The Exclusion Zone by Shastra Deo
Against the backdrop of ceaseless climate catastrophes and the ever-present threat of nuclear war, Shastra Deo’s latest poetry collection The Exclusion Zone (2023) emerges with a voice that demands to be heard.
Across 46 high-concept poems, Deo walks her readers through a contaminated nuclear wasteland and interrogates the effect that ecological collapse has on the self, language and civilisation. The collection opens with ‘It Survives’, a choose-your-own adventure style poem emblematic of Deo’s engaging and experimental style:
“No nests here.
There is a legend that says human history was hidden
in the shell of a sparrow’s egg, but all your prophets
have forgotten how to read
the birds. From here
you can see the thorns radiate, fill an entire expanse.
From here you can pretend you are separate from this.
To climb down and go further, turn to page 63.
To leave, turn to page 89.”
This landscape of thorns conjures startling images of the large imposing metal structures that many artists and architects contend may be a staple of Earth’s future and perhaps the most effective way to convey the dangers of buried radioactive waste hazards to future civilisations.
This imagery, combined with the tender vulnerability of “from here you can pretend you are separate from this,” stirred a sense of despondency within me that remained until the very last page.
As I continued to flick between pages at the poem’s instruction, I wondered at the possibilities. Are there multiple endings? Are all paths riddled with danger? Am I going the right way? After experimenting with the different pathways, I realised that all roads lead to page 89 – a haunting and powerful final line that readers should seek to discover for themselves.
Another striking feature of ‘It Survives’ is that it is partly written in Hindi. The language is unfamiliar to me, so I approached the untranslated lines with the same confusion as Deo’s speaker:
“This must mean something.
It must mean.
It must”
Although the meaning was unknown to me, there is an overwhelming sense that the Hindi messages reveal something about the desolate landscape, something important. I had a similar reaction to the many poems in the middle section of the collection. The section, aptly titled ‘The Game Room,’ draws heavily on the Yakuza videogame series and The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, as well as Final Fantasy XV – all of which I am a stranger too.
Surprisingly, my lack of knowledge was no bar to enjoying the reading experience. Deo’s masterful use of language and symbolism mean that you don’t need to understand every allusion to feel its power. In fact, the complex use of poetic devices, allusions and language mean that this poem can be visited and revisited in an infinite number of ways. In subsequent readings, I took great interest in translating the Hindi messages with my phone, reading the notes and googling the intertextual references in order to unlock new meanings within each poem. This is truly a collection to walk through and get lost in, over and over again.
A common theme that runs through the collection is the degradation of language. For example, in ‘It Survives,’ the speaker posits that “you’ve lost the word artic but you know all about masses on masses of sun damp snow” and the speaker in ‘The Hanging On’ describes “a feeling I don’t have nouns for.” ‘Frameshift Mutations’ experiments with form and simulates a gene mutation within the language of the poem itself, and ‘How Deep’ paints a sombre picture of a “wasting language.”
These poems reveal that when things or feelings become uncommon or are forced to change, language loses its power as a tool of description. The speakers’ vulnerabilities are exposed, and they stumble or in the case of ‘Frameshift Mutations’, become nonsensical. In contrast, words such as “transuranic elements,” “isotopes,” “strontium” and “ionising radiation” seem to flow naturally and confidently from the speakers. There can be no doubt that the speakers are living in the aftermath of a nuclear disaster, and Deo has captured the vernacular of their broken future.
Deo writes that “a prophet is always a poet, but not the reverse,” however it’s hard not to wonder if the Exclusion Zone of Deo’s imagination is all that different to the future that humanity is facing. The poems do not offer a direct indictment on the existence of nuclear weapons, or a formal critique of the systems or socio-political climate that catalysed their potential. Instead, we bear witness to the confusion, tenderness and desperation that permeates Deo’s well-crafted and confronting nuclear wasteland.
“If this is the gap
between omen and event, if then, what now, and then, and then,
when are we?”
Hannah Davies is a student, bookseller and aspiring writer based in Melbourne. She has a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Melbourne where she majored in literature and media and communications. When not reading or writing, she likes to bounce between hobbies and fuss over her geriatric cat.