Ms Militancy: Review in the Biblio

Ranjit Hoskote, reviewing Ms Militancy for Biblio writes:

In Meena Kandasamy’ s Ms Militancy, we encounter a series of self-dramatisations, each the result of an acute consciousness of having to address the pressures of perception that attend poets, women, and poets who happen to be women. Sometimes, this self-consciousness summons forth a generic response, cast in the approved form of resistance essayed by numerous women poets who draw on subversive mythic exemplars while affiliating themselves to heterodox woman saint-poets from the Bhakti teaching lineages.

In this spirit, Kandasamy writes ‘Should you take offence…’, which serves this collection as a Preface:

My Maariamma bays for blood.My Kali kills. My Draupadi strips. My Sita climbs on to a stranger’s lap. All my women militate. They brave bombs, they belittle kings…. Call me names if it comforts you. I no longer care. The scarlet letter is my monogram. (Ms Militancy, pp. 8-9)

Fortunately, there is a considerable current of surprise and elusiveness that does battle with the strain of predictability in Kandasamy’s poetry; even when she rehearses a well established choreography of feminist self-assertion, she does so with a sharp eye for detail, a grasp of worldly insight, and an appetite for phrasal shape-shifting. Her poetic personae— actors, commentators, drama queens, rebels—segue through history, cinema, television, myth and the venues of metropolitan culture.

Interview in The Hindu Metroplus with Baradwaj Rangan

There’s something entirely appropriate about the lassi that Meena Kandasamy orders one April afternoon. It isn’t just that a merciless sun is beating down upon us, sneaking up even in the shade we’ve settled into. It’s also the rage bubbling beneath the surface of her small frame, threatening to erupt any instant. She needs that lassi like the Fukushima facility needs coolant. She also needs her poetry. “You don’t know how it heals you, but it heals you,” she says. “It helps you channelise your anger.”

Looking at this young woman, all of 26, exuding a gypsy-beauty in jeans and a light top matching her purplish earrings and a cotton stole thrown casually around her shoulders, you wouldn’t know she needs healing. But she insists it’s not about personal healing. “I think society needs healing. Something like the caste system is society wounding itself. Every time you accept your superiority it’s because you don’t want to be wounded in some way, and you have at least this one thing to be proud about. But to feel proud, you go and hurt somebody else. This is the cycle.”

She enumerates the other ways in which society wounds itself — with domestic violence, with child sexual abuse, with the hatred around us. “These are all things that need healing.” At her most excited, her sentences wrap around an ascending series of notes that makes it appear that she’s the one asking the questions.

Sometime after school, Meena began volunteering with the Dalit Media Network. She says it wasn’t just empathy that made her interested in Dalit causes. “It’s also about being very shrewd and looking at the fault lines. You go to the OBC leaders, and they are very proud of the fact that they are OBCs. They hate Brahmins, and yet they are not accepting of Dalits.”

It was someone similar, a Nobel-winning non-accepter of Dalits, who spurred Meena’s foray into journalism. “When I read Naipaul, he came across as really slum-o-phobic. He says crazy things about the caste system. How did this guy get the Nobel Prize? That’s how I wrote my first article, ‘Casteist. Communalist. Racist. And Now, A Nobel Laureate’.”

A different writer who made news around the same time elicits an altogether different reaction. Talking about Arundhati Roy, Meena positively coos with admiration, seeming for the first time the girl-woman her age would seem to indicate. “All of a sudden, it was a post-Arundhati Roy world. After her Booker happened, it became a cool thing for girls to want to write.” She says she can still reel off sentences from The God of Small Things, and she does. “Biology designed the dance. Terror timed it.” That’s a good sentence, I say. She agrees.

Meena is currently writing her first novel — The Gypsy Goddess, inspired by her ancestral deity Kurathi Amman — but her early attempts at the form were abandoned hastily. “A novel is not something you can write at 17. You can write excellent first chapters, but beyond that do you really want to stay with those people?”

Ultra-sensitive

Poetry, she says, is more convenient. “It’s not unwieldy and large.” Meena started writing her own poetry at 17. Her first poem was about a sex worker. “I don’t know why I wrote this kind of poem. I think it’s a lot of reading feminist literature and things like that.” I ask her if she remembers what triggered this sudden outburst of poetry. She laughs and says, “I think things just started because I’m ultra-sensitive.” She sobers up. “I don’t know. I think I’m a deeply disturbed, deeply angry person.”

