Laura Marling, Faiz Ahmed Faiz and the Ghost of Forgotten Lovers Who Left Some Lines for Their Grave

  

I identify myself as a ‘he’, although there is a dilemma in me as a reader or a listener – or probably more, someone who is seeking convalescence through words and silence, through the violence and mendicancy of the aural hues of music, someone who, as Bhaskar Chakrabarty would have said, arrives at the doctor’s chamber before the doctor shows up and waits silently. But no, this is not about personal maladies, but about personal understanding of literary expressions of maladies. This is about being the silent spectator who observes the poet hiding a lock of her hair in the words like a totem belonging to a primordial past. This is about those who write and let us find our own speech in their calm, turbid howls; and about us, who scavenge through debris of broken lives, ruined civilizations, marred nights of lost moons – expressed in words and melodies – in search of stones and bones. The dilemma is, whenever I try to make a map of my wrinkles and scars in the contours of logoi, I usually relate to poets who are men by gender performance, but somehow not rooted in the phallogocentric dictions which are celebrated as ‘masculine’ in the prejudiced world of rhetorical expressions; or else I relate to poets who are women, whose words are firmly cemented in their battle-worn, quintessentially elaborate femininity. But, what do I intend when I try to put gender binary in the literary logos, the usage of language, the formation of poetic diction? Do I pertain to the enlightenment binaries of emotion/intellect, or do I try to somewhat empower or rather acknowledge the feminine literary canon by assigning a separate cognitive space for it? Probably none of these. Probably I am too afraid of sounding politically incorrect, and lose the apparent progressive self-respect of my cis-male identity, by being too cautious to not declare that perhaps I have been unconsciously trained throughout my journey as a reader/listener to identify expressions of pain as a feminine trait. But haven’t I found wonderful expressions of resistance in the writings of women? I did, but perhaps I have been trained to identify such expressions as ‘masculine’ in my prejudiced understanding? Moreover, why am I trying to write this visibly confusing, superfluous prelude before talking about poetry and songs, like unnecessarily long supermarket bills? What am I trying to sell? Perhaps, this piece of writing, or, perhaps, the very idea of ‘writing’ in a world of speeches? Or perhaps I am trying to delicately include the ‘others’ in the very blanket of ‘feminine’, ‘others’ who may not be categorically defined as ‘others’, but who carry the burden of being an inherent ‘other’ within the pungent embodiment of cis-ness, albeit being emotionally connected to it. Maybe the semiotic multiplicity of ‘writing’ gives them the secret space to hide from the specificity of ‘speech’. A space of one’s own, a space which is unconditionally gendered but not conditional at all.

World of speeches, as it untangles love from the lives of silent little sapiens’, pretend to behave like an exorcist; and most of the time the demon leaves no scars but the home is destroyed – glasses shattered, windows wide open and storms design the neighborhood with broken, upturned crosses, like unholy swords threatening the sky with a dark myth, a heresy so surreptitiously unaddressed that it seems more real than ever. How can a person live to write the tale? What would she wear? An armor or a cassock? Laura Marling wears both. She gracefully remains the woman that she is in her words, but her men become ungendered – her men become a set of values and signs and ideologies which, like the ghosts of love, can possess any person, belonging to any gender as well as belonging to the history of any gender. Some of them were lovers, some of them were fathers and some of them were the holy spirits, caped with an alluring profanity, spread like will-o’-the-wisp over the marshlands of her brumous youth. 

And she writes about letters and rendezvous and unanswered prayers. We, who have always imagined ourselves as the last lovers as we listen to the tender goodbyes of the departing beloved with such a pride that it almost hurts her – try to find where do we belong to the complex narratives of Laura. The seed which falls from the beak of a flying bird, can only know that he is not someone who can fly when roots start to grow. Laura sings:

Forgive me, Hera, I cannot stay
He cut out my tongue, there is nothing to say.
Love me, oh Lord. He threw me away.
He laughed at my sins, in his arms I must stay.

He wrote: I'm broke, please send for me.
But I am broken too, and spoken for, do not tempt me.

Her skin is white, and I'm light as the Sun
So holy light shines on the things you have done.

So, I asked him, how he became this man?
How did he learn to hold fruit in his hands?
And where is the lamb that gave you your name?
He had to leave though I begged him to stay.

Begged him to stay in my cold wooden grip,
Begged him to stay by the light of this ship,
Me fighting him fighting light fighting dawn
The waves came and stole him and took him to war.

He wrote: I'm broke, please send for me.
But I am broken too, and spoken for, do not tempt me.

This is about letters of love and betrayal, coming from an unknown warfront. Is the fall of Troy more heartbreaking than the fall of lovers? When a woman asks her goddess to calm down a demon, she turns into a pagan midwife searching for weeds in the blood-spattered war field – as her daughter needs to get rid of the burning seeds from her gentle puerile womb. Laura’s calm, broken voice, the waltz of melancholy humming in the riverine chords of her guitar, the untainted warmth of the utterings which she believes with all the sanity of her heart – makes us a part of her profound lament, sung in the crescent midnights of Aegean seashore. Her tranquil, moist voice reifies the absurdities of love, and makes them palpable, hurting.    

