Audio interview and poetry reading in OpenSpace

When I was in Montreal for the Blue Met Literary Festival, Veena Gokhale got talking to me about my writing and activism. This was one hell of an interview: we were recording it in my hotel room at 10 in the night, and then it went on till 11.30. I had not eaten anything, and was tired after two back-to-back readings in the evening. And yet, for all the fatigue, it was a great experience.

Listen to the three-part podcast on OpenSpaceIndia.

Special bits: I read Random Access Man (about the love triangle: Ram, Sita, Ravan), and Massacre of the Innocents (about the Gujarat genocide 2002).

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…

Ms Militancy: Praise, Preface, and so on

PRAISE BY K. SATCHIDANANDAN

“Meena Kandasamy’s full-blooded and highly experimental poems challenge the dominant mode in contemporaray Indian poetry in English: status-quoist, de-politicised, neatly sterilized.These caustic poems with their black humour, sharp sarcasm, tart repartees, semantic puns and semiotic plays irritate, shock and  sting   the readers until they are provoked into rethinking the ‘time-honoured’ traditions and entrenched hierarchies at work in contemporary society.The poet stands myths and legends on their head to expose their regressive core. She  uses words, images and metaphors as tools of subversion, asserting, in the process, her caste, gender and regional identities while also transcending them through the shared spaces of her socio-aesthetic practice.She de-romanticises the world and de-mythifies religious and literary traditions by reappropriating the hegemonic language  in a heretical gesture of Promethean love for the dispossessed.The poet interrogates the tenets of a solipsistic modernism to create a counter-poetic community speech brimming with emancipatory energy.”

MY PREFACE

If you take offence . . .

You are the repressed Ram from whom I run away repeatedly. You are Indra busy causing bloodshed. You are Brahma fucking up my fates. You are Manu robbing me of my right to live and learn and choose. You are Sage Gautama turning your wife to stone. You are Adi Sankara driving me to death. You are all the men for whom I would never moan, never mourn. You are the conscience of this Hindu society.

Your myths put me in my place. Therefore, I take perverse pleasure in such deliberate paraphrase as these poems show.

I am no atheist—I allow everyone an existence. It is just that I struggle with any story that has stayed the same way for far too long. So, my Mahabharata moves to Las Vegas; my Ramayana is retold in three different ways. I am unconventional, but when I choose to, I can carry tradition. That is why I am Mira, Andal and Akka Mahadevi all at once, spreading myself out like a feast, inviting the gods to enter my womb. I am also Karaikkal Ammaiyar, suspected of infidelity for being ravishingly beautiful. Like each of these women, 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 its 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. I do not write into patriarchy. 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. They take on the sun, they take after me.

I choose my words, coarse as the conned Kannagi’s colourful curses, chaste as her breast that burnt down a capital city. This tongue allows me to resist rape, to rescue my dreams. My language is not man-made, it is beyond the white-hot seminal of your texts. My language is dark and dangerous and desperate in its eagerness to slaughter your myths. My lines are feverish with the heat of the bodies you banish in your Manusmriti and Kamasutra. Tamil woman that I am, I do not spare the ageist, classist, sexist Tholkappiyam either. The criticism that I embark on, like your codification and my cunt, is beyond all culture.

Call me names if it comforts you. I no longer care. The scarlet letter is my monogram. I sew it on everything I wear, I tattoo it into permanence. I strive to be a slut in a world where all sex is sinful. I strive to be a shrew in a society that believes in suffering in silence. I strive to be a sphinx: part-woman, part-lioness, armed with all the lethal riddles.

Come, unriddle me. But be warned: I never falter in a fight. And, far worse, I seduce shamelessly.

~~~~~

WHERE TO BUY THE BOOK ONLINE

Scholars Without Borders
It is INR 150, plus shipping.

I will upload a list of bookstores in Indian cities soon, I promise.
; )

Second part of my interview in Thejas

Here is the second part of my interview (to M. Noushad) in the Malayalam fortnightly magazine THEJAS. A friend wrote in to say that the magazine has been published for the past 14 years, and that a majority of its readers are Dalits and Muslims. (-:

(I still haven’t read the first part, unable to find any Malayalam friends. Will read it soon. All that I can appreciate now is the layout and photographs based on which I have tagged this article)

Handsome Men, Harems and Hate Propaganda: The Indian Imagination of Love Jihad

I was recently interviewed by Noushad, a journalist from Kerala and over the course of our conversation, he spoke to me about the creation of a clever propaganda around love jihad/ romeo jihad — accusations of Muslim men allegedly targeting Hindu / Christian women and converting them to Islam. He blamed both the media and the judiciary for creating this monster-myth. I would not go so far as to say that conversions take place to and from religious owing to marriages, but this particular instance clearly looked like Islamophobia to me.

After I was done talking to Noushad, and I heard about the various aspects of the case, I wondered, “Why is it that neither the Hindu-right, or the judiciary even address the question of men converting to Islam?” That must be happening too, wouldn’t it? If the conversion of women to Islam has “national ramifications” as the Karnataka High Court bench put it, doesn’t the conversion of men have the same ramifications? Why is there a silence when it comes to men, and why this gendered understanding of religion/ religious conversion? Or, does this arise from the idea that only women are to be controlled?

Another thing that perplexed me, was that the lobby which was talking about love jihad was being opposed and criticized mainly by Muslim organizations. As feminists, shouldn’t we be the first ones to take offence since such a campaign insults our intelligence, our ability to choose for ourselves? Doesn’t this interfere with our freedom and doesn’t this amount to state-control of sexuality (since these probes essentially look at inter-religious marriages), if not the state-control of a spiritual quest?

To cut a long story short, I wrote a few lines about it. Especially because I have this fear that after Kerala and Karnataka, Hindutva will talk about ‘love jihad’ in Tamil Nadu too.