Her favourite poem is Mulligatawny Dreams, in which she dreams of an English language that “shall tire a white man’s tongue” and where “small children practice with smooth round pebbles in their mouth to the spell the right zha.”

With so many poems published, with so much fame at such a young age, I wonder if she’s finally happy, if her writing has finally healed her wounds and alleviated her anger. She thinks for a moment and says, “I’m not sure what happy means. When I feel happy, I feel empty. It’s a crazy situation. Misery is a very solid emotion. You can hold on to it and cry. But happiness, you can let go of it. You don’t know where it went. Misery, you can save it and keep it and…” I suggest, “Make poems out of it?” She laughs, “Yeah. It’s very nice to be melancholic and miserable.”

I conclude that she’s a Romantic at heart, a Byronic heroine even, completely at odds with the activist persona that prompts people like me to meet her. She should be writing about lost lovers amidst swooning sunsets. She laughs again.

“I never imagined this kind of success,” she says. “It’s really success. There’s no other way to put it.” I ask if she’s really honest about herself, the way artists are supposed to be in the pursuit of great art. For the first time during the interview, she plays cute. “Am I allowed to lie?” she asks. And then she says, “Of course I’m honest.”

Review of Ms Militancy in SAWNET by Champa Bilwakesh

Meena Kandasamy places gender and sexuality front and center in her collection of poems in the book Ms.Militancy. The title resonates with increasing volume as the work gradually, but surely, gets under the skin of the reader.

A set of poems in the collection draws a theme around the women saints of the Bhakti tradition, Karaikal Ammaiyar, Andal, and Mira. Separated by centuries, language, and geography, these women shared a common will. Evading marriage, they lived their lives outside the margins drawn for women. They roamed the streets, wrote poetry, sang and danced. Their lives and how they ended are not always clear to us but their poetry has become immortal. So erotic is the Nachiyar Thirumozhi that the fifteen year old Andal composed, that it has been suppressed in preference to the more acceptable, although still urgent in its appeal, the Thirupavai. Celebrated for their unwavering pursuit of the male gods, Shiva, Perumal, and Krishna, these women and their lives are still troubling enigmas today that deserve some unpacking.

And Kandasamy unpacks. In ways that are arresting and bold, she explodes the myths that have put the women saints, and thereby all women, in their place. With phrases that provoke she makes these saints merely human, who bleed and suffer and haunt. What drove these women to such sexual frenzy and the compulsion to scream it into their poetry?

Here is Andal sacrilegiously admiring herself in the garland meant for the deity, as retold by Kandasamy:

the guilt glazed love lay on Andal’s breasts.
thick and heavy as him.               

frightened with force
and locked away, she conjured him every night,
her empurumaan, her emperor-man.

recklessness on speed-dial, she became
a rape romantic. He, a bodice ripper.

Here is Karaikal Ammayar who went out naked in the world and walked on her hands all the way to the hills of Kailash. Blessed by Shiva she became a demon-goddess haunting cremation grounds.

i am a dead woman walking asylum corridors,
with faltering step, with felted, flying hair,
with hollowed cheeks that offset bulging eyes,
with welts on my wrists, with creasing skin,
with seizures of speech and song, with a single story
between my sobbing pendulous breasts.

And that story in her breast is the betrayal by her husband who, frightened by her “miracles,” abandons her stealthily and makes his life with another woman in another city.

Mira,
Lying on her back—waiting
To be full, filled and fulfilled—
Mira sings a siren-song
To summon Krishna.

The collection, Ms. Militancy, opens with the poem titled “A cunning stunt” played upon by the “man of words” who names her yoni and calls it the

“… seat,
abode, home, nest, lair, stable,
and he opens my legs wider
and shoves more and shoves
harder and I am torn apart
to contain the meanings of
family, race, stock, and caste
and form of existence
and station fixed by birth”

It is clear then that to combat this unseemly burden forced upon women, words need to be deployed by poets.

In her preface to the book, Meena Kandasamy finds catharsis in this act of retelling the myths in ways alternate to the traditional narrative Hindus have come to believe as the truth. It is a way to forgive, by “Twisting your story to the scariest extent allows me the liberty of trying to trust you.”

Here is Sita, “Princess-in-exile”:

“Scorned, she sought refuge in spirituality,
and was carried away by a new-age guru
with saffron clothes and caramel words.
Years later, her husband won her back
but by then, she was adept at walkouts,
she had perfected the vanishing act.”

