Ramazani Metaphor Y60v2x

Metaphor and Postcoloniality: The Poetry of A. K.
Ramanujan
Author(s): Jahan Ramazani and A. K. Ramanujan
Source: Contemporary Literature, Vol. 39, No. 1 (Spring, 1998), pp. 27-53
Published by: University of Wisconsin Press
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JAHAN RAMAZANI
Metaphor and Postcoloniality

The Poetry of A. K. Ramanu
*M~ A etaphor and postcoloniality migh

related and perhaps even antithetic
subjects. After all, isn't the analysis
wedded to universalist philosophy
poetics, to Aristotle and the New Criticism? A
literary analysis grounded in sociohistorical ap
race, and nationality, in critical methods that
mimesis over lyric figuration? Perhaps. But, i
may seem, the two areas remarkably intersect,
convergence might help us to rethink not only t
each of the fields. Consider, for example, the im
vergence for the Anglophone literary canon, in
spicuously subordinate.1 The relative metaphor
has contributed to the genre's marginalization, o
susceptible to being read as ethnographic mirror
condition. But if metaphoricity and postcolonial
structures of experience, and if metaphor is ind
cursive site of postcoloniality, then perhaps mor
granted to Anglophone poets like Loma Go
Brathwaite of the Caribbean, Okot p'Bitek and C
1. For examples of the general neglect of poetry in the postco

Anglophone studies, see the otherwise helpful collections of cri
by Jonathan White, Ian Adam and Helen Tiffin, and Feroza F
Dasenbrock. Some subfields within postcolonial studies, su
Lusophone areas, have accorded poetry a more significant pl
Contemporary Literature XXXIX, 1 0010-7484/98/0001

? 1998 by the Board of Regents of the University of Wiscon
28 * CONTEMPORARY LITERAT U R E
Africa, Eunice de Souza and A. K. Raman

poses of this essay, this last writer will b
convergences between metaphor and postc
liminary reflections on the discursive over
"Displacement," "transfer," "migratio
the standard lexicon of postcolonial studie
well-known discussions of metaphor. Ety
plain this strange intersection of vocab
metaphor, Greek for "transference," is the
space; that is, metaphor metaphorizes
change as spatial movement from one plac
or "context" to another. "[P]hora," as Pa
kind of change, namely change with r
epiphora of a word is described as a sort
ment 'from... to...."' Further, "metaphor is
that Aristotle calls 'alien' (allotrios)"-a w
ing," since "[t]he displaced meaning com
(Rule of Metaphor 17, 18, 19).3 Found scra
versity bathroom, "Transference," "Dis
"Borrowing," "Movement between Realm
would probably seem to echo lectures
metaphor. But this conclusion would be
of metaphor and the study of postcolon
with what has been called "the location of
more crucially its dislocation. Metapho
both conceived of in terms of the movem
ation of discourse from one place to ano
2. The terms "postcolonial" and "third world" have oft

ferences between texts that arise from widely varie
McClintock). Even so, I believe that the categories "p
main useful in highlighting similarities that cut acro
shaped by their encounter with and response to Eur
tural similarities are invisible from more local perspe
yoke together heterogeneous experiences under natio
keep in check the generality of the postcolonial framew
Ramanujan's work, I focus on the intricate and conflict
point to their indigenous intertexts.
3. Here and in my discussion of Ramanujan, I follow
stand "metaphor" broadly-not in the narrowly seman
ter trope of resemblance.
R A M A Z A N I * 29
volves not only a one-way shift but inevitably a b

bridization. While postcolonial literary study articula
convergence of places known as "East" and "West
"South," "metropole" and "colony," metaphor is, a
Richards, "a transaction between contexts" (94).
which were remote appear now as close," Ric
metaphor, describing the "rapprochement," "epiph
fer" of metaphor as "nothing else than this move or
ical distance, from the far to the near" ("Metaphoric
Lest these analogies seem merely the product o
play on Aristotle's terminology, let us look at a mor
of metaphor that trades heavily in the geographic la
associated with postcolonial studies. In his influen
Art, Nelson Goodman conceives of metaphor as t
gether of two different "realms," notably described
"native and foreign" (81, 72). What happens as a co
"expedition abroad" from one realm to another, afte
"migration" or even "invasion" (73, 74)? A "reorienta
vergence transforms each of the realms (72). Descr
Goodman sometimes sounds like a bizarre cross between Aristotle
and V. S. Naipaul:
The home realm of a schema is the country of naturalization rather than of
birth; and the returning expatriate is an alien despite his quickening mem-
ories. (77)
Its travels result in some displacement on its return (otherwise we

shouldn't even know it had been away); but the displacement is far from
total.... (83)
Does it matter that one can talk metaphorically about metaphors in

ways that recall postcolonial displacement, relocation, and transfer?
expatriation, diaspora, and migration? alienation and hybridiza-
tion? Or is it merely a coincidence? It pays, of course, to reflect on
why one can describe sex in terms borrowed from death, argument
in the language of construction, and wars as if they were games
(Lakoff and Johnson; Lakoff and Turner). In none of these cases is
the metaphorical traffic between realms essential, but neither is it
negligible. So too, I would suggest, the analogies between metaphor
and postcolonialism should awaken us to our oddly geographical
30 * CONTEMPORARY L I T E RAT U R E
understanding of metaphor, and, conversely

