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CONCEPT OF EVIL IN GILL'S SHRINE
Dr. Syed
M. Ahsan
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*Online Pakistan
Christian Post;
Misihi Sansar, India, May 2001
I have been reading Gill's latest collection, Shrine:
Poems of Social concerns. The `concerns' in the poems refer to the pain and
suffering inflicted upon some human beings by their fellow beings, the cruelty
of man to man. The camera is focused on the panorama of human life and, as the
pictures emerge, one by one, we begin to get an insight into Gill's view of life.
The
fear of a major catastrophe resulting from the stockpile of nuclear weapons
accumulated by the technologically advanced nations of the world constantly
haunts people all over the globe. Their hopes for world peace, sometime in the
future, have dwindled into a futile dream. Gill has given expression to this
universal sense of doom being experienced by our generation in the poem
"Talking of Peace" :
Our citizens
crave peace
but it shall remain a dream
because
the arms of darkness grown longer;
the crop of the arsenal is raised.
"War
Fever" is another poem which depicts the debilitating effects of constant
threat of war. It diminishes, desensitizes the human side of our nature:
It/brings darkness to the mind. The
most eloquent and most graphic description of the horrors of war occurs in the poem
"A Familiar Scene". It begins with the lines Bodies rotting in
ditches/or dumped with the garbage and goes to depict scenes of carnage which
occur all around us, all over the world:
It is a familiar scene
from
at the time of freedom;
or a place in the middle-east,
Bosnia,
Rawanda,
It
may be any country in Asia,
The
harrowing experiences Gill went through early in his life at the time of the
partition of India have left deep scars on his soul. He wonders how normal
people, with families of their own, could suddenly turn into beasts and
ruthlessly kill other people, women and children, burn houses and destroy everything
belonging to their perceived enemies. Is there an explanation for this
phenomenon? Obviously not. It is the misery of the helpless victims of violence that
touches Gill's heart. The poem "Somali Victim of 1992 Tribal Warfare"
tells the story of a boy who is forced to abandon his home in
His two sisters and three brothers
died on the way to the capital.
Malnutrition,
stress
and exhaustion from the journey
of one hundred kilometres on foot
proved a brutal blow to a ten years old.
His
face bloated
while bulged eyes became almost shut
when he reached the refugee camp.
Human
suffering results not only from mass violence but, more commonly, it is caused
by individuals victimizing the poor and the helpless. "Amputee",
perhaps the most touching poem in the collection, is about a six year old girl
who is sexually abused by her father. When she can't take it any more, she runs
away from her home. But her life remains full of deprivation and pain. She
can't hold on to a job, gets hooked on drugs, is supported by welfare and is
despised and humiliated by everyone around her:
She does not know
who she is.
The
feelings of being worthless
often overwhelm her.
The
painful memories of her childhood continue to haunt her. The desire for revenge
against her father wells up in her and she reports his crime to the police. Her
father is tried in a court of law, found guilty and convicted. But how is that
going to help her now? How is she going to escape from the prison of her mind?
How to break loose
from the shackles of the past
is a never-ending question
for her.
The few
poems I have referred
to above and many other poems in Shrine focus
on the element of evil in human nature which
manifests itself in
violent and aggressive
behaviour. What is its source? Are all of us tainted by it or just some
of us? Can it be erased from human heart? These are the questions with which
many thinkers and writers of the past have wrestled. Shakespeare ponders on it
in his play King Lear: Is there any cause in nature that makes these hard
hearts?: He divides the characters in the play into
three groups: those who are wholly evil,
those who are a mixture of good and evil and those who are wholly good.
He is not sure what is the cause of evil in human nature but speculates
on it: it could be planetary influence or
an inherited trait or simply an accident of birth. Jonathan Swift offers
the most unambiguous verdict on the nature of man. According to him man is the
most pernicious race of vermin nature has suffered to crawl upon the face of
earth. Shelley believed that all human beings are basically good and would live
in peace and harmony with each other but the evil tendencies in them have been
created through the restrictions imposed on them by the church and the state.
If these restraints are removed and men are given the freedom to choose their
own way of life, there would be no more strifes
or conflicts and the world would be transformed into the garden of Eden.
Conrad, in his Heart of Darkness visualizes evil as an overwhelming power which
poisons and corrodes the human heart. Man does not have the strength to resist
this dynamic force.
Lillian Feder,
in her
essay on Heart of
Darkness, entitled "Marlow's Descent
into Hell", says :
“When he discovers Kurtz, he finds , on one level, a man who has committed unspeakable
crimes against his fellows. But on another and more important level, he finds a
man who has allowed himself to sink to the lowest possible depths of evil, and,
by observing Kurtz, Marlow realizes that in all men there is this possibility.
In other words, he discovers the potential hell in the heart of every man.”
Gill attributes the
element of evil in
human nature to
the Original Sin. Our first parents defied the
command of God and tasted the forbidden fruit. As a
consequence, man was banished from Heaven and tainted with sin. In the poem
"Garden of Eden"
Gill says that Adam and Eve planted:
the seed of the tree of knowledge
which they managed to steal.
It
has yielded the fruit of
jealousy, superiority, murders,
rapes and exploitation in abundance
Eventually,
he goes on to say, man will be banished from this earth that he now inhabits to
another planet, but he will carry the germs of evil with him:
They are sure
to carry the seed of this tree
to corrupt the house of the host
also there.
The numerous
references to negative human behaviour in his poems suggests
that Gill considers evil to be an inherent in human nature and, therefore, it
is ineradicable. He does not believe that all human beings are
evil but some are. Those that are evil are so dynamic and powerful that they
inflict untold miseries on their helpless victims. Sometimes there are group
manifestations of human violence. At other times individuals cause immense pain
and suffering to others. But, no matter how these negative impulses come into
play, they will always be there with us. There is no light at the end of the
tunnel.
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*A retired professor of English Literature from the University of South
Dakota (USA), Dr. Syed M. Ahsan
has written scholarly papers.