Fissures And Fractures: Identity Crisis In Gill’s Poetry

A.N.Dwivedi

Throughout his poetic career, as also in his life, Stephen Gill has struggled immensely and made a hectic search for self-identity. This search becomes all the more poignantly relevant in view of his relatedness to the country of his birth (India) and the country of his adoption (Canada). He fled from India to breathe an air of freedom in Canada, but in neither land he felt what Milton calls ‘peace of mind, all passions spent’. And his discomfort and disquietitude stemmed from the “fissures and fractures”¹ he had experienced in life, specially from the identity-crisis he had suffered in both India and Canada. He himself has described his acute sense of ‘suffocation’ in his homeland and his harrowing experiences in Canada. In his Preface to Songs Before Shrine (2007), which is the focal point in this paper, he writes thus: “I began to flutter my wings to escape the prison of suffocation in search of an El Dorado of peace. The question was how and where to find that El Dorado.”² This statement of Gill amply shows his predicament at home and in society where he was treated with fear and distrust. His being a Christian aggravated the situation towards the worse. He was insecure everywhere, and nobody cared for his safety and that of his family. Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs were disinclined towards him. He felt, in Chaucer’s words, like ‘a fish out of pond’ in India. The severe identity-crisis at home compelled him to leave for Ethiopia on a teaching assignment, and after three years he went to England and thence to Canada. He has been living in Canada as an immigrant for the last three decades, but there too he has faced problems, the cultural conflict and the identity-crisis being the worst ones. Through Reghu Nath, the protagonist of Immigrant (1982), Gill expresses his bitter experiences of Canada: “Canada had a handful of openings, usually filled by persons born here or by British and American immigrants, who encountered no prejudice because they were not a visible minority like the Africans and the Asians who spoke differently and looked differently.”³ Because of Canada’s discriminatory policy, scholars and Ph.D. holders also suffer immensely there, like the Indian Prabha, a graduate in Library Science doing the job of a lowly paid cataloguer, and the Bangladeshi Dr. Hafeez, a renowned scientist in liquid fuel combustion. Several Ph.Ds end up there “rusting, first stinking.”⁴

Stephen Gill happens to be a poet, novelist and short-story- writer of the Indian diaspora now settled in Canada and doing creative works. As a poet, he has raised his voice against the waves of terror and violence in India and Pakistan during the 1947 partition days, and subsequently he has forcefully pleaded for peace and harmony in the war-torn world of today. In one of his poems, contained in Songs Before Shrine, he writes thus:

For the culture of dialogue

harmony weaves fabrics

for warmth

to womb the fetus of wisdom.

Harmony

the author of prosperities

composes a sonata

for the piano of delight.⁵

Gill strongly feels that there is a vast cultural gap between the East and the West, and that this cultural gap can be bridged by establishing harmony between them. When harmony is established, a new world order will be created. In this world order, people will live with love and warmth, prosperity and delight. Poems like this one abound in Songs Before Shrine. “Harmony and Peace”, “Evening of Harmony”, “Rays of Harmony”, “When” and some others are the poems of this nature. Bracketed with harmony is the poet’s repeated cry for peace in the human world. In reality, harmony and peace have been the burden of his songs in this volume. Realising the great need of peace in the present-day tense world around, the poet utters aloud as under:

Wearing

a jacket of peace

let me swim to the shores

where freedoms flow.

I would like to bathe in the waters

that spout from the fountain

of your comforting grace.

(“Peace”, Songs Before Shrine,p.10.)

No doubt, Gill is a great messenger, even a propagandist at times, of peace, which he often associates with such qualities as love and glory, comforts and prosperity, truth and beauty, delight and benediction. In the poem “My Name is Peace”, he says: “I am eternal/ I am peace”(p.11).On the same subject, he writes thus:

Poetry is to present my vision and my concerns, and to conceive peace in a peaceful way. The compelling influence for my crusade is the peace that is beauty; the peace that is creative; the peace that makes life meaningful. I attempt to illustrate that peace in its myriad forms on the rocks of my words. These rocks shout that Lazarus buried under them longs for life.⁶

Gill has laid so much emphasis on peace and harmony in order to erase the sense of insecurity and tension prevailing in the human world today and to create such a world-order in which the distracting question of dual identity or multiple identities does not arise. Then only the roaming individuals will be free from the worries of identity-crisis.