~~~~ my article, first published in Offbeat, The Alternative ~~~~

To write about the religious identity of women, especially in the context of their apparent marginalisation within society, is an emotive issue. I could write about the burden of culture that is allocated to women, the moral policing that takes place in the name of tradition and God in order to control women’s choices, or the shoddy labeling and criticism that accompanies every instance of female empowerment. The patriarchal nature of religion has always turned away free-spirited women, so much so that it is automatically assumed that every feminist is anti-God. Breaking from convention, this article is about women who consciously choose to embrace a/another faith, adopt a different God, and the amusing reactions that follow. Since I am governed by word-counts, deadlines, and a tendency towards disturbing silenced spaces, this essay shall not touch upon anything other than “love jihad.”

Following habeas corpus petitions filed by their parents, two girls (Hindu, Christian) appeared before the High Court of Kerala in September 2009 along with their Muslim partners and declared that they had converted to Islam on their free will. Judge KT Shankaran—going against the tenets of the Indian Constitution which enshrines an individual’s freedom to practice religion- reverted the women (both of them majors) to the custody of their parents.

After three weeks, the same girls told the court that they had converted forcefully. Jacob Punnose, the Director General of Police filed an ambiguous report, which categorically denied the existence of love jihad, noting that no particular organisation “was actively involved in religious conversions” . The Union Home ministry’s report to the Kerala High Court also confirmed these findings. Justice Shankaran however was not convinced even then, and he suggested that the state government should consider framing special laws to counter romantic conversions. (another link)

Since paranoia never exists in singularity and bad examples are rigorously emulated, a Karnataka High Court Bench constituting Justice Sreedhar Rao and Justice Ravi Malimath followed in these footsteps when a distraught Selvaraj filed a petition seeking custody of his daughter Selja. She was made to stay with her parents and asked to prove that her conversion was voluntary and her marriage, a bonafide love-match. Although Selja Raj said in open court that she had chosen Islam out of her own choice and not out of any kind of coercion, the Karnataka HC Bench displayed its ability to think independently. The court raised “serious suspicion regarding the statements of the petitioner’s daughter” and observed that “the case has ramifications for national security.” The court ordered the police to investigate this since it believed that such religious conversions “raised questions of unlawful trafficking of girls and women in the state.”

Court-speak in India has come to resemble its monosyllable cousin, Hindutva hate-speech. Both of them fail to
respect women as rational beings capable of decision-making. Not only are women objectified as preys and victims in need of “saving”, but they are also infantilized. By linking religious identity with sexual politics, they succeed in making a strong argument against conversion.

Here are excerpts from two Hindutva websites:

The “Love Jihad” organisation provides their members with mobile phones, motor cycles, good clothing, etc. for more effective alluring of girls. This organisation makes use of boys belonging to a particular religious faith. They are taught how to lure girls coming from different religious persuasions. They have been ordered to leave those girls who do not fall into their “love trap” within two weeks. Further, the organisation orders their followers to marry within a short period of six months and have at least four children.

The same website links this with the pub attacks in Mangalore:

“Several Hindu “modern” college-going girls were found in a compromising position and dancing suggestively with Muslim boys. The Ram Sena people saved these stupid girls from becoming the breeding cows of Islam and joining some Muslim harem.”

Another excerpt from the Hindu Jagruti site:

Jihadi Romeos promise to marry unsuspecting young girls within 6 months if they convert to Islam and then dump these girls in conversion centers. These Romeos then go for their next prey. These girls are subject to various forms of torture for weeks in these centers. There is information that these girls are shipped to foreign countries after drugging them.

If the site is to be believed, not only the police but the CBI, RAW and Navy and Narcotics Bureau and every other department of the Indian Government must be working on this case. Within a single baseless paragraph, we see the disgraceful fall of the “unsuspecting” Hindu woman who has been loved, converted, dumped, tortured, drugged, shipped to Indian cities, shipped to foreign countries, and forced into prostitution.

Hindutva paranoia alone cannot be blamed—after all, such a demand does curry favour with sections who are wary of inter-religious unions because it prevents consolidation along caste and religious lines. The first organisations to launch a tirade against love jihad—Nair Service Society and Sri Narayana Dharmaparipalana Yogam—were caste-based in character. In November 2009, the Kerala Catholic Bishop Council’s Committee on Social Harmony and Vigilance also joined hands with Hindu extremist organizations to counter such an ‘Islamic threat.’ (another link) Its secretary Johny Kochuparambil, citing “reliable sources”, said that 4000 women had been converted in the last decade alone. This provided the necessary impetus for the Sree Ram Sena to launch a poster campaign against love jihad in Thiruvananthapuram.

Islamic organizations decry it as misinformation, but the long-term impact of such calculated propaganda could be disastrous. As a precursor to the genocidal, state sponsored pogroms in Gujarat 2002, Durga Vahini pamphlets detailed how “the Sita on the street was going to become an Ayesha or Fatima or Julia” and how she would be “seduced”, taken to “foreign nations and then killed.” Clearly, the purpose of such pamphlets goes beyond its brief. Durga Vahini, like most of religion forgets that irrespective of whether a woman chooses to call herself Sita or Ayesha or Fatima or Julia, she is at the receiving end of male domination.