that metaphor ought to play in our underst
Although metaphor has often been decon
trope of identity and organicity, a postcolo
to renew our awareness that displacement, d
are no less inherent than equivalence in the
Perhaps I could spell out further some impl
between metaphor and postcoloniality. D
meaning, or culture from one context to an
both the metaphorical sentence and the post
complete integration within the new discur
duces dead metaphors and overassimilate
newly hybridized discourse to reorient pe
remain between the native and foreign, ten
frame. Metaphorical or poetic discourse,
mously argued, renews perception by "de
(13). It disrupts the "[h]abitualization" that "
ing down perception and making the world
Similarly, in third world literatures, juxtap
nization and migration throw into relief wh
ceals, defamiliarizing the cultures of colon
vision is characteristic of postcolonial litera
in terms of one another. Phrases like "split
scopic vision" have also served to describe
and maintains a tension between two modes
ence.5 Further, the rhetoric of "sameness" a
emphasis on "the tension between same and
ses of both postcolonial texts and of metapho
phor 256). "[T]he meeting of two distant rea
as if writing about the postcolonial experien
4. In the deconstructionist critique, metaphor is said t

rality, and contingency inherent within language (Derr
metaphor, as instanced by Ramanujan's postcolonial pra
tiotemporal gaps in figuration even as it crosses them.
5. See Ricoeur, drawing on Roman Jakobson and W. B
Process" 239-41).
6. Pierre Reverdy, as cited by Paul Valery, as cited by Ricoeur (Rule of Metaphor 348n26).
RAMAZANI * 31
Admittedly, to emphasize the locatio

metaphor, within discourse, culture, or rh
its sociopolitical basis. The postcolonial
hybridity and metaphoric tension arose o
violence, occupation, and resistance. Op
resemblances between metaphor and po
fies metaphor, as if tenor and vehicle we
gether by geopolitics, and depersonalize
onizer and colonized were less peoples t
or rhetorical units. Like any comparison
lights some aspects of each term and shut
such an emphasis might be salutary at a t
ciological analysis often overshadows th
postcolonial aesthetics, at the risk of r
tures to demographics and politics. By
between metaphoric and postcolonial hy
split perception, I hope to make visible ot
the dramatic ascendancy of postcolonia
half of the twentieth century. To explain
rience is especially amenable to aesthetic
highly figurative modes like lyric poetry
to consider that dislocations of meanin
of discourse, stereoscopic vision, defamili
guistic hybridity, and consciousness of
intrinsic to both postcoloniality and the
ing to suggest the crucial importance o
literatures as rhetorical locus of stereosco
tion, I explore the postcoloniality of met
ity of the postcolonial as exemplified in t
most distinguished Anglophone Indian
1993, A. K. Ramanujan.
Long underestimated and therefore per

duction, Ramanujan's poetry now seem
worldwide recognition. In 1995 Oxford
The Collected Poems of A. K. Ramanujan, g
ers (1966), Relations (1971), and Second Sig
32 * CONTEMPORARY L I T E R AT U R E
rial for an incomplete fourth volume, The Bl

Indian contemporaries like Nissim Ezekie
have hailed Ramanujan as the best Indian E
jan's earlier poetry is sometimes overwhelm
ties of Pound and Eliot, Anglomodernist
helped Ramanujan to fend off the sentim
that often clouded Indian English verse a
later volumes, above all Second Sight, ever m
and remake the forms, tonalities, and trope
language poets like William Carlos William
William Butler Yeats, brilliantly fusing t
of ancient and medieval Dravidian poetry
winning professor of linguistics at the Un
manujan translated and studied South Indi
Western and Eastern recognition for these a
Sanskrit traditions of India. Resisting the "m
tural imperialism" of proponents of a single
Great Tradition," Ramanujan reaffirmed tha
India are indissolubly plural and often confl
Are Windows" 188-89). "India does not hav
sized, "but many pasts" ("Classics" 135). Best
his crystalline translations of classical and m
nada verse, Ramanujan draws on many featu
atures in his own Anglophone poetry: the st
tural use of metaphor, the intensification o
"montage" and "dissolve" effects, streams
syntax, spare diction, avoidance of heavil
light in irony and paradox, precise obser
(puram) and exterior (akam) worlds, and reli
cal abstraction but physical detail for compl
246, 287).
As translator of classical Dravidian poetry,
forceful metaphors into contemporary Engl
as models for his own Anglophone poetics
complement Anglomodernist principles of c
nondecorative use of metaphor, as seen in
Tamil poetry that almost seems proto-imagi
RAMAZA N I 33
The bare root of the bean is pink

like the leg of a jungle hen,
and herds of deer attack its overripe p
In Ramanujan's translation, the metapho

phatically visible and vulnerable-supe
root, hybridizing vegetable and animal, co
and mobility. Considering the broad conto
one might speculate that this Tamil metap
into a mode of transportation may have h
reasons as well. Though rooted in South
since his birth in Mysore in 1929, Ramanu
United States, wrote primarily in Englis
American poetry, and criticized Sanskr
zealotry, and Indian revivalism. Conver
language poet in the United States, he
Asian studies, wrote primarily about Ind
Dravidian literatures, and often seemed cli
English language he worked in. On this las
notes that Ramanujan's use of English "
ity," as if "to turn language into an artifa
Ramanujan writes from within English ye
nizably postcolonial practice that Gilles
have famously if unfortunately labeled
nujan even describes himself as split be
"English and my disciplines (linguistics
"'inner' forms"-his lived Indian experie
its cultures (qtd. in Parthasarathy, "How
translator, Ramanujan relies on both meta
terweave his outer and inner worlds wh
tween them. Describing the translator's "s
Ramanujan suggests that metaphor and tra
as closely related forms of mediation be
perhaps even halves of the brain (Afterwo
"The word translate, as you know," Ram
"is only Latin for the Greek word metapho
("Classics" 136-37). As translator and sc
7. Ramanujan translates and comments upon this pas
to carry poetry across differences of languag

