By the doorways of womanhood: The poetry of Kashiana Singh
Kashiana Singh’s poetry collection Woman by the Door is an exquisite intersection of the blossoming, enduring strength of women, the struggle of rebirth, and the existence with death and loss… through which Singh points us to a sure and certain hope within ourselves.
According to Kashiana Singh, Woman by the Door (Loyola College/Apprentice House, 2022) is the poetic embodiment of the geography that is her, of all the places in which she has made her home over the past ten years. One can feel the presence of New Delhi, or other Indian locales, with the scent of “ginger and garlic” unfurling into a warm kitchen (16). One can easily finds themselves on a cold street in Chicago in “Hushed Snow,” in the “silence scattering across snow” (43). And where she takes us, Singh invites us to meet ourselves in the Woman by the door, to embody the multiple facets of ourselves, no matter how painful.
Singh’s first full-length poetry collection is an exquisite intersection of the blossoming, enduring strength of women, the struggle of rebirth, our existence with death and loss… through which Singh points us to a sure and certain hope within ourselves.
Singh’s courageous and honest examination of her life in Woman by the Door is presented in three parts: “Aperture,” “Portals,” and “Detours.” “Apertures” rings of remembrances, of a child in her nani’s kitchen, and of luxurious descriptions of food. In “Apertures”, Singh seems to be doing much more with food than simply offering a description of Indian cuisine. The preparation of food is subtly tied in reminding the children of who they are, from where they came, and whose they are. For instance, in “For the Evil Eye,”
my grandma makes into a delicious dish
never hurried…three parts spice, one turmeric
a hint of cumin powder…
my day is astringent, an overstuffed aroma
starts to inhabit my palette…
her eyes find untamed twine, seamstress
style she fixes them into firm knots
her knuckles tying into
these kots our stories
confided, told, untold…
humming a prayer…
suffused with a nectarine sweetness of words I do not so
understand, yet they make their way into me (7)
There is so much emphasis on girls and their involvement in the preparation of food that yet another thought comes to mind. Heat and fire are often used to add strength to whatever it is exposed, to season it. The author, through spending time around the fire and heat of her mother’s and grandmother’s ovens is being made stronger, she is being seasoned to enter womanhood.
Suddenly the poem takes a turn. No longer is it about the poet herself, but it is about all the women who have been vulnerable, who have passed through travails, who have been lovers, yet distant.
In “For the Evil Eye,” Singh speaks of “these knots of our stories confided, told, untold…” (7). This was a time when identity was coming together, words were beginning to string together in an articulation of that identity. A later poem, found in “Portals” – “Dormant Rituals” (53), written after visionary poet and activist Amanda Gorman, points to a time when those words and identity take on a more transcendent feeling of peoples and nations:
when the world
is better, less bitter…
we will be
free
in our language
again, phrases
poetry, words
not sanctified
expressions
we will begin
again… (53).
Here Singh describes a breach in language on an almost transcendent scale, which possibly illustrates the brokenness of our communication today among nations, ethnic groups, cultural groups, political parties and even within the literary community. Singh expresses a brilliant hope that one day the broken syntax of our language, and the boundaries which we have imposed upon one another, will be healed, and we will be freed, our language no longer foreign, but our own. Here we have the seasoned voice of a woman, who, out of her mother’s and grandmother’s kitchen, where “…the knots [of] stories were confided, told and untold…” can rise into the enduring strength of womanhood to encounter through the world’s brokenness:
a desire to belong
to the hill beyond
the one we could
not climb (“Dormant Rituals, 55).
In “Portals'', one of the most stunning poems is “Becoming Planets” (37), after Greta Thunberg, the fiery teenage climate change activist. We could say that Thunberg has become a planet in her own right, spinning furiously for her cause. As her cause has been in transition these past several years, due to the pandemic, so we may read this poem as a progression through the poet’s own self-awareness. The attributes of different planets serve her purpose in describing her vulnerability, then her maturation into confidence, when, as Uranus, “never having to explain myself before or after menopause”. She has passed through travails, like “red faced Mars,” She has been a lover, yet “distant, forlorn and cold to touch.” In this luminous progression we also encounter the poet “...as I paced/centuries of blackholes, no one to fault my goddess.”
The penultimate stanza of this poem is a stirring crescendo in which the poet experiences herself as a planet, too. “I am a planet though; as every woman before.” Suddenly the poem takes a turn. No longer is it about the poet herself, but it is about all the women who have been vulnerable, who have passed through travails, who have been lovers, yet distant. They no longer need to wish for confidence and maturation and the goddess within. It is theirs; now they can possess it. The poet is courageous, spinning “for all before me who were dwarfed… [drawing] orbits around names of all our departed souls.” Striking and painful is the line, “I gather our screams till they pierce through veins of these stars / I repeat all of the above , I rotate, I revolve, I burn, I am born / into the firmament above–”
This stanza, in and of itself, calls to mind the eponymous ‘Woman’ by the door. Does this Woman not embody all of these attributes? And while there has been much written about how the Woman is herself an intersection, could it not be that the poet, in a sense, is a woman by the door? This poem moves into a transcendent birth and rebirth, into a spaciousness of grace that can hold many, even “a flawed Earth as it still manages to trudge along.”
