Estha + Rahel Poems- Mbecerra19

Estha: In Silence

Silence crept up on me,

a warm visitor that spread to the very tips of my fingers.  

It was easy to find comfort in.

It was a second layer of skin,

as well as something that lived within me.

It allowed me to fade out of life,

when life held too much and not enough.

Silence kept the thoughts trapped in the crevices of my mind,

and after all that time,

it became a place I could live.  

And as time crawled and lurched on, that Silence never left,

and I found that I had no desire to fight its insistence

on staying with me.

But maybe it wasn’t the Silence that stayed,

but my Voice that left,

that stayed on that train platform,

as I raced away from anything that ever made my Voice strong.

My Voice decided that I had no use of it  without Rahel, without Ammu.

My Voice,

the way of participating in life as I chose to,

and I didn't want to chose to.

But in those rare moments that I did want to,

the thoughts whirred in my head,

but the connection from head to mouth had been lost.

It was lost somewhere within my body,

Painful to recall, painful to try and dig up.

I flew away from Ayemenem,

into streets that were only meant to be wandered

and people that were now only ever meant to be observed.

I stopped being Estha:

little Elvis-the-Pelvis with a spoiled, special- outing puff and beige pointy shoes.

I became Estha:

like a fisherman in a city with a dark and outdoorsy face,

wrinkled by the sun and sea-secrets inside of me,

neither rude, nor polite,

smaller than I used to be,

with a Silence that made people forget but never let me disappear.

When I was rereturned and Rahel simply returned,

She didn’t bring my Voice with her.

Maybe she lost  it in the forgetfulness of life's passivity,

where it's so very hard to keep track of each day.

Or maybe it got buried with Ammu.

Then again maybe it had never been left with either of them, but just simply left.  

No, my Voice did not come back with Rahel,

but with her, the Silence got driven away

and in its place was neither

just the bad or just the good,

but life itself, in the the way that

it twists and turns, rises and falls.

Music and Traffic,

and Violins and Clouds,

and Comets and loneliness.

Rahel: In Imagination

Especially in Death

Sophie Mol grew with me,

the Loss of Sophie Mol did.

After the awake Sophie Mol screamed inside the earth

and shredded satin with her teeth

A SUNBEAM LENT TO US TO BRIEFLY,

was Sophie Mol.

As much as I battled against Real Life.

And as I Grew, it was in a different direction.

No more two-egg twin.

The end of a life full of beginnings and very little was forever.

We or Us, to Me.

And the quietness in Estha became the emptiness in me.

Neglect became the accidental release of the spirit.

With neglect came the freedom from obligations, expectations.

Life became about inquiries,

about how it ought to be lived

But, without my permission,

and without my resistance

Life happened,

with waywardness and a fierce lack of ambition .

This creative project allowed me to delve deeper into The God of Small Things in a way that made me excited to look closer at the text. I chose to write two poems on each of the book's two main characters: Estha and Rahel. The freedom in this creative project was a great asset in allowing me to more closely analyze and reflect on this book, in a way that felt more authentic to the way that I processed and thought about it.

I have never been much of a visual artist, so when we got this assignment, I immediately knew that I wanted to further explore The God of Small Things through creative writing. Throughout the book, one of the characters that intrigued me the most was Estha, who I wrote from the perspective of in my first poem. I was particularly curious about looking more closely at Estha’s silence. With my own knowledge behind quietness, and Rahel’s relation of Estha’s, I was able to compose a poem that allowed me look more closely at the lasting damage on Estha after Velutha’s death. I went back and forth from the very beginning of book to the very end, looking at quotes where Rahel described the kind of person that Estha became after those traumatic events. Something that became clear while I was doing this was the connection between how Ammu dealt with the aftermath and how Estha did as well. They seemed to put their life on hold. Ammu actively trying to ignore the passing of time, while Estha “leaves his voice behind” and only begins to experience the world again when he is reunited with Rahel.

I chose to write my second poem from the perspective of Rahel. While writing my first poem, I got to explore the person that Estha became after Velutha’s death, so for my second poem, I was very interested in exploring the person that Rahel became.  I chose to do this poem slightly in the form of the Found poem that we wrote for Heart of Darkness, while I did change some of the tenses and switch from third person to first person, as well as adding in a few of my own lines. I found powerful lines that had to do with Sophie Mol’s funeral, as it was something that Rahel said long impacted her as she matured, as well as her separation from Estha and from her family in general. The connection that I found between the two poems that I wrote, is that both Estha and Rahel retreated from the world in the aftermath of their childhood trauma. Estha chose to stop participating with the world, while Rahel stopped caring what happened to her life.

This creative project inspired me look more closely at a part of the book that could only be fully understood and appreciated after I had completed the entire thing. Going back and seeing the connections and reasons behind the twins behavior was very enlightening, allowing me a deeper understanding of how the book came full circle. Doing this project in a creative way allowed me to study and present my observations and thoughts in a way that I feel is most clear and engaging.