One may wonder why resurrect these women from a dead past when we have other female role models, women so powerful they rock our world, our political destiny, commerce?

There are urgent and important reasons to question and destroy these myths that have grown around the women to silence their scream at the injustice of their condition and who went insane doing so. These myths cloak the horrible conditions that these ancient women endured in a gauzy and palatable saintliness, something to shape our sense of self around these idolized notions of womanhood that finally, and with certainty, cripple us. We still today murder girl babies and we prefer male fetuses; women bear their babies in unspeakable conditions, just like Sita did. India’s infant mortality rate is shameful.

This kind of alternate telling of myths has always been with us, transcending cultures and religions, and geography. In suffering we are all sisters. Every woman may need to make that journey by herself, if not to change the world, then to change her self. Kandasamy is only following on the conventions of marginalized women in rural India everywhere who have for a long time used Sita to voice their own sorrows and condition of powerlessness in poetry. Here is Nabaneeta Deb Sen in her essay in Manushi about the various alternate telling of the Ramayana:

“In the women’s retellings, the Brahminical Rama myth is blasted automatically though, probably, unwittingly. Here, Rama comes through as a harsh, uncaring and weak-willed husband, a far cry from the ideal man. The women do not mind calling him names such as pashanda or papisthi or directly attacking him by saying, “Rama, you’ve lost your mind” (“Ram, tomar buddhi hoilo nash“). This is possible because the women’s songs are outside the canon. Women’s Sita myth where Sita is a woman, flourishes only on the periphery. The male Sita myth where she is a devi, continues in the mainstream. In the women’s retelling, Sita is no rebel; she is still the yielding, suffering wife, but she speaks of her sufferings, of injustice, of loneliness and sorrow.”(from Lady Sings the Blues: When Women Retell the Ramayana, Manushi Issue 108)

But what is different in Kandasamy’s work is the way it hovers over the sexualization of spirituality in all these stories and episodes. While the other various subversive retelling are often hidden to us because of linguistic borders, this voice in English is confrontational and stark, and yet somehow speaks in all the languages of India.

There are other noteworthy poems in the collection that are political, that speak from a dalit stand and in solidarity with the struggles of the Sri Lankan Tamils. While these also stand out in the awesome beauty of their expression, the rhetoric is predictable in their thrust and lack the energy and spark in a deeply personal way that the feminist ones do. We can certainly look forward to more from Meena Kandasamy and to the way her writing matures.

Review of Ms Militancy in The Hindu Literary Review by Subash Jeyan

Here’s the link to the original piece

In a language darkly . . .

Meena Kandasamy writes angrily, often eloquently, about the politics of the body and caste in contemporary Indian society.

A man who saw the poet Meena Kandasamy read out from her latest poetry collection, Ms. Militancy, at the Jaipur Literary Festival this January apparently felt threatened enough to post his reactions on his Facebook wall:

“Watched a so called poetry reading session of a so called dalit-feminist-poet from chennai! The so called poem and the so called reading postures quite resembled that of w***** invitation to clients on roadsides! She addressed herself as a dalit-feminist! All the way i wondered, what did dalitism and feminism had to do in that poem, which literally worshiped group sex practice!!”

Perhaps it is unfair to give such reactionary words more circulation than they deserve but they do give us an entry point to the kind of poems that Meena Kandasamy writes (definitely not pornography) and a counterpoint from ‘real’ life to our notions of ourselves as a ‘progressive’ society. I don’t know what that Facebook person’s idea of poetry really is but if yours is anywhere remotely in alignment with his, perhaps you shouldn’t be reading this collection. Or, come to think of it, perhaps you need to read it more than anyone else…

No easy passage

It won’t be an easy passage if your politics are mainstream, let alone conservative. As a woman dalit poet, Meena Kandasamy writes angrily, often eloquently, about the politics of the body and caste in contemporary Indian society. Necessarily, what she sees is different from the images we have constructed for ourselves. It was Ambedkar who said that “women are the gateways of the caste system”. Kandasamy is intensely aware of how the female body is used as an instrument of control, by naming it, fixing it and locating it within a discourse whose concerns are very different. Talking about the female self and body in ways not ‘allowed’ by this discourse becomes a way of reclaiming it, of declaring one’s independence from this discourse:

Tongues untied, we swallow suns.
Sure as sluts, we strip random men.
Sleepless. There’s stardust on our lids.
Naked. There’s self-love on our minds.
And yes, my dears, we are all friends.

