. As a matter of fact, since
the sixties Indo-Anglian poetry has acquired a new character and a distinct voice of its own. Poets like Jayanta
Mahapatra, A.K. Ramanujan, R. Parthasarathy, A.K. Mehrotra, Arun Kolatkar, Gieve Patel and Kamala Das
are some of the well-known new poets who have won name and fame abroad and in our own country as well.
Kamala Das is perhaps the most interesting and controversial figure in post colonial Indian English poetry.
She writes with frankness and openness unusual in Indian context. Her personal experiences and observations
are depicted in her poetry but those experiences and observations seem to become universal. Her voice also
symbolizes the modern women’s voice who wants to free her from the religious orthodoxy (dos and don’ts).
Being a confessional poet, Kamala Das takes the reader into the world of her private life and unveils the
delicate facts and even the bedroom secrets. A true confessional poet places no barriers between his/her self
and direct expression of that self. Kamala Das does the same, places no barriers and expresses herself without
any restriction.
Keywords: Amazing frankness, boldness and self expression
Introduction
Indian English poetry since 1970 has been characterized by failure, hopes and despair, immediacy and
anger, search and struggle for identity, human relationship and growing sense of dissatisfaction. It is a kind
of strong reaction against romanticism and idealism of its predecessors. It not only tries to establish individuality and reconceptualise values but also tries to redefine culture. Poetry consists of verbal and contextual
features, choice of words (diction), syntactic and semantic features. Kamala Das orients the organization of
these features according to her views on the situation depicted in poetry. Here lies her mode of confession.
Confessional poetry is mostly subjective poetry but it touches upon the general humanities.
Likewise Kamala Das in her well-known poem called “An Introduction” writes a truly confessional
poem which is at once her poetic manifesto and a defence of dignity. She refuses the advice of her friend and
MIT International Journal of English Language & Literature, Vol. 2, No. 1, January 2015, pp. 33–38
ISSN 2347-9779 © MIT Publications
34
critics who restrain her from writing poetry in English because it is a foreign language. Kamala Das’s retort
is typical. “The language I speak becomes mine its distortion, its queerness all mine alone. It is half English,
half Indian, funny perhaps” She defends this kind of efforts on something quite honestly, though funny and
it is certainly useful to her. Again in this poem she also expresses her frustration in marital love and justifies
her extra marital relationship with a person who took response to her urges. “I met a man, loved him, called
him not by any name, he is everyman who wants a woman, just as I am every woman who seeks love”. The
poem ends with a confession of her sin: “I am a sinner. I am a saint. I am the beloved and the betrayed”. This
kind of boldness was something new in the Indo-Anglican poetry of the fifties. Kamala Das speaks with rare
courage of her heart, humiliation and loss of identity in the dominated society.
Her compelling originality and freshness strikes everyone as something authentic and genuinely confessional.
Kamala Das first came into notice as a poet of love with her very first volume “ Summer in Calcutta” which
was followed by two more volumes namely “The Descendents” and “The Old Play house” and the other poems.
Kamala Das is basically a poet of love and she writes of her experiences of love, frustration as well as sense
of satisfaction with genuine intensity and command over the verse technique and language. One common
feature in Kamala’s poetry is her amazing frankness and uninhabited self-expression. She mirrors her life in
all its nakedness particularly the oft-experienced horrors as well as the rare joys of love. In one of her well
–known poems ‘Compositions’, She remarks with amazing frankness that when she got married, her husband
promised her a lot of freedom but these were just empty words. And finally she came to the conclusion for such
questions, probably there are no answers, the answer must emerge from within”. And hence the poem ends
with a sense of shock as well as true self-realisation of her individual status as the house –wife level-love “I
no longer need with tenderness, I am most contented”. In many of her poems, the note of discontentment is
pronounced and she blames her insensitive husband for her failure because he was only interested in her body.
