Yuyutsu R D Sharma

Kathmandu:

Like in the game I played as a child I shout “Your Majesty, the King, greetings” to Everest, and he brushes shreds of cloud from his eyelids, letting the wind blow away sand that stuck to his belly and standing, for a moment, proudly on tiptoe. It’s been a while since he was reminded that he’s a mountain model in God’s fashion show. Last November when Israel’s most celebrated poet Ronny Someck signed his collection of poems, ‘The Fire Stays in Red’ for me, he wrote my name and generously added — “My fire from Israel, and a flower with friendship”. Elated, I took his hand and kissed it. I thought — what else do I possess to honour the generosity of this emperor of emotions?

When in the winter of 1998, Someck, together with famous artist Benny Efrat, held an exhibition entitled ‘Nature’s Factory’ at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, critic and translator Shlomit Shakked compared Ronny’s poems to Peter Greenaway’s movie, ‘The Pillow Book’ where the client of the heroine, Shangon, writes on her body in invisible ink to hide his manifest talent. The woman uncovers the writing by immersing herself in a bath of hot water and standing near a fire. She washes her body with onion juice since tears turn out to be the solution to revealing the writing. Similarly, Someck’s writing, I agreed with Shakked, can only be made visible through heat, sweat and tears of human struggle.

Months later Someck e-mailed his poem, ‘Kathmandu, above the Rice Paddy’. I understood how Someck worked — effortlessly baking life’s essential loaf of bread on the hearth of his poetry. “Above the rice paddies Buddha’s head turns gold. In the tear hidden in his eyes rain for the entire year collects. On the plate of the plaza grains of people are scattered, their faces pale as milk swinging in the udder of a sacred cow.”

Someck addressees Mount Everest as “Your Majesty, the King”, a mountain model in God’s fashion show. In ‘Rice Paradise’ he describes his grandma who forbade him to leave rice on his plate. “She didn’t talk of starving children of India, their swollen bellies, or how their mouths opened wide for each grain.” Instead, teary eyed she scraped leftover rice to the centre of their plates and told her children how it rises and complains bitterly to God.

Someck sees his dead grandma smiling at the gates of paradise. A royal carpet of red rice spread at her feet. She brushes olive oil on each grain, slips them into the simmering cosmic pot in God’s kitchen. “Grandma, I want to tell her,” Someck concludes, “rice is nothing but a shell washed ashore by the sea of life.”

There’s so much of East in Someck that one forgets one is reading a Hebrew poet immersed in the western culture. “I feel,” Someck told me, “that I need to live in two cultures. I like to drink Arak and Coca Cola, or to hear Abad El Wabb with the Beatles in the same compact disk.” He alluded to Orwell’s ‘Shooting an Elephant’ where the hero wears a mask and his face grows to fit it. Someck’s mask is Baghdad, his birthplace. His parents brought him to Israel when he was a baby and the black box of his memory was empty. But Someck grew up listening to the stories of a cafe near Tigris, smell of fruit at Shugra Market and singers like Farid El Atrash and Adb El Wabb. In his parents’ house they spoke Hebrew, only his grandfather followed Baghdad’s lifestyle. He thought Baghdad had turned into a metaphor, into a place that existed only in his grandpa’s heart

During the Gulf War Baghdad came back knocking at on his door. In every shot, he tried to place his stroller, or put lipstick on his mother’s lips or see his father brushing his fingers through his hair. The next moment, he saw how the place was destroyed. Now he misses the place where he was born and would like to mix it with his life in Israel. In Someck’s view, a poet living in Israel is like a pianist that we see in the western movies. He puts his piano in the corner of the saloon that always smells like gunpowder. For his safety he says: “Don’t shoot me I’m only a pianist”.

A few months ago in America when they asked him to read an optimistic poem, Someck chose, ‘Bliss’: “A wedding cake with us on high bride and groom, two dolls in the sky we fight to stay on the same slice when the blade descends, by and by.” “I’m waiting,” Someck said, “for a day when I write ‘bliss’ without the word knife in it.” yuyutsurd@yahoo.com