 

Then, in another song, she talks about a lover. He is lost, buried in the memories of forgetting, mourning the beautiful insanity of heartbreaks.

He walked down a busy street,
Staring solely at his feet,
Clutching pictures of past lovers at his side,
Stood at the table where she sat
And removed his hat
In respect of her presence
Presents her with the pictures and says:
"These are just ghosts that broke my heart before I met you.
These are just ghosts that broke my heart before I met you" 

Laura embraces him with this song. She knows that love is not eternal, and eternity isn’t a blackhole; and Time, although it bends at the will of the universe, might as well be bent at the will or indisposition of little men fallen out of love. She knows that he is afraid of breaking a lover’s heart again, so she says that she doesn’t believe in everlasting love. Maybe she’ll break his heart too, but she also knows, she is the one who has to save her from the past. She needs to drag him out of the oblivion of unresolved closures, so that newer pains can bloom in his lenient heart. She teaches him that, when flowers cut you to the bones, you should learn to stitch with the thorns. Therefore, in a metropolished tone of an ancient healer, she sort-of chants the words of a world that passes by with a wild, pompous élan, a world so swarmed by lives that even memories have to transform into ghosts to respond to its impulses. Her frisky voice quickly increases the rhythm and then at one point the rhythm transcends the apparent harmony to create an organic conversational symphony with the music that slowly penetrates into the song. This is a song of the world, sung to a man who has lost his way into it. This is about impossibility of love, but more about having the courage to live by it.

But eventually she is wounded by dust, and become a ‘master hunter’ who had to cure her skin so that nothing could penetrate inside. And she lets go of the hurt (I don't stare at water anymore,/ Water doesn't do what it did before/ It took me in into the edge of insane when I only meant to swim/ I nearly put a bullet in my brain when the rhythm took me in) and laughs at pretentious torments bestowed by lovers (You're not sad, you look for the blues) by hurling simple statements like javelins made out of raven grass. She lives with her songs. As a woman, she learns to use the tonalities of casual language expressions in her voice as the most powerful weapon against romanticization of the apparent simulation of stability of life in the age of money and machines. It is also interesting to observe how the temperament of her vocal tone changes with the mood of the song: not in an artificial way, but as spontaneously as life teaches us to be brave in love and tries to stop the antichrists from becoming anarchists in an obvious public recurrence of personal history. So, she recalls Dylan, the Ariel of our time, reclaims his ego as a woman and puts it to good use:

You want a woman cause you want to be saved
Well I'll tell you that I got a little lot on my plate
Well if you want a woman who can call your name, it ain't me babe
No, no, no, it ain't me babe               

There is a revenge in it. Bob played the chords of revolution with amorous fingers, and then got played by the very idea of it in a world that devours time to sell little temporal crenelles. Then, one day, he forgot to clip his fingernails. Eventually the sound of his music became warped. Lovers with broken heart began to worship the long, tangled up yellow nails in their pretty little odes to blues. Playful revolutionaries with tattoos, like gypsies with a pamphlet, sat under the shadow of that grotesque asceticism spread like the aerial roots of an old banyan tree, and tried to impress free-spirited women.

Finally, Laura, at the wake of twenty first century, writes him, and writes him back.   

But strangely, this reminds me of another person from another century, another continent, another temperament, another politics, another language and another love. Faiz Ahmed Faiz, the troubadour of an unsurmounted revolution called love, made Iqbal Bano sing this lullaby of lonely lovers:      

My heart, my traveller,
It has been ordained again
That you and I be exiled,
And yell in the streets,
Visit cities after cities
In search of traces
Of a messenger of the love,
Ask every stranger
The way back our lost home 

In the alley of unfamiliar folks
We have to haul the day into night,
We talk to someone now
And then talk to another,
How would I explain you what it is –
The night of grief – a terrible evil;
It would have sufficed me
Had there been any count,
How bad would death have been for me,
Had it visited me once.    

The last two lines are from Ghalib, the messiah of longing. Faiz used his lines after almost a century, and it seemed true more than ever. More so, when Iqbal Bano sings it with her rebellious voice. It sounds like a call to hit the road, the never-ending road to an end that never comes. Unlike Laura, it is not about revenge, it is of comradeship, that transcends idiosyncrasies of gendered self, and empowers the lovers, who dares to take the journey.           

I wonder what this journey is. How this inherent estrangement fuels the travellers to break the relations (producing the idea of ‘self’ in the turbid existentiality of love) pertaining to a decadent emotional economy, and the whole dialectics of longing renders a new understanding of belonging – a complex understanding of the past, not as history but as a game of conformity and insurgence, is born out of it. Would Faiz aver be able to come back home, humming Ghalib in the darkest of nights? Would Laura be able to situate herself in the carnival of love and despair, making blues out of a joke and jostling carelessly with the blues, Dylan’s Blues? I wonder what the journey is, but it has to be taken, nonetheless. Even if one chooses not to, the journey eventually chooses the traveller. Not taking the journey, at that point, eventually becomes the journey of a lifetime.

 

Songs:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rm3uMGfIj2E

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I-vbyIkkHiQ   

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fO2gm29rI7E

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y4tix4Jg8fw                   

 

Pictures:

Nasreen Mohamedi/ wikiart.org
Frida Kahlo/ fridakahlo.org