More Politics

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Here's something I wrote for Ultra Violet a couple of months back. I usually don't pontificate on my feminism in online spaces, so this counts as a kind of first. Do go and read.

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Letter from Ramabai to her Husband

Beloved,
I’m tired
and this drying body
remembers the crane-
white of your nails tonight.

The widows come in
limp droves everyday
and my ears scorch
with their words.

Today, Shanta told me
“They gave me powders
to choke my daughter.”
Her hands kept
fluttering to her head
as if to touch
dream hair.

Sometimes
at night
I see my brother’s
ghost and we
still roam and
moan with bloated
bellies and tongues painted purple with
sour berries
and my hungry child-belly
carries Manorama
kicking and clawing inside me.

Beloved,
it rains outside and termites have grown
wings to search for frail lovers.
Soon they will
lose them and

tomorrow
I will see whispered wings
squashed to
the ground.

~

For this post, I was asked to select one of my poems that I “consider feminist or woman-centric” and I dithered for months because I could not come to a conclusion about two issues. (i) Which facet of my feminism should I display and (ii) Why should I privilege that particular aspect of my feminism? Finally, after much deliberation, I chose this poem, “Letter from Ramabai to her Husband”, which I first wrote in 2004. A much-revised version was published in my first collection, Boki (2008). It is the opening poem in a series of epistolary poems I wrote around the life of Pandita Ramabai (1858-1922).

I became slightly obsessed with her when I started teaching extracts from her work to third year students of English Literature who study an optional course in Women’s Writing. I started by reading the prescribed portions in Tharu and Lalita’s Women Writing in India (600 BC to the Present) and then went on to read Uma Chakravarti’s magnificent Rewriting History: The Life and Times of Pandita Ramabai and Meera Kosambi’s Returning the American Gaze: Pandita Ramabai’s The Peoples of the United States (1889).

When I read about her life, I was both moved and shocked. Moved because she was an extraordinary woman who had lived an awe-inspiring life and shocked because I had been totally ignorant about her. No school text book had talked to me about her life. No book on Great Indian Women had included her. Why was this so? Was it because she relentlessly questioned Hinduism? Was it because she chose to destabilise caste laws by showing that a Marathi Chitpavan Brahmin could marry a Bengali Shudra? Was it because she converted to Christianity? Was it because she was criticised by Tilak as a Christian woman who was trying to “infiltrate…Hindu society…under the cloak of female education”? Was it because she was a single woman, a widow, who fought all her struggles alone and unaided?

Since one of my strongest beliefs about feminism is that it allows you to reconfigure history, allows you to retrieve what had been given up as lost and destroys (or attempts to destroy) the silence that marginalisation imposes upon you, it became important for me to write about her. As a feminist, I felt I had to utilise my poetry to repossess her, reclaim her, save her, as it were, from the muteness within which she had been walled. Even while keeping her life in mind, a life of much adversity and sorrow--the death of her parents, the death of her brother and the death of her husband when she was pregnant--I wanted to move beyond biography, beyond the chronicled facts of her life. I wanted to see her as a woman in a community of other women, a woman who knew what it meant to be solitary, a woman who knew she had to grapple with the patriarchy inherent in religion, in the caste system, in nationalist politics.

As a feminist poet, I feel the need to use poetic forms that can act as a crucible for my politics. Therefore, my predilection for forms like the epistolary and the dramatic monologue. Their pliancy gives me the space to negotiate the tensions between the private and public lives of women. In poems like “Swarn Noora”, “Gulabi Sapera”, “Harriet Hosmer to Louisa Ashburton” and my “woman/sign” series, I recreate the lives of women artists--singers, dancers, sculptors, painters--to emphasise details about creativity, struggle, silence/voice and sexuality. My poems are peopled by women. Real women, who knew how to love, lived their lives by their own truths and were never scared of the unknown. My poetry and my research is my way of conversing with them.

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Delhi Dust Storm

The rain hides in the dust
saltating a screen and seek.
Ah, this fickleness.
This blue of a peacock screech.

It is a demure rain
dim between the neem
and the drapes of green.
A geosmin flash in the heat.

Shield your eyes.
The dust is curious
and the rain glances
sideways at you, blinding you.

Reminding you of the
flourish of fingers on glass.
The greedy exit of the past.

~

Who is Peter Oswald?

The only possible answer: A Poet.

First, read David's post on the give-away-ability of poetry.

Then go read this.

And because his poems are so, so "wondrous", I have to post a few here.

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A Spirit Watches its Body being Devoured by Lions

I cling to the air,
Peering for a better view.
I now have no weight,
Diver without leads
Forever leaking upwards
With my own bubbles,
I have to catch myself,
Holiday helium balloon,
Haul myself down hand over hand,
A ship rigged with sails lighter than air,
Impossible to handle in even the slightest breeze.
I am more metaphor than anything,
I can bring myself down to the ground
By thinking of rocks, disappointments,
Shipwrecks, jokes badly told, and betrayal.

I have to imagine the smell of them,
Even the most recent memories are now fables,
That is why I have to watch them,
Just to make sure.
Yes. I am utterly done. Do not send
For paramedics with hunting guns,
One of them is prancing off
With my head in its fangs.
The head of one of them
Is stuffed right into my stomach.

Now the air is loose with dark birds,
And the shadows of the jackals
Shoot out from between the thorn trees.

I am satisfied. I leave
The red fog of slaughter beneath me.
All night the full fed,
Fighting off sleep, will do battle
With the scuttling desperate,
Who dash to outflank them,
While the earth, from beneath, picks me apart
By means of minuteness.

Whilst, in new rooms, I am encountering,
Briefly, the saddest possible music.
And that is it - that is all my mourning
For myself and those stranded behind.
I have the capacity for grief of an infant,
As I descend into the guts of the Infinite -
Rampant, heraldic
Or invisible stalker of spirits
Through the grass of the commonplace.

~

Deer 2

The tree-limbed deer as it flees, leaves
A permanent after-image of trees.

