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International Journal of Fear Studies Volume 02: Issue 02, 2020

2020-08-17

Fear in corona time: Nepali poetry

Timalsina, Ramji

In Search of Fearlessness Research Institute

Timalsina, R. (2020). Fear in corona time: Nepali poetry. International Journal of Fear Studies,

2(2),52-69.

http://hdl.handle.net/1880/112457

journal article

Ramji Timalsina ©2020

Downloaded from PRISM: https://prism.ucalgary.ca

Published by the In Search of Fearlessness Research Institute & The Fearology Institute ©2020

Interdisciplinary & Transdisciplinary Perspectives

International Journal of Fear Studies

Vol. 2 (2) 2020

Special Iss

ue

COVID-19

52

Fear in Corona Time: Nepali Poetry

Ramji Timalsina (Nepal)

Abstract

The whole of humanity felt threatened together for the first time in its history because of Corona Virus Disease 2019 [COVID-19]. Such an extent of fear has been expressed in different forms. Literary creation is one such site of expressions. On this background, this research article has explored how the emotion of fear is expressed through Nepali poetry composed during the COVID-19 lockdown. The poems used for interpretation were composed in Nepal and beyond by the poets who are Nepali in their origin though they live in different parts of the world at present. Using random sampling in the selection of the texts, the ten poems by nine different Nepali poets have been used to explore how they present fear related to COVID-19. The lines quoted in English are my free translations from Nepali except the poems of Manprasad Subba, Mukul Dahal, and Yati Raj Ajanabi who have published their poems in both the Nepali and English versions. The analysis has come to the conclusion that these poems depict the picture of troublesome life of the period and give voice to the atmosphere of fear, types of fear, sources of fear and levels of fear.

Keywords: COVID-19, fear, lockdown, Nepali poetry.

Pandemic and Fear

In COVID-19 pandemic discourses a serious question was predominant: Is it ‘the fear of pandemic or the pandemic of fear’ that pervaded the world in the first half of 2020? Giovambattista Presti, Louise Mchugh, Andrew Gloster, Maria Karekla and Steven C. Hayes conducted a research on this issue and came to the conclusion that like in the previous pandemics, this time too along with the explosion of the pandemic disease “a parallel outbreak of fear and worry is also spreading”. They explore the conditions and reasons behind it. The explosion of COVID-19 pandemic has put “patients, health professionals, and the general public . . . under overwhelming psychological pressure”. It is because of both the diseases and the possible losses that are “frightening and costly”. They refer to some researches that reveal that “the consequences of prolonged quarantines showed negative psychological effects [including] post-traumatic stress symptoms, confusion, and anger” (6). It is how, this pandemic, like the previous ones, has created

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a high scale and wide ranging fear on both the victims and the non-victims. During the lockdown in Nepal, I, too, personally felt vulnerable and isolated. Despite my

constant reiteration, through TV talk shows, radio interviews and webinar series, of ‘work-therapy’ i.e. the intense involvement on the works of one’s interest to make our mentality fear-proof, I happened to compose a poem that refers to the level of my fear. It represents the fear of my society and probably that of every sensitive person in the globe during the period. Gordon J.G. Asmundson and Taylor Steven are two of such researchers who explored into the impact of this pandemic. They report that the data “from recent public opinion polls show that 2019-nCoV is having a significant psychological impact” (1). Daniel Kwasi Ahorsu, Chung-Ying Lin, Vida Imani, Mohsen Saffari, Mark D. Griffiths and Amir H. Pakpour also have similar findings (1). This discussion indicates that fear was a predominant emotion during the COVID-19 pandemic.

It is natural to be fearful in such a situation as fear “is an adaptive response in the presence of danger.” Furthermore, “when threat is uncertain and continuous, fear can become chronic and burdensome.” (Mertens, Gerritsen, Duijndam, Salemink, and Engelhard 2). Fear is a type of emotion; and emotion is “a bodily consciousness that signals and indicates [its] importance, regulating . . . the relationships that a specific subject has with the world”. Such an emotion has its own pattern of expression: “In its most basic expression this involves three elements: (a) the assessment/appraisal; (b) of an event in the world; (c) made by an individual” (Bericat 2). And understanding an emotion means “understanding the situation and social relation that produces it” (4). Even the day-to-day experiences show that “emotions are events that people have (or that, perhaps, have them)” (Lindquist and Barrett 898). The fear of COVID-19 pandemic is also related to the people’s everyday life pattern. Poetry gives expression to these experience-based and some other imagination-triggered emotions including fears. The following sections of this article deal with different facets of the expression of fears in Corona time Nepali poetry.

