THE REVERSAL OF THE BINARY OPPOSITIONS:

THE CONSTRUCTION OF MALE IN THE POETRY

OF KAMALA DAS
Dr. Charanjit Singh
Department of English
Lyallpur Khalsa College, Jalandhar
09878058630
miltonjohn@rediffmail.com

Abstract

Kamala Das endeavours to expose or dismantle the trap of binary

oppositions, specified by Cixous, in terms of which patriarchy
constructs woman as negative and passive. But does this
endeavour reflect when it comes to the construction of man in her
poetry? In other words, does Kamala Das dismantle the binary
oppositions in the construction of man as she does in the
construction of woman in her poetry or does in her endeavour to
get rid of a trap laid for woman she push man in another similar
trap? With this objective, this research paper analyzes the
construction of male in the poetry of Kamala Das.

Orientation

In one of their tasks, Feminism and its subsequent offshoot

Feminist Literary Criticism probe the artificial binary oppositions
formulated by patriarchy in terms of which women and men are
positioned in society and literary texts. Quoting Kate Millet in this
regard who says “The essence of politics is power”, Toril Moi
(1997: 118) asserts that the task of feminist critics and theorists is
to expose the way in which male dominance over females
constitutes what Millet calls 'perhaps the most pervasive ideology
of our culture”. Undoubtedly, this ‘most pervasive ideology’ is
patriarchy. The work of the French feminist critic Helen Cixous is
notable in this regard. She (1997: 1001) lists up the following
binary oppositions prevalent in the patriarchical society:

Activity/Passivity
Sun/Moon
Culture/Nature
Day/Night
Father/Mother
Head/Heart
Intelligible/Palpable
Logos/Pathos
Form, convex, step, advance, semen, progress.
Matter, Concave, Ground―where steps are taken, holding and
dumping ground.
Man/ Woman

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In these categories the first term relates to men and the second to
women. Thus, Cixous shows that patriarchy brings man at the
centre and leaves no space for women or just keeps her at the
margin. This is what prompts her to comment, “Either woman is
passive or she doesn’t exist.” Simone de Beauvoir (1949) indicates
the prevalence of the process of naturalizing these binary
oppositions constructed by patriarchy in almost all manifestations
of human culture including law, religion, philosophy, science and
literature. She observes:

Legislators, priests, philosophers, writers, and

scientists have striven to show that the subordinate
position of woman is willed in heaven and
advantageous on earth.

And this is true in almost all literatures written in almost all the
lands. It is this naturalization of the binary oppositions that the
feminist writers expose, oppose, deconstruct and subvert in their
writings. In the writings of women writers this phenomenon is
more at work. Patricia Spacks (1989: 48) notices, "There seems to
be something that we call a women's point of view on outlook
sufficiently distinct to be recognizable through the countries.”
Here it is to be noted that this distinct women's point of view has
resulted in an altogether different representation of women in the
literary texts written by women who have been called feminists,
whereby women are shown negatively constructed and victimized
in the society or liberated, having a distinct identity and living life
on their own terms. In the light of this representation of women by
the feminist women writers, there seems to be a curiosity to probe
the representation of men by these writers. It is this curiosity that
the present paper caters to. Specifically speaking, it analyzes the
construction of male in the poetry of Kamala Das, one of the
founding figures of Indian poetry in English. For the purpose of
analysis, eleven of her poems are selected. These are A Losing
Battle, Conflagration, In Love, The Looking Glass, The Sunshine
Cat, An Invitation, The Maggots, The Stone Age, The Suicide, The
Old Playhouse and The Freaks.

Kamala Das and Feminism

Kamala Das (31 March 1934 – 31 May 2009) is perhaps the most
outstanding and debated Indian woman poet who wrote in English
in the post-independent India. Nominated and shortlisted for Nobel
Prize for Literature in 1984 and Winner of the PEN Asian Award
for poetry (1964), Kerala Sahitya Academy Award (1969), Sahitya
Academy Award (1985) and Kent Award for English Writing from
Asian Countries (1999), she is acknowledged to be a poet in whose
poetry the feminist literary agenda has been foregrounded. K.R.
Srinivas Iyenger (1985: 680) observes, “Kamala Das is fiercely
feminine sensibility that dares without inhibitions to articulate the

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hurts it has received in an insensitive man-made world.” Similar is
the view of Sunanda P.Chavan (1984: 60), “Kamala Das embodies
the most significant stage of development of Indian Feminine
poetic sensibility not yet reached by her contemporaries”.
Obviously, she is brutally bold and blunt in accepting her distinct
identity as a woman, an identity which does not conform to the
norms of the patriarchical society. The result is conflict. An
Invitation beautifully portrays this conflict:

I wore a shirt and my

Brother's trousers, cut my hair short and ignored
My womanliness. Dress in sarees, be girl
Be wife, they said. Be embroiderer, be cook,
Be a quarreller with servants. Fit in. Oh,
Belong, cried the categorizers. Don't sit
On walls or peep in through our lace-draped windows.
Be Amy, or be Kamala. Or, better
Still, be Madhavikutty. It is time to
Choose a name, a role.