the while reflecting in his own English-langu
lost in translation. At the heart of Ramanujan
plangent, meditations on transfer and loss b
on survivals and disappearances between p
switchboard through which spatiotemporal di
meet, metaphor discursively locates and ani
ness. Close analysis of passages from Ramanuj
help to probe in detail these and other
metaphor and the postcolonial. Specifically,
jan's poetry the many forms that metaphor t
coloniality: as contact point between one c
connective tissue of postcolonial memory; a
production; as conduit between the postcolo
gins or endings; and as discursive incarnati
tween the postcolonial self and its private, na
family.
The opening of "Waterfalls in a Bank" in Second Sight reflects Ra-

manujan's immersion in the work of translation and, more broadly,
his understanding of the parallels between metaphor, intercultural
translation, and intertemporal connection:
And then one sometimes sees waterfalls
as the ancient Tamils saw them,
wavering snakeskins,
cascades of muslin.
(Collected Poems 189)
From Tamil into English, from ancient to contemporary, Ramanujan

translates metaphors of snakeskins and muslin, which in turn "trans-
late" waterfalls. His eye a "rainbow bubble," Ramanujan would, as
he rhymes in a later poem, "see all things double"-or perhaps even
quadruple, as with this waterfall ("Mythologies 2," Collected Poems
226). Beholding stereoscopically a man-made waterfall in a Chicago
bank, Ramanujan's vision is split metaphorically between waterfall
and snakeskin/muslin. This metaphorical juncture straddles, in turn,
the "postcolonial" junctures of India and the United States, old
R A M A Z A N I * 35
Tamil texts and his own emergent writing. To see th

of postcoloniality, with its fusion of alien perspectiv
possess something akin to the double vision of me
jan decommodifies and Indianizes the confined w
American bank, putting metaphor to work in a kind
onization. The ancient Indian vehicles of snakeskin and muslin
paradoxically enliven with danger and wonder an image hackney

in Western poetry.
Summoning the multiple relations of resemblance in nature
(American and Tamil waterfalls), culture (the U.S. and India), and
time (ancient and contemporary), Ramanujan compares such meta-
phorical "transactions between contexts" to money exchanged in a
bank:
As I transact with the past as with another

country with its own customs, currency,
stock exchange, always
at a loss when I count my change....
In exchanges between past and present as well as one culture and

another, one is transformed by the transaction; here, the poet is pun-
ningly "at a loss" to understand his profound "change," both im-
poverished and enriched by his submission to an alien economy. In
a later essay, Ramanujan again compares the mutually transforma-
tive experience of cross-temporal encounter with the anthropologi-
cal experience of cross-cultural encounter: "The past is another
country, as the saying goes. With the past, too, one adds oneself to it
as one studies it. One is changed by it and the past itself is changed
by one's study of it" ("Classics" 132).8 Postcolonial quester after ori-
gins, Ramanujan nevertheless represents the cultural past as irrecu-
perable and unknowable in and of itself, unlike the static past of the
revivalist. In "Waterfalls in a Bank," as in other poems by Ramanu-
jan and indeed other postcolonial writers, metaphor is a primary
conceptual and linguistic site of both intercultural and intertempo-
ral exchange. As in Ramanujan's not-just-financial bank, it is a place
8. Bruce King comments on the changeability and irrecuperability of the past in

Ramanujan (74).
where diverse perspectives, cultures, and

gether to be transacted, transposed, comp
In the climactic scene of "Waterfalls in a B
metaphorically bridges the distances betwee
and West. Standing in a Western financial in
poet remembers from his childhood the m
might have become-a Brahman mendican
diseased, spasmodic, the sadhu lifts his lo
and "pisses" on two flowers beside the st
commingles with the ancient East in the m
the bank's waterfall with the sadhu's "stream" of urine. But the
most remarkable transfusion of cultural opposites occurs when "a

car turns the corner," illuminating the sadhu's urination:
Headlights make his arc
a trajectory of yellow diamonds,

scared instant rainbows, ejecting spurts
of crystal, shocked
by the commonplace cruelty of headlights.