~

Tree

Your head is buried in your foliage.
You have no interest in the present age.
Your arms are many and their gestures unclear,
Your leaves a school that swims together for fear.
Your leadership is firm though, and you stand.
To take your banner they must take your land.

Drenched in booze whilst you are steeped in sky,
I see you in the window passing by.
Fears cluster round my skin as round your bark
The leaves all tremble in the unresting dark.
My years are passing like an afternoon
Whilst yours go slowly and brightly like the moon.

~

Song from the Golden Ass

My daddy was a fisherman,
He threw me in the sea,
With a hook through my abdomen,
Oh misery, oh misery.

My mummy was a flowergirl,
She stuffed me in the ground,
And cut me at the roots to sell,
Where could a sadder tale be found?

My brother was a bankrobber,
He shoved me in his gun,
And shot me at an officer,
Still down the wall my blood does run.

My sister used to scream and shout,
We argued in the womb.
To keep her quiet I moved out
Into a slightly smaller room.

Tell me who will be to me,
Brother, sister, father, mother?
Empty of my family,
I am hungry for another.

~

Bluetit


Thin song like scissors in the morning
Cut my anger into ribbons

~

Warning

A slight slug has dragged
A redbrown stain halfway across
A sheet of paper and there lies dead,
Stuck to the paper. The paper
Has completely dried it out.
At this point stop.

~

Owl

Frankly, blankly,
the owl has looked at me.
Black sky behind, head inclined slightly.
One moment, two moments, three.
Now all the black I have looked at
is looking at me.

~

The Assam Agitation: A Subjective History

But then, I believe, all histories are subjective.

I was seven when the Assam Agitation started in 1979. I was ‘promoted’ to the next class without a final examination. I do not remember whether that made me happy or sad. Things at home seemed different. I would get very worried if I had to ask my parents for even the tiniest of new things. I managed with one pencil for weeks and when it eroded into a stump and became impossible to write with, I attached the dry, hollow body of an old pen to make it longer. I knew my parents had not received their salaries and were struggling hard not to show the wrinkles in their small world.

My father’s youngest sister and a cousin who stayed with us joined the Agitation. Both were young and full of anger. They were constantly at meetings, mobilising people, picketing and sitting on dharnas and going for long, protest marches all over the city. I began to find it exciting. I did not know what they were fighting for. I only knew that Bangladeshi was a dirty word. Miyan was a dirty word.

I went with my aunt to early morning classes where we were taught to use lathis as weapons. I became quite adept at moving lathis in circular motions around my shoulders. As the youngest in the group, I received a lot of affection from my aunt’s friends. Most of them were students at Gauhati University and belonged to the AASU--the All Assam Students’ Union. Many had already dropped out of university. They created catchy slogans and painted posters after the lathi drill. We also sang songs. I think my father objected to my aunt taking me with her to such places and the 4 a.m. trips stopped as abruptly as they had started. I was heartbroken, but school soon reopened and I forgot about the intoxication of holding a lathi in my child-hands.

My aunt, whom I called Na-pehi, and my cousin, Anjan-da, became more and more embroiled in the movement. Whenever talk of unscheduled checking of houses took place, they frantically went around burning incriminating documents in the backyard. The flowers would be covered with bits of burnt-black paper for days afterward. Once, we ‘saved’ a young man who was running away from the CRPF by hiding him at our home. I was not allowed to see him. While escaping through the dry sandbanks of the Brahmaputra, Na-pehi was photographed by some intrepid photographer and her picture appeared on the front page of The Assam Tribune. I remember feeling proud.

The nightmares started quite early, though. The blackouts, the continuous fear of searches, the relentless patrolling by the CRPF, the lathi-charges, the protest marches, tales of torture inside jails, all this took a toll on me. My sleeping hours were peopled by demons, screams in the dark, cries of wolves from across the city, swollen corpses pulled from the river.

One night, I participated in a long, silent march. All of us were given torches to carry. I have no idea why I was taken, but I remember being with my father. I walked fearfully with my torch in my hands, uneasy about the lighted drops of kerosene falling from it. The silence, the faces radiant with sweat and reflected fire, the terror with which I walked--these are images that remain with me, memories intense with the scars of witnessing something beyond my grasp.

I did not know what was right and what was wrong. I did not understand the idea of a ‘pure’ Assam. I did not know why the Bangladeshi immigrants were targeted. I only saw them as fishermen selling fish by the river, sometimes as rickshaw-pullers. They were poor--people who could not speak ‘proper’ Assamese. Most of them were also Muslim. The fact that I was a child could easily be used to throttle guilt. I have used it, still use it.

When Nellie happened in February 1983, I was three months away from turning eleven. When news started trickling in to the city, the hush at home, in the streets was palpable. The silence throbbed with something unspeakable. I overheard a neighbour whisper, “They are cutting off the breasts of Bangladeshi women.” Even now, I wish I had never heard it. Besieged as I was by the panic caused by a body I could no longer recognise as mine, this statement reverberated within me. It has lived with me and grown with me through 1984, 1992, 2002. It stays with me like a canker that refuses to heal.

The Agitation, which had mostly remained peaceful through the years, had to come face to face with this aberration. Or was it an aberration? What if this was the natural outcome of a movement founded on intolerance? I think both Na-pehi and Anjan-da had to deal with this. Even if they did not, I would have to deal with it on their behalf forever .

Those mornings when I walked to Jurpukhuri Paar with a lathi in my hand and slogans on my lips--mornings sweet with birdsong and dew and the chatter of young men and women with a vision in their hearts--are forever tainted in my memories. Nothing will ever cleanse them. They will always droop like flowers heavy with the weight of burnt evidence.

~

I usually don't write about my childhood. This story, however, needed to be told. It's the 37th essay in Blogbharti's Spotlight Series.

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I like this!

I've been Globed and Mailed. Do go and read.

Thank you, Judith and thank you, David. :-)

Happy Birthday, Blog!

My blog turned four today. That makes her almost middle-aged in Indian blog-time. Not yet entirely middle-aged, of course. And not old either. Far from old!

