'The Deliverer' - Tishani Doshi

Página 1

Tishani Doshi- 'The Deliverer'

This short poem sequence tells the story of an Indian newborn baby girl who is abandoned because she is not a boy. The baby is the cared for in a convent in the state of Kerala in India The narrator's mother, the deliverer of the poem's title, is a temporary foster mother who arranges for the baby to be adopted by an American couple. The second poem in the sequence describes the foster mother's arrival in America with the baby. She hands the baby over to the adopting parents. In the third and final poem in the sequence, the girl has grown up. The poem goes back to the day of her birth and subsequent abandonment.

Commentary- This shocking poem sequence has at its heart the abandonment of this daughter, but it also engages with ideas about motherhood. For such a short poem, there is a network of different parent/child relationships in the poem, each, in some way, disrupting conventional views of the family: the baby's biological mother who tosses her onto a pile of other babies; the nun who looks after the abandoned babies; the deliverer who for a short while, effectively fosters the baby as she takes her to America, and is also the poet's mother; and the adoptive American parents. The situation in the poem is not unique or made up: because of a preference for having boys in the family, some parents in India kill or abandon baby girls. Also, Doshi own mother did indeed bring an abandoned child over from India to an adoptive American couple.

It is one of the more socially engaged poems from the anthology as it seeks to draw attention to this practice in India. Doshi's compassion for the newborn babies and anger at their treatment is made very clear by the poem's diction and use of lists. As early as the third line we have the unembellished and shockingly general triad of prescribed characteristics COnsider the extended list in the second tercet as a further example.

The verbs are foreground synthetically by being placed at the beginning of the clause. The list itself implies the ongoing and pervasive nature of the events being described. The pitiless, apparently unfeeling process of the birth is conveyed in part by the short verbs Doshi uses towards the end of the poem: the slithering of the babies as they leave their mothers' bodies certainly has unpleasant associations, and the mothers throw the baby onto a pile of other discarded infants. Doshi also uses a macabre pun as life is described as being squeezed out, a pun which semantically contains both birth and death.

The diction and the form complement each other in 'The Deliverer'. The lines are short and frequently end-stopped. The tercets are terse and flinty, and the sentences are sort and stripped down. The overall structure of the poem sequences are short and stripped down. The overall structure of the poem sequence is circular, indicating the events described are ongoing and not and not unique. Perhaps for heightened emotional impact, it ends t the beginning, with the moment of the girls birth. However, the brutality of the birth is tempered by the render's awareness that the girl did survive, due to the combination of the care and compassion of the nun, the deliverer and her adoptive parents.

In the face of this horror, who or what is to blame? our thoughts might turn to the mothers themselves who murder or abandon the babies. However, the final lines complicate this as the mothers are described as trudging back home to sleep again, with their husbands. The exhausted, numbed verb which begins the final line suggests that the mothers choose not to reflect upon the brutalising experience. Their act of sleeping again with their husband implies passive victimhood in both their material and sexual obligations- the sex is as difficult as birth. But it is the adverb which concludes the poem, and which reminds us that the events described will repat and repeat. The brutality of the final line is reinforced by the poem's form. The lines diminish in the lead-up to the last line: in the final poem of the sequence, there are two tercets, followed by two couplets and concluding with that painful on-line stanza. We now see the mothers as victims. The so-called 'natural' processes of sex, birth and motherhood are turned upside down by social, economic and patriarchal forces.