Our ancestors believe those who love home make their final rest in a foreign land. Dying anywhere but home is the loneliest of thoughts.
Jim Wungramyao Kasom’s second work ‘Cradling Memories of My Land‘ comes in the form of poetry after his work ‘Homecoming and Other Stories’. Kasom renders the essence of the written art through poems and anecdotes in ‘Cradling Memories of my Land‘. Kasom has his way with words that bare readers to their vulnerable self. Intricate and refined, Kasom touches identity, sense of belonging, longing, the unseen, people and the land, uncertain transition, and love in his collection of poems. In addition, this poetry book is completed with images and paintings, which is a kind of its own.
A name is nothing and everything, the difference between remembering and forgetting.
Categorized into three sections— Belonging, Longing and Liminal, Kasom embraces the self and writes about the simple things, simple things that speak volumes. The unmistakable, ‘finding something substantial in the everyday life’ and ‘simple yet powerful’ are recurrent. Be it his previously published work, short stories or his poetry, Kasom has a rooted understanding of his people, his land— of his descent, how his folks live and what his folks love, how each season changes, how every feelings and transitions matter. The ordinary is made extraordinary through his writings.
I never stayed in my hometown long enough for me to stop missing it, and that is y gripe, my freedom story.
Belonging luxuriates the weaving in and out of the identity of the self. Each poem expresses a sense of belonging which is existent but beyond grasp, almost as if inconceivable. “I am always leaving, even in my arrival” writes Kasom.
Loneliness is not the absence of anyone but someone.
Longing abounds in emotions and the languishing feeling of love that was once there or love that was almost there (“Maybe we are never meant to land together like two ends of a seesaw”). For love comes naturally to the individual, and to have yearned for it and longed for it is priceless.
Do you wonder what’s it like to have it all and realise you would take this life over anayone’s?
Liminal bares the dreamlike and impermanence of life (“Do your mind get lost in the sunset and do you stand ground as if you are the last witness of a time that will soon be forgotten?”). The meticulousness with which Kasom unravels the written words is distinct and apparent with the turn of each poem.
Opening a Jim Wungramyao Kasom book is like being thrown into the mise-en-scéne of the ordinary and the simple. And then, he goes on to turn every simple thing, every ordinary thing into something remarkable, making the readers feel exquisite in the elementary. For Kasom, “the little things” of life are “the biggest manifestation of art”. And it is for this, even if you have never felt the simple things, that this poetry book becomes an essential read.
(Published by Red River, 2023; INR 299)
Review by Themreichon Leisan
