Nirmal Selvamony's "tiNaipoetics" by Dr Suresh Frederick

   

Nirmal Selvamony's "tiNaipoetics" 

by Dr Suresh Frederick

Introduction

tiNaipoetics is the poetics of the Tamils. Its equent term is Oikopoetics.  Oikopoetics or ecopoetics is poetics of the ‘oikos’ which, to the Greeks, meant habitat comprising the spirits, humans, nature and culture peculiar to it. A typical oikos is a nexus in which the sacred, the humans, natural and cultural phenomena stand in an integrated relationship. The Tamil equivalent of oikos is tinai that integrates specific space and time (mutal), naturo-cultural elements (karu) and human action (uri).

Being the habitat of the people concerned, tiNai forms the matrix of all social institutions – economy, polity, family and communication. Art, especially, poetry, is a variety of communication/communion shaped by the tiNai of the society in question. Being the ground, matrix, and context of a work of art, tiNai is the first principle of oikopoetics.

Three Basic Types of tiNai

Historically speaking, three basic types of tiNai have discernibly shaped all poetry – integrative, hierarchic and anarchic. In other words, one can speak of the poetry of the integrative, hierarchic and anarchic tiNais.

Integrative tiNai

The first type of tiNai integrates the sacred, nature, culture and the humans in a complex kinship, even as a family of kith and kin. The kin-like tiNai of primal societies allows freedom with responsibility. Duties, obligations and rights bind people, spirits, and nature together quite intricately. The power relations among the members of this familial tiNai are both horizontal and vertical; both love and authority are normative. Black Elk, the chieftain of an American Indian tribe summed up this intricate bonding thus: “The two-legged and four-legged lived like kith and kin”

Hierarchic tiNai

If a kinship relationship ramifies both horizontally and vertically, political relationship is configured only vertically in a hierarchical manner. In the hierarchic or political tiNai the members stand in a hierarchic relationship, with the sacred at the top, the humans in the middle and nature at the bottom. Now, the tiNai is no more a family, but a political unit where power is channeled only in a vertical direction. The original familial tiNai undergoes a double transformation in Tamil society. While tiNai as the larger social order has given way to the Aryan varna, with a typical hierarchical structure, tiNai as a specific habitat has shrunk to a political domain such as one involving a tax collector and tax payer.

By attributing supremacy to the sacred, distance between the humans and the sacred was effected, confining the latter to a special space deemed holy.

Similarly, the human world was also imagined as a hierarchically ordered one, with the superior ruler, and the inferior ruled. The distance between the two was clearly determined when the ruler was confined to a special space, namely, the court/ palace, and the ruled to the space outside of it.

Like the sacred and the human, nature was also hierarchized. If in the integrative tiNai different types of land (such as the mountains, scrub land, arid tracts, riverine plains and sea coast) were all regarded as equally important and unique, in the hierarchic tiNai they were all reduced to two basic types – wetland and dry land – which stood in a hierarchic relationship. Wetland was considered more auspicious, productive and useful than dry land. Even animals were ranged in a hierarchic order – the domestic and the wild.

Among the Tamils, monarchies of cerar, colar and pantiyar affirmed the hierarchic tiNai even as the poetry patronised by their courts and produced by their subjects did. The Saivite and the Vaishnavite saints produced significant crop of such poetry during the time of pallavar. Their poetry identified special spaces known as talam, worthy of worship and poetic celebration, which were located usually in wetland lying along the rivers kaveri and vaikai. If these sacred spaces were right at the top of the hierarchic ladder, the dwelling space of people known as natu was in the middle, leaving the bottom for uninhabitable, wasteland known as katu.

Anarchic Oikos

The hierarchic tiNai began to rupture when the supremacy of the sacred became dubitable with an increased emphasis on rational systems (like logic and science) and materialist ideologies in lieu of (non-materialist) religious doctrines. Rational scrutiny was necessary to determine the utilitarian value of the members of the tiNai. In theistic societies, the sacred was considered useful for certain purposes and for that reason acknowledged and invoked in ceremonies and customary practices. Nature, on the other hand, was more tangibly useful. With investment, it paid off considerable returns. Humans were also looked upon as resources and assets. In short, the new tiNai was anarchic in spirit but economic in practice. It was rather a market with a shift from the political hierarchy to an economic negotiation. It was reason that controlled the negotiations of the market tiNai. It helped accumulate knowledge about the sacred, nature and man and also in working out strategies to exploit these to human advantage.

Conclusion

             To sum up, this paper has defined tiNaipoetics as poetics of tiNai affirming that poetic theory and criticism should address not only individual constituents like language, technique, social context, nature, the supernatural and so on, but the entire system here referred to as the tiNai. Three types of tiNai – the integrative, hierarchic and anarchic have been identified and each has been explained with illustrations from Tamil poetry. Being an introductory and general exposition of the critical approach known as oikopoetics, this paper could not tackle specific critical tasks and issues like reading a certain poem from an tiNaipoetics perspective and contrasting that reading with a non- tiNaipoetic reading. But such critical explorations are necessary to draw utmost critical mileage out of tiNaipoetics.

The Emperor of Ice-Cream by Wallace Stevens from Web

The Emperor of Ice-Cream   by Wallace Stevens

Call the roller of big cigars,

The muscular one, and bid him whip

In kitchen cups concupiscent curds.

Let the wenches dawdle in such dress

As they are used to wear, and let the boys

Bring flowers in last month's newspapers.

Let be be finale of seem.

The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.

Take from the dresser of deal,

Lacking the three glass knobs, that sheet

On which she embroidered fantails once

And spread it so as to cover her face.

If her horny feet protrude, they come

To show how cold she is, and dumb.

Let the lamp affix its beam.

The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.

Wallace Stevens’ “The Emperor of Ice Cream” was published in 1922. The time is the early 20th Century. The place is the residence of a deceased woman in an American city. Apparently people of Latin-American ancestry live in the neighbourhood and roll cigars (wrap cured tobacco in a cigar leaf) to earn money. This poem is set up as a counterpoint between a scene of a funeral and images of enjoyment.

The narrator calls for a muscular cigar roller to make ice cream to be served to visitors attending the wake (a vigil held beside the body of someone who has died) for the deceased woman. In earlier times, a wake frequently took place in the home of the deceased. Besides paying their last respects to the dead person, visitors often ate, drank, and told stories.

The woman’s death presents an opportunity for her acquaintances to hold a party. The pleasure they will derive from the occasion apparently matters more than the memory of the deceased woman they are supposed to be mourning. No doubt, the women who attend will pay homage to the muscular man who makes the “concupiscent curds” (Line 3)--that is, Sensual; appealing to the senses appetizing. He and the ice cream represent sensual or physical pleasure. In turn, the “boys” (Line 5) will no doubt want to live it up with the “wenches” (Line 4), even if they are attending a wake. Everyone wants to seize the day - carpe diem.

“Let the lamp affix its beam”(Line15), appears to say, “Let us now place our attention, our spotlight, on life, not death”. The attendees will walk in the light of life, not in the darkness of death.

Ice-cream is short-lived, it melts away, it is consumed but it represents something that's delicious and attractive. It's temporary, like life, can be held, shared, and enjoyed to the full. This poem is about the affirmation of precious life, made real by the language of imagination.