Utterly United by Dark: Sarvesh Wahie’s poetry in the time of isolation
Cover art: Sarvesh Wahie
The nihilistic poetry collection Black Verses (2018) by Sarvesh Wahie offers a call for pure meditation, of accepting oneself in a vacuum.
The introduction of Sarvesh Wahie’s personally-published debut poetry collection Black Verses offers an early disclaimer of what to expect—or what not to expect. Don’t expect hope. Don’t expect light at the end of the tunnel. Expect darkness.
Wahie, a Mussoorie-resident, published Black Verses two years ago, when—shall we say a little underwhelmingly?—the world was different. Yes, even in those ancient days of only twenty-four months ago, we were suffering from impending climate disaster, from fascist-leaning political policies, from economic hardships, from crime, from tragedy. These were common sufferings for many, but sufferings where we could find commiseration in the most-foundational of human characteristics: social interaction. We could turn to our friends, our families, acquaintances down the street, co-workers, familiar faces in the market.
Since COVID-19, however, the rules have changed. The cruellest aspect of the current pandemic has been how it has robbed us that freedom to feel safe in the company of others. We are locked down: some with family, some all by themselves. We face darkness in the road ahead with no street-lights or road-signs that could accurately predict where this road will now lead us. There is a sense of true desperation, of meaninglessness.
It’s jarring, then, to read Black Verses in this time, a short collection of poems that offer a call for isolation and pure meditation, of accepting oneself in a vacuum. Black Verses was personally-published by Wahie—as opposed to self-published—without a legal copyright for the project or outside help for promotion, artwork, etc. Wahie writes in his introduction that the poems will speak of “dark as dark, without having hopes or holding faith towards light, healing, and happiness.”
Wahie calls ‘voice’ the most-prominent feature of his narrative. “No truths are promised,” he writes, and later adds. “The voice is able to dwell in darkness, without imagining an image to itself.”
This mission statement of sorts is immediately tackled in the first poem of the collection, “Situation”, an ode to “emptiness”, “groundless desires”, and to a state “unmarked by difference or similarity”. He writes:
Unconscious is the walk
Utterly united by dark
Everywhere is where I am
Everyone is who I am
We get a narrative of a positive justification of darkness. Perhaps, if we can’t see anything at all, it is up to us to decide the merits of that ‘nothing’. Darkness is only the absence of light, nothing more. It isn’t evil as much as it is good; it is what we choose it to be.
Wahie has a very consistent style: short lines, words that convey abstractness, a hymn-like chant that builds as each poem goes along. One gets the feeling of reaching out for emotions in a pitch-black room, looking for something else, but finding only oneself.
The sense of personal insecurity is explored, bleakly, in “Post tenebras lux?” and “Suspension”. “Suspension” begins with a faint feeling of wonder, and the almost exhilarant “Yes! there is time”. It offers some hope in the lines: “We are not alone / We are not done”. Eventually, the verse trickles into familiar bleakness, of an end—or at least a suspension—of hope: “Once and for all / Dire mockery of life”.
We can feel this nihilism in action in many other poems. “Greeting”, specifically, explores the sense of sound in a world that is black, of sounds heard, heard against ones wishes, or unheard.
Sometimes, the vacuity of images come together to create a beautiful new nothingness, where Wahie's haunting rhythm seems perfectly suited to the content. In “Drowning in Noise”, he writes:
Oh! That desire
To have been found
Located in this dark
Myself and more of myself
In human drapes
It’s a poem that perfectly incapsulates the dread of looking inwards into oneself, into the insecurities of a poet, and it’s the dread that many of us perhaps feel in this time, locked down with too much time to give to oneself, all becoming poets tangled within our own heavy drapes.
An image like this is a fleeting occurrence in the collection. Rarely are feelings and emotions grounded in this way across the collection. Even though the introduction warns us off the expectation of imagery, what it actually translates to in practice is that there is a lack of a ‘nucleus’ in many of the poems. While the introduction to a collection like this should be useful for readers to understand the poet’s intention, it shouldn’t be necessary. The poem should stand on its own, and for it to do so, should have that nucleus, a gravitational pull to the centre that keeps it together.
Take, for example, “Firework”, a poem with so many abstractions that entire sentences or stanzas could be lifted out of other poems in the collection—perhaps, another poem like “You”—and still arrive reasonably to the same concluding image of: “Into your eyes that illuminate / Fireworks from a distance”.
