Essays

The rise of social media users in the state, especially on Facebook has given a fillip to the vigorous poetic ecosystem.

Now is a better time than ever to be a poet in Assamese. There are multiple literary journals catering to a stable reading audience and a number of ‘little magazines’ published occasionally. Unlike English-language poetry, poetry anthologies in Assamese are also a thriving genre. The sales figures are quite high and academic engagement with poetry is very robust. The rise of social media users in the state, especially on Facebook has given a fillip to the vigorous poetic ecosystem. The most obvious change is the rise in the number of poets. A poet with a voice has to no longer wait for confirmation from an editor. Since social media sites offer instant feedback, the poet can use her Facebook page as a springboard for a new poem. She may introduce an idea, or present a few verses and construct the poem based on the feedback she receives. This is not a phenomenon restricted to young and upcoming poets alone; even reputed Assamese poets are increasingly using social media sites as a creative workspace.

Noted poet, Sahitya Akademi awardee Harekrishna Deka’s Facebook page can be taken as an example. Deka started using the social media platform very early and uploads poems on his page quite frequently. He has a massive fan following and some of it has carried over to Facebook. His page, as of now, has almost 13,000 followers. Deka’s most recent poem was published on Facebook on 29th November 2018 under the title ‘Sunyo’ (‘Zero’ or ‘Void’). Within twelve hours of publication, it was translated by a reader and posted back on the poet’s page under the title ‘Zero’. This chain of publication, reading, translation and re-publication or production, consumption and reproduction by the consumer is unique to social media and Assamese poetry has benefitted from it. The first few lines of the original poem (in Roman transliteration) and the translation are presented below:

Sunya keval sunya nohoy
Sunya eku noholeu eta xabda
Jak suna jay
Aru
Eko noholeu akhoror sin
Jak dekha jay

Zero is not mere zero
Zero is at least a sound
That can be heard
And
If nothing else
A symbol of alphabet
That can be seen
(Englische Übersetzung: Bibekananda Choudhury )

Poetry on social media, especially on the personal pages of poets swims in a sea of context and intertext. The reader has access to the social and personal life of the poet, is aware of the political and social inclinations of the writer and is privy to the other texts and personalities the writer likes or follows. The context-heavy nature of social media poetry means that work published there can never be read in isolation, especially after the adoption of the infinite scroll view by all social media and most news websites. A case in point is the work of Ashwini Phukon and Kukil Saikia. Both the poets are undergraduate students of a local university. Their Facebook pages, updated daily, are filled with photographs of college life, witticisms structured as tiny poems, shared articles and videos, reviews of their poems etc. Then there are photographs of or typed extracts from their poems shared by readers. Most extracts are accompanied by a small poem composed by the reader as a response. While going through Kukil Saikia’s Facebook wall (he has recently published his first volume of poems, ‘Xui Thaka Shororkhonok Jogai Diya’, roughly translated as ‘Awaken the Sleeping City’) I found an interesting photograph- four lines from his poem ‘Bulbuli’ written in red ink on a ruled notebook. The verses, translated read as follows:

Sans intoxication everything is an illusion
Intoxication is why
The days we live are called
Life

After ten minutes of scrolling through his wall, I was still reading posts on his new book. Every elternate post was a picture of the book cover. Facebook has changed fandom and poets who lament the death of poetry need only look at the social media profiles of writers writing in ‘regional’ languages to understand that poets are still rockstars here.

Another innovation in poetry that benefits from the social-media experience is poetry in multi-text. The best proponent of multi-textual poetry in Assam is Samudra Kajal Saikia, whose poems may be published either as typed text, or as multi-media photographs, photographs of installations, multi-media videos etc. His books ‘Disposable Sun and Other Poems’ and ‘Disposable Sun and Other Sonnets’ play with language and style, creating poetry from found text, overheard conversation and other disposables to create a quirky aesthetic and quirkier vocabulary. As such, his Facebook page becomes a very suitable medium for his poetry- a platform where his work in the visual arts and text converge.

The democratisation of poetry on social media has also allowed the use of a number of languages and registers which are otherwise not considered standard Assamese. Poetry in non-standard Assamese languages (or dialects) has existed in print for quite a while but social media gives it a new hip audience. Uddipta Kumar Bhattacharyya (who also works as a filmmaker and editor) and Kazi Neel (who moonlights as a photographer) experiment in the dialects of lower Assam while also writing in standard Assamese. Bhattacharyya’s lullaby ‘Sana apa’ Sweet Child) for example, uses the ‘kothito bhasa’ or spoken language, a language without a script and hard-bound grammar to express the tender feeling of a mother cajoling her child to finish his dinner:
Etu hathir dima, etu rajar dima
De bhat kha sana apa

Here’s an elephant’s egg, here’s a king’s egg
Now eat, my sweet child.
(Translated by Shalim M Hussain)

In Kazi Neel’s poems, the use of dialect becomes an expression of rebellion against the strictures of standard languages. In his poem 'Jodi shob bhasa haraiya jay' (‘If all languages are lost’), he writes:

Jodi shob bhasa haraiya jay duniya thika
Jodi thaima jay kalam
Bhalobashar kotha ki ami komuna, kou?
Ami ki komuna ei nirab dukher kotha?
Anya kunu aadim bhasay?

If all languages are lost
And if my pen stops
Tell me, will I stop talking about love
Will I stop talking about my silent sorrow
(In another ancient tongue? (Translated by Shalim M Hussain)

It is only apt that poems like these appear first on social media, on the personal pages of the poets- unmediated by editorial intervention and in the immediate context of the poets’ personal lives. Poetry is both individualistic and social and social media is the platform where it belongs.