This startling confluence of Western modernity and an ancient East-

ern way of life produces an epiphanic moment, when-to speak a
little grandly of an old man's urination-both liquid and light seem
transfigured into something beyond themselves, beyond either East
or West, precolonial or postcolonial. A luminous "exchange of con
texts," this climactic image figures in part Ramanujan's own poetry:
a humble world lit up by poetic form, an ancient sensibility startled
by its encounter with modernity, a traditional Brahman past meta-
morphosed by the onset of the Western present-in short, a
metaphor-making poesis that hybridizes and transfigures its cul-
tural sources. Having begun in metaphoric transactions between old
Tamil metaphors and a waterfall in a Chicago bank, Ramanujan's
poem culminates in the creation of a new metaphor for the post-
colonial experience of living in twin temporalities, seemingly unre-
lated, surely unintegrated, yet suddenly bridged, breached, and
transfused by unpredictable moments of resemblance.
In his four-part meditation "Drafts," Ramanujan dissects the
RAMAZ A N I ? 37
metaphoric resemblances not only between th

membered past but also between copy and origi
cultures, child and parent, even among thes
semblance. That reproduction and refigurat
tively engage the postcolonial poet is hardly
as Ramanujan is with recasting precolonial cultu
porary world. More surprising, perhaps, is R
ulation of what fails in translation, what is los
by metaphor. Ever alert to these difference
cially wary in "Drafts" of the metaphor-driven
beginnings, despite his knowing complicity
quest. Such mythologization can unwittingl
world what Rashmi Bhatnagar calls in anoth
tionary forces of revivalism. Nowhere is this d
the Indian context, where the search for the sou
in the Vedic times has almost invariably led to
to our contemporary plural/secular identity"
Ramanujan playfully and skeptically inspec
tempt to reconstruct ancient Eastern beginning
Itself a copy of lost events,

the original is nowhere, of which things,
even these hands,
seem but copies, garbled by a ciphered

script, opaque as the Indus,
to be refigured
from broken seals....

Ramanujan questions both the West's Orientalist nostalgia for Eas

ern origins and the East's nativist nostalgia for a precolonial past. In
stancing the much theorized, if often qualified, interrelation be
tween postcolonial and postmodern skepticisms, he emphasizes th
layers of mediation and slippage between past and present, origin
and copy. The seal, age-old device for certifying authenticity, is an
9. In other contexts, such as the Caribbean, revivalist movements like negritude ca

have very different ramifications. See Benita Parry, who cites Bhatnagar but offers a spi
ited defense of "nativism" on the basis of works by Aime C6saire and Frantz Fanon.
ironic emblem for such lapses in transmission.

dian imprint is a "copy" of a lost "original" sea
"Itself a copy of lost events." The prized ori
copies in an unanchored metaphoric chain
Though dubious of both Western and third wo
transparent an ideal, unitary, precolonial pa
theless, unlike the deconstructive purist, sugge
the past comes back to life through the co-c
the imagination. Supplementing the high m
seals with the low mimesis of contemporary
Ramanujan marvelously evokes transhistorica
declining series:
real homebodies,
family quarrels,
itches, clogs in the drain, the latter

too ordinary to be figured
in the classic seals.
(Collected Poems 157-58)
Unlike the unremittingly corrosive ironies of some postmod-

ernisms, Ramanujan's deconstruction playfully reinstates the post-
colonial poet as agent of cultural reconstruction.
In the middle of this poem devoted to scrutinizing the very nature
of resemblance, Ramanujan quickens the dance among resemblances
of different kinds, turning each into a metaphor for the metaphorical
conjunctions of original and copy, present and past. He protests the
validity of the concept of the "original," all the while ironically erod-
ing the concept by multiplying the play of mirror on mirror:
And we have originals, clay tigers

that aboriginals drown after each small-
pox ritual,
or dinosaur smells, that leave no copies....

Dependent "copies" strangely threaten the concept of the "origi-

nal," since they make possible substitutions or reversals between
the two terms. Hence Ramanujan humorously conjures an "origi-
nal"-"dinosaur smells"-that guarantees its primordialness be-
RAMAZANI * 39
cause it could "leave no copies." Reviv

uncontaminated by the logic of reprodu
to absurd conjecture about prehistoric
mocks the reliance on earlier customs
"aboriginals," to ground historical na
ment, such as narratives of the Western
tilized, Eastern Other, postcolonial narr
pristine, precolonial Other, or evolution
about human descent from the prehi
case, reversals made possible by the
metaphorical resemblance put in jeopa
or originality of either pole.
In a sudden twist, the poet rapidly spi
copies with displaced originals

like these words,
adopted daughters researching parent

through maiden names in changing
telephone books,
and familiar grins in railway stations
From the oldest originals without cop

latest copies without originals-"these
either printed words in their immedi
words at the moment of inscription.
written draft or inspired thought-cann
displaced originals," the poet's words
tion of postcolonial deracination. In
compares these orphaned words to ado
cated from their familial origins-by
displacement of the maternal name, and
gion's language to others. The vexed d
indeed, Ramanujan's entire meditat
copies and originals-is, once again, cle
rience of linguistic and cultural displ
expatriation. The poet's words are like
from an original draft text but a cultur
have little chance of ever bridging the
them from their "primary" world, which mu

in part, an imaginative fabrication. While m
sire to reach beyond drafts and copies, R
foregrounds the inevitable participation
postcolonial longing for an original home-
yond the wanderings of meaning, metapho
purest form, this longing is doomed, he
melancholia and irony, since even if recov
necessarily metamorphose into something di
The postcolonial ironist's quest for origi
poem through historical relics, aboriginal
names. In each case, a spatiotemporal chasm
"original," warping, fracturing, or garbling
blance, transforming copies into originals an
Not to attend to these gaps would lead, in Ra
entalist and revivalist falsifications of one's
past never passes," Ramanujan commented
the individual past or historical past or cultu
Yet, he continues, "the disconnection is as
of the past as making the connection. And p
sent have to see both, because to assert con
none, where we cannot see any, is to be a
tion" 7, 8). As a postcolonial poet, Ramanu
of the copies and reproductions that enabl
nation to cross multiple barriers, as well as o
memory, history, and language that comp
The "alien" element, the "foreign" admixture
he knows, into resemblance. Between revi
nativism and postmodernism is the self-cons
his own and indeed much of the best postcol
The question of origins that animates bot
falls in a Bank" is still more explicitly and u
ements of Composition," once a long poem d
five sections (Dharwadker xxxvii). "Where
course, a particularly insistent question for t
rooted in uprootedness, located in dislocati
Indian poet, the analogous question "Where
from?" is also inherently vexed. In this proe
RAMAZANI * 41
manujan quests for his origins in the ma

