by Sally Tan
What is Delirium?
An acute mental disturbance characterized by confused thinking and disrupted attention usually accompanied by disordered speech and hallucinations
With courtesy of Marriam-Webster Online Dictionary,
“Origin of DELIRIUM
Latin, from delirare to be crazy, literally, to leave the furrow (in plowing), from de- + lira furrow”
Perhaps, the term is best expressed in the following example,
- In her delirium, nothing she said made any sense.
So how is Tania De Rozario’s delirious poetry tender? It is a rather ironic title, given how the connotations of tenderness; love and care is used to describe a state of confusion.
Indeed, Rozario does not wax lyrical about lovers, relationships and of herself. If anything, her poems confess an ambivalent sort of tenderness;a rawness and delicateness associated with a wound. But in that open, raw wound, there is yet something yielding about it. Her first poem in the collection preempts the readers of a language full of sensuality/sensuousness, that is to be consistently “hurl[ed] towards [us]” in the course of reading.
In “What You Are”, Rozario in a confessional (not at all) rage, reminiscient of Sylvia Plath’s ‘Daddy” lashes out on her readers:
I want to write you a poem that unravels
from the gut, hurls itself towards you
like a slap across the mouth. Let my words
unleash themselves upon you like dogs
looking for a fight, like seeds bursting from overripe pods. (17)
Shattered of any optimistic expectations or delusions, the readers are coerced to not expect “sweet nothings, loves songs, cherished/cliches; the heart that triumphs over/ adversity, finds strength in the adoring eyes of a child, realises that we are/not so different after all” (17). Instead, the readers are led to be confronted with “bullet[s] through [our] beliefs, plagues with your [our] own reflection, every/illusion [smashed] like bricks through a window/pane” (17).
By the end of this poem, I was thrilled at Rozario’s unrelenting verbal sensuality as well as her emotional intensity. Her poems are packed with images that attack your senses. Imagine powerful seeds exploding from a flaky, long overdue pods. The natural has expired, no longer a source of tenderness. Rozario’s poems are well-intended to unsettle; the readers are to meet her “hurls” ,”slaps”, “fight” and to not resist at all. Who can? Given the caustic charm of her non-patronising poems that speak to, and resonate the dark, repressed emotions felt within every single soul. Maybe that is why she views the cliche: “we are/not so different after all” as too comforting and simplistic.
“Interpretation” (19) is one of my many favourites in this collection. In this poem, she brutally excavates Man’s fear of “open interpretations” and lays out on paper Man’s deep repressed fears of non-closure.
In sadomasochistic manners, the readers are undeterred and seem eager to get on Rozario’s joyride. In this poem, Rozario appears more optimistic than usual, seeking “worse things” to compare with things that, I personally feel are already dismal. Rozario plays out a common coping mechanism taken by people to deal with things that prove too much to bear. Browse through any series of motivational quotes and you will see how we often make ourselves seem not too bad and fine to carry on simply by basis of comparing bad scenarios with something worse. This is happening in this poem but at the end of it, Rozario’s coping mechanism only ironically frustrates her optimism. If there has to be an interpretation by the readers, the interpretation she reveals is that open interpretations are really the worst.
In this poem, she puts up three rhetorical arguments. All of them follows a general structure; starts off with a make-believe consolation “There are worse things, surely/ than (a dire subject)”, two uses of “than” as if the accumulation convinces the readers there are surely worse things, and lastly a poignant, stark revelation of the cause of this whole episode of self-convincing, encapsulated in three words:”open to interpretation”.
Visually on paper, the repetition of these three words contained in a stanza of two lines exposes in Freudian sense, a repressed anxiety. The fact that it can not be obliterated in spite of the rhetoric and exhaustive use of comparative term “than” points to its superlative nature already. A circumstance of being “open/ to interpretation” is the worst because it does not satisfy Man’s inherent need for closure. The poem poignantly resonates the pathos of non-closure when “endings” do not end and “silence” takes on corporeal viscous weight like “cement” (20). The open-endings which the poet badly desires to interpret, make light of, denies her access (Interesting also the sub-title cataloging this poem). The act of interpreting open-interpretation oppresses her.
Another eye-catching feature in the collection is her short stories. I am unsure if this should be considered more a diary entry given its brevity in length yet the indisputable intensity in emotions expressed.
They say the shortest distance between two points is a straight line. (98)
In “The Shortest Distance” (98), Rozario’s speaker somewhat defeats the above stated mathematical notion by “fold[ing] the map so that both of our countries touch.” She yearns badly for her lover and in doing so, reveals the tyranny of cartography. Yearning in a long distance relationship could never be traversed and recovered in a “certain number of coordinates away” (99). Her love for her lover resists physical entities: distance, sex and language. According to her, “A single statement [can] put miles between [her lover and her]” (99) and it is the emotional intimacy of sex that unsettles her suggesting that emotions are the factor that creates psychical distance, and renders desire so much intolerable.
The speaker then proposes a thought-provoking question, which I do not have a definite answer too. Perhaps, it is never meant to be answered conclusively other than to generate a reverberating sense of forelorness.
Does distance multiply desire? Or desire multiply distance? (98)
The speaker in the poem then invokes Jesus, claiming that Jesus’s salvation was never merely a straight line. “He wasn’t into short distances, short cuts, short-changing” (100). If there is a way to understand his depth of love, it is “to travel every inch of ourselves to find the answers we sought”(100).
After this epiphany, the speaker proceeds to profess her obsessive love for her love, disregarding the “shortest distance”. Love to her “takes the path of the heart, a line tangles as two lives intertwined. To trace love, one must journey the distance that cannot be mapped on any two-dimensional surface” (101).
Yet, while the speaker’s yearning and love cannot be contained in two-dimensional objects like distance and language, it is curious then spaces can collapse like shadows in an instance when the speaker’s love calls her name. Unless in this act of name-calling, deep memories and emotions are remembered and recovered at that instant. (which she does expound in “Jane” (74) where loss and desire can be named)
Does Rozario’s poems make any sense in their tender delirium? Perhaps in all her non-sense and madness, she speaks with even more acute perceptions of one’s deepest feelings and desires. Her uninhibited confessional poems resonate in their “chillingly sober and vulnerable” voices (Cyril Wong) and compels us to get in touch with our tender emotions. Having the ability to be tender is an universal condition of humanity.
In retrospect, what can be worst than having desire unmet. The frustration and pathos in having desire unmet could only be expressed in delirium.