And if she is dubbed as a freak, she is proud to be called so. In The

Freaks, she declares:

I am a freak. It`s only

To save my face, I flaunt at
Times, a grand flamboyant lust

Tejinder Kaur (1980) writes in this regard, “Kamala Das did

display tremendous courage in revolting against the sexual
colonialism and providing hope and confidence to young women
that they can refuse and reject the victim positions, that they can
frustrate the sexist culture’s effort to exploit, passivise and
marginalize women”. Another critic, Devendra Kohli (1980: 190),
also endorses this view, “Her poetry is in final analysis an
acknowledgement and a celebration of the beauty and courage of
being a woman. Kamala das is essentially a poet of the modern
Indian woman’s ambivalence, giving expression to it more nakedly
than any other Indian woman poet.” Beyond doubt, Kamala Das in
her poetry voices the agony of a woman who is frustrated in her
endeavours to belong to somebody, to seek love, to have a distinct
identity and to be recognized as a woman with human passions and
feelings and not as an object for the gratification of lust. K.V.
Surdendran (2000: 25) puts it more explicitly, “Her main concern
happens to be suffering and humiliation meted out to women.”
Obviously, in her poetry, Kamala Das endeavours to expose or at
times dismantle the trap of binary oppositions, specified by Cixous, in
terms of which patriarchy constructs woman as negative and passive.
But does this endeavour reflect when it comes to the construction of
man in her poetry? In other words, does Kamala Das dismantle the
binary oppositions in the construction of man as she does in the

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construction of woman in her poetry or does in her endeavour to get
rid of a trap laid for woman she push man in another similar trap?

The Construction of male in Kamala Das’s Poetry

Written in the first person narrative, An Invitation by Das makes

explicit statements on the nature of men and women. Here the man
the speaker meets is denied any identity as the speaker does not
call him ‘by any name’. Further, he is presented as a being with
‘hunger’ i.e. lust who ‘wants a woman’ for its gratification. On the
contrary, woman is presented as a being with patience and a seeker
of ‘love’.

I met a man, loved him. Call

Him not by any name, he is every man
Who wants. a woman, just as I am every
Woman who seeks love. In him . . . the hungry haste
Of rivers, in me . . . the oceans' tireless
Waiting.

Obviously, the poem positions women and men in a binary opposition

– love/lust – wherein the first element relates to women and the
second to men. This painting of man as a being with lust is not
occasional in Das’s poetry, but quite regular. The male in The Freaks
is shown to be given to ‘skin's lazy hungers’ and the female speaker
is shown to be wary of all this and in search for something ‘more
alive’. Obviously, this something ‘more alive’ means love.

Can this man with

Nimble finger-tips unleash
Nothing more alive than the
Skin's lazy hungers?

Likewise, In The Sunshine Cat, all men the female speaker turns to in
her quest for love are shown to be brimming with ‘young lusts’,
something which the female speaker disapproves of and wishes to
‘forget’. Further, the nature of adjectives used to describe men in the
poem needs to be taken into consideration. For instance, men are
called ‘selfish’, ‘coward’, ‘ruthless watcher’ and ‘cynics’. Needless to
say, that all these are thoroughly negative constructions.

They did this to her, the men who know her, the man
She loved, who loved her not enough, being selfish
And a coward, the husband who neither loved nor
Used her, but was a ruthless watcher, and the band
Of cynics she turned to, clinging to their chests where
New hair sprouted like great-winged moths, burrowing her
Face into their smells and their young lusts to forget
To forget,

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Not only this, through the agency of the female speaker, men in
the poem are reported to be incapable of love as love is not in their
‘nature’.
they said, each of
Them, I do not love, I cannot love, it is not
In my nature to love,

The Looking Glass, another poem by Kamala Das, also reinforces

the similar construction of man. Here the female speaker is of the
view that to get ‘a man to love’ all that a woman needs to do is to
gratify his lust, to satisfy him sensually and sexually, for a man
does not long for anything beyond ‘the scent of
long hair’, ‘the musk of sweat between the breasts’ and ‘the warm
shock of menstrual blood’.

Gift him all,

Gift him what makes you woman, the scent of
Long hair, the musk of sweat between the breasts,
The warm shock of menstrual blood, and all your
Endless female hungers.

Next, man in the poetry of Kamala Das is presented as

overflowing with ‘monstrous ego’ who makes use of ‘love’ to
tame woman, to make her ‘a dwarf’, to kill her ‘urge to fly’ and to
hinder her growth. It is this portrayal of man that we get in The
Old Playhouse. For a speedy comprehension of the idea, the
relevant phrases in the following lines are put in bold

You planned to tame a swallow, to hold her

In the long summer of your love so that she would forget
Not the raw seasons alone, and the homes left behind, but
Also her nature, the urge to fly, and the endless
Pathways of the sky. It was not to gather knowledge
Of yet another man that I came to you but to learn
What I was, and by learning, to learn to grow, but every
Lesson you gave was about yourself.