Here's my inaugural post. :-)

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Graffiti Replay

I have a new Facebook obsession--The Graffiti Application. I had added it a long time back and the first graffiti I’d drawn was posted sometime in July 2007. I used it sparingly because I found the tools primitive and difficult to handle. However, this year, I have become progressively more enthralled by this application. Believe it or not, I have made as many as eleven drawings in the last couple of months. This totals a ridiculous amount of time spent poring over a little bit of white space. Eyes water, fingers ache, the back groans in disapproval. Why, then, am I addicted? The blame can be placed squarely on a tiny, seductive button that says, “Replay”.

After you are ‘done’, you can click on the replay button and see the drawing unveiling itself in front of you. It’s like nakedness being covered with colour. Every line, every dot, every scratch, every thought as you add, subtract, create can be revisited over and over again. You can also go back from the finished drawing to a blank whiteness by moving the slider backwards. It appears miraculous! I had seen replays earlier, but never of my own drawings. For someone (like me), who’s totally image-obsessed, the conceptual ramifications are infinite.

Here are some of my recent favourites. Please remember that these are drawn with the help of my mouse and, therefore, the lines are often weepy, trembly and jumpy. Click on this link to see all my graffiti on FB. It’s an open page and anybody who’s on FB can view it. If you click on individual pictures, you’ll see the replay button and can try it out yourself!

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-Orange Moment


-Grow


-B&W Profile


-River


-Jokhini


-Wild Smudge with Lines

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And a poem with which to end this post.

Graffiti Replay

From zero
to fullness        you ignite
with speed. From nothing

to an end          you flower
with the slider. Move from white to
a chiaroscuro

of             spreading             thought.

See that creation
curve undone
started over
and then done.

Hidden opacity
messages brush previewed
into organicity.

The tablet
    a mindscape
the slate
    a template erased
rebuilt in lines instead.
~

My Face

Monday’s child is fair
of face, but my face did not
fit that. My darkness
was written
all over my face. A screwed
up face,
a staring in the face of
face, a not to be taken
at face value face.

My eyes made faces,
my nose couldn’t
keep a straight face, my lips
were two-faced,
my cheeks, a slap in
the face. My face had
egg on it, so did my hair. But nothing
helped my long face typeface

My face faced facts, faced
the music, screamed and raved
until it was blue in the face.
It came face to face
with my face and wiped
itself off the face
of the face.

~

Laryngitis

All hail, almighty queen, Laryngitis!
I welcome your swelling touch and your love
Your kiss is a yawning, full-throated abyss
You make me speechless and tongue-tied, my dove

Coo, sing, chant like an ancient, raspy tune
I’ll strain, whisper to meet you forever
Te amo, swear I by the fish, the moon
Tickle my neck with your whip, now and e'er

Make my throat your home, your address, your haunt
Will you leave me edgy, hoarse without you?
An infected silence is what you want
I’ll give it to you, don’t bid me adieu

But what’s this? I burst into words today
Alas, my love; this dismay, this decay!

~

I have been suffering from acute laryngitis for a week now. This poem can be read as a kind of side-effect.
~

Rosie Speaks to Me

You broke me into sounds.
I’ll run away, go underground
fade from that page
disappear.

I’m Rosie now.
My cracked heels will hold
this river, this rage, all nouns--proper ones and
improper.

Don’t follow me with your words.
Mad, the lies you wrote.
Don’t follow me.
Let me pick my flowers, my lice.
Let me be, whore.
I’ll hide here. Hide my cunt from view
Hide from you.
You can’t smell me. I’m Rosie.
Sweet are my secrets. They glisten with you.

You broke me into sobs.
Exposed me
beneath a microscope.
I had to change my name.
I had to spin a flame-loop, freak.
You know who is to blame
for the footfalls and this game
of hide-and-seek.

You broke me into syllables
tongue against the roof-tongue against the teeth-tongue
Your lines only sprawl and stall.
You bury me as you grumble and mutter
and fall.

But I can forgive too.
I can forgive you your laughter
your shy grammar.
I’m sweet now, bitch.

I collect pebbles in my thoughts
sharpen them with the cries of hawks
and throw them like metaphors.
~
~

Doiboki now calls herself Rose. This is a very drafty first draft and is in need of severe editing, but I felt like putting it up. Suggestions for changes are welcome.
~
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Translation

Kuffir has translated two of my “Poetry of Everyday Life” things (“Umbrella” and “Pencil”) into Telugu. I can’t read/understand Telugu, but I’m flattered. Thank you, Kuffir.

I tried reading these out loud, but couldn’t hear the meanings in the sounds of the words.

I feel a strange disjointing (is this a word?) between my poems and their translated versions. This happens because of a lack in me. My inability to read Telugu renders me dumb. Usually, it’s the source text that is unknown, not the target text. This reversal works in an interesting way for me, the ‘creator’ of the text. At first, I am curious, then detached, then search frantically for a moment of recognition, look for epiphany in words like balyam and rekhani--words that I can dimly identify. I feel locked out of the poems, severed from them.

However, I am happy. I think my poems have replicated themselves and become something new. They are transformed, yet fervently alive. They have taken on lives beyond me and my imperfect understanding of things.

~

Umbrella

I am a flower eroded
with tears and the sun.

A steel skeleton
gives me wings.

Look for me
when you need a veil.
-
goDugu

kanneeTilO yenDalO
vaaDina puvvunu nEnu.

oka ukku asti panjaram
nAku rekkalu istundi,

nA kOsam vetuku
musugu avasaramainappuDu.
~
~
Pencil

I am thin.
Leaden, yet light.
I am that fine line on white.
I am zigzag flowering wood that smells of childhood.
Use me, blunt me and make me grow again.
My death in pointed perfection repeated until your fingers can
hold me no more.