The identity-crisis is usually caused by the overwhelming sense of frustration and alienation. A person travelling to another distant land is bound to undergo this sort of crisis, as in the case of Stephen Gill. Such a person is a victim of displacement and dislocation, both physically and psychologically. Living in another country, he feels an exile who is faced with multiple problems of identity and adjustment. Gill’s second novel, Immigrant powerfully evokes the picture of a newcomer from India settling in Canada, and this newcomer is Reghu Nath, an aspirant for the Ph.D. programme in the Ottawa University. Not only the novel depicts the hopes and fears of Reghu but also it gives “an insight into the views immigrants hold of white people and vice versa.”⁷ The predicament of a Ph.D. scholar is beautifully brought out in the poem “A Ph.d. Says”:

I never had time

to know my rights

or tread

that path of romance

painted by poets. (p.88).

The scholar knows nothing about the world around him except the hunt and the pain of his work. He is confined only to his books and studies. In an alien land, he is a restless soul and no one comes to his help.

If Immigrant is an indication of the diverse problems faced by a newcomer to Canada, it becomes more or less an autobiographical account of the writer himself. Some of these problems are: an encounter with the rigid and prejudiced professors at the University, the unfamiliar Canadian accent and register of the English language, the confusing grading system, the adamant Canadian officials, and the haunting memories of the motherland. Of these problems, the last mentioned one makes the immigrant/newcomer long intensely for his/ her native land and he/ she becomes inescapably nostalgic about it. Then, relations and associations, family and friends crowd up his/her memories. They ‘dance upon the inward eye’, as Wordsworth would put it, and remind him/her of the hearth and home. He/She then feels a sense of the loss of home or a state of homelessness. In such a situation, he/she realizes emptiness and alienation around and fondly recollects his/her land and people. Songs Before Shrine contains some poems which clearly point to this truth. In the poem “Rocks”, Gill compares himself to Lazarus in wistful longing. The poet writes here as follows:

The blooms of my lyrics

shed tears

in the night of their

deep disappointments

over the fruitless longing.

Do not stop them

to uncover their veins

they borrow my chisel.

and further thus:

They rend their robes of silence

to say

Lazarus buried under rocks

longs for life.(p.44).

The note of ‘longing’ and disappointment is paramount here, and the poet-Lazarus deeply wishes to come into life. By means of his lyrics, he wants to get back to the vibrant life he has lost. ‘Memory and desire’ grip him irretrievably, reminding us of the famous opening lines in The Waste Land (1922):

April is the cruellest month, breeding

Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing

Memory and desire, stirring

Dull roots with spring rain.⁸

There is a certain month or season, when the dear and near ones press upon our memory and desire and then we long to meet them. This applies to all creatures-humans, birds and beasts.

Poems like “My Muse” and “At the Wrong Time” also depict the loneliness and emptiness of the poet-persona in a forceful manner. In a somber mood, he declares in “My Muse” that he has been able to diffuse ‘the darkness of autumn nights’ with the help of his Muse, whose benign company can keep off ‘the toxic insect of emptiness’. Indirectly, the poet-persona suggests here that he would have felt totally empty and deserted without the sweet, soothing company of the Muse. The other poem, “At the Wrong Time”, emphatically brings out the poet’s sense of loneliness and helplessness in an alien land. This poem is a clear-cut statement of what and how the poet feels in the land of his choice. It bears out the fact that the poet is still not free from the identity-crisis (which certainly plagued him and his parental family in Pakistan where he was born as well as in India where he grew up and was educated. In a state of restlessness, he writes in this poem as follows:

A wing-clipped bird

I desired wildly

to hear that voice

from the bushes of stillness

when I was away

from the embraces

of sleep.

and again in the same breath:

Even walking

with the winds of loneliness

in the dale of woes

where

hopes break like weeds

the same voice speaks.(p.47).

