Critical Analysis of Preetinicha Barman’s Poem “Cycle”.

By the titular ‘cycle’ Preetinicha Barman in her poem “Cycle” metaphorically refers to the menstrual cycle signifying fertility, birth, flow of life etc which every girl has to undergo enduring all the pain and bane in order to become a ‘woman’. The image of the beads of sweat in the speaker’s body is quintessential of a woman’s menstrual blood— “Pungent, slimy, the quasi-liquid drips”— which flows from the uterus through cervix and out of the body through vagina which is symbolized by the ‘naked hill’, thus implying the spatio-temporal action the backdrop of the poem is supposed to have set against. The use of the adjective ‘naked’ is compatible enough with the vagina in that it sheds or empties all the menstrual blood— which is partly blood and partly tissue from the inside of the uterus symbolized by the ‘red soil’— from it during menstruation. The speaker seems to have been worn out after her ritualistic participation in the monthly period. The burden, pain, sufferings inflicted on the delicate, unrebellious and susceptible body of the speaker devoid of the pure, platonic and emotional love that she actually expects from her lover during her menstruation, is evidenced by the line— “A body leaned over cushions”. The speaker is tremendously torn between the anticipated danger of not being able to beget her children and her vain exercise of effacing the memory of throbbing or cramping pains caused by her menstrual cycle. Indecisiveness, indetermination and insecurity result in the speaker’s profound pondering over the grim reality where every woman has to undergo such a painful, perennial period with no definite objections on their part only to acquire the identity of a mother and hence inferior and subordinate to the condescending male figures and their supremacy endorsed by the patriarchal society. The speaker is seen to question the unethical, unlawful and inhuman practice of forcefully transforming a girl into a mother by coerced sexual exploitation, physical tortures, oppression, abuses etc that every girl as a rule is compelled to go through to become in the eyes of the society what is called a ‘woman’. Here the words of the female French existentialist philosopher Simone de Beauvoir in her 1949 book called The Second Sex appear relevant— “One is not born a Woman, But Becomes One”.