Chew on me and suck when you think
I taste good.
-
pensilu

sannagA vunTA.
bhArangA, kAni tElikE.
nEnu telupu pai aa sannani rEkhani.
nEnu bAlyam vAsanalu vedajallutU vankaraTinkaragA pUsE koyyani.
nannu vADukO, mona araga teesi maLLee penchu.
nA maraNam paripUrNa rachana nee vELLalo imiDEnta varaku punarAvrutamavutundi.

nannu namulu cheeku AlOchanalO
ruchigA vunTA.

~
PS: I wonder if there is any word in the Indian languages for ‘pencil’.
~

Embroidery

You have to learn
to uncrease the wrinkles
with the tightness of a hoop.
Use a circle of wood and a screw
to pull taut a moon of cloth.

Choose carefully
the needle, the skeins, the pattern.
Squint eye to eye and thread thin
silk. Designing fingers will arrest

an instant--a lazy daisy nest, a running
bird, herringbone leaves, feathered curlicues
closed with French flowers.

Craft a silence balanced by the stab
of needle, the clink
against thimble.

Knot with care
when you’re done.

The underside
(the flight of thread
the net
of loops knobs jumps)
will never be seen.
The precision
never undone.
~

Directions

Travel beneath the streets.
The earth was disembowelled for you.

Ask a red-spitting rickshawallah
to pedal you to me through Pahari Bhojla
He will fly by the Bulbuli Khana.
Wait a moment.

Think of birds singing there. Any bird.
Perhaps even the bulbul
in the middle of the bazar. Look sideways
at a house called Churiwalan and think of bangles.
While you jump-jolt on your seat
parts of cars will shine a black grease
shine at you. Eyes will look briskly, slowly
at engines, dashboards, tyres, bumpers and you will hurtle closer
to me.

But first, don’t forget the Chitli Kabr.
Don’t forget it could be the grave of a goat or a girl
or a cheetah or a horse.

Also, a queen was buried
somewhere near here. Razia, she is here
somewhere near Masjid Amrudwali--a mosque of bursting
guavas. The stories will
chase you like smells of halva.

Stop near Dariba Kalan.
I’m waiting here with jalebis.
Buy a pair of jhumkas for me today.
I waited so long for you.
~

Tight Slap (and other things!)

We hear the stern smack
of sound, bright flight
of palm, bite
of tight, spite
of slap.

It stretches
snug skin.
It stiffens
soft cheek.

The tuh-tuh-tuh-light of tight.
The trip trap clap of slap.

~

(and other things!)

Four of my poems were published in the current Muse India issue on Indian English Literature. Read them here.

And I should have mentioned this earlier, but I somehow did not get around to doing it. Three poems--“Madhubani”, “Shapeshifty” and “Naani to Ramher’s Bapu” will appear in Not a Muse (Haven Books--Hong Kong and Asia Publishers), an anthology of poetry edited by Kate Rogers and Viki Holmes. The coincidence of Muse and Not a Muse was too much to ignore.

~
Finally, dear Reader, please go and read this poem. While there, read some more.
~

PS: Tight Slap

Accidental Fractals

Surfacing
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Batman Trap
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Coral Polyp
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Snake
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Stare
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Autumn Night
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Ghostly Conversations
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I am posting fractals on my blog after a really long gap. I thought it'd be good to end this blog-year with a bit of colour.
Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!
~

Omphaloskepsis*

Allow me to exhibit
this marring, this mark
through layer of lint and mother-dirt.

You shall see
this silver puncture this pink glass this closure
that slumbers curled in my center.
A barren scratch that flirts
and shouts for eyes

In this swell soiled
by a nail where
nothing multiplies

my insides are jailed

veiled by a tinsel catch

~

*Written as a kinnafae reply to a poem titled, “Obscene”, which begins thus--“There’s something obscene/about a bellybutton ring.” I quite liked the poem, but since I have a pierced navel, I felt duty-bound to write a response.

~

Poetry Reading

Desmond L. Kharmawphlang*, Aruni Kashyap and I shall read from our work on 17-12-2008 at 3.00 pm in Room no: 12 A, Arts Faculty, University of Delhi.

Everyone's invited.

*The link leads to a Muse India article on "The English Poetry of the North-East". Check it out. Here's a more 'proper' link to Kharmawphlang's work and publications.

~

After the Reading (An Update):

I was awed by Desmond’s modesty, intellectual integrity and generous charm. I know these words sound hollow nowadays, but I speak the absolute and total truth. And to top it all, he has the voice of an angel and he reads like a dream.

And now, Things to Think about After the Reading:

Nostalgia (even ‘critical nostalgia’), as opposed to rootedness. Nostalgia is such an oft-used word that sometimes I wonder if it means anything at all. However, memories of our past spaces are somehow stamped onto our imaginations, our skins, our words. There is no escaping nostalgia, is there? I don’t write about my home much, but it appears in my writings--my symbols, my myths. I may resist this identification; the pull that tells me--name yourself, name your home, but what if other people are anxious to do it? I also have to think about what happens when a self-conscious mantle of marginality is worn. Will I have to be on the margins in order to write truthfully about marginality?

Disclaimer: These waif-like, haphazard thoughts don’t have much to do with the actual reading. Aruni and I enjoyed ourselves immensely--we read reply poems to each other and I also managed to sneak in a bit of prose!
~

Another Update: A report in the Assam Tribune.
~

The dying poet addresses his hangers-on

(i)

I believe
in the blindness of words
and seedling shapes.

I can freeze
the disease of grass
pierce secret sorrow
numb regret in wings
bleed blackrain.

(ii)

Your arms screamed yesterday.

Yesterday
yes, yesterday
the guilt of burning angels
tore apart the fade of sleep,
the illusion of veins.

Ah, my authority
breeds a wilting.

(iii)

I can teach you about
cuts that are birth-eyes
and fleeting glass.

~
~

Googling for cliché gave me this. In this sixty-six word poem, more than thirty words are from the list.
~

My Politics/My Poetry

Over at Facebook, an interesting discussion took place around the Mumbai ghazal that I posted a few days back. Aside: people who read me here as well as there seem to prefer commenting there. Is blogging losing out to FB? But that’s a matter for another day. Today I want to talk about My Politics and the apparent lack of it in My Poetry.