There will be no blood on our bridal beds.
We are not the ones you will choose for wives.
We are not the ones you can sentence for life.

(“Backstreet girls”)

And it goes hand it hand with an irreverent taking apart of the contradictions, hypocrisies and pretences she finds around her everywhere in life, literature and the mythologies of the mainstream. But it’s not all mockery, for, she can also write with chilling clarity about the way things still are. Sample this:

One-eyed

the pot sees just another noisy child
the glass sees an eager and clumsy hand
the water sees a parched throat slaking thirst
but the teacher sees a girl breaking the rule
the doctor sees a medical emergency
the school sees a potential embarrassment
the press sees a headline and a photofeature

dhanam sees a world torn in half.
her left eye, lid open but light slapped away,
the price for a taste of that touchable water.

In other poems, she writes with a gay abandon that comes from the liberating knowledge that she doesn’t have to play by your rules anymore. Her poems mock the countless edifices of tradition, culture and literature that had been/are complicit in keeping a whole people invisible and worse for centuries. In spite of the delight in wordplay, the startling phrases that catch you unawares and ambush you as you turn a corner (there’s that delightful emperuman, Emperor-man), her poems are mostly simple, direct, effective and often violent. Because it takes violence to rip apart structures that have kept you down, structures that have become invisible, transparent and part of the ‘natural’ order of things to those who don’t have to live with its stifling oppressiveness. Actually, Meena Kandasamy does a favour to people like that gentleman on Facebook by enabling them to see again. For, acceptance could be the first step towards change, for oneself and others.

Possible redemptions

For herself, it is through rebellion that the path to freedom lies, to other more enabling possibilities. As she puts it poignantly in the ‘ foreword’: “I have to write poetry to be heard, I have to turn insane to stay alive….Telling my story another way lets me forgive you. Twisting your story to the scariest extent allows me the liberty of trying to trust you. I work to not only get back at you, I actually fight to get back to myself.” The possibility of redemption, then, through the rubble of rebellion, both for her and us. But if her poetry only shocks or offends us, if we can only mourn the past that has been shown up for what it is, the possibility of reconfiguring our world and living spaces and discourses on a more equal and just footing would be lost, yet again…

My article on poetry in The Hindu Literary Review, Jan 2011

Official link to The Hindu here.

Celebrated British poet and performer Lemn Sissay pinpoints the exact nature of our problematic relationship with poetry: As a society we don’t know where to place poetry: On the one hand, we accuse poetry of being elitist and out of bounds for the masses. On the other, we are rudely dismissive of finding poetry anywhere but on the page. When we see it in advertising, or in Bollywood songs — like Gulzar’s work in “Slumdog Millionaire” — we refuse to even recognise that it is poetry.

It is in this climate of confounding divides that Poetry with Prakriti has completed the fourth edition of its annual poetry festival — converting public spaces in the city into venues of poetry performance, and successfully bringing poetry closer to the public of Chennai.

The format employed by the festival — poets reading their work, multilingual/multimedia presentations, dance-dramas based on contemporary poems, poetry films — quite literally has poems spilling off the page, on to the stage and metamorphosing into newer forms.

How does the performance of poetry affect its reception? How does poetry find its foothold in public spaces? Does poetry appeal to the public?

Poetry as performance

Australian poet Jayne Fenton Keane (JFK) points out the notorious division in the English poetry scene: between “page poets” who see themselves as separate from “performance poets”. She says that poets have been drawn into these oppositional corners “as a result of different aesthetics, not only about how a poem is written, but also about what a poem should contain or do.”

As a poet whose powerhouse performances make liberal use of theatrical conceptions of voice, space and movement to enthrall audiences, JFK is quick to point out that those like her who dare to “experiment with the way they read their poems in public are often confronted with condescension and disdain from poets who have a strictly page-oriented passion, some of whom believe that a poet’s body should not be seen, heard or experienced anywhere.”

Lemn Sissay, disagrees with this dichotomy between “page” poets and “performance” poets, and attributes this divide to the inherent nature of categorisation that sets things apart. “Possibly, there is a frightened canon enforcing this!”

He also refutes the charge of style over substance, saying that it is not exclusive to “performance” poetry alone. Laughing, he adds, “There are terrible ‘performance’ poets. Just as there are terrible ‘page’ poets.” When asked to address the criticism that performance poetry is “new-fangled” and therefore “suspect”, he cites examples from history to prove the contrary: “All the great stories, myths and ballads were carried in our poems which were performed all the time. That is how legends stayed alive in the mind of a community.”

