Water in War, Woman, and Welkin
The Hermeneutics of Imtiaz Dharker’s “X”
Introduction
Estranging in its tone and alienating in its ambiguity, Imtiaz Dharker’s bewildering poem made up of couplets tells the story of a woman fetching water. However, the constant use of isometric stanzas, in which lines are interposed with commas and periods and ending irregularly with enjambments or end-stops, seem to hint at a different story. Not only is the poem bewildering in its form, the frequent maneuvering with metaphors and symbolic presences seems to barricade efforts at effective comprehension. While traditional attempts at practical criticism in attempt at cohesive comprehension of the poem fails, we contend that applying certain analytical frames, or different theoretical angles, can bring out more significances when analyzing Dharker’s “X”. By placing this poem under different hermeneutic context and examining it through different theoretical lenses, different stories unfold between the lines. This essay, then, will examine Dharker’s “X” under the lenses of (1) wartime eco-criticism, uncovering how water scarcity, as an environmental issue, exacerbates conflicts, (2) eco-feminism, exploring that the identity of women, in parallel to the environment, is also at stake, and (3) object oriented ontology (OOO), outlining the hidden structure behind the seemingly simple facade of the water crisis and revealing the structure’s layered nuances. In the end, by attacking and dissecting Dharker’s poem with intricate theoretical tools, a more nuanced understanding of water and its tangents can be achieved.
Ecology Under the Gaze of War: Examining “X” Through Wartime Eco-Criticism
Examining the poem from an eco-critical perspective uncovers Dharker’s delicate play with poetic sounds—attempting to build a cacophony, or a large ensemble of harsh sounds—establishes the poem around the central theme of the water crisis at times of extreme conflicts. In the first two couplets of the poem, where “Hand shaking on the stop-cock, she looks / at the X, the warning cross, // the water-tap unlocked, its padlock cracked. / Breath hacks in the throat, / Check your back.” (Dharker, lines 1-4). The consonance within the first two stanzas, entailing the frequent k, x, and ss sounds, on the one hand, constructs a voice of cracking coughs, perhaps due to thirsty and the lack of water, as the “breath hacks in throat”; on the other hand, this ensemble of percussion sounds might also represent a chaotic atmosphere of danger, perhaps due to shots of a gun fired frequently in time, as the woman needs to “check [her] back” to maintain a situational awareness midst a dangerous battlefield at the water distribution point. Indeed, the interplay of the consonance and the cacophony not only contextualizes the water crisis to be under the shadow of a chaotic war, but also formally represents the shortness of the breathes of the woman, trying to fetch water under life-threatening conditions while coughing due to thirst.
Following her building up of the poetic rhythm with the employment of a sequence of cacophonic consonants, Dharker further delineates the image of a woman fetching scarce water under the situation of armed conflicts with two euphemisms. She first introduces the central metaphor of the poem—“X”, qualifying it as the “warning cross” (Dharker, line 2). Putting the metaphor of a “warning cross” under the context of armed conflict makes it easier for us to identify the tenor in the metaphorical relation. That is to say, “X” as an object signifies the target or aim of a gun. Therefore, the woman’s subsequent action can be explained logically under this threatening of a gun. Mainly, she is “anxious” (Dharker, line 5) and in constant need to “check [her] back” (Dharker, line 4) because there is a gun pointing at her, forcing her to abandon and put down the bucket of water she is attempting to bring “home” (Dharker, line 10). The association that Dharker puts in place in the last line of the poem: “die out, a careless X”, buttresses this interpretation of relating the metaphor of the “X” to the targets of guns, since being targeted might result in the death of the woman. The second euphemism employed in the poem is the subtle hints from the images of the “[j]et-trails” (Dharker, line 21) and the “aimless tracks” (Dharker, line 20), which on the one hand, once placed into the interpretative horizon of wartime eco-criticism, signify the shots of astray bullets, and on the other hand, placed into the context of the walk of water-fetching, signify the tears of the woman. The second interpretative route of associating the “tracks” as to the tears left on the woman’s face is especially interesting as an interplay of juxtaposition. Namely, the tears as abundance of water juxtaposed with the context of a water crisis as the lack of water. This dynamic enhances the thematic expression of the poem. Moreover, we can observe that the tears might dry off in the end, as “they die out” (Dharker, line 20), which further emphasizes the theme of water scarcity, in the inevitable process of any source of water—even as meager as one’s tears—turn into the oblivion in the end. Dharker then builds this association that bridges the emotion of anxiety and helplessness with the object of tears by applying Eliot’s technique of the objective-correlative. As T. S. Elliot describes in his essay “Hamlet and His Problems”:
The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an “objective correlative”; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked. (Eliot 4)
The tears of the woman, hinted through the suggestive image of the “tracks”, in other words, is the correlative object corresponding to the emotion of anguish and despair, as a consequence of the water crisis.