Maaz Bin Bilal and Aruni Kashyap, both thinking and sensitive young men, made fascinating observations on this poem and, generally, on my poetry. Since there is no public link to the discussion on FB, I’ll have to reproduce the relevant portions here:

Maaz: Liked it, like all your poems.
I think this is the first directly political poem of yours that i have read. Somewhere I found it lagging in the element of wonder most of your poetry carries and inspires. Though, I know it may seem wrong to even expect the same here.

River: Maaz, thanks. Yes, you're right. I'm scared of writing "directly" political poems. I will, however, avow that all my poems are 'political' in content. ;-) What exactly is this "element of wonder" that you refer to? Do you mean this ghazal lacks it because it deals with gross/gory details of Reality? I'm sincerely curious and would like an answer. :-)

Aruni: Beautifully written; brings the horror closer with great intensity, Nitoo. The playful tone invigorates me, and i shudder again and again since it underlines the havoc and the trauma. Great to see you responding to current realities--something which I have expected from you for a long time.

River: You young men seem to have come to a conclusion about my non-political self!!! :-O Thanks, though.

Jokes aside; yes, Aruni, I haven't written much about "current realities". I'm not sure about how to tread the fine line between sloganeering and poetry. I have thought about this for a long time and I still don't know where I stand. But I'm ready and willing to think some more about it.

For instance, I felt a need within me to write about Mumbai. My first drafts/notes had too many things in them, were too chaotic and I had to streamline my thoughts into some kind of form. Therefore, the ghazal. The ghazal allows melodrama and also calls for strict control.

Maybe all my "directly" political poems from now on will be written within the strict cadences of a form.

Aruni: Hey Nitoo, you just write what you want, what you feel for. But as a regular reader of your work sometimes I have tried to find echoes of current realities, contemporary politics in them. But even without that your work is political - 'How to cut a fish' though about being 'woman like', is also about being 'Asomiya woman like'—since the art of cutting a fish, that a woman has to learn, demonstrate in front of people to prove that she'd be a good wife is particular to our culture. And not many people would identify this--I could since I'm an Assamese too. So you have feminist politics there, you have the foregrounding of an identity that is specifically local, specifically Asomiya. As GJV Prasad says, your work is not Indian English, its Asomiya-English (do I remember correctly?); now that is political in its own way! Just that sometimes I have expected you to respond to contemporary politics, to negotiate current realities; it’s no demand, just expectation and you may not feel burdened by it.

Neruda thrills me. Not only because he wrote about the night when he could write the saddest lines, or the odes on lemon and suit and tomato but also that he asked us to come and see the blood in the streets. After that many have come--wrote wonderfully about lemons and birds and trees and rivers and hills--but not many spoke to us about the way Spain was, or the bowl of blood for Franco to drink. Now, that’s propaganda as well as an amazing piece of art. Who can deny that?

Maaz: I didn't mean that you shy away from reality in your other poems... not at all.
Wonder was meant to express (in a Greenblattian sense almost (reading a lot of theory these days, its getting to me i think :P )), the great level of rendering the ordinary in an unfamiliar manner that one encounters in your poetry. There is an element of surprise, something that astonishes...
And i seem to be now citing my own writings as an advertisement, but here i remember some graphic poems of yours, where you had experimented with the lengths of the poetic lines... I wrote a poem for which you could say i was inspired by these poems of yours...
there was a certain play with words and form and even subject in your poems that i found lacking here... your other poems hit one in a very serendipitous manner, it is that i found lacking here.
and i think it is a strict form such as the ghazal that is perhaps partly responsible...
while because the urdu language that has a verb at the end of a sentence allows so much greater freedom within the ghazal form itself, english which carries a noun at the end of a semantic line, can be very stifling for the ghazal and therefore the expression capable of being rendered here...
perhaps i m still not clear... do revert if you seek anymore elaboration

River: Maaz, Aruni, I think I will respond to your comments in a longer post. Maybe on my blog. I need to think things out in a more coherent manner. This is too important for me to be hidden away in a secret corner in FB

Ok. End of quotes from the FB discussion. First of all, I want to thank Maaz and Aruni for giving me an opportunity to talk about something I have never really dealt with at length on my blog--my politics. Of course, the act of writing itself is a kind of politics, but we’ll keep that aside for now. Let us talk about obvious politics, “direct” politics.

Without beating about the bush, let me say right away that in Real Life I belong to the extreme left. I know it’s no longer fashionable to tag oneself thus. Indeed, the Left is as vilified and as frequently bashed as the Right in India. However, ever since I ‘grew up’ (can be dated exactly--6 Dec 1992, if you want to know), I have believed in a certain kind of politics. I have been harsh, uncompromising, aggressively compassionate in my beliefs. After coming to JNU for my MA my left-leaning tendencies crystallized further. I became quite active in a quiet kind of a way in Party work outside the classroom. Within the classroom, my scattered opinions on issues of caste, class, gender, race, communalism, sexuality received a theoretical impetus and clarity of vision. When I started teaching, I shifted out of the JNU campus and could not remain involved in active politics. That’s when I started thinking about how a revolution can be created as much in the classroom as on the streets. My teachers had given me a legacy of thorough and critical inquiry. I attempted to do the same with my own students. I’m sure they will affirm that making them question dominant ideologies is one of the first things I do in the classroom.

This rather bland introduction is here for the purposes of making my ‘political position’ clear at the outset. Taking off my garb of anonymity seems to have accelerated the unravelling of my self on my blog. This is simply another layer. I don’t like talking about myself, but it seems I will have to. Now, let’s move on to poetry and the questions raised by Maaz and Aruni. To summarise Maaz’s unease: he thinks my ability of rendering the ordinary in an unfamiliar manner is missing in this poem and he cannot see the Greenblattian sense of “wonder” that he has come to expect from my poetry. He also mentioned that this is the first “directly politically poem” of mine that he had read. Aruni, on the other hand, had no problems with the poem per se, but mentioned that he wished me to write more poems on “current realities” and “contemporary politics”. Both are, of course, quite aware of the presence of subtler varieties of politics in my poetry. I don’t wish to belabour the point here, but in spite of evidence to the contrary, or rather the lack of it, I want to say that my poetry is political even when it is frivolous. If I were to simplistically create an inventory of such ‘political’ poems I would say that “Winged Rabbit” is about the politics of language-construction, “Barbie Roopvati” about globalisation, “Leni’s Song” about Leni Riefenstahl and the aesthetics of propaganda, “Origami” about free circulation of knowledge and so on and so forth. But this is a limiting way of approaching the question.