As she complains “ You are pleased with my body’s response, its weather, its usual swallow convulsion.........
you embalmed my poor lust with your bitter sweet voices.” As a matter of fact, in many of her poems she
shows her intense consciousness of her feminine self and a sense of hurt in a manmade world. However, in a
well known poems “Love” she shows that sometimes she found genuine warmth in shared love:
“I found you.
I wrote verse, drew picture.
And went out with friend, for walk.”
This experience relates to her previous phase when she was denied love but when love was shared and
reciprocated, she had a different kind of experience:
“Now that love you...... like an old mongrel, my life lies content in you.”
But in some poems at least, lust is transformed into filial love and the poetess celebrates the birth of her son
and her duties as a mother for the future of her son. The poem in question are “Jai Surya” and “Afterwards”.
In some of her poerms Kamala Das writes about other issues such as “The House of Her Grandmother” where
she receives love in abundance from the grand old lady.
Confessional Poetry: Its Origin and Features
Kamala Das is undoubtedly a confessional poet and in this respect she may be regarded an outstanding
Indian English Poet. Confessional mode of writing has origin in mid 50s in America. John Berryman, Robert
Lowell, Anni Sexton, Sylvia Plath are its chief exponents. Confessional poetry is hybrid mode of poetry that
comes to existence as a consequence of the popularization of the psychological studies. Confessional poetry
MIT International Journal of English Language & Literature, Vol. 2, No. 1, January 2015, pp. 33–38
ISSN 2347-9779 © MIT Publications
35
means objective, analytical or even clinical observations of incidents from one`s life. Confessional poets
see themselves as victims and heroes, suffer through their sensitivity and are heroic in their suffering which
renders a peculiar tone– nervous and hardboiled, sullen and self-pitying the nervous breakdown often ending
up in suicide. Confessional poetry springs from the need to confess and so each poem cast in this mode is in
some way, according to Robert Phillips, “a declaration of dependence” or of guilt or of anguish and suffering.
Kamala Das as a Confessional Poet
Being a confessional poet Kamala Das takes the reader into the world of her personal and private life and
unveils the delicate facts and even the bed room secrets. The themes of most of her poems are love or lust
and marriage. In dealing with these themes, she hides nothing. The orthodox reader would even accuse her of
being immodest, shameless in the use of language through which she lay the secrets of her private life. Naik
(1982) in his History of Indian English Literature writes:
The most obvious (And to the casual reader colorful) feature is of Kamala Das’s poetry is the uninhibited
frankness with which she talks about sex, referring, non-chalantly to the musk of sweat between the breasts,
‘the warm shock of menstrual blood and even my pubis’. Though her poetry seems to be a desperate with
love and lust it is also poetry of introspection of self-analysis of explanation and of self revelation. ‘An
Introduction’, ‘The Freaks’, ‘The Old Playhouse’, ‘The Looking Glass’, etc. are some of the poems in which
the wounded self is delineated.
The confessional mode in ‘An Introduction’ does not hinder its development from personal to general. The
poem deals with poet’s strong feminine sensibility. Prasad (1983) rightly remarks: The poem begins with
the dilemma of Language and ends with an assertion of identity. It explores the crust of the poet’s self who
is an individual women. It is frankly confessional, terrifying authentic and exclusively an articulate voice of
the feminine sensibility. The poem is turbulently, quite unconcerned with the objective world of nature. ‘An
Introduction’ is one of the best examples of autobiographical and confessional poems. The poet sketches
growing from child to women-how she becomes young and how her limbs swell. The poet reveals that her
early marriage seems to have given a rude jolt to the sensibility as a woman. The later part of the poem is a
mild satire on male attitudes and conventional gender role assigned to a wife in terms of the dos and don’ts.
