Where the darkness blooms into jasmine: The poetry of Zilka Joseph
Image courtesy: Mayapple Press
In Zilka Joseph’s new collection In Our Beautiful Bones, Chintan Girish Modi celebrates the in-betweenness of cultures, the confluence of food, culture, politics, religion, and beauty from the vantage point of an Indian displaced abroad.
Zilka Joseph has a unique vantage point: the poet lives in the United States, but India lives in her. Her work, then, produces a powerful voice, a celebration of her multiple affinities and affiliations, poems that choose integrity over cleverness. She was born among the world’s most persecuted religious minorities*, and she is not religious. I say ‘and’, not ‘but’, because Joseph invites us to shake off our stereotypes.
Though she has written books, contributed to anthologies, and won awards, I hadn’t encountered Joseph’s poetry until her book In Our Beautiful Bones (Mayapple Press, 2021) found me during the COVID-19 pandemic. I was drawn in by Joseph’s biographical details. She was born in Mumbai, and lived in Kolkata before moving to Michigan, Ann Arbor, where she now lives, writes and teaches. She belongs to the Bene Israel community of Indian Jews.
The poem “Herstory” is one of the many that I like to revisit. Joseph captures the cadences of everyday speech so effectively that the experience of reading is more like listening to the radio. She writes, “Joseph? There are names like that in India? There are Jews in India?” The disbelief is a rib-tickling mimicry of the ignorance that Indian immigrants find in the US.
This is followed by “All this time I thought you were Hindi. Oh sorry, Hindu” and “OMG. How do you know so much about animal, birds, Nature? Did you learn all this after you came to the US?” I cannot help roaring with laughter because this is exactly the kind of conversation that I have had to sit through. Thankfully, nobody has asked me if an elephant escorted me to school, but I roll my eyes every time I am asked, “How do you speak such good English?” My standard response is: “Oh honey, we were colonised by the Brits!”
A friend teaches her the secrets of disguise, a skillful way to inhabit two worlds at once. The strategy is to “boil a pot of coffee” or “bake cookies, or a cake” so that the aroma will fill her hair, clothes, house and neighbourhood; else “the curry smell” will follow everywhere and “people will glare. / Especially at the office.”
In “Herstory”, Joseph writes about Marathi as mother tongue, and a maternal grandfather who worked at the Port Trust in Karachi before Pakistan was created in 1947. She writes about a great grandfather who was “the magistrate of the state of Aundh in Maharashtra” and a grandfather who served as a doctor in Egypt during the First World War. She writes about the history of Indian Jews “shipwrecked on the Konkan coast.”
The poet pays tribute to a grandmother who “spoke, read and wrote sudh Marathi” and to prayerbooks that transliterated from Hebrew into Marathi. She longs for the delicious nolen gurer sandesh from Park Circus in Kolkata, where she used to live. These fragments from the past have travelled with her to a land “far, far away” where she seeks “to make a / new life.”
When I read Joseph’s “Dhanya Patta”, I think of Indian friends in the US who struggle to find the right spices and condiments to replicate the flavours of their mother’s cooking. This is a tender love poem for the humble cilantro, calling it “a herb afraid of itself.” It might be “stamped foreign” in “someone’s cookbook” but, in her kitchen, its “fingers” happen to “touch every dish.” It is “rough” and “feisty”, its “green breath” is “essential as a blessing.”
The poet uses food to talk about culture, identity and heritage. In “The Scent of an Indian”, she writes about an “auntie” whose neighbours complain about “cooking smells” that “float out of her window / and into their apartments.” Another one teaches her simple desi hacks like burning incense—sandalwood or jasmine—or “beads of camphor” to sanitise her Indianness, which is not a minor inconvenience but a full-blown olfactory assault for fellow Americans.
This poem reminds me of conversations with American friends whose parents were born in India, so their homes and their school lunchboxes carried more than a hint of “curry”. Enrolled in white majority schools, these friends grew up embarrassed about their food because it put their differentness under the spotlight and exposed them to jokes and bullying. In trying hard to fit in, they cultivated a distaste for not only their food but also their culture.