The reader must mark the use of such phrases and expressions as ‘A wing-clipped bird’, ’the bushes of stillness’, ‘the winds of loneliness’, ‘the dale of woes’ and ‘hopes break like weeds’, which combinedly allude to the none-too-happy condition of the poet-persona. He is, instead, leading a life of ‘stillness’ and ‘loneliness’ in the midst of festivities going on in the vicinity. He must have looked within and then written the above-noted lines. Evidently, he is a tormented soul drifting here and there in search of his true identity, which definitely eluded him in India and which again proves to be a will-o’-the-wisp in Canada. And both the nations are multi-racial and multi-cultural societies. It is unfortunate that a sensitive person like Gill does not find fulfilling his heart’s desire.

For an immigrant to the West, especially to Canada, it is but natural to come across some problems of distracting fashion. What W.F.Westcott remarks of the protagonist of Immigrant is also applicable to the writer of Songs Before Shrine. The noted critic Westcott observes about the protagonist of this novel thus:

Immigrant does a fine job portraying a new Canadian’s plight. The problems, language barriers, cultural discrepancies, and a longing for the mother country can easily be seen in the strife faced by any new person in any new country.⁹

The various problems confronting a new entrant to Canada, as aptly mentioned by Westcott, are: language barriers (including educational prejudices), cultural contradictions and diversities, and nostalgic recollections of the motherland (which has already been dealt with in this paper).Coupled with these problems are those related to social differences, political and official prejudices, ethnic and social discriminations, and unequal treatment in job opportunities. Some of these problems of the immigrants are fairly highlighted in Songs Before Shrine. At many places in this volume, the poet vehemently attacks religious bigotry and fanaticism. Those who spread the fire of violence and distrust in society are called ‘reptiles’ by the poet. They move about freely under ‘the skin of fanaticism’. Speaking of them, the poet writes in the following manner:

In these sunless lands

birds of intolerance fly freely

through the clouds of pitiful ignorance.

The serpents of racism

form images here in the mist of fancy,

spreading the toxin of hate

to feed the ulcers of anarchy.

From the cups of their wickedness

reptiles thirstily drink painful longings

to see corpses of the innocents

mutilated by the explosives

from hidden hands.

(“Reptiles”, Songs …,p.59).

They indulge in acts of savagery and wickedness because of their ‘painful ignorance’ of what they are doing. These ‘serpents of racism’ spread the air of hate, chaos and anarchy among the people, and take delight in managing the killing of innocent ones. Again and again, the poet returns to such perpetrators of hell; they are impelled by “religious mania” (in the poem “Light of Truth”, p.78) and “religious malice” ( in the poem “Last Years of the Century”, p.105).

Apart from the religious bigots, the poet assails the propagators of ethnic and racial prejudices in Songs Before Shrine. These ‘racial discriminators’, as the poet calls them, are the ‘icebergs of venom’, and they spread the fire of disharmony among the people. Derogatory adjectives are heaped upon them. They are portrayed by the poet as follows:

Morn-alarming gusts

adders of the dust

stinking vultures

untouchable for cold intense

rain-starved

xenophobic

uncertain, unsafe

these smiling shylocks

rest in rusted tombs.

(“Discriminators”,p.68).

These irrational racists forget the fact that the human world has been drastically reduced today in space and time, and that it has become a meeting-ground fro all peoples and races. Instead of monochromatic culture and language, it has now drifted towards multiculturalism and multilingualism. In the present-day global set-up, the sane suggestion of the distinguished critic, Homi Bhabha (who wrote the well-known book, Nations and Narration. London: Routledge, 1990), can effectively solve the problem of diverse cultures and languages. This critic has put forward the concept of ‘hybridism’ in matters of culture and language in the global context. This concept allows cultures and languages, other than one’s own, to flourish side by side in a spirit of tolerance and understanding.

Stephen Gill also comes out with a suggestion of his own to overcome the problems of cultural diversity, linguistic barriers, socio-political intolerance, religious fanaticism, and ethnic and racial prejudices, and this suggestion entails the evolving of a universalist stance in these various matters. The need of the hour is to live in an atmosphere of mutual love and trust, and when we learn to live in such a congenial atmosphere, much of the tension caused by the extremist forces will cease and the individuals will be able to emerge out of the identity-crisis and the psychological pressure. One can easily gather the poet’s message in the following lines:

My religion

was not my choice;

yet I love all creeds.

I did not choose

my tongue either;

yet I respect all breeds.

Every culture,

a beauty of the same garden.

