Quarantined Sonnets
- By Tabish Khair
(Photo montage courtesy of Dejan Vekić)
Sex, Money and Shakespeare
In my second week of the lockdown in Denmark, a friend asked me to look again at Shakespeare’s sonnets for an academic anthology that she was planning. I am a fervent admirer of the sonnets, and when I started re-reading them yet again, I also started re-writing some of them with humor, irony and, gradually, satire. I stopped with 21 in all, which I thought was the right number, given the usual coronavirus quarantine recommendations. It started as a labor of love (and distraction), but gradually got branded by what was happening around me. As is the case, in my view, with Shakespeare’s sonnets, the renditions in my sequence contain various personas, not just the poet’s voice (or not simply the poet’s voice), and they end up getting progressively darker. This extract contains three sonnets from the second, darkening, half of the sequence. I had not intended to publish the sequence but then, largely on the urging of three friends whose opinions I respect, including Jim Hicks, I succumbed to the temptation of adding to the parallel, but hopefully less deadly, pandemic of COVID literature.
[When in the Chronicle of Wasted Time]
When in the chronicle of Facebook posts,
I see my objections to the hijab:
It makes women look like postboxes, ghosts,
And how is it possible to keep tab
On the wearer’s shrouded identity –
What if it’s some terrorist? Who can tell? –
A major problem of security!
Why can’t they show their bloody faces? Hell!
I litigated to get face-veils banned.
I was not phobic; no, I was prudent,
And by those old postings I staunchly stand:
I meant what I said, I said what I meant!
It’s damn unfair of you to laugh and ask:
What I think now of wearing virus masks!
[O, Truant Muse, What Shall be thy Amends]
O, truant Fact, just watch me now amend
The factitious fiction I had proclaimed,
Whose truth and beauty on my words depend,
In this garden that I, not Adam, named.
How dare such things unsubstantial as tracts,
Figures, numbers, data, science, law restrain
A man who does not think before he acts,
And has only quick profit on his brain?
I do defy you, Fact, to prove a thing,
The vilest thing against me: if you do,
My people dauntless will my praises sing,
And blame the crimes you discover on you.
They will accept as Gospel all my views,
But you, O bitter Fact, will be Fake News!
[When, in Disgrace with Fortune and Men’s Eyes]
When on the dole because recently fired –
The virus crisis was hard on me, mate,
And even afterward no one’s been hired,
The working class abandoned to its fate;
To keep applying for jobs that don’t exist,
Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,
And worrying like hell how to subsist,
For systems cut us little slack but rope
In billions as help for corporations,
Which pay nothing or only token tax,
I think of you, and then my thinking runs
On days when the security being lax
You pilfered from the till (I was too prim):
Could you loan me a tenner today, Jim?
Born and educated in the town of Gaya, in Bihar, India, and Associate Professor of English at the University of Aarhus, Denmark, TABISH KHAIR is the author of two poetry collections, three critical studies, and six novels, including How to Fight Islamist Terror from the Missionary Position (Interlink), Just Another Jihadi Jane (Interlink), and Night of Happiness (Picador).
