Critical analysis of Muktibodh's poem Void

1. • The Void

2. • The void inside us has jaws ,
those jaws have carnivorous teeth; those teeth will chew you up,
those teeth will chew up everyone else. The dearth inside
is our nature, habitually angry,
in the dark hollow inside the jaws there is a pond of blood.
This void is utterly black,
is barbaric, is naked,
disowned, debased,
completely self absorbed.
I scatter it,
give it away, with
fi
ery words and deeds.

3. • Those who cross my path
fi
nd this void
in the wounds
I in
fl
ict on them.
They let it grow, spread it around,
scatter it and give it away
to others,
raising the children of emptiness. The void is very durable,
it is fertile.
Everywhere it breeds
saws, daggers, sickles,
breeds carnivorous teeth.

4. • That is why, wherever you look, there is dancing, jubilation, death is
now giving birth
to brand new children. Everywhere
there are oversights
with the teeth of saws,
there are heavily armed mistakes: the world looks at them
and walks on,
rubbing its hands.

5. • Lines 1-5 paint a picture of a terrible monster inside every one of us.
It is a void in the sense that it is empty of all positive human
attributes of kindness, compassion, love etc. It has fed and grown
on corruption and violence,and like Dracula, it scatters it all around.
It is all-consuming in its hunger, destroying life, spreading death. It
is a void but it is not inert or passive.

6. • Lines 6-14: The paradox of emptiness as fullness continues. But a
negative fullness of violence and corruption. The fantasy of the void
as a frightening, aggressive presence within us is extended further.
‘The dearth inside is our nature’ gives an idea of the warping of
human spirit by this state of self-absorption. ‘Black, barbaric,
naked, disowned, debased’. These adjectives characterize the
corrupted human spirit itself, for, it s synonymous with the void itself.

7. • Lines 15-26: There is another paradox here. The void is ‘completely
self-absorbed’ yet it exorcises a malignant in
fl
uence on
whomsoever it comes in contact with. The fantasy sucks up more
horror as this void enlarges its domain of darkness and emptiness.
Like an infectious disease, it creates more voids. Evil breeds more
evil. Those that are infected by that diseased void infect others. And
thus the terror and darkness of the void spreads further.

8. • Lines 27-26: The evil inside us is far more active, lasting and
productive than good. It only generates violence and destroys. But
it overpowers us so that we are submergedin it. The void is no
longer within us; we are in the void, which is present everywhere in
all its manifestations—evil, violence, hatred. It becomes a state of
being for the whole community. And its members enjoy it. The lines
‘death is now giving birth to brand new children’ underlines the
paradox of life dying and death thriving: death, not life, is producing
children. Life and death have switched roles.

9. • Finally, the poem projects a despairing picture of a spiritual void
where wrongs and injustices are not only not challenged but are, in
fact, countenanced. ‘The Void’ in the
fi
nal analysis is an image of a
dehumanized, fascistic society, which are a sum total of the voids
that are there in each one of its members.

10. • The void is a fantasy that visualizes the individual’s state of self-
absorption and isolation as a monster that distorts the personality of
not only the individual but of all those he comes in contact with.
• In Chand ka Munh Terha Hai, the volume from which this poem and
the other one ‘So Very Far’, have been taken, reality and fantasy
merge in his surrealistic images.
• Muktibodh believes that art emerges from a synthesis of reality and
imagination. Muktibodh makes extensive use of fantasy in his poetry
because he believes that it helps him project a factual world without
having to elaborate it.

11. • Muktibodh does not believe that art is a representation of truth.
• Literature, he says, gives only a perspective on truth, not truth itself
but only, a dimension, a direction and a feeling. All the
fi
ve senses
of the poet should reach out to all the horizons. And it is through
fantasy that the poet accomplishes this.