Tell me Mr. Death
Date, Time, Place.
I have to look for my
Life-of-sin panties
Make an appointment
For a pedicure.
(Learn from the Almond Leaf 23)
Eunice de Souza was an Indian confessional English language poetess, literary critic and novelist. Born as a Goan Catholic and settled in Pune, she attended Sophia College, Mumbai and then earned a Master’s degree in English literature from Marquette University, Wisconsin, and a PhD from the University of Mumbai.
She started teaching at St. Xavier’s College (Mumbai) in 1969, heading the Department of English from 1990 for several years, and retired in 2000. She actively organised stage plays for the college annual theatre festival Ithaka. She was Arts columnist, Economic Times, Bombay, 1973–84 and Literary editor, Indian Post, Bombay, 1987.
Over four decades, Eunice published four notable volumes of poetry, Women in Dutch painting, Ways of Belonging, Nine Indian Women Poets, These My Words, and Learn From The Almond Leaf; two novellas’, Dangerlok and Dev & Simran; compiled anthologies of Indian women’s writing; edited volumes of folk tales, and literary criticism; poems for children, which were translated into Portuguese, Italian, Finnish and Swedish. She contributed weekly review articles on art, literature and culture for the Mumbai Mirror. She is included in Anthology of Contemporary Indian Poetry.
Anti-establishment, Eunice de Souza had a remarkably sparse style of writing, bereft of verbose ornamentation. Her expression would be a calibrated tone of restraint that made her poems read like notes exchanged between people who already knew one another well.
Her poems often seemed to scorch the page with acid irony. Quaintly admitting that with words, she stomped around, ‘like a sour old puss in verse’ with aplomb, she believed her poems grew calmer, more nuanced, and less one-dimensional.
Her irreverent, unsentimental poetry was imbued with a sense of the personal, distilled from the lived experience of being a Catholic woman in a patriarchal set-up. The seemingly innocuous, unremarkable, everyday social lives of her characters were often the subject of her poems.
Reluctant to be labelled a woman poet, she however never shied away from using her poetry as a medium of social critique vis a vis women’s subjugation within institutional structures of family and marriage.
Her women, perfect models of submissive compliance, epitomised the lack of agency that female subjects endure in patriarchal societies. Her persistent engagement with matrimony as the site of social hierarchies and prejudices is reflected in her poem Marriages are Made, where the prospective bride becomes the object of intense scrutiny.
Her poem Feeding the Poor at Christmas, examines the performance of Christian charity, where the note of condescension towards the recipients of alms reveals it as being a self-serving, conditional, superficial exercise.
She acknowledged therapeutic value in the writing of a poetry that can contain destructive impulses by giving them form:
Yet the world will maul again, I know,
and I’ll go gladly for the usual price,
Emerge to flay myself in poems,
The sluiced vein just a formal close.
Her work influenced younger poets to not only speak about the gendered nature of everyday experiences but also to capture the potential for strength and humour in it.
Eunice who never married, caring for her mother and aunt until their death, passed away in Mumbai aged 77 of a cardiac arrest, leaving behind a lifetime’s worth of writings and will be remembered as an inspiration to younger people.
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A. Radhakrishnan is a Pune based freelance writer, poet and short story writer.
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