My response to this seemed too complex for a comment box in the walled world of FB. I needed to clarify my own location to myself and also perhaps to the world that did not know me. My own stand was so lucid to me, I could see it everywhere--in the way I lead my life, in my relationships, in my classroom. I never thought that it would not be conspicuous to others around me.

Do I have a politics? Yes, I do. A well-defined, active politics.

Problem One: Evidently, my politics is not apparent in my poetry.

Why don’t I write “directly political poems” or about “current realities”? I’m not sure about what these categories stand for exactly. But I will suppose that they refer to things like innocent people dying--terrorism, communal riots, caste oppression, rape, etc and not merely to the rising cost of vegetables. I do not because I am scared that my politics will not fit within my definition of aesthetics. It will not translate well into my idea of what works (and what does not) in poetry. My poetic distance achieved after much discipline will go haywire. Moreover, I find that I cannot write when I’m too overwhelmed by emotion. I am also scared that instead of writing poetry, I’ll be churning out slogans. It’s not that I haven’t tried, but if I couldn’t write well, I thought it best to remain silent.

Problem Two: Is my aesthetics at war with my politics? Is this so-called refinement of language/sophistication of thought/escape from reality elitist? Am I pandering to the ‘ruling classes’ by not questioning them in a language that is easily understandable? I don’t think so. My experiments with things like form, content, language, my use of the comic mode to prick pomposity of all kinds, my conversations with history are, I believe, as political as one can get.

Why did I write about Mumbai? I did because I had to. I had pages and pages of single word notes. Verbosity everywhere--something I try to avoid in my poetry. Too much anger, pandemonium, uncertainty, everything was too white hot. The only way the problem could be solved was by control. I chose the form of the ghazal in order to trap my feelings within rules. Conversely, the form gave me a freedom that free lines of invective and jingoism couldn’t have.

Problem Three: Can one write poetically about bodies being ripped apart? Here is an answer to Maaz’s question. One can, but at the risk of sacrificing a bit of that wonder. The only wonder I felt was at the idea of twenty-twenty five year olds going on this crazy killing spree after a few months of indoctrination. What did they think of when they woke up that morning? How did they decide what to wear that day? Did they think of the number of people whose lives they rendered meaningless before dying themselves? Could I have written about this in my poetry? I don’t really know. I tried to and it came out wickedly in the Versace t-shirt couplet.

Maaz also felt that the wonder could have been lost because of the use of the ghazal. Perhaps, but without it, I wouldn’t have written about Mumbai at all. And Maaz, check this out for my Greenblatt moment.

To answer Aruni--Yes, more “current reality” poems coming soon to a blog near you. Poetry is ‘a making’ after all. If I can make certain worlds, other realities, I should also be able to make/re-present an-other type of reality.

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A Ghazal

Fears flower in frail helmets these days in Mumbai.
Will I walk away from the daze of Mumbai?

When pigeons explode like spiteful smoke, you know
It’s time for poetry in the maze of Mumbai.

Listen, let’s scratch images in the base dust.
Words will grow weapons in the plays on Mumbai.

A last message screams--hidng undr d bed.
What about my home in this craze for Mumbai?

Slayers saunter in black Versace t-shirts.
It seems like they have learnt the ways of Mumbai!

A blushing dome stretches apart the shrill skies.
Catch the flash of death in the rays of Mumbai.

Rivers hide beneath the wit of unwise speech.
Hear the spark of quiet in the blaze of Mumbai.

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Boki Launch

I'm link-happy today

Especially if the links lead to nice things about my poetry.

I’m one of the featured poets on Poetry International’s India page. Arundhathi Subramaniam has written an insightful article on how this month’s features were conceptualised (for a special new edition called “Poets on Poets”). I found her introductory comments on editorial responsibility and the editors’ participation in canon formation particularly interesting. My inclusion in this issue is, I believe, serendipitous. Meena Kandasamy, a poet whose work (and political wit) I respect, decided to “present” me to the world. Meena surprised me when she announced in a mail that she wanted to write about me, or rather, my poetry. I, of course, felt like an ingénue being asked out on her first ball (:-P), and I agreed prettily. This is what she wrote after parking herself on my blog for two days! Read it in full here:
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A friend introduced me to the poetry of Nitoo Das early this year (2008) and since then, I have returned to it again and again. I love her critical, caricaturist eye because it shocks me in the most unexpected places. Sometimes she playfully populates her poems with insects and bugs; sometimes she escapes after getting one stuck in a multiplicity of interpretations.

Many of her poems appeal to me because they are about the secret life of everyday things – umbrellas, pencils, razors, scissors and safety-pins. That make-believe, that anthropomorphism might belong to the realm of the fable, but Das pulls it off brilliantly within a short poem. And because I am an activist obsessed about social ostracisation, I am moved by her poems about people whom society has trouble accepting: Pandita Ramabai . . . or a dreaded forest-brigand's daughter . . .

Her poetry raids the reserves of memory, so panic rises “like steam like heat like / Flashbacks of quick childhood slaps”. In the hands of Das, stanzas become embodiments of rebellion: “They could not / kill me. I erupted out / of the soil wailing / at the sun and pulling / at my hair. The earth / could not hold / my ankles.” She writes a lot about sexuality and gender, and her women-oriented poems, as in the ‘Street Series’, can be as brutal as they are beautiful: “The street grows / lewd hands / and sneering eyes / and slaps me until I shrink to a zero”

I admire her work because of its versatility, its ability takes on various voices while experimenting with the form of the dramatic monologue. She is by turns intuitive (‘The Water-Strider’, ‘Conjoined’) and seductive (‘Guwahati May’), fiery (‘Murder: An Experiment in Perspective’) and earthy (‘how to cut a fish’). And then, when her poems grow moody, she takes shelter in nostalgia (‘April is a remote place’, ‘School Sonnet’).