The flawed, tired Earth is felt in the poems penned by Singh concerning the ongoing pandemic, one being “An Ode to Paused Cities.” (52) The poet sings sorrowfully of “A paused spring / in convalescence.” Even the seasons need healing from this “tarantula…spreading its hips wider and wider into the / arched breathlessness of our tightening chests” (“Empathy”, 60”). Consider further interpretation of these poems within the context of the book. Just as the woman in “Woman by the Door” showed great capacity for grieving well, the Woman by the door is capable of embodying whatever we bring as we pass through the door frames of our journeys: Our comings and goings, our sorrowing, our vulnerabilities, our endings.
In “Detours,” there were a number of poems that were splintering with themes of terrible loss and grief. One of these was “I Stopped Counting,” which was jarring as a child describes her own rape, and her mother’s passivity during it all.
sometimes ma
you forget about me
I feel you ma
you and your hustle bustle in the kitchen
gur with ghee, sizzling hot
your pallu tucked tightly at your waist
oh ma
that night
was their feast ma, that night
they were so many
While Singh does not release us from the terror and revulsion of the act, she helps us bear it through language that forgives us, like her “ma,” for all of our unknowing.
Another poem that fills Woman by the door with a stark dimension is “Cope” (80). The poem strikes me as being feminist in its tone, as it opens with a fisherman’s song. He goes to work catching fish, something he has done every day, unthinking, unmindful. This will reflect the state of patriarchy in society: it is simply everywhere, commonplace, like the frames of doors through which we mindlessly pass. However, in the poem, there is nothing mindless or commonplace about it for the creature beneath the water, who responds to the song, and then is betrayed as she is caught by the fisherman’s hook. It is an old song for women, one whose beauty entices us each time we hear it, yet its patriarchal singers, once we are “caught,” rob us of choice, identity, and opportunity in the dangerous waters of politics and corporate life. Singh then writes the most emotionally jarring lines of this poem:
Just as she showed great capacity for ‘grieving well’, the Woman by the door is capable of embodying whatever we bring as we pass through the door frames of our journeys: Our comings and goings, our sorrowing, our vulnerabilities, our endings.
coughing
out of my belly
all the
phlegm’ed dust, stripping
my fallowed skin
away from me and my
ever fiddling nerves…
This moves the poem beyond simply cultural and societal violence, but physical violence–violence that threatens traumatic, physical harm, even to the death. Singh called forth the powerful stories of so many women in so few words.
The title “Cope” comes from the line,
To cope, my teeth are
forged into my jaws
anchored
like the calcified skull
of a fish, staring blind
into a rusted hook.
The first three lines are reminiscent of the old saying, “to set one’s jaw,” which, of course, means to be determined, or to be resolved in one’s action. Despite everything, the poet “sets her jaw,” and is resolved to face any conclusion to her plight, even if that conclusion is a disturbing simile utilized by the author, “... a calcified skull of a fish, staring blind into a rusted hook.” Therefore, the poet will not sacrifice her resolve, or dignity, even in the face of the final conclusion. The Woman by the door is by every door frame through which we pass, the abuses and the emotional scars of both women and men enfolded within her. She is a keeper of wounds—who heals.
In Woman by the Door, Kashiana Singh has granted the reader an unstinting view into her journey of self-awareness as she has grown and metamorphosed with the changing landscapes of her life. As a child in her mother’s and grandmother’s kitchen, we see the poet becoming. She slips through the aperture of her childhood towards the light of the Sun into womanhood, seasoned and strong for the world. She does not flinch as she confronts the passivity of a mother as her child is facing rape. From sexual violence to the pandemic to the struggles of feminism to our mortal end, Singh’s courage and fearless writing leads us through an ever-changing geography, through cities and door frames that mark our comings and goings. Whatever door we pass through, the transcendent Woman is there to meet us, embodiment of women gone before who have been “dwarfed,” who have been denied justice, who have been denied remembrance.
Singh, in this collection, does not forget all the women who have come before her. She is relentless in telling their stories, and in doing so, we learn hers. This is a rare book possessed with moving beauty and depth, where, within its covers, one finds, “How a woman… / delivers enough / drenched, wet, unfolding hope.”
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Melissa A. Chappell is a native of rural South Carolina where she is inspired by the natural world. Besides writing and reading, she enjoys the guitar, the piano, and singing. Her work has been published in BlazeVox, Amethyst Literary Review, and Ethos Literary Review, among others. The latest of her five books is For the Next Earth (Wipf and Stock, 2021). You can find her on Instagram: @melissachappell962.