ments" "composing" his literal and liter
121-23). At the end of the poem, having red
chemical elements that make up his bo
memories that constitute his psyche, Raman
he has been dislocating his identity in tryin
even as I add,
I lose, decompose
into my elements,
into other names and forms,

past, and passing, tenses
without time,
caterpillar on a leaf, eating,

being eaten.
The quest for biochemical, psychohistorical origins scatters identity

instead of hardening its lineaments. To recompose the self as "other
names and forms" from the past is to metaphorize it as traces, alter-
ities, congeries of others.10 "Elements of Decomposition" might
have served as well as Ramanujan's title. Incorporating yet truncat-
ing the prophetic vision of what is "past, or passing, or to come" at
the end of Yeats's "Sailing to Byzantium," Ramanujan's poetic
"composition" demonstrates how it feeds on the "elements" of ear-
lier "compositions." "Individual poems," according to Ramanujan,
"are created out of all the given 'elements of production,' and all the
language of past poems" (Afterword 282).
In a poem that roves from Yeats to the Upanishads, Western sci-
ence to Eastern spiritualism, physical to psychic discourses, Stone-
henge to Nairobi and Madurai, Platonic parable to Islamic festival,
Ramanujan maps the multifarious geography deposited in his iden-
tity and his poem, almost as if he, like Saleem Sinai in Salman
Rushdie's Midnight's Children, personified the diverse and uncon-
tainable cultural origins of modern India. As Ramanujan writes in
10. As Vinay Dharwadker writes of the poem, "What is particularly paradoxical and
ironic about the constitution of the self, in relation to its various 'others,' is that the
process which accumulates its defining characteristics becomes indistinguishable from
the process which evacuates its identity" (xxxiv).
his allegorical portrait of India as a great

everything circulates,
Things come in every day
to lose themselves among other things

lost long ago among
other things lost long ago....
("Small-Scale Reflections on a Great
House," Collected Poems 96)"
Concluding "Elements of Composition" with an allusion to the Upa-

nishads, Ramanujan suggests that what he translates elsewhere as
"Food Chain, Sanskrit Style" is a logic that holds for both body and
mind, both poem and nation: "And what eats is eaten, / and what's
eaten, eats / in turn."12 In the decolonizing third world, the bound-
aries of self, poem, and nation are more obviously permeable and
blurred than they may be elsewhere. To recompose them into dis-
crete identities is to falsify their complex filiations and mixed ori-
gins. Better to adopt a poetic that rides the shuttle of metaphor be-
tween past and present, here and there, representing whatever lines
it draws and totalities it arranges as composite, provisional, and
open-ended. Better to locate the postcolonial self and poem in the
dislocations of time, metaphor, and culture, to move with the move-
ments of the eye and the word.
Like beginnings, endings also enable self, poem, and nation to de-
fine themselves in relation to a horizon that delivers the contours of
identity. Like "Where do I come from?," "Where do I go to?" is a

pressing and problematic question for the postcolonial subject and
poem. Just as the elements of composition are key to understanding
identity, so too are the elements of decomposition-death and dis-
persal, bodily and spiritual afterlives, national and literary des-
tinies. In "Death and the Good Citizen," Ramanujan reverses "Ele-
ments of Composition." Meditating on endings rather than origins,
11. According to M. K. Naik, the poem is about India's great creative synthesis of cults,
cultures, and races (18-19).
12. Ramanujan translates and discusses this poem from the Taittiriya Upanishad in
"Some Thoughts" (333) and "Food for Thought" (222-23). See Bruce King's discussion of
the allusion (87).
RAM A Z A N I * 43
he metaphorizes the self not as its bodily and ps

the imaginary possibilities of its future (Collect
Whether viewing the human life cycle from the va
start or its finish, Ramanujan indulges but criticall
nealogical and eschatological impulses of much p
ture and theory. For him, neither the beginnings n
of the self are singular and fixed; they are fluid, m
terminate. Exuberant ironist of origins, Ramanu
"Death and the Good Citizen" to be a no less pla
gnant ironist of endings.
The postcolonial impetus behind Ramanujan's m
itation on the recirculation of nutrients, organs, an
explicit when he figures organ donation as cult
and integration:
Hearts,
with your kind of temper,
may even take, make connection
with alien veins, and continue
your struggle to be naturalized:
beat, and learn to miss a beat
in a foreign body.
Disorienting and incongruous, the postcolonial or