Tamil investigative magazine Nakkheeran recently reported (4 May 2010) a story of two young Hindu women Satya and Sundari from the Chinna Avudayarkovil village converting to Islam. In spite of the girls’ version that they converted because they liked the religion, their Muslim employer Shiauddin was blamed for ‘brainwashing’ them. Though there is no love spin-off to the story, the local BJP leader blamed Muslim employers for systematically ‘targeting’ Hindu girls from economically weaker families. Expressing his ‘concern’ that such conversion logically leads to inter-religious marriages, he offers a simple solution – prevent Hindu girls from seeking employment and let them stay at home.

Women are the worst-hit in any case, having to endure greater repression, losing the right to earn, to make friends, to choose their life-partners. When they change their religion, they are perceived not merely as traitors to their families, but also terrorists to the nation.

As if the existing witch-hunting was not enough, this just adds another insensible, hate-filled dimension.

The Phoenixes of Banishment and Oppression (Article in The New Sunday Express, Feb.28)

Read the official, edited version here.

Recently I had the opportunity of reading Changiya Rukh : Against the Night, the first Punjabi Dalit autobiography that has been rendered into English. Changiya rukh means a chopped tree–a metaphor of mutilation and a symbolic image of enforced stunting–of something made small and inferior so that the others appear larger and superior—an excellent parallel to the position of the Dalits in this deeply divided society.

Balbir Madhopuri movingly describes rural poverty and the hunger in the dry, wintry months, the closely-knit relationships among the Ad Dharm community to which he belonged and the centrality of his 100-year-old grandmother in shaping the lives of not only her immediate family, but almost every women in that village. Burdened with the stigma of untouchability in the Jat heartland, he grows up to learn that tea is an inferior drink because only the lower castes drink it, whereas milk was the staple beverage of the upper-castes.

In Changiya Rukh, he documents the inner turmoil to which Dalits are reduced whenever they have to conceal their caste identity. We observe instances of how, sometimes, the Dalit people themselves internalize the view of caste-Hindu society and develop a feeling of inferiority. Simultaneously, Balbir reveals how he was so upset with his Hindu-sounding surname that he dropped it and instead took up the name of his birthplace Madhopur. By expunging one identity, and taking on another, he succeeds in rejecting an entire history of oppression.

He notes how neither the Communist movement, nor the movement for an independent Khalistan actually addressed the problems of the Dalits. The pleasures of discovering Communist  literature and writing revolutionary poems is short-lived since Balbir’s immediate task at hand is to take up a job and support his family. He moves to Delhi, and with his wife and children, struggles to even find a house since caste-Hindus are unwilling to rent their flats to a person whom they suspect is a Dalit. Modern literature is replete with instances of what it means to find ones home, and literary discussions are rife with the idea of returning home, but from a Dalit perspective, the stark reality associated with ‘home’ is managing to find accommodation.

Dalit autobiographies, since their first, stunning arrival on the literary terrain, address such divisive issues that refuse to go away.

Autobiographies are also the most prominent and marketable genre of Dalit literature today. The caste-Hindu elites’ interest in Dalit autobiographies spring not only from the fact that they satisfy the voyeuristic curiosity of the non-Dalits by documenting the lived experiences, but they also provide them the necessary guilt-trip. Om Prakash Valmiki’s Joothan dealt with the Bhangis in Uttar Pradesh, Sharankumar Limbale’s Akkarmashi portrayed life in rural Maharashtra, Vasant Moon’s Vasti (translated by Gail Omvedt as Growing Up Untouchable in India) spoke of life in an urban Dalit slum, and Kesharshivam’s Purnasatya highlighted the plight of Gujarati Dalits.

Narendra Jadhav’s memoir Outcaste probed what it meant to be an highly educated Dalit.The publication of Dalit autobiographies, coupled with their literary assertion has recast and revitalized the literatures of the regional languages.

Semi-fictional narratives like Bama’s Karukku and Sivakami’s Grip of Change recorded what it meant to be young Dalit women under the shadow of casteism. Urmila Pawar’s Aydaan (rendered into English as The Weave of My Life) is not merely testimony but also manifesto—seeking to locate the position of the Dalit woman within the stifling constructs of casteism and patriarchy without sensationalizing or romanticizing suffering.

Every narrative has unfailingly recorded how the rural structure is strict in its segregation: Dalit wadas/ cheris/ colonies/ bastis were all set away from the caste-Hindu village, a banishment that was brutal not only because of the geographic exclusion but also because of how easy it became for the oppressors to launch violent attacks on the Dalit people. These first-person life stories are a means of expressing angst and assertion, they reverberate with an experience of pain and discriminatory politics,  and they uniformly seek to exorcise the ghost of untouchability that has haunted their communities.

For a nation that loves to live in denial, such authentic narratives will hopefully lead to a greater engagement with understanding, and possibly, eradicating caste.

My article on Chennai in TimeOut :)

The text version follows:

Give it to Chennai for chutzpah, for her courage to take on the world. For all the laidback calm, she launched the Home Rule League to overthrow the British, the Anti-Hindi Agitation to show New Delhi that she wouldn’t stomach another tongue being thrust down her throat. If you care to learn her whole history, listen to it come away in layers, like the names of old, unforgettable lovers: Pallava, Chera, Chola, Pandya, Vijayanagara. Empires who held her close, coveted, almost concealed since the seventh century—a port city on the Coromandel Coast. Then there were those who colonized her: the Portuguese, the British, and sometimes in between, the French. The earliest sale-deeds date to 1632, but who bothers about such barter? Her soul is as old as the sea by her side.