Joseph writes about another “auntie” who “fries fish in her garage” in cold weather and sprays “fresh peppermint” after “the fumes dissipate / quickly in the open air.” She wonders why the “spicy smells” of Indian cooking are a big deal when
no one mentions the reek
of grills heating upon patios
and decks, the stench
of burning meat that wraps
around several blocks
every day.
I wonder if the Indian-origin Silicon Valley CEOs face the same issues.
A friend teaches her the secrets of disguise, a skillful way to inhabit two worlds at once. The strategy is to “boil a pot of coffee” or “bake cookies, or a cake” so that the aroma will fill her hair, clothes, house and neighbourhood; else “the curry smell” will follow everywhere and “people will glare. / Especially at the office.” The poet is amused because garam masala has become a “buzzword”, turmeric capsules are “a rage” and coconut oil is being hailed as “a miracle.” She writes, “This food is hip to some, but not / when we live, cook next door?”
As I chuckle in response to every stanza of this poem, I recall my days in Washington D.C. a few years ago. I was visiting the capital of the US for a conference on nuclear disarmament. Having spent most of my life in Mumbai, the weather there was too cold for me. I missed my homemade kadha, a go-to remedy for cough and cold, because it contains ginger, turmeric, cinnamon and cloves. I had to settle for pumpkin spice chai latte.
Zilka Joseph. Photo courtesy: Mayapple Press
The poet gets nostalgic about her life in India, where “every home’s cooking smells / mingle and shimmy in the streets.” Even as I write this, I can hear the tadka in my neighbour’s kadhai. I can smell the garlic, which must have been finely chopped for dal at lunchtime. I can also hear the sneer in the poet’s voice when she lists out “fun facts” about “European raiders” beguiled by the very smells that beget “complaints, curses.” She reminds us of those who “conquered for cinnamon. / For pepper.” and “killed us / for clove, cardamom.”
She is aware that violence exists in India too, and feels no hesitation to speak up about the same. Narendra Modi is not directly named, but there are obvious references to India’s prime minister in the poem “Live to Eat.” She writes,
Some world leaders move fast to quell
the plague. Some, like the saffron-robed
king of India condemn the poorest
to death-marches and starvation,
and the police beat those who leave
their homes during curfew.
Lockdown after lockdown.
In Joseph’s poetry, the fires of rage are cooled by the waters of empathy extending to all, and non-sectarian “prayer” that dreams of a “beautiful earth” where we can live without harming each other. She writes:
one day, may the bullets knives nooses knees hands of hate war tyranny
burst into roses
may all darkness that lives among us inside us around us
bloom into jasmine
may pain be transformed into lilies
sweet scent lifting us all to new light.
This is the most fragrant prayer that I have ever read. It smells of freshly washed hair, of candles, riverbanks, gravestones, and altars. It reminds me of how I read, what I bring to the words on the page. Sometimes I nibble, sometimes, I binge. Sometimes I dip my feet in, sometimes I take a deep dive. I try to coax meaning out of the verse. Or I let it reveal itself over time. I read at the pace of a snail. Or I rush through it like a vada pav on the move.
In Our Beautiful Bones by Zilka Joseph is available on e-book here. You can find more details about the author at her website.
* Joseph maintains that Jews were never persecuted in India as they were elsewhere in the world, so the Bene Israel integrated easily. They adopted local Indian customs and cuisine, without losing their distinctive cultural identity.
***
Chintan Girish Modi has an M.Phil in English Language Education, and has worked with the UNESCO Mahatma Gandhi Institute of Education for Peace and Sustainable Development, the Kabir Project, and the Hri Institute for Southasian Research and Exchange. His writing has appeared in Bent Book: A Queerish Anthology, Fearless Love, Clear Hold Build, Borderlines Volume 1, and more. He can be reached at chintan.prajnya@gmail.com.