Picture of Fear in Poetry

The mothers are hesitating to breastfeed their own kids

The sons are scared to bear the body of their deceased father

The crematories are void of funeral-goers and grievers

No attendees are at weddings

The grooms are faltering to hold the bride’s finger for a ring

The newly-weds on their honeymoon are petrified to share the bed.

These are the lines composed by Bhutanese Nepali disaporic poet Yati Raj Ajanabi who lives in Australia. The poem entitled “Equality Fetched by the Fear of Tragedy” published in April 2020 showcases how the world is gripped by terror because of COVID-19 and its inhuman

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consequences. Even the people with intensely close relations are compelled to maintain a physical distance and those who need to have some compulsory contact are fearful to do so. The social functions are strange in absence of enough number of people in them. The scene where a mother hesitates to breastfeed her own baby is the most severe case of the depletion on human connection.

Similarly, poet Mukul Dahal, living in Scotland, depicts the picture resulted from fear in his poem entitled “Bhaairasako Parkhaala Ra Lakadaauna.” [“Wall of Virus and Lockdown”]. He begins the poem with the following expression:

I do not see friends in person these days

They fear me

And I fear them.

This fear that is in the level of terror has changed their expectations from the friends and the relatives. When they meet, they expect that nobody would cough and sneeze so that the virus would not be launched into the air and it would not be swallowed unknown. The poem further states that it is just because of the terror of death: “Friends fear friends / People fear their kith and kin / Lovers fear their beloveds”. Even the atmosphere of the world outside home is terrible in itself: “On the road is the feel / Of death imposed lockdown”. The government, too, is fearful of the spread of the virus. So, it is watchful that the virus would not travel in the vehicles, would not fly in the planes and would not cross the borders.

Similarly, Rajab Pudasaini, from the USA, in his poem “Prakop Kshetrabaata Imel” [“Email from the Area of Outbreak”] expresses uncertainty and fear looming in the society there. The speaker of this poem feels that instead of blood an unknown terror is running throughout his body. The terror is about the possibility of being infected with COVID-19: “Tomorrow, I may be gripped with a high fever / May be coughing and waiting for an ambulance”. At that time, the speaker suspects that there may not be any relative to extend the help. As a result, there is the fear of the intimidating death: “If you do not get my email or call / Be sure I am in the ventilator”. This level of fear shows how vulnerable people feel amid the pandemic.

In the same way, Poet Sushila Dhakal Adhikari, in her narrative poem entitled “Corona”, brings into the fore the fear of an elderly mother from a remote village of Nepal. The persona, who is in the capital city, gets a phone call from her mother early in the morning. The mother asks about the condition of their stay in the city along with the condition of their relatives in and out of the country. The call is the result of bad dream the mother had in the night; and the dream is the result of her fear of the unknown. She fears the hunger of her children away from home. She is alone at her old age though she gave birth to and reared up many children. This is a two way fear: fear of the mishaps on the children and fear of some very terrible life of the self, resulting from the distance the COVID-19 induced lockdown has created.

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Poet Rupak Shrestha from London depicts the picture of the frequency and fear of death. His muktaka [four-line fee verse] goes like this:

It’s terribly thundering, it is not the hailstone but the corpses are raining

This hard time is celebrating the death, and the world is getting terrified

You man travelling from the moon to the Mars, now see your plight

A normal virus is terrifying you to have a scapegoat’s fright.

During the pandemic everybody was locked down inside the house. Its first consequence is

lack of movement. Depicting this condition, poet Ramji Timalsina muses on: “These days, / I am a tree at home”. And the poem explains it: “I feel alive / In the expansion of my branches / In the dimension of my leaves!” He comes to the realization that the crowd is not his space for life at present: “Now, I know / Loneliness is my friend”. But such loneliness is not fear-free. Everything around seems to be the source of fear:

Something that comes towards me

Beyond twenty-seven1 feet: Is the air Filled with my undeclared foe;

It is the water That carries his army.