Chennai once began as a group of villages; the rural roots reflect in her fondness for gossip. She is sometimes harsh in her judgment—even an off-the-cuff remark about chastity sends her women marching on the streets—but she is always hush-hush in her affairs. Trust her to be tight-lipped about her secrets. Success-stories of her booming economy merely provide the subtext: auto-manufacturing plants eating into faraway suburbs, software giants clamouring to claim real-estate space. Rumpelstiltskin-like when labouring, she only shows you the garish gold.

She is famed for her margazhi dance and music concerts, but anyone here can demonstrate the dappankuthu: endless, drunken dancing to funeral drums. When you learn to appreciate her refinement, brace yourself for her rawness.

Etched in memory as Madras, she is also a city of moderation. She boasts of masjids and maths. She caters to 1000-year-old temples and temples under traffic lights with equal panache. She enshrines a bleeding cross, and in her most ornate cathedrals, Santhome Basilica, is buried one of the 12 Apostles of Jesus.

She harbours a fetish for fair-skin, but her men are mostly dark and moustachioed. Her women, grace and grievance combined, deserve a separate treatise. A diehard cinema fanatic, she houses India’s second largest film industry. She crawls to a stop whenever there is a movie-shoot nearby, but makes no fuss over the fact that A.R.Rahman brought home two Oscars. For all her mood-music, she relies heavily on Ilaiyaraja.

Three of her rivers are remembered because of the bridges built over them, otherwise their names aren’t taken in polite conversation. It is this sea that sways us. Even the 2004 tsunami did little harm to Marina Beach, the twelve-kilometre long sparkling seashore that defines this city.

She considers Mount Road her lifeline, its Spencer Plaza the mecca of malls. A movie-date would have you ending up at Inox, CitiCenter. A marriage in your family would land you up in a shopper’s paradise called Pondy Bazaar. Driving down her East Coast Road will satisfy all your hedonistic urges. Even as you splurge, she will look away modestly.

Since she is humble, she wouldn’t even point out that she has produced more Noble Laureates than the other Indian cities taken together. She would be more pleased if the monsoons were on time. Every fifth person is a migrant, and no other city invites people with such open arms. Periyar EVR was a Kannadiga; MGR was a Malayalee—but try telling that to anyone here. She celebrates kinship, everyone is hers the moment they set foot, much before they even settle down.

She is also the city of garrulous graffiti, city of cramped slums and flyovers, city of laughter, city of slaughter. She unfailingly stars in the dreams of the eight million men and women she shelters. Once ravaged by famines, her standard line after every salutary smile is, Saptengala? Have you eaten? She hates to see anybody go hungry.

She speaks a language with a legacy of two thousand years; she understands every word of English. She romps around with jasmine on jet-black hair, night or day. No other city shall ever seduce you in Chennai’s Tamizhachi style: with sultry, sidelong looks; with spontaneous speech; with all her selfless, surplus love.

(Here’s the official link)

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!

Another Interview

(An edited version of this interview appeared in the Indian Express North American. Sujeet Rajan interviewed me for the weekly. This came out about a month ago, but only today I was suitably lazy to do this job)

You write candidly of love and love-making; leaving windows open to the bedroom sometimes. If it is autobiographical, how difficult is it to tabulate emotions of love and love-making through poetry?

I am not sure it is always the bedroom window I leave open, for love, after all, happens everywhere. And again, I am going to keep the suspense and not own up or disown the possibility of my poems being autobiographical! I think poetry is best equipped to enclose some emotions and exhibit others, because writing of love/ love-making in prose would simply call for too many excruciating details, and in the most cautious of cases, it would require a great deal of aesthetic and choreography to get the damn scene right. And only rarely can such elaborate construction capture spontaneity, which is what love is all about.

From an artistic medium, what is best to express love: the written word, the spoken word, brush on the canvas, silence? Why?

I have done everything but paint. And well, you have left out something which I see as central to love: movement. As in dance, as in theater, and also as in all of language.

3. Is anything taboo for you to write about?

No. Except of course if someone asked me to write a poem of praise, that tends to make me nasty.

5. You were displaced from home, from Chennai, for more than three months, having been invited to a writing residence program in Iowa. What has been the experience like?

I loved the time I spent in Iowa, and I also got to travel widely across the USA. The best part of the program was getting to meet these fabulous writers from other countries. The next best was the University library and the second-hand bookstores. My novel is about the Kilvenmani massacre, and surprisingly I completed most of the research while I was here, in a foreign nation. And lastly, I did write like crazy. I wrote the 50-odd poems that go into my second collection of poetry (Six Hours of Chastity).

6. How has the West influenced your writing during these last three months?

Nothing radical happened. And the subtle changes, if any, will have to be picked out by scholars or theorists, and even in that case, one never knows how accurate it is! I am always in a state of flux, so I do believe that coming here, and being footloose and fancy-free, would have changed me in some ways, and which would change the poetry in a sense.

7. If you were to write a poem based on the experience of your last three months, what would you write about?

I am too involved with the experience to verbalize it right away. There will be a diary at some point, and trust me, there will be love poems too.

8. You are an intrinsic part of the Dalit movement; an indelible, vociferous voice for the underprivileged in India. How do you reconcile yourself to a situation where you yourself live in a metropolitan city which is removed from the caste predicament for the most part, and now are in a developed world which has only academic interest in the problem?