Poetry and public spaces

Lemn Sissay has the distinction of being the first poet to be commissioned to contribute a poem for the 2012 London Olympic Games Park. “The poem I have written is about women workers who rallied for their rights at a match factory by the Olympic site. A poem is born out of its environment.”

Over Skype, he directs me to Global Poetry System, modelled after Global Positioning System, a website where users are asked to take a fresh look at the poetry around them, record it digitally and map the poetry of the world. “Poetry in the public sphere should be celebrated and encouraged,” he says.

JFK is more blatant. “To offer an antidote to the currently irrational space of most of society’s economic foundries and their toxic by-products, public space needs more poetry and poetics to enable other aspects of the human spirit. This shall provide breathing space, dreaming space and being space,” she says.

Bill Herbert, who has spent nearly a decade working on cross-media installations and public art in the UK says, “Text is all around us in cities — we can read it or ignore it as we please. If it’s always there, we can pick it up incrementally. So it operates as poetry does, slowly, but in an accessible space. It offers the possibility that people can treat a poem as a normal part of their environment in exactly the same way as I think poetry is a normal part of their ordinary thinking.”

For the people

Ezra Pound envisioned a revolutionary role for poetry: Go, my songs, to the lonely and the unsatisfied/ Go also to the nerve-racked, go to the enslaved-by-convention/ Bear to them my contempt for their oppressors./Speak against unconscious oppression/ Speak against the tyranny of the unimaginative/ Speak against bonds.

Poets of today might shy away from such a direct declaration, even as they seek to engage with the lives of the communities they live in. South African poet Ronelda Kamfer, who writes about the legendary gang culture of Cape Flats and the discrimination plaguing South Africa’s “browns”, says that it is imperative for a poet of today to be relevant to the times she is living in. “I write about everyday things, about normal people, people whose stories will otherwise be lost. I believe that literature plays a strong part in documenting history.”

Lemn Sissay quotes Bob Marley — “The stone that the builder refuse/ will always be the head cornerstone” — to highlight the centrality of the disenfranchised to poetry. He says, “Poetry is the language of the heart. When the heart needs to speak, it is poetry that gives voice. Encouraging political consciousness and celebrating the birth of a child, require poems because they both speak the language of the heart. Because we need our hearts to speak, poetry is at the heart of our communities, not the periphery.”

But it is not only the staccato cries of the poetry of the marginalised that have escaped the attention of the public. With his unsettling poems of love and debauchery, dedicated to women and wine, Swiss poet and musician Raphael Urweider stormed into the German poetry scene, sweeping every available award. In his verse, he conjures up the notion of a poem to describe a tender moment of intimacy: norma and i that is a poem/ a mesh a thicket in which there / is room only for norma and me./ norma and i slash our way through/ the poem and pitch a tent in the clearing./ norma and i sleep close our/ tent is of words that mean us. But, when asked to comment on the importance of poetry, he speaks with the candour of youth and the angst of a poet who continuously confronts the devaluation of poetry: “Poetry is better than sex because it ain’t over when it is over. Coz it lasts longer. Coz it is not nobody’s business.”

Shock value of his statement aside, does he suggest everybody should relate to poetry?

“Poetry is out there,” Urweider elaborates, “Everyone should go out there and fetch it.”

Indian poet and novelist Priya Sarukkai Chabria too, agrees about this far-reaching universality of poetry. “Poetry mauls one out of comfort zones into a temporary lucidity and perhaps even transformation,” she says, “I don’t believe anyone is outside its purview.”

Lemn Sissay is determined to have the last word in this debate: “Everywhere around us, we are being told what to buy and what to aspire for. That’s not what we were born for. We are here to seek truth, find peace and enjoy community — and poetry, even sad poetry, takes us closer to attaining all of this.”

Brave New Voices Poetry Slam at Madurai

The US Consulate General Chennai and Fatima College, Madurai organized a Brave New Voices of Madurai Poetry Slam on the 30th September. I was a featured poet, as well as a judge at the slam. What moved me was the quality of poems in Tamil, and how young people were using poetry essentially as a vehicle of protest and political expression. Monica, the girl who walked away with the first prize, performed her poem on the witch-hunt of adivasi people who were branded Maoists; Benjamin who won the Judge’s Special Mention had a poem on how religion divides people and Muthu, the guy who won the audience favourite prize read a poem on how everything is for sale in our world. I was really stunned and I just admired the students. There could be so much they can write about. But the fact that they choose to write about some of the ills that plague our society really sets them apart. The poems in English were a little bit disappointing, not in terms of presentation, but in terms of content (most of them were on mother/friendship/love).

