‘Stammer’ is a poem in translation written by the Malayalam poet Sachidanandan. Irregular and declarative in form, the poem reflects on stammer as a mode of speech. However, the poem itself stammers as it at once suggests stammer as a distinct speech and universal characteristic of human kind, and simultaneously as a disability and different ability.
The thought of the poem develops through comparisons and metaphors. Stammer is compared with lameness and then identified with sacrifice and divine and human creativity. At each stage, thought develops into new stage. The poem begins with a declaration that stammer is not a handicap, but a mode of speech. This statement sounds as a defensive and disruptive counter-statement that targets to destabilize a dominant point of view. It is compared lameness, another ‘handicap’ in popular view. Both are described as a silence: one as silence between a word and its meaning and the other as silence between a word and deed. The idea of stammer as silence leads to a question whether it preceded or succeeds language. It also prompts to ask whether it is a dialect or another language. The speaker feels that linguists stammer on these questions as they are impossible to settle
The thought of these questions which challenge linguists and their authentic knowledge provides the poem with a pivotal turning point. From seemingly defensive or disruptive tone, the poem suddenly gets a takeoff and exalts stammer over unfaltering speech. Stammer is sublimated as a sacrifice offered to the god of meaning. It is then universalized as a feature of creativity. God might have stammered when he created man. The infinite ambiguities that pervade everything human – from prayer to command- point to this. Not only god’s, but human creativity also makes one think so. Poetry, which is the product of man’s creativity, also stammers with its ambiguities
Stammer which represents the non-rational, the non-assertive, the non-linear and reflective obstruction to the flow of conscious, rational and pragmatic discourse, is perceived as an infirmity and the poem challenges this hegemonic idea. However, proceeding from there it valorizes stammer as a creative faculty that surpasses the ‘ordinary’, practical and socialized speech. At the same time, the poem itself is an instance of faltering utterance which leaves unresolved contradictions. The explicitly political statement about stammer as the mother tongue of a society who is incapacitated of resistant speech occurs in the midst of the linear progression of thought that reserves a privileged place for stammer. This breaks the flow of thought and brings back the negative associations with the ‘disability’. Exposing another self-contradiction, the poem presents stammer as a point of difference and distinction at the beginning and as a universalized human and divine property at the end.
Just as any stammering speech, the poem is irregular in form and shows a hurdled progress. As the thought of the poem gathers momentum and vivacity, the number of lines in stanza also increases and aphoristic statements give way to elaborate unfolding of ideas. The choice of vocabulary and the style of the poem are subversively prosaic.