I don’t think the Dalit movement is a rural movement, or that untouchability/ casteism does not exist in cities. The migration to the city does erase some identities even as it allows the scope for anonymity, but the Dalit remains a Dalit for the most part. The metropolitan cities are better suited for the Dalit movement’s growth and establishment because they allow for the Dalits to carry out democratic/ public agitations/ demonstrations without fear of a backlash, of being targetted and done-to-death and crushed by oppressor castes whose violent diktat operates much more freely in the villages. Coming to the second part of your question, yes, the developed world only has a superficial interest in these issues, which is quite disappointing. However, the struggle against caste should be waged only by those who have suffered because of it, and it should be supported by those who don’t believe in discrimination. I guess here the curiousity of the West could help since it actually brings things to the world’s attention. There’s another way of looking at it: the militant and political Dalit struggle (or even literature) has hardly been effectively theorized, or documented, so the academic interest emanating from this is certainly beneficial.

9. You write, commiserate with Tamils in Sri Lanka; is it emotional baggage for you now that crisis in Sri Lanka is no longer in the news with the Tamil Tigers gone?

The Sri Lanka crisis is now in the news in a way in which it has never been before. The US State Department’s report of what happened earlier this year in the war zone in which tens of thousands of Tamils were mercilessly bombed to death by the SL Govt., the Tamil Diaspora re-mandating their right to a homeland in the North-east, people all over the world being concerned about the three hundred thousand Tamils caught in concentration camps, Sri Lanka being the second-most unsafe country for journalists all over the world–these are issues of prime importance, irrespective of whether the media in the US, or India decides to highlight it or not. I take up a cause because I am involved with it, or I empathize for it, and not on the basis of the amount of media spotlight that it accrues. I guess the Tamil issue will always be an emotional baggage until we receive the right to a life of safety and security and self-determination. I trust that now is the time for humanitarian people all over the world to actually support the Tamil cause because things have never been worse.

10. Race, religion and caste come to play the most when elections are around the corner. In that respect the United States might not be much different from India. Emancipation apart, what needs to be done in India to remove barriers for equalization?

Yes, what you describe is the typical vote-bank scenario. I believe that equalization can come about only when the oppressors also decide that it is time for them to change, it is time for them to mend their ways. There is a possibility that such a change can come about through self-directed/ self-initiated efforts, but there are not enough pointers from history which lets us reinforce this belief. Those who seek to maintain the status quo, those who work against equalization and democratization, are known to change only when their own power is questioned and challenged. So, much of the responsibility for bringing about change lies in the hands of the oppressed people, since they have to continue their resilient struggle against oppression. If they resist the subjugation successfully, and if they manage to break out of it, then equalization will come about. It can never be beyond reach. What needs to be done in India is to encourage the freedom of the press, to bring out more stories of victimization and resistance to light, and to empower women without resorting to any cultural dogma. Anyone can observe that all systems of oppression ideally go hand-in-hand, so none of us can be free until all of us are free. For instance, I would like the feminist movement in India to really take up the ideology of annihilating the caste system not just because it is discriminatory and inhuman, but also because it is based on the control of a women’s sexuality (in order to keep the caste pedigree pure).

11. Do you agree with the quota system for the backward classes in government and educational institutions in India?

It is not for anyone to agree/disagree with the quota system, what people need to concentrate on is to ensure that all sections of society achieve real growth, and that no one is left behind and marginalized. I think the decision to extend the quota system for the backward classes (here i make a distinction from the Dalits) was taken because of their abysmal presence in both state-run educational and employment enterprises. We have to become a more tolerance and more inclusive society, and affirmative action is just one way of getting there.

12. Kamala Das backed your poetry; wrote a foreword to your debut collection of poems. Why does that mean so much to you? What do you like most about her poetry?

What Kamala Das said about my poetry meant so much to me because she is a woman who calls a spade a spade, she’s forthright and outspoken and doesn’t say things that she doesn’t mean. So, when such an authentic and genuine (not to mention accomplished and fiery) poet like her encourages your work, you just gain confidence in yourself, and you channel more efforts towards writing more, representing people more. I love her poetry, because she broke the barriers against Indian woman writing on troublesome/ taboo topics; at the core of everything, she was truth-seeking. Personally, I also adore her flamboyance, her fire.

13. How do you reconcile poetry with reality? Does imagination triumph?

My poetry is rooted in my reality: the reality of the Dalits fighting against caste-atrocities and violence of the oppressive forces who want to subjugate them, the reality of women who still have to fight to assert their equality and their rights, the reality of Tamils who have to express themselves in spite of the worst kind of threat to the freedom of expression, who have to struggle against systematic genocide in their own homeland. My poetry is a product of all my multiple, coexisting realities–right now, I don’t think I outsource my poetry to imagination.

Book Review: Sam’s Story by Elmo Jayawardene

(First published in The New Indian Express, 02 August 2009.)

Sam is poor, Sinhalese, and a servant in the Master’s River House. His only best friend is the owners’ dog Brutus. Sam is someone who can never figure out what a problem is, someone who doesn’t know why people cry. He has never learnt anything, not even how to write his name. He is a village idiot who doesn’t know what breasts are, but then, surprisingly, he knows about the Tamil militants.

Employing the first person narrative throughout the text, Sam’s Story succeeds in its attempt to imitate the raw, sparse prose style of Hemingway — the stark simplicity blends with the irreverence and dumbness of the protagonist, and the sudden shifts of action make for an aesthetic reading experience. But the story-telling embeds a clear-cut political agenda and is nowhere as remarkable as the superficially successful prose-style.