“Welcome” is another example of a poem attempting to convey feelings without an anchor. Words like ‘pride’, ‘envy’, ‘love’, or ‘darkness’ only seem like placeholders for the actual emotion that Wahie intends to communicate here. After starting off with a vivid opening image, “Sharp winds, biting cold / Gather around for one more / A dream in the dark”, the intention of the poem is lost to abstraction.
The presence of “Other Voices” the middle of the collection is a delight. After experiencing the set-up of the one-tone inward bleakness pressed upon us, the sudden introduction of other voices sounds as foreign to the reader as it would to the speaker of Black Verses.
Look Jesus is here
Bob Marley encore
Dealing with a heartbreak?
I know the organizers
Will get you through.
To anyone dwelling in the dark, the language of the outside world can only be gibberish; subtly, we read it as a criticism of social falsities.
The speaker of the collection skates and circles around deeper conflicts, touching, bruising (oneself and the other) and returning often. “Cause” sees Wahie fluttering over a break-up, the image of a contraceptive, and the powerful last words, “then cast my crime”. In “Sage”, the speaker seems to have a torrid affair with its opposite, “Your light / My Black / Make love entwined”.
Even if many sections of Black Verses feel repetitive and directionless (remember, no truths are promised), the humdrum of these chants and abstractions eventually build a steady rhythm, a sound where the message justifies the form.
“Dream” has a passage that best encapsulated the central theme of the entire collection:
My dream immaculate
Shaped in verses Black
…
I sense a belonging
To this place, I call black
Infinite in its lore
We get a narrative of a positive justification of darkness. Perhaps, if we can’t see anything at all, it is up to us to decide the merits of that ‘nothing’. Darkness is only the absence of light, nothing more. It isn’t evil as much as it is good; it is what we choose it to be.
In another highlight, “Endarkenment”, Wahie writes a rhythmic practical instruction on how to be meaningful amid meaninglessness:
Hearts don't speak of truth
Yet we find peace.
All light divides
Dark but unites.
Simple songs smell good
When soaked in rain.
Tools are not weapons
And weapons are not needed.
If you break
Speak out broken.
A similar, rhythmic dark musical quality creeps up again in the call-and-repeat chants of “Summon”.
All light divides / Dark but unites / Simple songs smell good / When soaked in rain. / Tools are not weapons / And weapons are not needed. / If you break / Speak out broken.
The collection rarely lets off from its nihilistic bend, highlighting the voice of the individual in its blind, dark world, and otherwise, “hoping nothing, believing nothing, and being nothing”. This hyper-individualistic frame is particularly pertinent in the current time, when so many of us are locked down and locked in with little more than our own anxieties, with a confrontation of our own personal darkness in the face of larger, shared disaster. And yet, however bleak as Black Verses may sound on the surface, the poems here are a call of pure meditation, of being nowhere but in the moment, of accepting oneself in a vacuum.
Unlike the forewarnings in the introduction, we do come across a glimmer of light at the end of the tunnel by the end of this 30-poem book. It may not be a light that enlightens that bleakness of life, but it is still a flicker in the dark that celebrates poetry and the art that we’re left with within this blackness. The poem “Tribute” peaks with the words:
Poet extraordinaire
Heaven and hell that dare
Words of yours
Happen inside me
Black Verses may not offer hope, but it may serve as a steady companion. For that is the truest essence of poetry: it doesn’t necessarily ‘solve’ problems; but it provides a language with which to understand, embrace, empathise, and console.
The darkness that Wahie referred to in his 2018 collection preceded the darkness we all face now—some far more than others. Like the narrator in the poems, we may not enjoy the time of despair, but we will continue to grapple in the dark, if only to survive it, if only to belong.
Title: Black Verses
Author: Sarvesh Wahie
Personally-published
Pages: 56
Price: Rs. 150
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Karan Madhok is a writer, journalist, and editor of The Chakkar, whose fiction, translation, and poetry have appeared in Gargoyle, The Literary Review, F(r)iction, and more. He is the founder of the Indian basketball blog Hoopistani and has contributed to NBA India, SLAM Magazine, FirstPost, and more. Karan is currently working on his first novel. Twitter: @karanmadhok1