Do these birds fly with his wings? Do these animals move on his legs?

This suspicion on everything is the result of fear of the possible transmission of the virus. Poet Ajanabi further depicts this condition. He finds that “Everything’s dull / Blocked are the borders / Aloof are the affinities”. And he concludes: “Mute are the tones of life”. Thus, the first dimension of the Nepali poems composed during the corona time is the depiction of the picture of fear the people have experienced and thought of.

Such a picture is intensified with the depiction of the atmosphere of fear growing in the world, especially in the metropolitans and towns. Pudasaini, a Nepali transnational poet living in the USA, portrays such an atmosphere of the city he lives in. His poem entitled “Email from the Area of Outbreak” depicts the following scene:

There is no vehicle in the main roads

1 It was rumored at mid-April that corona virus could be transmitted from somebody at the distance of 27 feet through air. Earlier the distance was believed to be 6 feet.

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The roads in the town are silent Everywhere there are ambulances in high pitch voice running to hospitals

The trucks full of corpses are running to mass graves

All the skyscrapers in the town are wearing the gloomy look

The town that entertains and runs business

Has closed its door to all.

It cannot be said what is ahead

Cough and fever prevails the city

People are silent with covered mouths in their rooms The number of people who fear opening the doors and windows are increasing.

Pudasaini, in his next poem entitled “Kalabyaak” [“Call Back”] portrays an even gloomier picture of the city. When the speaker of this poem opens the window and peeps outside, he finds that the sidewalk is silent. There is a long line of the cars parked at the curbs. Their owners cum drivers have not come out for weeks. In the surrounding, all coffee-shops and cafes are closed. It seems even the nature is reciprocating with this human sadness: There are only a few clouds in the sky; the sun rises and sets in a flicker and some transnational birds are flying back to their homelands. In such a gloomy scene a sad, depressed, dejected dog-owner with his face unshaved for weeks comes out in the road with his dog. Such a gloomy scene terrifies the speaker. So, he cannot continue looking out. And finally, he closes the window and returns to his isolation.

Even inside his room there is no solace, but only a damp monotony: “There are many books in this lone place / There are TV channels / And there are wine bottles”. But sadly “all of them are overpowered by fear”. The poem further depicts the scene outside the house. There are lines and piles of delivery packs that contain the New Yorker and Atlantic Weekly, the daily papers such as Boston Globe and The New York Times. It is already more than a month that the speaker has not come down to pick them up. The poem shows how the sources of pleasure have turned into the sources of fear. He describes how the headlines of the newspapers are filled with the words like virus, death, COVID-19. The speaker fears that the hospitals might be full of death, scarcity and terror. These are the main reports of the television and radio news as well. As a result, he feels terrified even in the isolation.

Researchers have also found the basic causes of such fear and gloom in the corona time humanity. Presti, Mchugh, Gloster, Karekla and Hayes report that people are “witnessing consequences also at a societal scale” such as “the pandemic is disrupting economies and breaking health-care systems, separating people from workplaces and everyday spaces”. They believe that this pandemic is “undermining modern society on a scale that can be close, or even worse, to that

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of World War II” (66). The result of such a social and economic disruption in the human psychology is extreme state of fear. When somebody constantly thinks about the same thing that may bring hazard to their life, the result is mostly fear (Davis 305). Mertens, Gerritsen, Duijndam, Salemink and Engelhard find that there are basic three reasons for the people to fear the corona virus disease: the first among them is the likelihood of becoming “serious ill or even die due to contracting the coronavirus”. Similarly, the next reason is their “worry about the health of their friends and family” that this pandemic may disrupt. And finally, they are worried about “the impact that the coronavirus may have on their personal circumstances (e.g., being unable to visit family abroad) and employment (e.g., becoming unemployed)” (4). The poems discussed above relate to all these reasons of the poets’ fear expressed there.

Asmundson and Steven report that there is growing trend of corona-phobia, not only a common fear. They refer to the researches on various pandemics in the past and conclude that there are “various psychological vulnerability factors” that have played their roles in “coronaphobia, including individual difference variables such as the intolerance of uncertainty, perceived vulnerability to disease, and anxiety (worry) proneness” (2). They believe that the “[l]ack of faith in the healthcare system is likely to fuel fears about the consequences of becoming infected” (1). It is true in the case of Nepal. They add that the fear of 2019-nCoV is “likely to be due to its novelty and the uncertainties about how bad the current outbreak might become. [It] is much greater than fear of seasonal influenza, even though the latter has killed considerably more people” (2). It shows that the fear related to COVID-19 is the result of facts and fictions combined.