Sam’s Story, first published in 2001, painstakingly avoids even a single oblique reference to Tamil suffering on the island. Perhaps, it is left for us to infer that just as the stupid Sam is incapable of looking at reality, even to the minimum extent of noticing that Tamils are being discriminated against, people too refuse to accept that linguistic and racial chauvinism have wrought a climate of hatred on the island.

Most of the novel is a successful study in hate: the narrator prefixes everything about the Tamil language, people or culture with the word “stupid” and goes little beyond depicting Tamil people as those “who threw bombs and killed our soldiers and tried to divide our country”.

After more than 100 pages of a monotonous rant, we are privy to the picture on the other side, of how the Sri Lankan military is also a convoluted place to be. Perhaps, this is one way of striking a balance and attempting neutrality, although the damage is already done; no amount of salvaging can help the text.

The depiction of the brutalities of army life begin when Sam talks of his brother Jaya who’s killed-in-action, and his brother Madiya who deserts the armed forces. From this point forward, the book changes vastly in tone and treatment. Madiya, in his brief stopover at his home (after his desertion, and before going into hiding) explains the poverty draft and the meaninglessness of the war.

Against this backdrop, Jayawardene explores how poor people, bereft of all opportunities, send their children to war; and how they make do without food and medicine whereas a rich man’s dog gets immediate access to the best doctors and a stream of visitors inquiring about its health. He writes of this divided world where the political ‘punishment’ for a Sinhalase man campaigning for the Other Party involves being transferred to teach at a faraway Tamil school.

Sam’s lives his life in a climate of mutual hatred, and he instinctively distrusts the Tamil servants at River House. While Sam tolerates the housekeeper Janet, he resents the cook Leandro, who, with his talk of Eelam, divides the world into easy binaries — the people who are willing to kill (The Army) and the people who were willing to die (The Tigers).

Sam’s suspicion of Tamils extends to everybody: he thinks Velu, a servant in a nearby bungalow is a spy; and he doesn’t appreciate that Master’s son has found himself a Tamil girlfriend. The fatal climax, replete with a truck-bomb driving into a national bank, throws them all apart, and widens the rift to such an extent that any coming together seems fraught with impossibility.

Flowers of Violence: Review of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Thing Around Your Neck

With her latest book The Thing Around Your Neck, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, who won the Orange Prize for Fiction for her novel Half of a Yellow Sun, proves that she is much more powerful on the rigorous terrain of the short-story. Hailed by Chinua Achebe as a “writer endowed with the gift of ancient storytellers,” Adichie leaves an indelible mark through her first foray into short fiction. Seven of the dozen unlinked, stand-alone short stories in this collection are set in a turbulent Nigeria whose crime and corruption she describes with detachment.

Set in the University of Nigeria campus at Nsukka, “Cell One”, is a young girl’s tender retelling of the story of her handsome brother Nnamabia’s arrest and subsequent release. Without screaming for attention, it also offers an insight into college cult warfare, police excesses and custodial deaths. In “A Private Experience”, Chika, an Igbo Christian medical student is herded into safety by a poor Hauza Muslim woman even as a violent regional-religious riot is on. Three hours later, both these women — who discover friendship and faith — return to a city full of charred bodies and unsure of the fate of their loved ones.

The mindless violence that haunts Nigeria is a theme that Adichie often revisits. A young asylum seeker in “American Embassy” refuses to hawk the story of her son being shot dead by government agents in order to keep her dignity intact. The most engaging story in this collection, “Tomorrow is Too Far”, is set in the amoral world of children where sibling rivalry leads to the young Nonso’s death.

In “Ghosts”, the despondent survivors of the January 1970 war, torn

between alienation and allegiance, share their memories even as they carry with them the weight of what could have been: Biafra, the nascent nation that

no longer exists. This short-story preceded the publication of her celebrated novel, Half of a Yellow Sun, which dealt with genocide and starvation in Biafra even as it explored how the Nigerian nation never allowed its peoples to break away but brutally forced them to stay together in submission.

Unlike the ideological rigidity that characterises states, Adichie portrays the family as a fluctuating unit that is free to fracture. Certain shared facets of her stories don’t evade notice — for instance, all (but one) of the protagonists are young Nigerian women. And, all the men, invariably, inexcusably, cheat. Therefore, when some of the stories delve into the multiple crises of married life in an alien land, there is nothing intriguing or puzzling about what the men will do. Women, on the other hand, hold the answers. They take the decisions that really count.

“Imitation” is the story of a middle-aged Nigerian wife who finds her voice when she has lost her space. When Nkem discovers that her husband has installed his young mistress at their Lagos home, she decides to leave the comfort of America in order to secure her marriage. Nkem’s rage, though legitimate, is more a reaction that springs from her own experience as mistress to married men than from harbouring tragic illusions.

“The Arrangers of Marriage” echoes Indian Diaspora writing as it brings out the series of shams that constitute any arranged marriage. Here, Adichie makes inroads in understanding an immigrant’s efforts to merge with the mainstream at the cost of his identity: Ofodile Emeka Udenna names himself Dave Bell, conveniently opts for a visa marriage with an American, and orders his African wife to forget Igbo language and food.

Adichie probes into same-sex love in two stories, “The Shivering” and “On Monday of Last Week”; but the doomed endings are disappointing, and sound almost as if the protagonists were punished for daring to love differently.

By dwelling on lesbian desire and the female body, “On Monday of Last Week” stands a great chance to be a influential story, but our hopes are dashed when we learn that artist Tracy was merely ‘flirting’ when she kept asking Kamara to pose in the nude. “The Shivering”, a story set in the Princeton University, follows the lives of Chinedu and Ukamaka who miss the obvious future by carrying the burden of past loves.

