We Are Not a Museum

We Are Not a Museum, by Pramila Venkateswaran. Finishing Line Press, 2022. 41 pp. $14.99 (paperback)

Pramila Venkateswaran grew up in Bombay and has lived in the U.S. for the past forty years. She is the author of several collections of poems, including The Singer of Alleppey (2018), Thirtha (2002), Draw Me Inmost (2010), and Trace (2011). Her work explores the lives of women, South Asian imagination, and exile. Anthologies such as A Chorus for Peace: A Global Anthology of Poetry by Women (2002), en(compass) (2005), and Indivisible: An Anthology of Contemporary South Asian American Poetry (2010), feature her poetry, and she served as the Suffolk Poet Laureate on Long Island, NY. She is among the finest Indian poets writing in English today.

Venkateswaran’s book of poems We Are Not a Museum performs the double task of voicing a long history and reaching into that history for her own roots. It is in every sense a book of memory, both personal and cultural. “Memory is unreliable,” says the poet-speaker in “Against Erasure” (p. 41), the final poem of this short, but powerful collection, which comprises 40 poems. As an instrument of culture, the poet takes on the responsibility to bring history alive in language. The slippery moment between experience and speech, the importance of putting that experience into words, and a sense of unease about the fluidity of memory, are expressed in this poem, where:

My eyes hungrily scan fragments of the past
mixed with the present. I know, when the ferry drops
me off on the opposite shore, words will evade my pen.

The eyes have seen a powerful vision that must find articulation, the poet and the pen having become sources of knowledge.

Venkateswaran returned to Kochi, Kerala, in Southwestern India, in 2009, to revisit her childhood home, by the harbor, close to the Cochin Synagogue. The poem “I was seven,” (p. 10) recalls the carefree girl exploring the holy place with joy and curiosity:

That’s me, standing between Baba and Amma,

barely reaching my mother’s hip,

my tight plaits sporting red ribbons

tied into bows. See me running in and out

of the synagogue, my frilly frock fluffing out

in the wind? How excited I am to be in a celebration:

Amma in a silk sari, her hair in a bun, Baba

in a suit like his friends. The doors of the synagogue

are open. People gather on the street. No one

tells me, “Stop running. Sit down. Mind your

brothers.”

This is not any celebration, but the 400th anniversary of the Cochin synagogue that took place with the help of the poet’s father, who was the manager of Canara Bank, a primary bank used by the business community and one of the first under her father’s leadership to build its foreign banking system. PM Indira Gandhi joined the ceremony, which was a major recognition for Cochin as well as the Jewish community settled there.

Venkateswaran provides in her poetry an illuminating account of a little-known branch of the Jewish people. It’s a story of religions and cultures living in harmony over hundreds of years, in a port carved into the Indian coast by a flood around 1300 AD. The poet returned to write the stalapurana, which is the story of a sacred site, so she revisited the Cochin Synagogue, as well as the Tekumbhagam synagogue in Eranakulam, a ferry ride away from Kochi. In an interview, she recalls:

On any given day, we could hear the temple bells, the muezzin’s call, church bells. Everyone took our multireligious coexistence as a matter of course. It was most ordinary. Now looking back on it, I think this is what makes India extraordinary. This is the India I want to preserve. This is the India the Jewish, Arab, Syrian Christian migrants centuries ago saw in Kerala, when they put down roots among Hindus and Buddhists and atheists. Cultures and flavors flowed seamlessly into each other. Today, literature, architecture, food, politics, and language reveal this blended array of cultures.

My story of place involves not just my family’s life in Mattancheri, Cochin, but the locale, with its synagogue, temple, harbor, ferry boats, shipping liners, and the smell of fish and jackfruit.

All this richness—of architecture, ways of life, traditions of worship, communion between people—is brought to life in the poems. The different voices rising from the poems form a harmonious choir that sings the Jewish story of exile and resettling. In “Exile,” (p. 4), “Going happens in a split second,/ a bird taking wing.” But in “The Long Journey” (p. 5) the home one is forced to leave is carried along by the air and by light, and remains alive in the senses:

The earth carried the smell of

trees, the light of the moon

under which she prayed,

the sound of water.

At the end of journey, in a strange land, people have built their home away from home and their temple. There, in their new place of worship, they brought the Torah, and, as the beautiful poem “Torah Scrolls” (p.16) observes, there will be guidance:

Filigreed cylinders—
silver leaves and flowers—
with crowns on their heads. 

Gold crowns—an offering
by the Raja of Travancore,
for he knew the worth
of guarding the sacred store.

Only blessed fingers can
open the heart like a jar,
and let mundane moments slip
into the ineffable.

*

We know why mystery
is stored, its syllables
rich with darkness,

for to unveil it
would make the everyday
ordinary.

What is life
without expectation of
the ultimate revelation?

As the heart is protected by the structure of the chest, so that it can perform its mysterious work of keeping the body alive, so the sacred text—“its syllables rich with darkness”—is protected by the “filigreed cylinders” and the “silver leaves and flowers” which are in their turn placed in the temple. They are blessed with the gift of “gold crowns” from the Raja of Travancore. The words of the sacred scrolls will help people understand their experiences in spiritual terms.

Homesickness, longing for a piece of earth to call home, and arduous journeys are captured in these poems, which insist on speaking of diversity and celebration, two words which are nowadays politicized and fall flat on institutional mission statements. Venkateswaran brings color and joy to these words, reinvigorates them, tells us that we know how to live with each other in our difference; we have known how to respect and cherish our varied traditions for a long time. We Are Not a Museum, the title of this short collection, insists on gathering this knowledge about the many people of the earth living in harmony. The poems are an exhortation to look at history not as an exhibit but as a breathing, living part of who we are.

—Reviewer Carmen Bugan is the author of nine books, most recently Time Being (Shearmsan, 2022) and Poetry and the Language of Oppression: Essays on Politics and Poetics (Oxford University Press, 2021).