The other featured poets were Thamilmuthalvan and Ranganayaki. For pictures of the event, view my facebook album.

Sorry for this post which sounds as if I was writing it in shorthand. I am travelling again tomorrow, and I don’t have a lot of time to wax eloquent.

Post-war, post-genocide poetry: Revisiting the Tamil Eelam tragedy

After the teaching semester came to an end this May, as usual I had this list of huge things I planned to do. Now university resumes in mid-July and I have to welcome a new batch of students and I look back at the vacation, and I feel, well, I did the stuff that had to be done. (Even if it was not part of the plan)

So, what did I do this summer? Well, I managed to translate this moving collection of poems written by Cheran Rudhramoorthy, V.I.S.Jayapalan, Latha and Ravikumar about the genocide of Tamils in Sri Lanka’s NorthEast last year. The poems emit bitterness and tragedy, even as they speak a language of hope and resistance and faith and pride. Some of them are extremely intense, most of them bleed.

Cheran and Jayapalan are well-known poets from Tamil Eelam and have been anthologized (along with my hero-of-sorts Puthuvai Rathinadurai) in Wilting Laughter: Three Tamil Poets. While I have translated Cheran, Jayapalan and Ravikumar (with generous inputs and help from Sascha Ebeling) for this as-yet-untitled forthcoming book, Latha’s poems have been translated by my dear friend Ravi Shanker.

Darker than the poems, and much more haunting in its directness is the extensive 4000-word introduction by writer Ravikumar (the editor-publisher of this collection) of this who captures the myriad facets of the genocide and its aftermath. He makes use of a wide range of sources: letters by the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Arbitrary Executions, report of the University Teachers for Human Rights (Jaffna), news-stories, eye-witness accounts in exposing the anti-Tamil, xenophobic and ruthless nature of the Sri Lankan state. He also writes painstakingly of how India betrayed the Tamil people and how it failed to protect them. Because I had to pause to cry, I found his prose deadly and damning.

Lest we forget the horrors of the genocide, this book was brought out in Tamil (Engaludaya kaalathildhan oozhi nigazhndhadhu – எங்களுடைய காலத்தில்தான் ஊழி நிகழ்ந்தது, published by Ravikumar’s publishing house Manarkeni) in May 2010 to mark the first anniversary of Eelam War IV that left nearly half a million Tamils dead.

Watch this space for more details on the English translation, its publication and so on. If you are highly curious, please drop me a line.

Poetry as an enemy of the oppressive state

This 10-minute video is a part of a hour-long discussion on how poets are regarded by totalitarian regimes. Sohail Najm of Iran and Milos Djurdjevic of Croatia, Khet Mar from Burma and I participated in this discussion that took place on September 11, 2009 at Pittsburgh. We were there as poets from the IWP to take part in the City of Asylum Jazz Poetry Concert.

In this video I speak about Tamil poetry, poetry as resistance, Kasi Anandan, Tamil Tigers, suicide bombers, Eelam, language, oppressive states, exile and whatever else 3 minutes can hold..   : )

On a related note, here is an article in Sampsonia Way Magazine by Desiree Cooper about the collaboration between the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa and the City of Asylum Pittsburgh. Check it out..

My review of ‘Rapids of a Great River’ in today’s New Indian Express

Read the official version here.

Rapids of a Great River: The Penguin Book of Tamil Poetry
Lakshmi Holmstrom, Subashree Krishnaswamy, K.Srilata
Publisher: Penguin/Viking
Pages: 222, Price: Rs.499

There cannot be a better way to begin a book of Tamil poetry than with A.K.Ramanujan’s translations of Sangam poets. In Rapids of a Great River, the journey starts splendidly but on the way downstream, everything begins disintegrating.

The first section consists of selections from Sangam poetry, Silappadikaram, Manimekalai, Tirukkural , Tirumurai, Periya Puranam, Tiruvaymoli, Naachiyar Tirumoli, and Iramavataram. One also finds excerpts from the works of the Siddhar and Tayumanavar, and from Kuttrala Kuravanci and Nandanar Charitra Kirtthanai. The translators have conveniently used extant translations for this section and one finds it sufficient. However, I personally prefer Suddhanandha Bharati or G.U.Pope as translators of the Thirukkural, since P.S.Sundaram’s rendering in English is flat and dull, and does not bring out the depth or the poetry of the original couplets.