One counterargument to this interpretative angle of wartime ecological criticism originates from Dharker’s word choice of “chowki” (line 11). Because the word “chowki” is grounded in the Anglo-Indian dialect, opposition to wartime ecological interpretations infer that the poem is contextualized in India, a place not known for armed conflicts or intense military warfare. The opponents further interprets, not without hermeneutic merit, that the “aimless tracks” that fill the sky signifies the traces of commercial airlines (Dharker, line 20). Thus, they conclude that the water crisis in India is not a result of regional armed conflict; rather, the scarcity is a direct result of over-tourism. On the surface, this argument remains seemingly solid. However, a discerning analysis reveals five follies of such interpretation. Then, we will promptly attack and refute this argument and defend our interpretation on these five grounds. One, on the textual level, the opposing route of interpretation that resorts to over-tourism as the cause of regional water scarcity overlooks Dharker’s characterization of the “tracks” as “aimless” (line 20). The assumption that the “tracks” signify commercial airlines do not hold up water as planes fly with a destiny in mind, not “aimless[ly]”. Two, on the paratextual level, is it not reasonable to conclude that scarcity in water, a basic necessity for living, inevitably leads to the exacerbated conflict between people? Therefore, on this logical level, the opposition fails to provide the mechanism that correlates over-tourism and water scarcity, while the relationship between water scarcity and armed conflicts is more plausible and self-evident. Three, factually, more than one authors, including reporters from BBC and New York Times, have identified water crisis in India as exacerbating armed conflicts or the other way round (Bhattacharya 2023; Milne 2021; Sengupta 2022). Four, by constraining the horizon of interpretation only onto India, the opposition also overlooks the global significances of the water crisis. Five, the emphasis placed on the contextual elements of the word “chowki” misses its connotation of “imprisonment” (Oxford English Dictionary). By identifying the connotation of this word, the opposition’s argument dismantles itself, since “imprisonment”, in a sense, aligns with the hinted connotations of war and armed oppressions.
So far, we have attempted to deconstruct the significance of Dharker’s “X” from the lense of wartime eco-criticism, emphasizing the problem of water scarcity exacerbates armed conflicts, contributing to a vicious cycle.
The “Padlock” of Women and “Mutter Swells”: Examining “X” Through Eco-Feminism
Another attempt at dissecting the meaning of Dharker’s poem is from the perspective of eco-feminism, directing our attention towards theme besides the ecology and nature, but to the feminine, the minority, or the suppressed. This route of hermeneutics holds its ground in application to this poem because this poem seems ambiguous to the point that elements from the nature has retreated into the background, prompting the question to a discerning reader: “what else is present and at stake besides the environment?” The answer: the feminine. However, one still might ask: “why a woman?” Dharker’s answer is blazingly simple (and here we expose another convenience of interpretation provided by wartime eco-criticism): while the women are busy fetching the scarce water supply, the men are busy firing bullets.
Under a feministic analytical framework, with the recurring referring to the feminine pronoun and the female identity, Dharker builds on top of the environmental concern of the poem, introducing the elements of potential danger posed to the woman. Between the lines of “X”, word choices that connote a feminine identity—“she”, “her”, “hip”—repeats frequently. Within 22 lines, the word “she” repeats four times and the word “her” repeats thrice. After Dharker establishes the feminine presence, she then subtly injects danger into the journey of the woman’s fetching of the water, by depicting her walk as “dangerous”, by describing that her “hand[s are] shaking”, by placing her body at a dangerous condition of being “shout[ed]” and “whistle[d]” at by a “police” (Dharker, line 1, 8, 11, 12)—danger from not only the ecological collapse and the scarcity of water, but also from the opposing masculine presence. Additionally, the “padlock” of the water valve might stand in further, as a “padlock” of the woman’s social statuses (Dharker, line 3), referring to the patriarchal social hierarchy that women are forced to endure in. That is to say, besides the direct danger that the masculine presence of the “police”, femininity is also under the threat of a metaphorical social “padlock” that locks them in disadvantaged positions under the patriarchal suppression.
