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baburamchandran
Reviews
Maadathy (2019)
Yosana - Girl of the bush
In an interview with Bill Moyers in 2013, Sherman Alexie the magnificent American Indian writer and poet reasoning his father's alcoholism to his ethnicity - of being a Red Indian. Later in the same conversation Alexie reveals, as dramatically as only a poet can, that he is also an alcoholic, recovering. And Moyer asks him why he answered that he is 'too a Red Indian'?
Watching the scene of a death ceremony where villagers throw coins and a liquor bottle to give the laundry job to Yosana's father in Leena Manimekalai's movie 'Madathy', I couldn't help but sigh at the uncanny bearing of these two stories - Sherman Alexie's and Yosana's. The obstinacy of oppression that is persistent through generations. And how alcohol acts as a governing paraphernalia to control the resilient soil-fostered human beings.
Leena portrays a girl as innocuous as the earth transmuting herself into a grueling goddess, because of the enormous malice piled on her - like one of those south Indian mother goddesses who punishes her kids with a prodigious sum of adoration. In between this transformation we experience the destitute cries of mothers who carry fire in their lap for generations, grandfathers' helpless prophecies and the unforgiving sky pouring unbearable pain.
Yosana - a girl of the bush, her refuge, Nature a fiesta to the eyes, like streams that reveal irreversible desires, wherein rocks lays bare to be carved into goddesses and the wind tells stories of ultimate immortality to her ears.
Leena is a poet who transcends boundaries of narrative language with delicate and detailed visual consciousness.