Perhaps because she is a visual artist, she is able to re-imag(e)ine every poetic cliché and so we are informed that “The sun jumped / headlong / into the river and killed himself / everyday by / the ghost trees.” She makes her poems stark and short, and within that space, she shakes her fist at a status-quoist society. I love her poems because they speak to me with a star-burst of spontaneity. Like a river in first flood.

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I’m sure that mention of rivers was designed to please a very foolish fond old woman.
The ‘main’ editorial by Sarah Ream on the PIW homepage also has a brief, incisive paragraph on two of my featured poems.

…[Her] poem ‘how to cut a fish’, through its use of energetic rhythm and syntax, imbues a seemingly innocuous domestic task – which has to be done sitting “properly / woman-like” – with violence and power, her use of the pronoun ‘he’ in reference to the fish introducing unavoidable overtones of gender struggle. Also displaying the verve with which she handles the English language is her poem ‘Love Song IX’, which is rich in medieval, Jabberwockian vocabulary: “Her wiggance is so gizsal. / So houndeous, so beauteous, / so imperfeccamble.”

Needless to say, I’m tickled. Very tickled.

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PS: “how to cut a fish” is poem of the week on PIW. Boki is book of the month on Booksy.

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News

I've realised that it takes time for books to travel from one corner of the world to another. So the Delhi book launch will happen at The Attic on 12-11-2008 at 5.00 pm. Boki will be released by GJV Prasad, an important critic in the area of Indian Writings in English and also one of my favourite teachers. It's almost a month away so make a note of it in your diaries. Of course, I'll keep reminding you at regular intervals.

In the meantime, I have been interviewed. Check this out at Women's Writing.

For people who are too lazy to click and read, here's the full text:

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What is your poetry about?

My poetry is primarily about playing around with given grammars, words and voices. I think of myself as a ventriloquist. My poetry is about comic detachment. It is also about soundscapes: creating a sensory world with the uncanny magic of words that slip, slide and careen into each other. Finally, my poetry is about the apparently insignificant -- insects, umbrellas, razors, safety pins -- things that make up our world.

What does Boki mean?

"Boki", the title of my collection, is taken from my poem "Doiboki". In this poem, a woman's name breaks up into pieces, turns into a taunt, a song. In Assamese, my first language, "to bok" means to mutter meaninglessly, almost crazily. My book works with these multiple layers: poetry as naming, as pure sound, as uncontrollable speech. Boki nearly becomes my slightly unhinged poetic muse.

How did Boki come to be?

In 2005, Steven Schroeder, one of the co-founders of Virtual Artists Collective, asked me if I wanted to publish some of my poems. At that time, I was not ready to publish and I said as much. Sometime in September 2006, I changed my mind and wrote to Steven saying that I'd be happy to work on a collection with him. I was enamoured of VAC because of the way it functions. The idea of independent publishing sounded good to me. Theoretically, I was still opposed to big publishing houses, didn't want to send a manuscript to strangers and VAC seemed like a godsend. Of course, I procrastinated a good deal and suffered from persistent spells of inertia. Around June-July of this year, I decided that enough was more than enough and sat down to tie up the final loose ends and got "Boki" ready for the book shelves.

What role does sexuality play in your poems?

I believe that poetry has the ability to voice the inherent performativity, playfulness and flux in gender roles/identities. I constantly seek to challenge heteronormativity in my poetry. I have explored themes of sexual orientation, taboos and alleged 'perversions'. So, yes, there is quite a bit of sexuality in my poems.

Nature also appears in your poems frequently. What inspires you to write?

Yes, nature is inspirational. I know how clichéd that sounds, but it is the truth. My childhood was spent in the lush valley of the Brahmaputra in Assam and I grew up with a very healthy respect for nature. Poetry, for me, is about the minutiae of existence. The perfection of a safety pin can inspire an ode, so can the bursting of a balsam seed.

Who are your influences?

My influences have been eclectic. In no particular order, the names that come immediately to my mind are: Ted Hughes, Kamala Das, Jayanta Mahapatra, Sujata Bhatt, Arun Kolatkar, Robert Browning, Sylvia Plath, Bhartrhari, Remedios Varo, Plato, Vladimir Nabokov, Roland Barthes, Benoit Mandelbrot, Saadat Hasan Manto, Art Spiegelman, Sharon Olds. I could go on for ever.

You teach English at Delhi University. Which poets/works do you use in your classroom and why?

Well, DU has a fixed syllabus and because of shortage of time and other such constraints, there is not much that we can do beyond the syllabus. I teach the Victorian poets [Tennyson, Browning, Christina Rossetti], Charlotte Brontë, Charles Dickens and Karl Marx to first year honours students and Jonathan Swift and Feminist Literary Theory to third year honours students. The Delhi University English Honours syllabus does give the teacher a lot of space to negotiate with various questions of class, gender, sexuality, race, etc. Within the given framework of strict attendance rules, assignments, mid-terms and final examinations, I try to orient my teaching towards the creation of an atmosphere of radical questioning.

How do Indians react to your poetry?

I'm not sure about how to answer this question. Indians have reacted in much the same way as people from other nations. Of course, some references are easier for an Indian reader than say an Australian reader. A poem like "Grandmother's Godrej: I" might touch more chords in an Indian reader because there wouldn't be any need for annotations. I refuse to use glossaries, so someone who's not from India may have to do some additional research to understand some of the poems.

You posted a lot of your poems on your blog, River's Blue Elephants, before putting together Boki. Why do you think blogging is so popular in India?

