The 19-year old Dalit girl from Boolgarhi village in Uttar Pradesh's Hathras, who was allegedly gang-raped by four upper caste men, her tongue slit and cremated by the cops in dead of night, could also be a springtime god, as Louise Gluck, the new Nobel laureate writes in her poem Persephone the Wanderer.
The 19-year old Dalit girl from Boolgarhi village in Uttar Pradesh's Hathras, who was allegedly gang-raped by four upper caste men, her tongue slit and cremated by the cops in dead of night, could also be a springtime god, as Louise Gluck, the new Nobel laureate writes in her poem Persephone the Wanderer.
The three characters - Demeter, her daughter Persephone, and Hades, the king of the underworld in the popular Greek myth, which Gluck chooses to symbolize her ideas in the verse could be any girl or any mother or any 'divine' culprit like Hades.
To narrate the reason behind the spring, ancient Greeks invented a myth, in which Persephone, the beautiful daughter of Demeter was abducted by Hades, the king of the underworld. A euphemistic expression for 'hell', the underworld which is the land of the dead, saw Persephone alive after Hades made off with her there while the girl was collecting flowers in the meadow. Then Demeter, disappointed about the disappearance of her daughter learns that she was kidnapped by Hades to the underworld.
Pained by the separation of Persephone, Demeter cursed that no plants would sprout on the soil until Hades returned Persephone to earth. Despite Persephone's abduction being after the conspiracy by Zeus, the supreme god of the Greeks, and the husband of Demeter herself, Zeus finally had to consent to Demeter's demand of Persephone's release from the underworld. Nevertheless, a hitch prevented Persephone from living on earth throughout the year.
As she ate six pomegranate seeds in the hell, it was the logic that she must be in hell for six months matching the six pomegranate seeds. In the remaining months of the year, she can return to earth and live with her mother. Therefore, Persephone's annual return to the earth was meant as spring in the world with the flowering of meadows and sudden growth of grain. But her return to the underworld was dying down of plants.
The Greek myth hardly discloses whether Hades raped Persephone in the underworld. But the 77-year old Nobel laureate Louise Gluck, with her passion for mythology, traces the truth in her verse. Taking a dig on the scholars of literature that have researched the myth for centuries, Gluck writes:
Persephone's initial sojourn in the hell
Continues to be pawed over by scholars,
Who dispute the sensations of the virgin
Gluck sees Persephone's return to home. A girl from hell, how does she look to the poet?
Persephone returns home
Stained with red juice...
In her phrase ’stained with red juice’, does Gluck mean the mere juice of the pomegranate seeds?
Winter arrives on earth when Persephone enters the underworld.
Persephone is having sex in hell
Unlike the rest of us, she does not know
What winter is, only that
She is what causes it
Gluck knows well that the earth is synonymous with women, but does not belong to them. And what Persephone believes in Gluck's verse is the belief of Gluck herself.
She believes she has been a prisoner
Since she has been a daughter
The mystery surrounding Persephone's life in the underworld makes the poet probe into the unknown.
‘Did she cooperate in her rape?
Or was she drugged, violated
Against her will
As happens so often to modern girls?”
Persephone spends her six-month time on earth. But to Gluck, it is her vain attempt to belong to the earth. In the final lines of her poem, Gluck cannot help imagining herself as Persephone.
My soul shattered with the strain
Of trying to belong to earth -
What will you do?
When it is your turn in the field with the God?
It is said sperms cannot survive after more than 90 hours. Nevertheless, the Nobel laureate’s search for them through ages is not to prove the rape of just one Persephone.
About Louise Elizabeth Glück
Louise Glück won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2020. Glück was recognised for "her unmistakable poetic voice, that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal" said the Swedish Academy, which oversees the award.
Glück, born 1943 in New York, lives in Massachusetts and is also professor of English at Yale University.
Glück won the Pulitzer Prize in 1993 for her collection The Wild Iris and the National Book Award in 2014. Her other honours include the 2001 Bollingen Prize for Poetry, the Wallace Stevens Award, given in 2008, and a National Humanities Medal, awarded in 2015. She was also editor of the anthology The Best American Poetry 1993.