I am also

your God’s child.

(“I Am Still a Man”, p.61).

The poet has touched here the points of clashes and contradictions the world over-religion, tongue (language), and culture. He then delivers the message of universal love and brotherhood in unequivocal terms:

I am a human

I love humankind.

Smile, my friend,

because

we are all one.(Ibid.,p.61).

The spirit of this meaningless message pervades the poem “My Canada”:

My Canada

in thy lap

lie all nations

humans and beasts

melt into one shape

under thy care

my Canada. (p.20).

The self-same idea is repeated after two stanzas, and the poet seems a contented man:

Thy soul

a serene temple

for every creed

for every breed.

My heart will sing

always for thee

my lips will chant

night and day for thee

O Canada. (p.21).

Here the poet considers Canada to be a country of diverse creeds (religions) and multiple breeds (races). For this reason, as well as for their living together in a spirit of universal brotherhood, love and compassion, the poet is all praise for this country.

But it is felt in Gill’s poetry that all the problems related to creed, culture and race are still not solved. Otherwise, why should he give a clarion call to ‘build bridges’ in the human world? What is the need of it? Why should he talk of greed-ignited blazes, hostile arms, hearts turning into solid rocks, etc. in a poem like “Let Us Build Bridges”? The clear-cut indication in this poem is that humanity must shun the path of violence and bloodshed and thereby build a happier and brighter future for itself. The closing lines of this poem are worth quoting here:

Many minds

admire sages now

peace cannot swim

on the waves of violence

for a happier future

let us build bridges. (p.111).

‘Building bridges’ augurs well for the future of mankind, but it requires sincere striving of honest minds towards the goal. Until these bridges are built, the holocaust of the Third World War will loom large over our heads and the overall atmosphere of the world will be fraught with fear and distrust. The divide between man and man, nation and nation, culture and culture, language and language, will continue to persist in the human world. Though Gill tries hard to build “bridges with his books”¹⁰, all is not in his hands. The human world is governed and guided today by self-seeking politicians and power-hungry bureaucrats. In such a situation, the citizens of the world are bound to suffer, both physically and mentally. Their sufferings will lead to untold tension and crisis, including the identity-crisis.

To sum up: the humankind is riven today with numerous problems, and some of these problems are related to language barriers, cultural contradictions, ethnic and racial prejudices, religious fanaticism, and socio-political discriminations. Stephen Gill, as a sensitive poet, is fully aware of these disturbing problems leading to insurmountable tension and crisis in human minds. He suggests, with a streak of idealism, that peace and harmony are the thinkable remedies for them. He also suggests that the universalist stance might solve the problems. But as the reins of power lie in the hands of wily politicians, it is somewhat difficult to arrive at a solution of the raging problems of today. Gill knows this fact very well, and hence mental tension and identity-crisis continue to plague him in his poetry.

Notes & References

1. Patricia Prime, “Shrine : Poems of Social Concerns”, The Mawaheb International (June 2000),p.4.

2. Stephen Gill, “Preface”, Songs Before Shrine (New Delhi: Authorspress,2007), p.xi .

3. Stephen Gill, Immigrant (Ontario: Vesta Publications Ltd., 1982),p.25.

4. Ibid., p.111.

5. Stephen Gill, “Harmony”, Songs Before Shrine, p.19. Subsequent references to this text (poems) are given in the paper itself.

6. ---, “Preface”, Songs Before Shrine, p.xxi.

7. D.Parmeswari, “The Cultural Baggage: A Reading of Stephen Gill’s Immigrant”, Glimpses, ed. Hamadan Darwesh (Ontario:Vesta Publications Ltd.,2005),p.137.

8. T.S.Eliot, “The Burial of the Dead”, ll.1-4, cited from The Waste Land and Other Poems, 1940 (London: Faber & Faber,1972),p.27.

9. W.F.Westcott, “Immigrant”, Christian Monitor(November 1980); cited from D.Parmeswari’s article in Glimpses, ed. Hamadan Darwesh (2005),p.137.

10. See Daily Expositor (Canada) on the flap of Songs Before Shrine (2007).

This research paper will be included in Discovering Stephen Gill, a book that Dr. Nilanshu Kumar Agarwal is editing and is going to be released shortly.

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