Reviewed by Peter Siegenthaler
Water & Wave
by Eugene Datta
Redhawk Publications
May 2024, 108 pages, ISBN-13: 978-1959346517
A journalist and editor, born in Calcutta (Kolkata) and living now in Aachen, Germany, Eugene Datta has seen the world and paid close attention to its details. He was serving as a stringer for a U.S.-based newspaper when in 2001 he went to the northwest Indian region of Jammu and Kashmir to report on communities wracked by sectarian violence. Earlier that year, he witnessed the terrible results of the Gujarat earthquake that killed more than 20,000 people, destroying whole villages in western India and leaving hundreds of thousands of people homeless. Water & Wave is filled with portraits of people and places. He draws from Kolkata and Gujarat, but also Bhutan, Normandy, Moscow, Rwanda, and the Ukraine, impressions, voices, and visions.
Datta’s craft is most immediately felt in pieces that re-vision traumatic events whose effects he has encountered firsthand. Writing of the border region of Jammu in 2001, as separatist violence brought bloodshed and destruction, he zeroes in on the monomania of a suicide bomber and its results for his family:
Veiled faces gazed
out of windows back in the martyr’s village; his father
hit his own head against a brick wall, againand again, as the women wailed and others
stared in silence. Thin spirals of smoke roseto the spring clouds hanging low over Ganderbal.
My son got what he wanted, the father said. (“Ganderbal” p. 22)
In these poems, truisms of the inescapability of religious affiliations and national loyalties are swept aside by direct experience. Walking in the rubble of a town nearly obliterated by the 2001 earthquake, Datta recreates a conversation:
How can you cremate this person without knowing if they
were Hindu? we’d asked. The shape of a human foot
in the flattened flesh.We don’t know, he said. No one is alive to tell who was who.
We cremate the bodies we retrieve, the Muslims bury the ones
they find. (“Anjar, 2001” p. 23)
Many times in the collection, recognition of the thinness of affiliations leads to an inability to speak, in words crossed out and replaced with others that reach for a different truth. Taking a stroll in his German neighborhood after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, he observes:
An Indian father, out for a walk with his half-
Ukrainian daughter, aged eight, said they worriedabout their family in Ukraine.
I didn’t
I couldn’t tell them my children were half-Russian. (“Not Our Colors, but Our Colors Now” p.44)
Not all of Datta’s observations are firsthand, and here is where the issue of witness comes to the forefront. Datta recognizes and explores the difference between information gained directly at the source and what is remembered or captured in another’s photograph. Describing in detail three photographs he took in Bhutan decades before, he admits,
The prints and negatives are all likely lost; in memory they
keep
fading; so here, the most remembered details put down in black
& white. (“In Black & White” p. 62)
One wonders what it means to witness, if one’s information about the event is mediated by time, memory, and the frame of the remembered photograph itself. How much weight can the scene journalistically reconstructed from notes, photographs, or memory itself convey?
As Carolyn Forché notes in her opening essay for Poetry of Witness: The Tradition in English, 1500–2001 (p. 21), the act of witnessing in poetry takes two forms. The first is what she terms “documentary literature, or poetic reportage,” what we might expect a skillful journalist to produce when not writing to a deadline. The second, standing on the many strengths of poetry – observational but also emotional and empathetic – erases the distance between the observing poet and the traumatic sights observed and recorded. “In my sense of the term,” she writes, poetry of witness “is a mode of reading rather than of writing, of readerly encounter with the literature of that-which-happened, and its mode is evidentiary rather than representational – as evidentiary, in fact, as spilled blood.”
It is a particular strength of Water & Wave that in the poems Datta repeatedly confronts his position in relation to what he’s seen, heard, and experienced. Prompted by news of the eruption of a volcano off the coast of South America, and the projected domino effects of a tsunami and outbreak of the Omicron variant of the coronavirus, he questions the capacity of any of us to empathize with others who are suffering:
If you’re lucky to have been unharmed, you do not
cannot know what it’s like to be
otherwise. There’s no such thing as objective
experience. You cannot fathomthe absolute value of anything, let alone life
and death. Imagining pain isn’t
equal to suffering it, and knowing there’s suffering
changes nothing (“January, 2022” p. 46)
“There’s no such thing as objective experience,” the poet writes, suggesting we have no escape from our own limited view of the world, unable to know other people or understand others’ suffering. The final set of pieces in the collection emphasizes and amplifies this existential alienation. In a poem based in his thoughts while sitting with his young son on the patio of a café and watching a “rough-edged disk of aluminum foil” blown by a breeze, he writes,
The rolling, tinkling sound is gossamer-
thin – rising and falling, stopping and startinglike a child who’s just learned how to walk.
…What I see is how my mind
looks: it is the world I see.…what I see is the fruit
of my mind, just as a dream is (“The World I See” pp.78–9)
In Datta’s view, the brain is a “doughy mass” of “flesh-soft mind-matter” (What Is It Like? pp. 86–7), the mind the operator of a machine who complains to its body that it is trapped
inside this airless,
lightless cavity, trying, for your sake and mine, to make
sense of the world outside, based on what the senses
tell me. (“Water & Wave” p.96)
In the end, Water & Wave succeeds by telling the story of the poet’s own evolution as a witness to experience. From the poems early in the book that treat memory and the writer’s capacity to evoke it with few caveats, to the final title poem in which the distinctions between mind and body, thought and experience, are stark and unable to be overcome, Datta brings us to the present moment.
In the early twenty-first century, few of us have been spared at least the photographic, if not the cinematic vision of horrors that in past eras were more often described in words than experienced directly. Forché echoes poets such as Holocaust survivor Paul Celan in arguing that people “blessed to survive” the horrors of the twentieth century wrote “not after such experiences but in their aftermath – in languages that had also passed through these sufferings” (Poetry of Witness p. 19). Our twenty-first century discourses retain the deep fissures and traumas of the past century. In its uncertainty, in the tentativeness of Datta’s work, we see the common residue of our tortured language. In these poems, we see the power of trauma as clear and as potent “as spilled blood.”
About the reviewer: Raised near Boston, Peter Siegenthaler lived in Philadelphia, Hong Kong, and Austin before returning to New England in 2019. Formerly an editor at The American Poetry Review, Zoland Books, and Oxford University Press, he holds a B.A. in English Literature, an M.A in Communication Studies, and an M.A. and PhD. in Asian Cultures and Languages. He teaches Japanese, Asian, and World history, serves in the leadership of his local food cooperative, and writes in several genres. He has published his work widely in literary and scholarly journals. Find out more at https://www.petersiegenthalerwriter.com/