ence resembles the ultimate crossing of bounda
body and another. Ramanujan's exhilarating meta
interbodily to intercultural transplantation sugg
ous, violent, and strange it is to be refitted into a n
social organization. Like the postcolonial or migr
out of one cultural context and inserted into a new
blinks in a new head or the heart that beats in a new chest cannot al-
ways adapt with ease to its new surroundings. At the same time, the
poem implicitly invites our hearts to "take, make connection / with
alien veins," with the individual sensibility and cultural experience
inscribed within its lines. So too, the poem enacts its own connec-
tions and naturalizations. It reinscribes the English lyric metaphor
of the heart within its textual corpus, even beating with the word
"beat" at the beginning and end of a line, i

rhyme "take, make."13
Having explored how waste, food, and o
texts, and tropes, circulate through diff
manujan closes his poem with a skeptical y
Eastern and Western rites of ultimate c
Hindu cremation and American embalming
culation. After imagining himself "steriliz
accordance with Hindu ritual, Ramanujan p
risome fate in the West:
they'll lay me out in a funeral

parlour, embalm me in pesticide,
bury me in a steel trap, lock
me out of nature
till I'm oxidized by left-

over air, withered by my own
vapours into grin and bone.
Far from arresting the processes of natural metamorphosis, the

modern funeral director merely condemns the body to transforma-
tive decay by its own gaseous emissions. Again incorporating a
phrase from Yeats's "Sailing to Byzantium" ("once out of nature"),
Ramanujan remembers Yeats's mildly ironized hope of transcend-
ing nature through art, counterpointing it with humanity's pathetic
attempts at escape through embalming and crematory practices.
Opening the body of his poem to Yeats's words, Ramanujan links
the closed poem, supposedly pure and autonomous, to a corpse,
narcissistically trapped in its own putrid gasses. In metamorphosing
the Anglo-Irish Yeats, Western lyric tropes, the English language,
and Hindu ritual, Ramanujan indicates that the recirculation of cul-
ture is just as unstoppable as the recirculation of physical matter.
Having repeatedly ironized the nativist quest for pure and static ori-
13. In this poem, the Hindu themes of reincarnation (samsara) and of the world as food
(annamayan jagat) clearly shape Ramanujan's fascination with the recirculation of human
beings into food, vegetation, and other human bodies. On the concept that "All forms
arise out of food and return to it," see Ramanujan, "Food for Thought" (223). For a Vedic
death chant that Ramanujan echoes in this poem, see "Where Mirrors Are Windows"
(201).
RAM A Z A N I * 45
gins, he also warns that the quest for inviolable

risks cultural sterility and claustrophobia. For i
and cultures, Ramanujan envisions endings that
controlled or predicted, endings that are openings
new metamorphoses.
The imaginative relations between oneself and
self and one's beginning are, as we have seen i
etry, crucially dependent on metaphor-on lingu
both traverse and mark the gaps between past, pr
As indicated by Ramanujan's metaphoric crossin
ent tenses of his existence, the dislocation and
metaphor metaphorizes as spatial are also tempo
ject constructs itself partly out of the resemblanc
and the otherness of its bodily, psychic, and cul
out of the resemblances between itself and the oth
sible destinies-its imaginary afterlives in the b
minds of the future. Crossings between now an
there, one body and another are in turn isomorph
poetic metaphors have shown, with passages be
culture and others. The family, an obsessive top
poetry, can be thought of as the primary institutio
chronic transmission and synchronic codification
blances. A closer look at the interrelations bet
metaphor, and postcoloniality in Ramanujan's p
us to understand better the relation between vertical and horizontal
likeness, between the many forms of displacement and transmis-

sion-hermeneutic, linguistic, genetic, bodily, geographic, and tem-
poral.14 While metaphor metaphorizes itself in terms of place, the
metaphor of family is also, of course, key to our general under-
standing of metaphor. Indeed, family resemblance is a master trope in
contemporary discussions of metaphor. "Family resemblances,"
Mark Turner speculates, "are perhaps the similarities that from in-
fancy we notice most. And we use just this concept of similarity to
help explain ... how two things can bear a metaphorical relation or
resemblance. In short, we explain metaphor to ourselves in terms of
what we know about family" (12). In poems like "Extended Family,"
14. For a critique of the family trope to signify postcolonial ethnicity, see Gilroy (98-99).
as we shall see, Ramanujan illuminates th

tween our knowledge of the family and of
Even critics who have clashed over India
did Homi Bhabha and R. Parthasarathy in Th
ment (1978), agree that, in Parthasarathy's w
Ramanujan, one of the central metaphors
("How It Strikes" 189), or in Bhabha's, "F
metaphor of the family-bearer of ancien
of love, change, regeneration-that aligns
tablishes his own history" ("Indo-Anglian
multiple reflections and opacities, its sam
family is frequently the locus of Ramanu
definition. Across a wide array of lyrics, th
sorting through his resemblances with hi
children, siblings, and wife. At one extreme
balance toward a sameness that threatens
"Self-Portrait," the reflections he sees in sh
stranger's portrait, "often signed in a corne
lected Poems 23). With help from psychoana
duism, Ramanujan weighs the leaden burd
Nor is the family's assimilative pressure onl
izontal. In dreams the face of the poet's wif
hers," until resemblance erases even gender
feeling "whole in the ambivalence / of bein
... / androgynous as a god" ("Love Poem f
Poems 84).17 At the other extreme, Ram
15. The conflict was one of cosmopolitanism (Bhabha,