Once out of Nigeria, and in America, people enter into relationships that would never have been possible back home: an upper middle-class girl befriends an impoverished gay driver, a domestic help turns into a rich wife’s confidant and best friend, a waitress finds a college-going boyfriend, and a university-educated woman becomes a babysitter. The Thing Around Your Neck experiments with the second-person narrative to depict how the American dream is rendered meaningless for Anukka when she realises that most of the population in USA adopts either a curious, or a condescending attitude towards her.

Switching between dualities with ease, Adichie repeatedly returns to her preoccupation with cultural encounters. The mischievous and tightly-crafted “Jumping Monkey Hill” explores prejudices, subtle racism and attempts to define the Other that occur over a two-week long writing workshop. A British Africanist has the self-righteous superiority to tell a group of young African writers what constitutes “an African story.” Significantly, this story-within-a-story mentions no workshop participant by name, preferring to refer to them by their nationalities such as Ugandan, Kenyan, Tanzanian and Senegalese and so on.

She takes off from where she left in her debut novel Purple Hibiscus by using these short stories to explore how Christianity and colonisation succeed in demonising native traditions. In “The Headstrong Historian”, we come across Nigerians who have been conditioned by Christian education to disregard their own culture. Nwamgba’s soul is crushed when her son becomes a priest and treats her contemptuously as a pagan, but she is avenged when her grand-daughter Grace renames herself with Afamefuna (“My Name Will Not Be Lost”) and writes about the lost and undocumented history of the African peoples.

It is evident that Adichie subscribes to the show-don’t-tell school of story-telling, but sometimes she goes a little overboard with the symbolism. But for this slightly irritating flaw, there is no fantastic chutneyfication of language, no bombastic driving-the-reader-to-a-dictionary. Armed with broad strokes and a straightforward style, Adichie subverts on other levels.

Her critique spans continents, her stories flit across timeframes but throughout the book, she maintains the restraint of an oracle, never wasting a single word, never sitting in judgment.

It’s turned out to be something of an Adichie festival because the publisher has taken advantage of the opportunity to make available reprints of two earlier works, Purple Hibiscus and the award-winning  Half of a Yellow Sun. Both are ideal candidates for re-reading and enjoying again the world that she has created with her carefully crafted words.

(Published in the New Sunday Express, i.witness, 12 July 2009)

Eat, Drink, Man, Woman

Reproduced from Tehelka.com

MEENA KANDASWAMY has an electric effect on rooms when she reads her poetry. The erotic content quite apart, the juxtaposition of her highly femme persona and the tartness of her observations always charges the atmosphere.

The late Kamala Das wrote the foreword to Touch, the collection of poetry Kandaswamy published at age 23. ‘Love and its politics inform my poetry. Caste atrocities happen most frequently because of intercaste love affairs.” A happy denizen of the Internet, 25-year-old Kandaswamy’s first short story The Suicide’s Inbox was the perverse unfolding of a correspondence between two women.

The daughter of a Tamil professor and a Maths professor at IIT, Meena has been always aware that even PhDs are not invincible armour. She chose to pursue a degree privately. “I knew I would not rest quietly if I had to suffer the usual caste slurs in college. Such a waste of time.”

Kandaswamy pins her dalit identity on the act of rebelling against any kind of oppression. She describes what it is like to live in a state with powerful dalit movements going back to the legendary Nandanar, who died claiming his right to worship Shiva: “Discrimination is sophisticated. Once a day — I’m not exaggerating — once a day someone will ask me whether I am vegetarian to figure out whether I am Brahmin.”

She avidly follows the media’s handling of dalit public figures. ‘People say dalits smell but when dalits stand for elections people say that suchand- such dalit’s perfume was expensive.” She has funny stories about the liberals left as well. “People exoticise our ‘sexual freedom’ as if dalits live in a nudist colony. I once met the editor of a left-leaning national newspaper. He told someone to verify if I was a dalit since I spoke English well.”

Kandaswamy says she wrestles daily with the biases of language in her writing, her PhD thesis and her rapacious translation of Tamil literature. She teaches English in a college. She blogs about local politics but is writing a novel set far from Tamil Nadu. Is this the life she dreamt of? “I dream of too many lives,” she replies.

NISHA SUSAN

From Tehelka Magazine, Vol 6, Issue 24, Dated Jun 20, 2009

Book Review: Family Values by Abha Dawesar

(Both this review, and the following interview with the author were first published in i.witness, The New Sunday Express last Sunday)

SOME HOME TRUTHS ABOUT RELATIONSHIPS

With a plucky, precocious little boy as its protagonist, Family Values delivers some home truths about the illnesses that pervade Indian society. Narrated from the point of view of a child living a queasy, claustrophobic existence in an one-room house where his doctor parents practice, it simultaneously exposes the feuds that run within an urban family, and fraudulence that runs through the country’s administrative machinery.

Even as the little boy strives hard to strike friends at school and struggles for space in his home, he finds himself lost in the large-scale drama that enters his lacklustre life. His parents plan to expand their practice by buying a new clinic, so they drag him along on their visits to bank managers, lawyers, policemen, architects and astrologers.

Soon, the boy (who has so far entertained others only by names-dropping clinical conditions and talking about female monthlies) starts coming up with some shrewd observations. Meanwhile, there’s plenty going on in their extended family: his paternal uncles Psoriasis, Paget, Sugar Mills, Six Fingers, Poop and aunts Self-Sacrificing Sister and Pariah set out to find a bridegroom for his cousin briefly setting aside their squabbles for a share in grandfather’s property.