Although the first section does have a sprinkling of the Usual Suspects, there are some omitted Tamil classics such as the Kalingathubarani which valorized/ glamourized the spectacles of war and heroism and occupies a pre-eminent place in the Tamil canon. Likewise, the religious and cultural diversity of the Tamil tradition is not highlighted by failing to include selections from Veeramamunivar’s Thembavani, a celebrated epic poem on the life of Jesus Christ and Umaru Pulavar’s Seerapuranam, a biography of Prophet Mohammed written through 5000-odd poems.

The second part of the book consists of translations of Tamil poetry beginning with Subramania Bharati. Much as I would like to be blind to the politics of selections, there are certain lapses here too that cannot evade notice. Iconic poet Bharatidasan (1891-1964) whose poetry radically influenced the politics of Tamil Nadu is missing from the anthology. Is this reflective of a prevailing elitist mindset which sidelines poets who sympathize with the ideology of the Dravidian/ Communist/ Dalit movements, preferring to label them political poets, and not poets’ poets? Bharathidasan and Suradha were trend-setters, they took modern poetry to the people, but the manner in which they’ve been ignored is disheartening.

Other glaring omissions include notable poets like Ka.Na.Subramaniam, Abdul Rahman, Abi, Inquilab and the Vaanambadi group (consisting of progressive Tamil scholars like Sirpi, Mu. Mehta, Puviyarasu, Erode Tamilanban). Likewise, although cinema is deeply embedded in Tamil society/ culture, it is regrettable that there’s no mention of Kannadasan, Vairamuthu, Na.Muthukumar, Arivumathi, Thamarai and others who not only hold the lay people in their sway, but have also proved themselves as literary poets. Even as one cheers for the inclusion of about a dozen Eelam Tamil poets in this anthology, the above instances of exclusion raise doubts about the criteria required to make the cut.

Coming to the poems themselves, in many instances, the translators seem to have not understood particular nuances of the original text. As an illustrative example, in Sukirtharani’s poem Pallichenru cholli (sic) vidukiren from her collection Iravu Mirugam (Night Beast), the line Appavin thozhilum aanduvarumaanamum/ solla mudiyamal/ vaathiyaaridum adivaanguven, literally translates into: “Unable to reveal/ Father’s occupation and annual income/ I would get beaten up by the teacher.” Here, a Dalit schoolgirl speaks of her inability to divulge the details of what her father does for a living because it would not only ‘place’ her socially and economically, but also because of the stigma and the humiliation she would face if this information became public. She seeks shelter in silence, and even suffers the corporal punishment meted out to her.

Instead, the translation in the anthology (by K.Srilata and Subashree Krishnaswamy) introduces an undertone of obstinacy (which is neither existent, implied or intended in the original poem) when these lines are transformed into: “When my teacher caned me/ I didn’t reveal/ father’s occupation/ income per annum.” (p.198) The internal helplessness which she faces, her being punished for a powerlessness that seeks protection, is totally absent in such an alternative rendering. As a result, the militancy in the last lines—where this hesitant girl grows up to tell people outright that she is a Paraichi (a Paraiyar woman, an epithet used as a slur by caste-Hindus)—is effectively mellowed. Fidelity to the text may be fast going out of fashion, but a greater sensitivity towards, and perception of, lived Dalit realities would have ensured that such sabotaging of denotation did not take place.

Rapids of a Great River is surely an ambitious project as far as its aspirations are concerned, but at the end of the book, one is left wondering: Where are the rapids? And what really became of the Great River en route to its English avatar?

Interview with Hoshang Merchant: Published today in The Hindu’s Sunday Magazine

UNIVERSE OF VERSE
Read the official online version here.

One of the most daring and important voices of contemporary Indian poetry, Hoshang Merchant (b.1947) has published 20 books of poetry in 20 years from the Writer’s Workshop, Kolkota. Other notable books include Flower to Flame (Rupa, 1990), Yaraana: Gay Stories from India (Penguin, 1999), Forbidden Sex/Text (Routledge, 2009).

His translation of Jameela Nishat’s Urdu poems was published by Sahitya Akademi (2008). He is presently a Professor of Poetry and Gay Studies at the Hyderabad University where he has taught since 1987. He holds a Ph.D. (for his dissertation on Anais Nin) from Purdue University where he was one of the founders of Gay Liberation.

