Hunger By Jayanta Mahapatra | Summary & Analysis
Hunger is a poem penned by an Indian poet “ Jayanta Mahapatra” recognised for his extraordinary writings on human behavior and society. It was published in 1976, and it consists of four stanzas. The poem is based on the child sex trade and desire.
It was hard to believe the flesh was heavy on my back.
The fisherman said: Will you have her, carelessly,
trailing his nets and his nerves, as though his words
sanctified the purpose with which he faced himself.
I saw his white bone thrash his eyes.
The first stanza outset with an unknown burden the author is experiencing on his back. The next line is where the fisherman asks him, “ Will you have her?” It is not exactly what the author is impending by her,” the fish or the woman, and the narrator leer at the predicament of the fisherman, whose white bone can be apparently visible, which shows abjection.
I followed him across the sprawling sands,
my mind thumping in the flesh’s sling.
Hope lay perhaps in burning the house I lived in.
Silence gripped my sleeves; his body clawed at the froth
his old nets had only dragged up from the seas.In the flickering dark his hut opened like a wound.
The wind was I, and the days and nights before.
Palm fronds scratched my skin. Inside the shack
an oil lamp splayed the hours bunched to those walls.
Over and over the sticky soot crossed the space of my mind.
In the next stanza, the speaker follows the fisherman. His discomfort, his desires, and his quondon attempts when he tries to conform his desires.The third stanza takes us to where the fisherman takes him, to his house or the shelter, which is construed as an opening in the darkness. The speakers refer to the wind as him, followed by days and nights he has spent before in an event he is in flashback to. The palm leaves cause scratches and discomfort in his skin. The oil lamps inside the shelter depict the interior of the fisherman’s house. The last line is about the mental condition and intrusive thoughts in the speaker’s mind.
I heard him say: My daughter, she’s just turned fifteen…
Feel her. I’ll be back soon, your bus leaves at nine.
The sky fell on me, and a father’s exhausted wile.
Long and lean, her years were cold as rubber.
She opened her wormy legs wide. I felt the hunger there,
the other one, the fish slithering, turning inside.
The fourth and last stanza, where the fisherman introduces his daughter (in the first stanza, when the fisherman asks, "Will you have her?"), means his daughter fulfills his desire. He said, “Feel Her” which means to have her as a symbol of thirst to satisfy his lust, and the fisherman left, giving them privacy. The speaker stares at her, who is thin, and her body is compared to rubber. As she has just turned fifteen, the innocence and vulnerability she carries makes even speakers feel pity for her. Then she widens her legs, and the speaker feels the “Hunger” finally.
The hunger in the poem symbolizes the sexual desires of the speaker: the money the fisherman will get after trading his own daughter for service, and the daughter, to survive in this world, has to trade herself for her own necessities.