From this the rest of the poem follows as a mild protest of a women who very much wishes to have an identity
of her own and earnestly seeks it. Finally Kamala Das describes herself in the following lines:
“.......................I am sinner
I am saint, I am beloved and the betrayed. I have no joys which are not yours .no
Aches which are not yours. I too call myself I”
She seems to be no different from other human beings, that like every other human beings she is sometimes
sinful and sometimes pious. Kamala Das acknowledges her failures to achieve a required dimension in manwomen relationship. Her criticism of man is appropriate because she does not find an equal response from the
man. For instance, in her poem ‘The Freaks’ which is also confessional in nature and tone, the poet presents
the man-woman relationship. The man is only worried about his physical needs. The shallowness of man’s
nature hurts women’s emotional urge all the time. The poet writes in the beginning of the poem:
“He talks, turning a sun-sustained.
Cheek to me, his mouth a dark
Cavern, where stalactites of
MIT International Journal of English Language & Literature, Vol. 2, No. 1, January 2015, pp. 33–38
ISSN 2347-9779 © MIT Publications
36
Uneven teeth gleams his right
Hand on my knee, while our minds.
Are coiled to race towards Love,
But they only wander, tripping, idly over puddles of
Desire.....................................................”
The words and phrases used and employed in the above lines are noteworthy as being very effective in
conveying the poet’s reaction of disgust to her lover, may be her husband. At the end of the poem the poet
also calls herself a freak– meaning an abnormal kind of person or unnatural creature.
“.........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
Time, a grand flamboyant lust.”
The poet’s feminine sensibility influences her poetic outlook as well as poetic world. Her voice becomes so
powerful in her poems that she seems to be a mouthpiece of feminine movement in India. ‘The Old Playhouse’
presents the pathetic and gloomy condition of a girl in different manner. The protagonist compares herself to
a swallow (bird). Her husband wanted to tame her and keep her fully under his control by the power of his
love making.
He wanted to forget all those comforts and even her very nature. We have typical picture of male-dominated
society in this poem. The wife is victim of her husband’s ego and false vanity she is quite busy in arranging
her husband’s daily routine. She has no time to look after own ambitions and pleasures. Finally, the poet deals
with the alienation and suffering of the women in the hands of the man. The protagonist feels that her freedom
is encroached. Her life is supposed to be the old playhouse where there is no light. The poet concludes the
poem in superb manner: There is no more signing, no more dance. My mind is an old playhouse with all its
lights put out. In ‘The Looking Glass’, the poet has presented utter sense of despair and dejection caused by
man’s dominance and exploitation. In the very beginning of the poem the poet presents the comparison of
man and woman in physical terms. The poet uses the image of mirror and writes:
Getting a man to love you is easy
Only be honest about your wants as
Women stand nude before the glass with him.
So that he sees himself the stronger one.
And believes it so, and you so much more.
Softer, younger lovelier ...
The poet does not hide anything and her voice is candid and direct. She describes without hesitation the man’s
limb and his way of urination on one hand, the picture of breast and shock of the menstrual blood. The poet
MIT International Journal of English Language & Literature, Vol. 2, No. 1, January 2015, pp. 33–38
ISSN 2347-9779 © MIT Publications
37
also stresses the fact that it is impossible to live without love. Love is the essence of human life and human
existence. Kamala Das may or may not be serious about women’s emancipation from male domination, but
as a poet she is seriously and creatively concerned with her own identity as a women. Kamala Das’s treatment
of the subject of sex is indeed astonishing and her observation in this respect are undoubtedly based upon
her sexual experiences with men. Falling in love is easy but it is too difficult to maintain the same warmness
and magnitude. Kamala Das’s poetry has a strong note of subjectivism-the same sort of subjectivism as we
witness in the Romantic poets of England (in Shelley and Keats particularly) The poet is mostly concerned
with herself as a victim of circumstance and sexual humiliations. All her poetry is an expression of her private
experience in matters of love and sex. There is a strong autobiographical touch in the poems of Kamala Das.
The lengthy poem ‘Composition’, ‘The Suicide’, also abound in personal emotions and assumed roles, herein
Kamala Das says:
“What I am able to give
Is only what your wife is qualified to give
We are all alike,
We women in wrappings of hairless skin.”
