Dear Reader,

Birds play an important role in two recent English movies, both based on novels. In the much-acclaimed Hamnet, set in Shakespeare’s England, the female protagonist, Agnes, flies a Harris’s hawk. This has caused some consternation among critics since the bird, an American species, was introduced in England for falconry only in the late 1960s.

In the source novel, Maggie O’Farrell’s Women’s Prize-winning Hamnet, the bird that Agnes has is a kestrel, symbolising its owner’s independence, wildness, and enigma. Of course, the Harris’s hawk might as well stand for these qualities and a casual viewer would hardly be able to differentiate between the species. But critics are given to nitpicking, as we know.

Hamnet, the book, is subtitled A Novel of the Plague and it is surely that, being pivoted on the death of Shakespeare’s young son, Hamnet, by plague. But the story gets its power from the character of Agnes, whom we know as Anne Hathaway, Shakespeare’s wife. In O’Farrell’s imagining, this solitary, reclusive, motherless woman is a singular character, deeply attuned to nature, and as untameable. Known for her knowledge of herbs and medicines, she is also rumoured to be a witch. She certainly bewitches her brothers’ tutor, William Shakespeare, who remains unnamed in the novel.

The scene where he first claps his eyes on Agnes is intriguing and amazing, presaging the theme of gender fluidity which marks both the novel and Shakespeare’s plays.

“For a moment, the tutor believes it to be a young man. He is wearing a cap, a leather jerkin, gauntlets; he moves out of the trees with a brand of masculine insouciance or entitlement, covering the ground with booted strides. There is some kind of bird on his outstretched fist: chestnut-brown with a creamy white breast, its wings spotted with black. It sits hunched, subdued, its body swaying with the movement of its companion, its familiar.”

The first part of Hamnet, with its focus on Agnes, deeply impressed me. Not so much the second bit, when she and her husband are hit by tragedy. They react to it in different ways, with the tutor intellectualising it into a play (Hamlet) and his wife becoming something less than herself, hobbled by the loss of the life that emerged from her. I did not like the second section too much because it seemed formulaic and obsessive, intent on fetishising the female experience of the death of a child. The last is evidently the reason why the novel won the Women’s Prize.

The film Hamnet has also been derided by some as grief porn. This is a contentious territory, forcing us to reexamine questions of representation. The depiction of how much grief in literature or cinema can be considered the right amount? Can there be a right amount? What is the presentation meant to stoke? Sympathy or pleasure? Is it right to make grief into an aesthetic, even consumable, product? And, perhaps the most important question, can grief—its incommunicable core—be represented at all?

These questions underlie the other book on grief featuring a bird: H is for Hawk, by Helen Macdonald. Recently adapted into a movie starring Claire Foy in the lead role, H is for Hawk documents the stages of Macdonald’s grief at the sudden demise of her father. As a means of coping, she decides to train a goshawk. Goshawks are the red flags of falconry because they are reportedly moody, intractable, mysterious—somewhat like the experience of grief itself.

Here we begin to see why a bereaved person might take it upon herself to bend such a wild animal to human rules. But there is more. In training the goshawk, whom she names Mabel, Macdonald finds herself slowly turning into one herself—more animal than human, fixated on one object (the prey in the case of the bird), wholly present in the moment, beyond which there is nothingness for her.

Inevitably, it brings on something like madness. Detailing Macdonald’s descents into the pits of melancholy, the momentary highs—all the more killing because they must be followed by a deeper sinking—her desperate search for freedom from the confines of anguish, the numbness and the isolation of it all, H is for Hawk is a mad book. Macdonald realises at one stage: “[The] wild is not a panacea for the human soul; too much in the air can corrode it to nothing.” The prose is luminous, throwing the reader into the wild spaces that are Mabel’s haunts. And we too rise and fall with the ups and downs in the moods of Mabel and her owner.

However, Macdonald is so intense and so single-minded in her suffering that after some time, one almost feels sorry for Mabel, who is made to play her therapist, lugging the burden of her sorrow. The reader is also forced to perform a similar role: halfway through, I started resenting the trauma dumping, and shut the book. However, I would like to check out the movie. Given how inward-looking the memoir is, making a movie of it must have been a feat.

In all this, I wonder why birds should be linked to grief. Max Porter changed Emily Dickinson’s line, “Hope is the thing with feathers”, to “Grief is the thing with feathers” in the title of his novel about a bereaved husband’s wrestling with pain. “Dad”, the unnamed protagonist, is a Ted Hughes scholar: naturally then, after the death of his wife, a crow arrives at his doorstep saying, “I won’t leave until you don’t need me any more.” It is a nasty, noisome, obscene creature, giving off a carrion smell—the psychological association with death and the uncanny is apparent.

But it is not clear how the garrulous crow helps Dad and his two boys in the process of healing. But they do heal—at the end, Dad scatters his wife’s ashes, muttering “I LOVE YOU I LOVE YOU I LOVE YOU”, while the boys yell out the same. Porter does not tell us if the crow left them alone at that point. Perhaps such questions are not to be asked of a book as stylish and clever as Grief is the Thing with Feathers. It has also been made into a movie starring Benedict Cumberbatch.

To return to birds—I cannot bring myself to imagine them as projections of our grief. Of course, they must be feeling sorrow themselves. And it is we who bring them to grief and harm most of the time—by cutting off the trees where they nest, by killing them for sport or superstition, by poisoning the food they eat. In their world, humans must be the harbingers of death. Remember the Ancient Mariner, who arbitrarily killed the albatross that had brought the crew only good luck?

He is damned for his evil deed and the curse begins to lift only when he can bless something as unlovely, as unremarkable as water snakes. In that spontaneous gesture of benediction, he is at last liberated from the prison of his self. I believe that shedding the grief of death, at least when the loved one has passed naturally, demands a similar release. There is wisdom and maturity in letting go. “Ripeness is all,” as O’Farrell’s tutor said.

The other day, while staring out of the window during a coffee break, I caught sight of a white-cheeked barbet in the Ashoka tree outside. I have been hearing its high-pitched kutrow kutrow all the while but could not see the caller, perfectly camouflaged among the new silken green leaves. Just looking at the bright green sprite—its head and neck comically streaked with white like a joker’s, and a few whiskers sticking out of the base of its beak—felt like grace. All tensions eased and I felt well-adjusted with life for a while. Maybe it was the coffee but more likely it was dear Kutrow having his evening snack on the branches.

More next time.

Until then,

Anusua Mukherjee,

Deputy Editor,Frontline