ter) and indigeneity (Parthasarathy, Letter).
16. In a fascinating comparison between the Oedipus
family, Ramanujan argues that "the direction of aggressio
Indian myths: "most often we have fathers (or father-
siring daughters." Ramanujan speculates that, unlike mo
heroic quest is individuation "achieved through an overt
hero's quest is to fulfill his father, his family," in accord
need "to use and absorb the vitality of the young" ("In
17. Elsewhere, Ramanujan speculates that the male "wish
in Indian literature and religion than in Western: "Indi
are full of female identifications, transvestite imagery, e
poem "Highway Stripper" (Collected Poems 166), cross-g
RAMAZA N I * 47
opaque differences separating him from his f

first "Love Poem for a Wife," nothing can
shared childhood experiences, so the poet ev
as possible remedy to spousal estrangement
practice of incestuous marriage. In the later "
and Her Trees," he writes of his wife, "you're
the faraway / stranger who's nearby" (Collect
Ramanujan's family poems move dialectical
of equivalence and difference, the metaphoric
members are a source of both self-alienation
"Clones subtly gone wrong," as Ramanujan
mously published "Lines" (Collected Poems 2
His, or is it her, parts

are yours, but they do not add up
to who you are, and you too
are no longer you.
Already in the title and epigraph of his 197

Ramanujan signals the centrality of family in
ing the Indian provenance of this preoccup
classical Tamil poem: "living / among relations / b
Poems 56). Here as elsewhere in Ramanujan,
blends with Western psychoanalysis: the volu
a stark photograph of the author's face, his f
an inset photograph of his parents, a litera
imago.18 The cover invites us to compare t
with his parents', as well as the son's modern
ful that it seems to obliterate not only distances betwee

cognate distance between one place and another, the speak
moulting, shedding
vestiges,
old investments,
rushing forever
towards a perfect
coupling
with naked nothing
in a world
without places[.]
18. Ramanujan describes his father's appearance and thinking in "Is There an Indian
Way of Thinking?" (42).
48 * CONTEMPORARY L I T E R A T U R E
ther's turban and Sri Vaisnava caste mark, hi

paring oneself with one's relations, Ramanuj
may be the most basic of metaphorical activitie
jan explores how we think in family metaphors
to other peoples. The trope of the "family of ma
of the figures fundamental to our understandin
In the delightful poem "Extended Family,"
likens the likenesses between family members a
ing the metaphorical basis of our understanding
intercultural community (Collected Poems 169
series of similes, as by family relations, the na
humorously rediscovers himself in the disco
tween him and his familial others:
Yet like grandfather

I bathe before the village crow
the dry chlorine water

my only Ganges
the naked Chicago bulb

a cousin of the Vedic sun
Here the word "cousin" is key. Metaphorizing as kinship the meta-

phorical relation of a Chicago bulb to the Vedic sun, it overtly relates
intrafamilial relatedness to intercultural: put in the form of propor-
tional metaphor, America is to India as the speaker is to his grand-
father. In the ironic juxtapositions of chlorinated urban water and a
sacred river, of a harsh interior light bulb and the natural yet divine
sun, the speaker sees his life stereoscopically, as refracted through
the prisms of metaphor and diaspora-a life that is a secularized, ur-
banized, Americanized, comically diminished version of the family
and culture from which he came. The poet's cross-cultural meta-
phors both bridge and reveal these distances in belief, environment,
and geography. Some familial and cultural habits persist, despite
changes in place and time, as exemplified by the son's bathtime
slapping of soap on his back and thinking in proverbs "like father,"
even as, "like mother," he hears "faint morning song." But in both
cases, cultural otherness obtrudes to warp these intergenerational
RAMA Z A N I * 49
continuities. After likening himself to his fath

ously bends inward the structure of the family
like me
I wipe myself dry
with an unwashed
Sears turkish towel
His Brahman father, by implication, would never have violated

codes of purity with an unclean towel. Cultural confusion and con-
tamination-"Sears turkish"-signify the difficulty of sustaining his
father's ritual practices in America. Similarly, the speaker may re-
semble his mother in listening to faint morning song, but "here it
sounds / Japanese." The poem itself, moreover, alludes to the Japa-
nese haiku in its compressed comparisons and spare short lines and
stanzas. From Chicago to India, Turkey to Japan, cross-cultural con-
nections, resemblances, and migrations make it increasingly diffi-
cult to determine the precise location indicated by the word "here."
Narrowly understood, "here" is Chicago, but memory, metaphor,
and poetic form, as well as trade and migration, explode geograph-
ical literalism. At the level of punctuation, Ramanujan further
loosens the poem's moorings by eschewing end-stopped lines. The
meaning of the lines "like me" and "like mother," for example, syn-
tactically migrates to the lines below and above, moving in different
directions across the space of the poem and the world.
Metaphor, especially the trope of simile, is the rhetorical site not
only of geographical but of bodily crossings in the poem. It spans
physical differences of generation and gender. Musically attentive
like the woman who gave birth to him, the naked speaker also finds
in his body resemblances to the girl he fathered:
like my little daughter