On the same line of thought, Daniel Kwasi Ahorsu, Chung-Ying Lin, Vida Imani, Mohsen Saffari, Mark D. Griffiths and Amir H. Pakpour argue that such a fear “may amplify the damage of the disease itself”. They take it natural that fear is a common mental condition in connection with infectious disease. As per them, fear is “directly associated with its transmission rate and medium (rapidly and invisibly) as well as its morbidity and mortality.” This condition “further leads to other psychosocial challenges including stigmatization, discrimination, and loss”. They finally argue that “[w]ith the high levels of fear, individuals may not think clearly and rationally when reacting to COVID-19” (2). When the mind cannot think clearly, the increase in emotion is common. The poems analysed here give expression to such emotions, primarily the emotion of fear.

Types of Fear in the Selected Poems

The poems under analysis in this article have depicted different types of fear people have undergone during the COVID-19 pandemic. The first among them is the fear of transmission of the virus that may lead to death. And the death is sure to cause separation, loss and absence. So, people simultaneously fear all of them. We can see different levels and types of fear of corona as

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Wayne A Davis has discussed in connection to the fear caused by anything. One among them is ‘fright’ that “results from the sudden fear that one is about to be injured or even killed”. In such a case the subject typically has “a disposition to flee, but occasionally freezes”. The next type or level or result of fear is ‘terror’ that “involves the intense fear that one may be killed or seriously injured at any time, accompanied by a sense of helplessness”. And finally there is ‘dread’ that is “caused by a wider category of often long lasting fears” (287). COVID-19 has caused all these types of fears; and the poems related to it have given expression to them.

One of such poems is Pudasaini’s “Call Back” that expresses the fear of separation from his close friend. His intimate friend who lives just four houses away is not in his contact for long. But he is unable to call him because of the fear of some unwanted possibility. When the speaker reaches to the phone dialer, his fingers tremble. He guesses that his friend’s fingers, too, may react in the same way. So, it is already one and a half month since they last talked over the telephone. The speaker is not certain whether his friend is comfortably living at home or is in the isolation or has already been taken to hospital. He fears separation and loss of the friend.

A very popular poem in Nepal during the lockdown was Raju Syangtan’s “Daaju Haraaeko Suchanaa” [“Notice on Missing Senior Brother.”]. This poem gives a grim picture of a subaltern’s missing that triggers many questions about the social management, poverty, politics and marginality in the nation. In pandemics, it is the poor and backward people who suffer much more than the people who are privileged to have basic needs and comforts for life. Even the government is indifferent to the people from the margin as their voice does not reach to the centre. In the poem, the speaker is a junior brother to a person who has been out of contact for more than a week. The absence of his brother from contact reminds him the scene of the flight of the people from the capital city to their village settlements. This basic scene shows how the poor workers in the city can never feel secure in the cities they make for the rich ones. The poor build the city but they have to live in fear within it. Once their life is in crisis, they do not get any support there. The scene of the flight of masses from the cities to their remote villages shows this predicament.

The poem begins reporting the separation of two brothers: I am locked down

Here in the village

You are lost There in a strange city.

Then the speaker remembers what his missing brother had said the previous week: On the first evening of lockdown

You said over the telephone: ‘The owner of brick furnace

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Drove me away from work He dismantled my hut

Made of unripe bricks

Where may I go now?’

These lines present the fear of uncertainty looming in the mind of the poor worker. He lived being fearful of the master who finally dismantled his temporary hut, too. It shows the extent of cruelty fear may lead to. Here, even the fear of the master is indirectly indicated: The master feared that the poor workers might transmit COVID-19 to him and his family. So, to make sure the workers move away right then, he destroyed their shelters. It is the fear multiplied; and the poor man and his family are the ultimate victims. Finally, he left the city, and was out of contact:

From that day on

I have not received your message My brother Where are you, now?