Travelling all over the world, he studied Buddhism at Dharmashala, and Sufism in Iran and Palestine. He was in Chennai recently to kick start the Poetry with Prakriti festival. Excerpts from an interview:

Can or should poets give interviews since the Buddha says there is no personality?

Yes, there is no personality. I’ll tell you my own example and of Miohaux (French). I thought to become a Buddhist; I danced instead but went back to poetry. Not Buddhist poetry, like the fourth Dalai Lama’s… I have few possessions, but I couldn’t be a Buddha because I thought too much to be some One.

Henri Michaux did not want his poetry canonised, he wouldn’t even allow himself to be photographed. He was happy the Dalai Lama saw his photo; “Now I am in the Dalai Lama’s mind.” As he lay dying, he talked to his nurse of travel. When she started to give him oxygen, “No! Let me keep travelling,” he said.

What is the aim of your poetry?

Even gay poetry’s aim is NOT to change legislation. “To come out into an objectless view/Which is the true aim of all poetry,” is a definition I use in my poems. “Objectless” does not mean “not objective,” because anyway the lyric is a subjective art.

It means that poets have no axes to grind. Their objective is the poem itself. However we poets have to ‘abstract’ our experience to fit it to the reader’s experience. We all share the same space/time. Some great poets make their own space and their times. It comes as a surprise to know Whitman, Melville and Dickinson were gay. We do not know them as gay poems but as Transcendentalists even after 150 years. This transcendence is a poem.

To paraphrase Dickinson “to make a prairie/It takes fancy, a clover and a bee/Fancy alone will do/If bees are few.”

Why do you equate Dalits with gays?

Because gays, like women, are gender-Dalits. Also, there are gay Dalits who refuse to be identified for social reasons. Both are oppressed groups. I understand forms of oppression differ. But oppression is oppression. For politics we need coalitions (not only LGBT but also women and Dalits). Gays have to stop oppressing women. Some women who oppress gays have to stop doing that. Ditto for Dalits. To divide minorities and prevent them from coming together in a common platform is just another male heterosexists’ ploy to preserve their power.

My struggle is unimportant unless it also opens up a possibility for generalised liberation and living.

Are you before your time for India?

No! The poet is always of his/her time. It is the others who are behind.

Is writing a political act?

No. But if you say you’re not political that means you side with the establishment. If you want to change your heart, mind and body then that’s politics.To say sex is a private matter is to pretend sex is about love only and not also an exploitative.

Why do you travel so much?

I travel to get new identities. And to write about them. It is how kids ‘enjoy getting lost’. It reminds me that personality is not solid. In a new land people don’t know you, you can become whatever you want!

What is the audience reaction to you? How does your audacity sit with them?

Mine is not a moral universe. But it is a formally beautiful universe of verse. If I affront them I also beg their indulgence. And, mostly, I get it!

In which the Poetess becomes a Terroristress

तमिल ईलम संघर्ष के पिछले ४० बरस से मुख्य स्वर रहे, क्रांतिकारी-लिरिकल कवि कासी आनंदन से युवा दलित अंग्रेज़ी कवि मीना कंदसामी की बातचीत और उनकी कुछ कविताओं के अंग्रेज़ी एवं हिन्दी अनुवाद. मूल से अंग्रेज़ी में लाने का काम मीना कंदसामी ने किया है और अंग्रेज़ी से हिन्दी अनुवाद गिरिराज किराडू ने. राजनितिक कविता के बोझिल बड़बोलेपन के बरक्स कासी की लगभग सूक्तिनुमा छोटी-छोटी कवितायें मितव्ययी होने के साथ ‘अचूक’ होने में विश्वास करती हैं;, वे महाकाव्यात्मकताओं के छल को पहचानते हैं. दूसरी तरफ़ साक्षात्कार में वे ‘सुंदर’ के विरूद्ध अपनी रणनीति के बारे में बात करते हैं.

ON PRATILIPI: Meena Kandasamy’s conversation with revolutionary-lyrical poet Kasi Anandan who has been the voice of the Tamil Eelam struggle for the past 40 years, along with some of his poems translated into English (Meena Kansadasmy) and Hindi (Giriraj Kiradoo). In contrast to the tedious stridency of most political poems, Kasi’s poems are epigrammatic and precise: he has come to recognize the emptiness of the epic grandiosity. On the other hand, he also talks about his stand against beauty.

ps: Forgive me for the title of this blogpost.. I don’t have any such intentions in the foreseeable future ; )