Witnessing In The Grain: The Urgency Of 'Clamour For A Handful Of Rice'

In recent years, the poetry of witness has undergone a quiet yet decisive reorientation. Rather than placing catastrophe safely at a distance, filtered through abstraction or historical hindsight, many contemporary poets now engage violence and deprivation from within, insisting that lyric expression and material reality can no longer be treated as separate terrains. In this shifting landscape, the poem becomes not merely an aesthetic object but an ethical instrument, tasked with bearing testimony while interrogating the conditions that produce the suffering it describes.

Sonnet Mondal’s Clamour for a Handful of Rice emerges firmly within this lineage, but it expands its reach in ways that make the collection both urgent and formally intelligent. These poems do not simply record hunger, war, and displacement; they examine the very act of seeing, the fragility of empathy, and the uncomfortable privilege of the speaker who is close enough to observe yet distant enough to reflect. Hunger and violence become not only subjects but systems of understanding, shaping what can be perceived and articulated.

From the outset, Mondal positions hunger as the book’s generative force. The opening poem declares that “My hunger was born inside the seeds of paddy,” locating deprivation within ancestry, agriculture, and memory rather than momentary crisis. Hunger becomes both private and historical, a rhythm that persists beneath every other element of the book. This hunger is not only physical; it is existential, a form of longing that bends the speaker’s perception of the world.

As the book widens its lens, war and political violence enter naturally, as if they were inevitable companions to deprivation. Mondal’s treatment of war is never sensational. Instead, it is nearly clinical in its clarity. When he writes that “a missile is stuck in the head of Buddha” or that rice bowls have become containers “filled with bullet shells,” the effect is not rhetorical shock but a sober recognition of how intimately violence infiltrates the domestic and spiritual realms. Sacred symbols, everyday objects, and human desires collapse into one another.

Mondal’s restraint gives the poems their documentary quality. In Below the Sky of Sirens, he writes, without embellishment, that “war has no nostalgia,” stripping the event of the romantic aura that can sometimes cling to conflict narratives. Throughout the collection, war is treated as a kind of weather: ambient, unrelenting, and woven into the daily routines of people trying simply to live. It interrupts trips to the market, morning reflections in a glass of water, and the quiet of a child’s room.

Children, indeed, occupy the moral centre of the collection. In the title poem, the boys whose “rough dry fists” clutch the hope of a single grain reflect both vulnerability and defiance. In Bazaar Children, the young who help their parents with labour watch school-bound children passing by, their desires “anchored in the riverbed of hunger.” And in one of the book’s most harrowing pieces, Babies with Burnt Heads, the poet notes how the pages of the newspaper are “heavy enough to crush the news of yesterday,” suggesting that even infant suffering can be buried beneath the weight of routine. These poems argue that the world’s injustices register most sharply in the lives least equipped to bear them.

The collection’s geographical sweep further amplifies its urgency. Though steeped in the sensory textures of Bengal—festival sounds, the whiteness of kash flowers, the overcast mood of seasonal transitions—the poems traverse Gaza, Ukraine, and unnamed borderlands with equal lucidity. In “Blank Postcards,” the speaker leaves Lviv with cards handed to him by a friend who intends to write later; their continued blankness becomes an emblem of suspended futures, of selves whose personal narratives have been interrupted by war. In To the Children of Gaza, the poet confronts the enormity of collective grief, asking the children who die amid fire, “When did you decide to forsake us?”: a devastating collapse of parental guilt, helplessness, and moral failure.

Mondal also turns the lens on himself, interrogating the role of the poet in the presence of suffering. In Drawing Room Poet, the speaker admonishes the figure who writes about others’ misery while “fretting about the safety of your space,” a charge that implicates the poet himself and, by extension, any reader engaging this work from a distance. These moments do not seek absolution; they insist on unease as an ethical posture.

Language, too, becomes a site of political violence. In one poem, Mondal describes how certain public words—“major,” “superior,” “secular”—become hollowed out through repeated distortion. This erosion of language is presented as a subtle form of cruelty: a softening of meaning that makes injustice easier to justify. The poems suggest that clarity of speech is inseparable from clarity of conscience.

Even when Mondal turns toward quieter themes—ageing, regret, solitude—the wider world intrudes. In Night Walk, a seemingly mundane stroll becomes a confrontation with the image of a wounded child; in Breakfast in the Times of War, a simple request for water is haunted by the vision of another child licking parched lips, hoping for rain instead of fire. Personal experience is continually perforated by collective trauma.

Yet amidst these devastations, the book offers moments of tender resilience. In The Pigeons on My Terrace, a bird nests through a tear in the terrace net, and the speaker refuses to seal the breach, recognising that this small claim of life brings “the sound of life” back into days overshadowed by violence. These glimmers of persistence—lamplight held through storms, seeds pushing through ash—do not resolve the surrounding grief, but they affirm the tenacity of living things.

The final poems deepen the book’s sense of fragile endurance. In Ceasefire, the tentative stillness of conflict’s pause is described as “green whispers,” subtle and easily broken. The closing pieces meditate on the aftermath of violence: graves that do not hold, histories that turn pages without grief, names lost before their stories can be carried forward. The silence after the last siren is not healing; it is a space in which absence becomes fully visible.

Ultimately, Clamour for a Handful of Rice asks a single, insistent question: How does one remain ethically awake in a world where deprivation and violence are normalised? Mondal does not pretend that poetry can solve these crises. Instead, he offers a poetry that refuses numbness: a poetry that insists on attention, accountability, and witness. The collection’s achievement lies in its moral steadiness: it does not look away, it does not simplify, and it does not offer consolation. What it offers instead is consciousness.

In a time when images of global suffering risk becoming indistinguishable from background noise, Mondal’s book stands as a work of clarity and compassion: unflinching, deeply felt, and urgently necessary.