Now, the original fear of the speaker, i.e. the third fear beyond the fear of the master and the

lost worker, starts. It is the fear of the poet and so it is the fear of every sensitive and responsible citizen of the nation towards the present and future of the underprivileged ones. Many such people have been lost never to be found. The speaker fears that his brother might have left the city amid a crowd that moves at the midnight. With some sense of hope and fear intermingled he searches for his brother’s face amid the people who “have left their places with kids at midnights / And are walking along the roads”. He also tries to find his brother’s face among the people who were walking through the jungles and “in the long chain of people crossing the river”. But he was not found. The fear is intensified when the speaker’s guess is proved to be wrong. Such a journey described above would also be very difficult for him; but once he was not found in it, the fear of even worse condition looms in the speaker’s mind.

Now, the fear of missing is grown to the fear of death. The speaker reports that At the middle of the night

A mini bus that escaped the city to reach a village Fell into the Koshi

I could not see your name

In the list of the dead and the injured

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But when even in the list of the dead people he was not found, even worse kind of plight is feared: It is the fear of being killed and disappeared. Here, the fear is intermingled with the hatred and anger pointed at the people in the position of state power:

The people who painted the house of a General

They carried soybean and the noodles

Inside the empty colour-cans

When they were measuring the highway

With the torn slippers on They were stopped with the order of the same General

The old shirts uncolored even by color

Protrude their chests Your face does not match with these painters

He further pokes at the elites: There are people generous Who enjoyed taking selfie

While giving two packets of noodles

Even that face crumpled with the crowd Does not match with you

Now, the speaker fears of great difficulty his brother might have fallen into: You must have started for five hundred kilometers

Taking sister–in-law on the bicycle You must be going somewhere

But the Facebook has not published that picture of yours

The speaker fears with hope that at least his brother may be found as a labourer “standing with his body shaking / Looking at bread fallen onto the dust / And is swallowing his own saliva”. But, sadly, he is not found in this plight as well. Then, he is more or less sure that the brother is dead. This is the highest level of his fear:

A thin corpse is found Nearby the garbage heap of a five-star hotel

Where the ‘Chyame didi’ throw the leftover

Such news has not come yet

On the banks of

The Bagmati, the Bishnumati and the Dhobikhola

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There is seen an unidentified corpse Such news has not come yet

When even these terrible guesses did not come to be true, the speaker fears that the age-old social hierarchy might have finished his brother’s life along with the life of his family and class comrades.

Thus, the poem moves ahead to portray the poor’s fear of the rich. It is done with the description of the missing man’s difficult life in the past:

Three years ago

You said from Qatar – I earn twelve thousand a month

We need ten thousand

Just for the medicine of your sister-in-law Tell, my brother

Should I stay here or should I return Nepal ?

My shock Must have been an answer to you

And, you returned

Yoked yourself again in the brick furnace

Three months ago, you said again – ‘Today I was nearly burnt into the brick furnace’

You, who never reached the school

I am not sure Whether you understood the meaning of lockdown or not

Always constructing cities

You remained far away from it

I am not sure

Whether you knew the meaning of ‘stay home’ or not.

This is the type of fear induced by the structural violence in the society, anywhere in the world. Such a possibility is established when nobody from the ruling class is concerned about his sad missing:

Those who enjoy boating on your sweat-lake Their lockdown dairies are published, in the magazine

The so-called celebrities

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Are distributing quarantine tips In the FM’s and radios

The so-called leaders are showing

On the television screens

The menu of foods to increase immunity power

Are printed

On the online portals

The lists of the blue, yellow and green films

That can be seen while alone

But The news of your missing

Has not been published in any magazines

Has not been seen anywhere

At this point in the poem, the speaker connects such a missing with the fear and absence of the marginalized and the subalterns in the mainstream discourse of an unjust national society:

For long, We had been lost from the list of the state You are lost even more

During this calamity My brother

Where are you, now?

Thus, this poem shows how personal fear gradually grows and is taken to the level of social

fear and ultimately changes into the hatred and anger against the privileged class. Once reached to this level, the speaker’s hope of finding his missing brother comes to an end. Once there is no hope, there is no fear. Instead fearlessness, at least for speech, begins. So, the speaker now is able to vent his anger at the higher class people and the rulers who create fear among the underprivileged ones as a means of ruling them. Here, the history of the creation of fear is brought into the fore. It shows that corona fear is connected not only with corona. It is, at the same time, connected with other multiple layers of fear generation and its application in unfair social management.

