Kamala das as a confessional poet. Confessional Theme and the Crisis of Woman’s Identity in the Poetry of Kamala Das 2022-12-22
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Kamala Das, also known as Madhavikutty, was a confessional poet who wrote openly and candidly about her personal experiences and emotions. She is considered one of the most prominent figures in Indian English poetry, and her work is characterized by its honesty, vulnerability, and willingness to confront taboo subjects.
Das was born in 1934 in Kerala, India, and grew up in a conservative Hindu household. She was married at the age of 15 and went on to have three children, but she struggled with the constraints of traditional gender roles and the expectations placed on her as a wife and mother. In her poetry, Das often wrote about her desire for independence and her frustration with the limitations placed on her as a woman.
One of the most notable aspects of Das's poetry is its confessional nature. She wrote openly and candidly about her personal experiences, including her relationships, her sexuality, and her struggles with mental illness. Her poetry is raw and emotional, and it often touches on themes of loss, loneliness, and the search for self-identity.
In addition to writing about personal experiences, Das also explored themes of gender and sexuality in her poetry. She was one of the first Indian writers to openly discuss issues of sexuality and desire, and her work helped to challenge traditional views of femininity and masculinity in India.
Despite the controversial nature of her work, Das was a highly respected and influential figure in Indian literature. She received numerous awards and accolades for her poetry, and her work has been translated into several languages. Today, she is remembered as a pioneering confessional poet who bravely explored themes of personal experience and identity in her writing.
English Literature: Kamala Das: Confessional Poet
Even suicide is a subject they are ready to confess. Thus almost all the poems of Kamala Das are poems of protest and exert a strong message of feminism in confessional tone which labeled her as a staunch feminist poet. Who are you, I ask each and everyone, The answer is, it is I. As already pointed out, Kamala Das is iconoclastic in her approach to marriage. On 31 May 2009, gagged, she died at a hospital in Pun, but has earned considerable respect in recent years. She wants to break the chains around her and wants to be free. Right from the beginning of their life, women are forced to feel dwarfed and acquire a highly circumscribed world-view.
The other side of the story is this that she keeps saying and protesting against with the agenda of becoming a feminist and we too like to hear the story of hers rather than that of her husband. She urges them to let their lovers know what they the women expect from them their lover when they lie in bed together. An epitome of womanhood, a soul laid bare, a guilty and a pure writer, an unequipped housewife, a loving mother, an affectionate granddaughter, a teenager who migrated to womanhood, an innocent soul who was left alone in the sea of lust to experience and safeguard her identity, Kamala Das started writing at an early age only to discover it to be her greatest love and biggest fear. She seems to describe her suffering and to provide the social context to some extent, to her experiences. She is so frank here as to call herself a freak and to confess that subject of sex. . Her husband can be an adulterer, or sodomite, or stained with every crime, yet he is still her husband and she cannot leave him or remarry.
CONFESSIONAL MODE IN THE POETRY OF KAMALA DAS AND SYLVIA PLATH
Poet's failure in love is displayed in them. But in me The sights and smells and sounds shall thrive and go on And on and on. The summer which she describes is not a loo-laced, gulmohar-tossing summer, but the sexual siesta of her. The Criterion encourages interpretative criticism and fresh insights into new and established authors and texts and seeks to generate a serious debate on different academic issues. Confessional poets court death and disintegration, so that a high level of perception may be possible. Be embroiderer, be cook, Be a quarreller with servants.
Why is Kamala Das known as a confessional poet? Is it because she wrote about personal matters in her poetry?
It is an autobiographical poem, deals with feminine sensibility. This poem describes, metaphorically, Kamala Das' feeling of suffocation in her husband's home as a consequence of her husband's selfishness, self-centredness, egoism, and exaggerated sense of his own importance. An Empty Cistern, Waiting Through long hours, fills itself, With coiling snakes of silence. I would have been a happy human being. It is here where I think that Das can be seen as a confessional poet.
The bulk of her poetry is a confession of her relationship with her husband, and of her extra-marital sexual relationships. In me shall sleep the baby That sat in prams and sleep and wake and smile its Toothless smile. We follow a strict double-blind reviewing of the submitted works, which we promise to conceal always the identity of both the reviewers and the author from each other. I am Indian, very brown, born in Malabar, I speak three languages, write in Two, dream in one. Will you marry it, marry it, marry it.
What not does it contain? She urges them to let their lovers know what they the women expect from them their lovers when they lie in bed together. She chooses to confess everything by writing rather than going to a priest. Both Sylvia Plath and Kamala Das have distinguished themselves by becoming vital, familiar landmarks in the development of poetry in their respective native cultures. Indian critics have found in her poems the voice of the new liberated Indian women without realizing that she never speaks on behalf of anybody but herself, Jet alone any class or section of Indian society. The streak of sunshine which fell at the doorstep looked like a yellow cat, keeping her company a day. Emphasis is all through an evaluation of the relevance and validity of her observation as a confessional poet.
She accuses her husband of having been a selfish and cowardly man who neither loved her nor used her properly but who was a ruthless watcher of her sexul act with other men. Dad's sense of sorrow and exhaustion in striking manner. Oh, Belong, cried the categorizers. . She has expressed her intense desire to confess in a very graphic manner by saying that she must "striptease" her mind and that she must exude autobiography.
Confessional Theme and the Crisis of Woman’s Identity in the Poetry of Kamala Das
Her poetic creativity includes for volumes viz. Her husband sought to subjugate her with his superior muscle power which get she abhorred. It works, there is nothing wrong with it. One of her longer poems, entitled Composition, expresses such diverse moods as a passionate attachment, agonizing guilt, nauseating disgust, and inhuman bitterness. Her husband shut her In, every morning, locked her in a room of books With a streak of sunshine lying near the door like A yellow cat to keep her company, but soon Winter came, and one day while locking her in, he Noticed that the cat of sunshine was only a Line, a half-thin line, and in the evening when He returned to take her out, she was a cold and Half dead woman, now of no use at all to men.