Perhaps it gives people a way to articulate their writerly capacities, perhaps they find anonymity seductive, perhaps they have understood that self-publication is a powerful new-age tool. Speaking for myself, I started blogging before it had become fashionable in India and poetry blogging is, anyway, still not the in-thing to do. My blog started as a kind of adjunct to my research project on poetic hypertextuality and poetry communities. Issues of writing and publication become very pertinent in the blog world. Self-publication, comment policies, the immediacy of the critical responses to a post, the maze of links to other blogs, the invisible 'statcounters' that allow opportunities for total surveillance of visitors, all these take hypertextuality to newer domains. These were the reasons why I started blogging.

Martin Amis famously said that "poetry is dead. The obituary has already been written ... I mean, it goes on, and its funny, ghoulish afterlife is in the form of tours and readings and poetry slams and all the rest of it, but not many people now curl up in the evening with a book of poetry." Is poetry dead?

There is a contradiction at the heart of Amis' pronouncement. He talks about the creators of poetry and the consumers of poetry in the same breath. The romantic image of the solitary reader curling up in the evening with a book of poetry is, historically speaking, a recent image. However, the poet doing readings, poetry slams and tours falls within an older, oral tradition of poetry. All art forms create and recreate themselves in order to remain alive and relevant. If poetry has recreated itself in a more social, less elitist grid, where lies the harm?

Would you consider yourself a feminist poet?

Yes, I wear the feminist tag with pride. However, I feel that while the feminism in my own life is of the activist, sloganeering variety; it is not so 'strident' in my poetry. The feminism in my poetry is usually less action-oriented, more conceptual. I also feel the tussles and tensions of various feminisms struggling against each other in my writing, which is not always a bad thing.

Is feminism alive in art in India?

I would definitely like to believe so. There are innumerable women artists--painters, musicians, dancers, actors, writers, publishers who have asserted their agency and declared their place in the public sphere. Perhaps it is not always an informed, ideologically charged stand, but I have no grave problems with that. One also needs to remember that the historical trajectory of feminism in India is different from other forms of feminisms in other nations. Issues of communalism, specific class structures, radical reconfiguration of the image of the Goddess, Dalit Feminism are some of the unique markers of feminist art in India. These need to be analysed and interpreted as different and not within a universal construction of feminism.

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I rather enjoyed answering the questions. It reminded me of another interview from three years earlier, one that was published only in December last year. Click on this and scroll down. Mine is the third interview. At that time my ideological position was slightly different and I was highly entertained on re-reading it. It feels like an archival document of my life.

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Boki

When Steven Schroeder first talked to me about publishing my poetry, I confess, I didn’t take him too seriously. I had my reasons--I did not believe anymore in the enchantment of words on paper, I had become rabidly anti-publication and I thought that flickering poetry on a computer screen was the best kind of affirmation of beauty, love, life and any other cliché you could think of. I’m exaggerating just a wee bit, but you get the picture. This was almost exactly three years back. After three years of intense and wholehearted procrastination, the book is ready. In these three years I managed to draw/design the cover, make a few illustrations, write an acknowledgements page and read the same poems over and over again. When I dither, I dither well. Only Steven’s silent and steady editorial presence could have seen me through this phase of wondrous dawdling.

Well the book is ready to be sprung upon the world. In a week’s time, Boki will be out. And am I glad that I chose Virtual Artists Collective for my first publishing adventure! Just a look at the home page and reading what it says makes me supremely happy:

Virtual Artists Collective began as the idea of a composer (Clarice Assad) passionate about connecting audiences with music of quality. It grew in a collaboration between Clarice and a poet (Steven Schroeder) in which a poem turned into a song. We began to think about how we could make such miracles happen more often, and this led us to the idea of a virtual collective--virtual because we are widely separated geographically, though the internet makes it possible for us to be in touch at the speed of light. Why not use that, we thought, to facilitate the miraculous things that can happen when people connect around the arts we love? This takes us back to some of the things the internet did best in its earliest days, before it became a commercial venture--increasing access, exchanging ideas, bypassing the Market. And it reconnects us with the much older tradition of guilds through which artists and craftspersons provided mutual support and made themselves visible to communities that appreciated and supported art. We hope, too, that it revives and transforms a tradition of patronage that makes it possible for artists to devote attention to art. Patronage has been associated with wealth and, sometimes, elitism--as well as consumption. But we envision a patronage that is more widely distributed, in which small is beautiful, local connections are facilitated, and communities are cultivated through celebration and mutual support.

Moreover, in the Reading Room page of VAC is a poem about the reading of my poetry by Christopher Kelen. I love what it does to my own words. Do go and read it. While there, don’t forget to check out the pre-publication notice.

Here’s the front cover of the book:




















[click to enlarge]

Watch this space for information about the Delhi launch.
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Out-closeting Myself

As is obvious from the previous post, I went to read some of my poems at a Public Place. Those of you who know me well, also know that I have been anti such things for years. I have had a deep theoretical dislike/distrust of the poet’s physical personhood being associated with the poet’s words. This one cryptic sentence cannot explain well enough the years of research that had gone into the formulation of my beliefs. However, certain events in the past few months have made me conduct an overhauling of sorts. I am ready to take off my garb of anonymity, ready to confront the dangers of embodied words. So well, I am ready to say sundry, stupid things like: Hey world, here I come, etc.

I rather liked the discussion afterwards. I was asked questions on nonsense verse (1, 2) , ghazals in English (1, 2) , form vs. free verse and my insect poems (1, 2, 3) among other things. Even though my closest friends will avow that my communication skills desert me when in a small group, I love talking to a crowd. One of the reasons why I am a teacher, I guess. So I quite enjoyed myself during the discussion. A friend/colleague asked me a very interesting question. She said that she felt my images were very intense and precise and wanted to know whether putting up my poems online somehow harmed the precision of the images…whether a kind of disintegration/dispersal of meaning happened to them when read on the computer screen. I gave her a vague-y reply. Would somebody like to answer that question?

PS: My first collection is coming out in August. I’m mighty excited.

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