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As a result, people are not ready to trust any social bodies. They are compelled to feel that it is only they themselves who can save them. Poet Timalsina concludes his poem with this tone:

For now,

This twenty-seven feet

Is my nation

It’s my government

My democracy It is everything for me!!

This was the common feeling of the people during the pandemic.

Poems have shown that even the hopes are filled with fears. Syangtan’s poem discussed above and Pudasaini’s “Call Back” are such examples. When the speaker in “Call Back” calls his friend with the hope of finding him fine, he is fearful at the same time. The fear aspect wins even in the real case. His call was not picked. Instead, there was an automatic response which reported that his friend had been admitted in a corona care hospital. The last statement of the response was: “I will call you after I come back from the hospital”. But the speaker cannot be fully hopeful as his hope is intervened with a fear that he may not return from the hospital.

Level of Fear and the Role of Consciousness

The more conscious one is, the higher level of fear one gets. Presti, Mchugh, Gloster, Karekla and Hayes argue that human beings “react cognitively to every known event, so pandemics are not simply biological diseases confined to health specialists, they also influence individuals and society more generally through symbolic relations”. They further posit that “[g]iven the worldwide scale of COVID-19, media coverage has amplified the psychological and social effects of this pandemic”. As per them, these effects “ranged from neglecting the threat initially, to later highlighting the virus and the disease in such a distinctive and dangerous way that sometimes stress, anxiety, and even a sense of panic were generated” (65). It shows that the more conscious and informed the people are their fear gets more severe.

Poet Ajanabi finds the fear of corona higher in the level than those of the fear created by many other terrible events in the history of humanity. He argues that human beings are more horrified by COVID-19 than they were by Adolf Hitler, Saddam Hussein and Pol Pot. It is worse than the two great modern wars: World War I and II. He concludes: “They no longer recall the gas chamber / They’re destined to see their own holocaust”. Such a terror is depicted in the following lines from Timalsina’s poem, too:

Now, My leaves do not need any storm

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To dream of being plucked off and dropped, For this,

The air loitering with him is enough!

The images of his sharp thorns are enough;

For my branches to fear

Of being chopped and dropped,

They do not need to see any weapon in hand.

My body is already in high fever

It is tired

It is going to collapse Just with his single sight!

As a result of intense fear, all activities have come to a halt. Writers are unable to create anything new as poet Manprasad Subba from Darjeeling, in his poem entitled “An Unwritten Poem”, describes his condition:

You ask me to write a poem for you

when all the words are dissociated from one another and each of them has gone into isolation

Not a line takes form and I am utterly out of wit

The words that busily walked along the streets and lanes, the words that commuted in buses and trains,

buzzed in and around the markets and shopping malls, sometimes took to the streets in protests,

have now gone quietly into their dungeons

The words that sweated for their daily wages the words that the parks and beaches teemed with

the words I was one with since time immemorial

are today quarantined in their individual cages Now, how can I string lines with those words That would convey my intimate feelings?

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So, the poet implores his beloved: . . . my Love,

please, accept this blank sheet of paper

and feel upon it the heartbeat of a poem left unwritten

Or, stare with your eyes closed

at the blank screen of my Facebook wall

which is but the dark blank space

left by those poor departed souls

The poem shows that because of the consciousness of the speaker, he is able to understand

the extent of terror COVID-19 has created. So, he is unable to be creative which is the next conscious act of a poet. Some poems show that it is only the human being that is affected by that level of fear of the unknown, the unheard and the unseen. It is because man has the consciousness. Poet Mukul Dahal, from Scotland, gives poetic expression to this reality:

In the garden There is no such feeling though. The birds are flying from branches to branches

Butterflies do not know of social distancing

Leaves are fluttering in the wind There is no sign of the virus in the sunshine

The poet further describes that the political leaders are afraid of COVID-19 because they are conscious about the possible consequences it may bring in their upcoming election or in their regular activities in such a way that their common way of existence may be disrupted. The poor are consciously fearful of death or the torture of the same height. And the persona is fearful whether he would be able to go back to his nation to meet and bow down to the legs of his mother or not.

