Resilient Obscurities: A Hybrid Reflection on "Ringing bell or Mount Everest?!" by Farheen Bhuiyan Nancy
Resilient Obscurities: A Hybrid Reflection on "Ringing bell or Mount Everest?!" by Farheen Bhuiyan Nancy
“For she was meant to rise and she will rise again and again each time she falls,
Like Mount Everest—her pinnacle stands tall—”
In the poem “Ring bell or Mount Everest?!”, Farheen Bhuiyan Nancy composes a lyric of recursive paradoxes that destabilizes notions of visibility, ownership, and feminine presence. The poem does not merely narrate identity—it enacts it through rhythm, contradiction, and metaphor. This reflection seeks to interpret the poem as a site of feminist metaphysics, existential phenomenology, and subaltern poetics.
1. Poetics of Reversal: Phenomenology of the Unseen
Nancy's construction—“Priced but not to be owned, / Disowned but not to be lost…”—recalls Heideggerian phenomenology, particularly the tension between being and appearing. Each phrase negates and redefines a state of perception. Something can be buried but not hidden, unknown but not unseen, as if identity persists beyond the gaze. The “she” of the poem is both object and subject, hidden and monumental.
This form of negation-within-presence resonates with Irigaray’s feminist critique of Western ontology. Irigaray argues that the feminine is often rendered as “lack”—defined only through absence. Yet Nancy’s speaker is not a lack. She is opaque, layered, and towering—not elusive, but unavailable to reduction.
2. Mount Everest as Feminine Sublime
The metaphor of Mount Everest is not used for conquest but for endurance. Unlike traditional masculine allegories of summiting, Nancy reclaims the peak as a symbol of quiet transcendence:
“Though not always crystal clear,
Sometimes foggy and shrouded by clouds,
Not seen and vague—
But it stays!”
This is the sublime—not as terror, but as ungraspable depth. The mountain is a metaphor for womanhood that refuses to be simplified or subdued. It calls to mind Simone de Beauvoir’s challenge to patriarchal myths of the eternal feminine; here, the feminine is no longer myth, but mountain—a thing that does not beg for attention, yet commands space.
Moreover, this Everest is existentially authentic—its “attitude” shaped by “altitude.” There is dignity in the unreachable, and strength in not being easily seen.
3. Subaltern Soundscapes: Murmurs, Leaves, and Memories
Nancy’s later lines move from the mountain to mundane, decaying landscapes:
“Murmuring sounds of dried leaves moving backwards in the backyards—
As if those watershed can wash away their sins—”
This shift grounds the transcendental into the postcolonial soil. These are not pristine valleys but backyards, marked by memory, decay, and moral residue. The speaker remembers all, suggesting a testimonial voice—perhaps echoing Gayatri Spivak’s “Can the Subaltern Speak?”
Here, the speaker murmurs not for recognition, but as witness. She cracks the cocoon—traditionally a symbol of transformation—only to find a “dried zealot—torn.” This is a poignant deconstruction of romanticized rebirth. The zealot, possibly symbolizing misguided idealism, is desiccated. Survival, in this world, does not always bloom—it sometimes dries out, but even then, remains remembered.
4. Woman as Temporal and Cosmic Force
What emerges through the poem is a cosmic femininity—not merely personal, but archetypal. The poem’s structure—a cascade of “X but not Y” binaries—mirrors the paradoxes of existence in time: presence and absence, materiality and invisibility, continuity and fragmentation. Nancy’s speaker is not a being-in-time, but a temporal force—falling and rising, foggy yet permanent, erased yet remembered.
This resonates with Henri Bergson’s notion of “durée”—living time, where consciousness cannot be split into distinct parts, but flows. The speaker is not bound by singular moments of trauma or triumph—she becomes through them. Her being is block-universal, where past and future fold into the present.
5. Toward an Ethic of Felt Presence
The poem ends with a final juxtaposition:
“Felt but not be chosen,
Chosen but not be transient,
Transient but not to be transparent…”
In these lines, Nancy critiques a utilitarian gaze—one that chooses only what is useful, visible, transparent. The speaker resists this gaze. She is not “chosen” like a consumer product, nor is she “transparent” for interpretation. She exists in a felt register—a presence known through intuition, not logic.
In this, the poem suggests a new ethics of presence: to honor that which is felt, enduring, ambiguous—qualities often denied to the feminine or marginalized. The poem does not offer answers. It offers altitude—a state that alters the breathing, the rhythm, and the worldview of those who dare to approach it.
Conclusion: Voice as Altitude
“Ring bell or Mount Everest?!” stages a confrontation between noise and silence, visibility and majesty, domestication and transcendence. Nancy’s speaker does not ring a bell for attention. She becomes a mountain, and in doing so, articulates a radical feminist metaphysic of presence.
She is not chosen. She is not claimed.
She rises.
🔖 Suggested Keywords for Academic Indexing:
Feminist poetics, Heidegger, Irigaray, metaphysical feminism, subaltern voice, resilience, phenomenology of the unseen, poetic resistance, South Asian womanhood, spiritual elevation.
Read my poem:
https://farheenancy.blogspot.com/2025/07/feel-numb-my-eyes-get-wet-i-feel.html
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