Combining with the ecological concerns, Dharker constructs the double motif in ecological feminism—juxtaposing the woman and the water in parallel. Not only is the water in crisis due to environmental collapse, the feminine identity is also under oppression from the masculine social hierarchal system. Dharker’s construct of juxtaposing femininity and dionysian water is interesting also when analyzed from the perspective of archetypal symbolism (Nietzsche 1). Specifically, the feminine and water both align closely with the Dionysian, while both are under crisis originating from the conflict with the masculine—whether the police as a symbol of power and regulation, or the sun drying up the tears made of water and not allowing the “shock of cool” and the “spark of light” to stay for long. By extending eco-feminism into the realm of symbolic analysis, our cohesive interpretation of Dharker’s poem “X” is verified again.
Hyperobjects in the Sky: Examining “X” Through Object-Oriented Ontology
The hermeneutic project at interpreting Dharker’s poem is not yet complete without the final step of applying Timothy Morton’s theory of the hyperobjects, grounded in object-oriented ontology (OOO). However, we first need to set this theoretical frame up. In Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology After the End of the World, Morton defines hyperobjects as “massively distributed in time and space relative to humans” (1). Among others, one of the most obvious characteristics of hyperobjects is its non-locality. Morton emphasizes that “any ‘local manifestation’ of a hyper- object is not directly the hyperobject” itself (1). Morton’s argument is that “one only sees pieces of a hyperobject at any one moment. [Therefore, t]hinking [about] them is intrinsically tricky” (4). Returning to the counterargument we faced in the section applying wartime eco-criticism to Dharker’s poem, Morton’s argument explains the natural motivation for such opposing interpretation constrained to regional significances—namely, India. However, the counterargument still fails to stand because its perception of the water crisis, or ecological collapse, as hyperobjects in-itself is incomplete and inadequate. In other words, the motivation behind the counterargument we faced explain precisely why such counterargument is a common folly in interpreting hyperobjects, not a justification for the opposition.
Besides water, a more complete picture of the environmental collapse is encompassed in Dharker’s poem in the poem’s construction of the intra-relationship within the hyperobject of the earth system. Mainly, the “jet-trails” that the “blue” sky is “scarred with” stands as a representation of the destruction of the ozone layer in the upper stratosphere, while the spilling of water in the bucket presents itself as the overflowing of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere—a major contributor to the climate crisis (Dharker, line 19-21). The poem by Dharker becomes then a system, where water scarcity is juxtaposed with ozone destruction and climate crisis as the nonlocal phenomenons, the systematic collapse of the Earth’s ecology and environment as one degree higher, and the gender inequality crisis alongside with armed conflicts—as one degree lower than the phenomenons—for they are the underpinning dangers of the Earth’s hyperobjective system (illustrated by graph 1).
Further, it can also be said that each layer of manifestation of hyperobjects is an hyperobject in-itself. What is revealed, through analyzing Dharker’s poem with Morton’s analytical frame, is that Earth’s system, though facing its ultimate collapse, can be deconstructed into a recursive structure with nuanced layers of influences that overlap phenomenon with its causes and consequences.
Conclusion
In the end, the seemingly simple facade of Dharker’s poem proves to be nuanced and apt at evoking hermeneutic interpretations. The utilization of a wartime eco-critical, an eco-feminist, and an object-oriented ontologist analytic frame, Morton’s poem reveals the complex dynamics between water scarcity, armed conflicts, gender hierarchy, and other elements in the intricate web of hyperobjects within Earth’s system.
This hermeneutic project, in its essence, attempts to demonstrate the necessity and the brilliance of dissecting simplicity with complex tools for theoretical analysis, and hope to destroy any attempt at simplifying literature till the point of insipid cliché.
Works Cited
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---. The Ecological Thought. Harvard University Press, 2012, pp. 1–11.
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