I play shy
hand over crotch
my body not yet full
of thoughts novels
and children
Humorously concealing his genitalia, the speaker reimagines him

self in the innocent, female body of his daughter, before it is filled
with ideas, imaginings, and children, which wi

his identity after his death. The penis, absente
with his daughter, reappears as his son's inn
the male conduit to a genetic future. The speak
at the dependence of his future on his children
ual organs.
Having translated the poet back in time to his familial origins,
simile now propels him forward to his hypothetical progeny:
like my grandson
I look up
unborn
at myself
like my great
great-grandson
I am not yet
may never be
my future
dependent
on several
people
yet
to come
Dwindling ever since its beginning, the poem is finally honed

one- or two-syllable lines, as it sheds the known weight of the pas
for the airy unknown of the future. Again echoing the imagin
song "Of what is past, or passing, or to come" at the end of "Sailin
to Byzantium," Ramanujan acknowledges his dependence on fut
readers and poets, who, much as he reincarnates Yeats's word
will-he hopes-reincarnate his. Bound together by Ramanuja
allusion, both poems propound the resemblance between the cro
ing of distances in space-Ireland to Byzantium in one wor
Chicago to India, Turkey, and Japan in the other-and the cross
of distances in time. Effecting one miraculous form of relocation, p
etic metaphor also affords the other-in both cases, the emphasis o
geographic displacement gives way to temporal. The word "li
RAMAZA N I * 51
functions as the connective tissue that graft

temporalities-the figurative apotheosis of
migratory translation. Without metaphor,
herit, cultures get passed down, and peoples
phor that reveals the family resemblances
forms of transmission and reproduction, as w
ceive them in metaphors drawn from one a
tudinous families of the mind.
Ramanujan's keen eye for the varieties of family resemblance-in-

tergenerational, interpersonal, intercultural-is inextricable, as we
have seen in poem after poem, from the postcolonial experience.
Thus his use of metaphor benefits from being understood within the
context of the doubleness and displacement, the hybridity and in-
terstitiality usually associated with postcoloniality. So too, his post-
coloniality is best explored through the prism of metaphor, the com-
plex rhetorical site of resemblance and "double vision" in his poetry.
While vigorously practicing a metaphoric poetics, Ramanujan also
shines a light throughout his poetry on what metaphor leaps
across-gaps in time and place, differences of culture and history.
The postcolonial experience helps to explain not only Ramanujan's
exuberant use of metaphor but also his ironic awareness of the edges
and differences crossed by metaphor, as we have seen in his poi-
gnant fingering of the fissures that separate him from his origins
and endings-from other times, other places, other traditions, even
other members of his extended family. Ramanujan's agility in fus-
ing passionate attachment to metaphor with trenchant skepticism,
rainbow-eyed postcolonialism with postcolonial irony, positions
him to be read in coming decades as one of the leading poets of the
postcolonial world. As the field of postcolonial studies attends to
the significant interrelations between metaphor and postcoloniality,
perhaps it will begin to grant Ramanujan and other Anglophone
poets like Goodison, p'Bitek, and Brathwaite, Wole Soyinka and
Agha Shahid Ali the close literary analysis that their work richly
rewards.
University of Virginia
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Metaphor and Postcoloniality: The Poetry of A. K.

Metaphor and Postcoloniality

*M~ A etaphor and postcoloniality migh

1. For examples of the general neglect of poetry in the postco

Contemporary Literature XXXIX, 1 0010-7484/98/0001

Africa, Eunice de Souza and A. K. Raman

2. The terms "postcolonial" and "third world" have oft

volves not only a one-way shift but inevitably a b

Its travels result in some displacement on its return (otherwise we

Does it matter that one can talk metaphorically about metaphors in

understanding of metaphor, and, conversely

4. In the deconstructionist critique, metaphor is said t

Admittedly, to emphasize the locatio

Long underestimated and therefore per

rial for an incomplete fourth volume, The Bl

The bare root of the bean is pink

In Ramanujan's translation, the metapho

7. Ramanujan translates and comments upon this pas

to carry poetry across differences of languag

The opening of "Waterfalls in a Bank" in Second Sight reflects Ra-

From Tamil into English, from ancient to contemporary, Ramanujan

Tamil texts and his own emergent writing. To see th

paradoxically enliven with danger and wonder an image hackney

As I transact with the past as with another

at a loss when I count my change....

In exchanges between past and present as well as one culture and

8. Bruce King comments on the changeability and irrecuperability of the past in

where diverse perspectives, cultures, and

most remarkable transfusion of cultural opposites occurs when "a

Headlights make his arc

a trajectory of yellow diamonds,

by the commonplace cruelty of headlights.

This startling confluence of Western modernity and an ancient East-

metaphoric resemblances not only between th

Itself a copy of lost events,

seem but copies, garbled by a ciphered

from broken seals....

Ramanujan questions both the West's Orientalist nostalgia for Eas

9. In other contexts, such as the Caribbean, revivalist movements like negritude ca

ironic emblem for such lapses in transmission.

itches, clogs in the drain, the latter

Unlike the unremittingly corrosive ironies of some postmod-

And we have originals, clay tigers

or dinosaur smells, that leave no copies....

Dependent "copies" strangely threaten the concept of the "origi-

cause it could "leave no copies." Reviv

copies with displaced originals

adopted daughters researching parent

and familiar grins in railway stations

From the oldest originals without cop

them from their "primary" world, which mu

manujan quests for his origins in the ma

into other names and forms,

caterpillar on a leaf, eating,

The quest for biochemical, psychohistorical origins scatters identity

his allegorical portrait of India as a great

Things come in every day

to lose themselves among other things

Concluding "Elements of Composition" with an allusion to the Upa-