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.
~
