Our Correspondent
KOHIMA, DECEMBER 9
“It is safe to look at our culture and traditions through Rose-tinted glasses and romanticize them but safety and faint hearts achieve little or nothing—it is always those who dare, create change and create the environment to change.” Editor of Nagaland Page Monalisa Changkija said this while launching Where Wildflowers Grow, a collection of 92 short poems written by Avinuo Kire on Wednesday at Crossword in Kohima.
The senior journalist then urged the writers and poets to ‘unshackle’ themselves from the ‘safety of Ivory Towers to take off those Rose-tinted glasses’, if they are wearing them, and to dare and to change the “world around us, starting with our society and state.”
Avinuo, a young writer whose first anthology of short stories titled ‘The Power to Forgive and Other Stories’ was also released earlier this year, says the poems in Where Wildflowers Grow were written over a period of 13 years. She considers the collection as a “life verse”.
In her address following the release of the book, Monalisa Changkija maintained that poetry is not a new and “modern” development in Nagaland because poetry has always existed in the songs, lore and legends, in the various forms of art and dances of the Nagas. She said the oral traditions of the Naga people required great poetic imagination to be rendered and become an integral part of their culture and heritage, and was gifted down to generations as a legacy.
“What we are seeing today is a modern manifestation of our traditional poetic culture in an easily consumable form, increasingly in a language that has become our binding force,” she stated. For centuries, she said, the Nagas have weaved poetry in numerous forms but today the subject matters have increased because the universal human experiences have also increased from the simple lifestyles of yore and they are now as varied as the various lifestyles and experiences we live through every day.Changkija observes that Avinuo Kire has persuasively brought that essence out in the simplest way in her book Where Wildflowers Grow. “I can say without reservations that she (Avinuo) is a true communicator because she says the very profound in very simple words and in a very easily comprehensible way. She makes poetry understandable to the common person,” she said.
The veteran journalist and editor also asserted that the power of Literature lies in the fact of it being both the message and the medium. She said literature, whether prose or poetry can be looked at as a record, or history, not only of individual’s lives but also of society’s life. Towards this, she said it is imperative to write about peace, harmony, justice, liberty, equality and fraternity amongst the human race, about freedom to think, to feel, to ideate, to write and to read about poverty, hunger, mal-nutrition, diseases, injustice, corruption and all the other ills that beset the society and state, which in turn drown the people in the quagmire of under-development and sink them in the quick sands of mediocrity.
“Yes, we are very proud of our colourful culture and traditions, which we love to put on display for the world’s applause and for the world to notice our uniqueness but there are gray areas of our culture and traditions too, which need to be highlighted if we value freedoms, liberty, equality, justice, peace, harmony and fraternity,” Changkija said. She strongly feels that writers must double up as activists as well, that writers and poets climb down from “Ivory Towers” and see and feel the real world they are living in.
“This requires that we do not romanticize ourselves, our cultures, our traditions, our society and our state,” she said. She also underscored that literature should never be viewed as a means to gain popularity, despite the temptations social media offers in today’s technologically-dominated world.
Writers and poets must know the difference between selling themselves and selling their work.
Stating that literature has also always been a very powerful tool of protest against everything political, economic, social, religious and cultural that goes against the very grains of natural human life, she remarked that it must be utilized as a tool to protest against the injustice perpetrated against vulnerable, alienated and marginalized sections of the society such as the disabled, the LGBT and other disadvantaged, to be acknowledged and respected for their personhood.
Changkija urged upon writers and poets to change the world around them, starting with the Naga society and state.
Earlier, Avinuo recited some of her poems to the gathering while Elizabeth Chasie read out the ‘publishers note’ on behalf of Easterine Kire. Six young students of Don Bosco College Kohima, where Avinuo is currently an assistant professor, presented special music on the occasion.