Poet Mahesh Poudyal also, in his poem entitled “Haahaakaar” [“Panic”], shows how the children can walk on the street being fearless as they do not have the consciousness and so are fearless. Before showing the grown up’s fear and children’s fearlessness, poet Poudyal symbolically depicts the scene of panic in the town:

In this rain

Instead of water the eyes are raining from the sky

They are everywhere Whether it is a day or a night!

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Now for me, from these innumerable eyes

Neither the darkness can barricade

Nor the curtain of someone’s hands

And, he concludes: Now, I am thinking – My civilization will be detained

And in the roads

It is only the children who can walk uninterrupted.

The above discussion shows that poetry is able to give expression to the terror of the time. The poems also exhibit that fear “denotes several different, though related, psychological states” (Davis 287); it also “entails aversion and uncertainty” and at the same time is the result of some sort of desire for something (289). It is seen that Lisa Hinrichsen is true when she argues that poetry is capable of “translating traumatic loss and anxiety into the rhythmic manipulation of signifiers and figures, objects and syllables”. It is where “poetry itself approximates the creative play of the boy's game, substituting word for thing, and overcoming absence by positing presence” (47). Nepali poetry composed during the COVID-19 pandemic exhibits these qualities and establishes that fear is the major emotion of this time and creations during it.

Conclusion

Every pandemic is a source of fear; and so was COVID-19. Every conscious human being felt threatened during the lockdown. Poets, as sensitive people, have given expression to this fear of different kinds and levels. Nepali poems selected for this analysis are able to depict the extent of fear the people experienced during the pandemic. As the world was gripped by terror because of COVID-19 and its inhuman consequences, even the people with intensely close relations were compelled to maintain a physical distance and those who needed to have some compulsory contact were fearful to do so. The social and economic activities were disrupted and human connections depleted. Saving the ‘self’ was the major human concern of the time. Even the atmosphere of the world outside home was terrible. Death smelt everywhere and had the most intimidating presence at everyone’s psyche. It is not only the individuals; all the governments across the globe were terrified. Created in such a situation and mentality almost all of these poems express uncertainty and fear looming in social and personal psychology.

All people’s dreams were bad. There was nothing that could make people free of fear. Only the isolation was the solution to safety. There were different types of fear people had to undergo.

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The first among them was the fear of transmission of the virus that may lead to death. And the death was sure to cause separation, loss and absence. So, people simultaneously feared all of them. There was a ‘fright’ that one is about to be injured or even killed alongside ‘terror’ of being killed or seriously injured at any time. Terror was accompanied by a sense of helplessness. And, finally, there was ‘dread’ that may last long and may go to the level of trauma. In the expression of all these types of fears, poems portray the bodily and mental reaction of the time affected by the feeling of fear: so affect is also seen through some poems.

The next aspect of fear these poems give expression to is the poor’s fear of the rich and vice versa. Though the pandemic is harsh for all people in the world, it was harsher to the poor as they have hunger added to fear. They have to fear the state, too, as it never works for them, at least in case of Nepal. Here, the fear gets its class-face as well. The village fears the town and town is fearful of the village. The height of human cruelty and the multiplication of mutual fears are the other paradigms of emotions these poems deal with. At the same time, these poems express the fear of the poets who represent the fear of every sensitive and responsible citizens of the nation towards the present and future of the underprivileged. It is seen through these poems that corona-time fear is connected not only with corona. It is, at the same time, connected with multiple layers of fear generation and its application in unfair social management. All in all, corona-time Nepali poetry is able to give creative expression to the terror of the times.

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Dr. Ramji Timalsina is a researcher of poetry and diaspora, and lecturer of English in Tribhuvan University, Nepal. He has earned his PhD Degree on “Exploration into the Use of Rasa in Nepalese Diasporic Poetry”. He is the chair of the Center for English Teachers’ Research and Pedagogy, Nepal. He has conducted number of programs as a facilitator on research and

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writing. Dr. Timalsina has published five books and more than four dozen research articles in each of the English and Nepali languages. He currently works as an Editor-in-Chief, Executive Editor and Editor of different literary and academic journals. He has been taking part in national and international conferences on language, literature and diaspora. He is currently working on the transnational approach to Nepali Diaspora and its literature. His latest book is Nepalese Diaspora and its Literature: Emotion and Expression published from Germany. ramjikoshi@gmail.com

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