You called me wife,

I was taught to break saccharine into your tea and
To offer at the right moment the vitamins. Cowering
Beneath your monstrous ego I ate the magic loaf and
Became a dwarf. I lost my will and reason, to all your
Questions I mumbled incoherent replies.

he strong man's technique is

Always the same, he serves his love in lethal doses,

A cursory look at these lines reveals at least two binary

oppositions at work here – humility/ego and liberty/imprisonment.
Again, the first and the positive element in both these pairs has

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been assigned to woman and the second and the negative one has
been made the identity of man. Another interesting thing in the
poem is that the female speaker denounces the ‘love’ of her male
partner almost in the same way as in other poems of Das the
female speakers denounce man’s ‘lust’, and looks upon this love as
man’s ‘plan’ to ‘tame a swallow’, as ‘man's technique’ and as
something which is ‘lethal’. Almost similar is the case in The
Looking Glass. Here once again the female speaker presents man
as egoistic by suggesting that in order to make man love her all
that a woman needs to do is to satisfy his ego by making herself
‘softer’, ‘younger’ and ‘lovelier’ so that he finds ‘himself the
stronger one ‘. Her long list of suggestions to women in this regard
is as follows:

Stand nude before the glass with him

So that he sees himself the stronger one
And believes it so, and you so much more
Softer, younger, lovelier. Admit your
Admiration. Notice the perfection
Of his limbs, his eyes reddening under
The shower, the shy walk across the bathroom floor,
Dropping towels, and the jerky way he
Urinates. All the fond details that make
Him male and your only man.

In addition to lust and ego, another characteristic assigned to

man in Das’s poetry is fickleness. In The Suicide the female speaker
observes that ‘holding’ the ‘moving water’ of sea is easier than
holding a man even ‘for half a day’.

Holding you is easy

Clutching at moving water,
I tell you, sea,
This is easy,
But to hold him for half a day
Was a difficult task.
It required drinks
To hold him down.
To make him love.

Among other things that are useful to probe the

construction of male in Das’s poetry, the most noteworthy is her
use of imagery to build up the image of man. Often it is animal
imagery as in The Stone Age, where man is called ‘a lion’ and his
hand is compared with ‘a hooded snake’.

Ask me, everybody, ask me

What he sees in me, ask me why he is called a lion,
A libertine, ask me why his hand sways like a hooded
snake Before it clasps my pubis.

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Similarly, in The Maggots, lying in ‘her husband's arms’ at night,
the wife considers him a maggot feeding on a corpse.

At sunset, on the river ban, Krishna

Loved her for the last time and left...
That night in her husband's arms, Radha felt
So dead that he asked, What is wrong,
Do you mind my kisses, love? And she said,
No, not at all, but thought, What is
It to the corpse if the maggots nip?

In another poem, In Love, the female speaker compares the limbs of

her male partner with ‘Carnivorous plants’. Here it is to be noticed
that carnivorous plants make their food by trapping and
consuming insects and other arthropods. Obviously, the comparison
paints man as violent, brutal, hurting, heartless and parasite:

his limbs like pale and

Carnivorous plants reaching
Out for me

Further, in Conflagration, murder imagery is used to describe the

aftermath of the sexual act performed by man. Obviously, here
man, who goes physical with a woman, is presented as a murderer.

How well i can see him

After a murder, conscientiously
Tidy up the scene, wash
The bloodstains under
Faucet, bury the knife

And finally, this advice to women in A Losing Battle is above

all:

Men are worthless, to trap them

Use the cheapest bait of all, but never
Love

The inference that this analysis brings forth is that in the

construction of male Kamala Das seems to be falling in that trap of
binary oppositions which the feminists revolt against when it
comes to the positioning of women in the society and literature
dominated by patriarchy. If patriarchy positions woman in a
disadvantageous position and paints her in negative colors as
Helen Cixous suggests, while constructing male in her poetry
Kamala Das seems to be doing almost the same. She paints man as
a being with lust and ego, brands him as ‘selfish’, ‘coward’,
‘ruthless’, ‘cynic’, fickle and incapable of love, compares him with a
‘hooded snake’, ‘maggots’, ‘carnivorous plants’ and a murderer and

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goes to the extent of calling him ‘worthless’. Here it needs to be
stressed that such negative constructions of male in the products of
popular culture like literature, film, news or advertisement give
birth to a negative assessment of man in real life too. A recent
evidence in this regard is the rejection of an Indian student for
internship by a Professor at the world-famous Leipzig University
citing the following reason:

“I don’t accept any Indian male students for

internships. We hear a lot about rape problem in India
which I cannot support. I have many female students in
my group”

Needless to say, all the constructions which position man and woman
in binary oppositions, wherein one element is negative and the other
is positive, are faulty and need to be dismantled as human species are
neither absolutely black nor thoroughly white. Manju Kapur (cited in
Naik 2003: 13) observes:

There is a man within every woman and a woman in

every man. When, manhood is questioned womanhood
is fragmented.

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