Hineni by Shivranjana Rathore (signed copy)

In a jugalbandi exchange of verse and prose, Hineni (Hebrew for ‘here I am’) is an attempt to table a conversation on emotional health, specifically on emotionally abusive parenting-how it affects the child’s view of the self, her navigation through the world while questioning her identity (or the lack of it), and the eventual fight to break out of the shackles of the mind of the abused and find herself. The book chronicles the internal and external dialogues of Zee, the only child of emotionally unavailable Mr X and abusive Ms Y, who are tied together in marriage, much to their own wonder. Zee’s life flows in an ‘inside-outside’ format where the ‘outside world’ is in her voice as she walks through the world, interacting with the it, in silence. The ‘inside world’ is in the form of a dialogue between two alter egos that Zee possesses, in the form of two choices that she has early on in life – to either succumb to the emotionally defunct system, morphing her identity according to the parent’s emotional reality (as represented by Sombre); or to live the same life with a sense of lightness that overcomes everything while maintaining a breezy approach to everything (represented by Levity). Through poetry broken by prose and narration, Zee’s story speaks of the fallacies of the system of marriage, identity, emotional health and abuse, loneliness, and the resilience of the human spirit. The book closes with Zee breaking out of patterns of abuse and embarking on the path to find herself.