Confessional poetry sounds so appealing and so convicting. It frequently takes resorts to personal failures
and mental illness of its composer. ‘The Sunshine Cat’ is a poem of her mental illness in the company of a
cruel husband, in it we have:
“Her husband shut her in,
Locked in a room of books
With a streak of sunshine
Lying near the door. . . ..
When He returned to take her out she was a cold and
Half dead woman now of no use at all to men.”
While dealing with confessional poetry we should also take into account that a confessional poet often writes
about death, disease and destruction, Mrs. Das’s story has also been a story of recurrent attackers of diseases
and illness. Her illness makes her too weak and she looks thin and pale. In her autobiography we have several
accounts of illness. In chapter 40 of her autobiography, given as under:
“I had lost during that illness the resemblance to/anything human. I looked like a mounting bird. My skin had
turned dark and scaly. My voice had thinned to a whisper .... My little son was frightened of my looks and burst
out crying. My second son tried for several days to rub mustard oil on my scaly legs to make me normal again.”
She has written some poems on delay, disease and death. ‘Winter’, ‘The End of Spring’, ‘Too Early the Autumn
Sights’ are some of the examples of this kind. In ‘The Suicide’, the poetess expresses her desire to die when
she is unable to find true love she says:
“O sea, I am fed up
I want to be simple
I want to be loved
And
If love is not to be had
I want to be dead.”
MIT International Journal of English Language & Literature, Vol. 2, No. 1, January 2015, pp. 33–38
ISSN 2347-9779 © MIT Publications
38
Conclusion
In conclusion, I would like to reiterate that Kamala Das has justly been labelled as a confessional poetess.
In support of this Iqbal Kaur’s views about Kamala Das are really noteworthy. Iqbal Kaur, one of the best
critics on Kamala Das spent three days with Kamala Das in Malabar. He tells us that the term “confessional”
for Kamala Das’s poetry is perfectly appropriate because she frankly and frequently confesses in her poetry
a large number of things exclusively related to her own self. Kamala Das really dissects and probes her own
female psyche, and her ‘self’ emerges powerfully in her poetry. In her intensely confessional tone, she gives
us descriptions of her bodily experiences, her jobs and failures in love.
Last but not the least; Indian English poets refer to a variety of modes ranging from simple melancholy to
bitter disappointment. If frustration in love is the root cause of pervasive melancholy in Kamala Das’s poetry,
the existential agony of the modern man remains Shiv Kumar’s major concern. Similarly Daruwalla’s poetry
is a graphic description of communal violence and note of melancholy originating from different causes.
Works Cited
1. Atwood, Margaret. Surfacing. New York: Fawcett Crest Books, 1972.
2. Diamond, Irene and Orestein, Gloria Feman.Eds. Reweaving the World (The Emergence of Ecofeminism)
San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1990.
3. Devine, Maureen. Woman and Nature (Literary Reconceptualisations) Metuchen, N.J. and London: The
Press, Inc.1992.
Scarecrow
4. Hellor, Arno. ‘Margaret Atwood’s Ecological Vision’ Nationalism v. Internationalism: (Inter)National Dimensions
of Literatures in English. Eds. Wolfgang Zach, and Ken. L. Goodwin. Tubingen: Strauffenberg,1996: pp. 313-18.
5. Kapra, Fritj of The Turning Point: Science, Society and The Rising Culture. New York: Bantam Books,1982.
6. Mac Gregor, Sherylin. Beyond Mothering Earth (Ecological Citizenship and the Politics of Care) Vancouver:UBS
Press, 2006.
7. Ozdemir, Erinc. Power, Madness and Gender Identity in Surfacing: A Feminist Reading. English Studies, 2003, 1.
pp. 57-79.
8. Parker, Emma. ‘You are what you eat: The Politics of Eating in Margaret Atwood. Twentieth Century Literature.
41.3,1995. pp. 349-69.
9. Tolan, Fiona. Margaret Atwood: Feminism and Fiction, Amsterdam, NLD: Rodopi, 2007.