The novelist has painted a doomed story of sons who turn against their own fathers and grandsons who go astray choosing guilty pleasures — Sugar Mills’ son Flunkie Junkie is on the road to ruin with his drug addiction, Six Fingers’ son is a local hoodlum. Interspersed with this narrative are disturbing stories of missing children and multiple organ-theft at the Milkwoman’s nearby slum, the kidnap of an industrialist’s kid at the boy’s school and several instances of the police brutalising the poor.

In the risky intersections where the individual-and-the-particular meets the universal, we learn of a model-bartender being shot to death in a shady pub owned by an arms-dealer who has links to the ruling family who use their influence with the police to get the children-eating cannibals of a Delhi suburb get away scot free.

The boy’s family can’t condone these clu­msy happenings not only because it is all over the papers, but also because this arms dealer in question is the illegitimate father of the boy’s female cousin who is getting married. It is a mean and miserable world alright, but Abha Dawesar shows us that it is a small world too.

Unlike the characters who bear weird nicknames, the capital city, its streets and its suburbs are left unnamed and the author succeeds in her refusal to be specific. However, the novel’s monotonous and sparse prose style is capable of eclipsing the meticulous effort that has gone into producing it. One has to acknowledge that the slack-and-straightforward storyline, and the many stylistic innovations, successfully serve to maintain a small boy’s point-of-view.

This novel may take a great deal of time to read but to the novelist’s credit, forgetting its insolent (or in other cases, innocent) character-cast will take even longer.

In a society where it’s taboo to talk ill of family and an act of transgression to question its role as an institution of economic and emotional exploitation, Dawesar has displayed enormous gumption in spilling the beans about this constantly glorified system. Her clear and compelling voice will provoke any reader to have a fresh look at the so-called “family values” that are zealously upheld, but never lived up to.

INTERVIEW WITH ABHA DAWESAR

Why are men, women and children in your novel identified only by their quirks, deformities or excesses? For a novel where everything has been penned down in microscopic detail, why this decision to name no names, but only stick to epithets?

The first few pages came out that way and it made intrinsic sense to me. The boy is exposed to the adult entourage of his parents but he doesn’t necessarily know a lot about the individuals who are familiar to him. At least not in the sense that adults know about one another; instead he has an impression of them based on a fact or a characteristic he’s heard of. Once I decided to name the characters this way, it would have been jarring to have the city or its streets named either. The other day one of my cousins told me that his son refers to me as Macy’s bua because the last time they were in NY we had been to the department store and that’s stuck with him. It’s the way one looks at the world at that age. The microscopic details goes with the book, I don’t think that the book could hang together without them.

The story is seen from the point of view of a small boy. It is written in the present tense (which is too tiring at times). It shies away from using quotation marks, or dates. Much of the story actually revolves around the use of the family toilet, and personal histories are often little more than medical conditions. Why did you choose to deliberately overthrow aesthetic considerations?

There is a rigorous anti-aesthetic that informs every page of the book. It is the only kind of style that makes sense for the book. In all my work, style and content have been very closely wrapped together because I don’t separate form and content. The humour in the book too is very measured. It would have been possible and even easy to write this same story with a splash of colour that made it all entertaining and palatable and let the reader and the writer glibly sidestep any inconvenient questions that arose about the nature of our complicity in this system. That’s not the kind of book I wanted to write. The exigencies of writing in the present tense were a challenge as were the lack of quotation marks. Since neither was intended to be confusing I had to work through several drafts of the book. I learned a lot more about writing from this book than from all my other novels put together though many readers who were attracted to the more classic style of That Summer in Paris might find Family Values distilled and stark in comparison. But the book, not just in its content but also through the way it is written demands pause.

Babyji, about a desi Lolita, was so different in tone and theme compared to‚ Family Values. Why did you choose such a conventional storyline for your fourth book?

I disagree. The other day one of my editors in Delhi said Family Values was more subversive than any of my other books and I think he is right. It is an unflattering portrait of ourselves and asks about what is broken in our world. On another note, I think Family Values is as visceral as Babyji was sensual; I am talking here about disease and health in which are metaphors for the illness and health of our society but which are treated close to the ground and pinned to the flesh.

Sometimes the family is portrayed as a bunch of scheming siblings, at other times, it is the only saving grace and support system. As a woman, and as a writer, what is your opinion on the institution of family?

I think we are in the habit of glorifying the institution all too easily and as a writer my job is to burrow underneath the convenient notions of family values we like to pay lip service to. Family can be claustrophobic and it can stifle the personal desires of its individuals. It can also step up to support an individual in times of distress. There is a constant tension between these roles and we see the boy’s parents, the doctors negotiating these tensions. There is also another consequence of family ties that is deeply buried in the book the love of one’s own has consequences for a nation and its health. It is the root of partiality and nepotism and therefore injustice; the boy’s mother tells him this. Both the other boys in the family, Flunkie Junkie and Cousin are protected by their parents when they do wrong things.

The large-scale effect of this sort of partiality is to promote injustice and contribute to the larger scale problems we see in the book.

The fictionalised accounts of the Nithari killings, the model-bartender being shot to death, the arms deal scandal: events that have rocked the national capital dictate the fate of the boy’s family. Why did you take the decision to play with history and therefore flatten out the timeline of these events to fit just a few years in the boy’s life?

To an extent these events have become types of events, events we probably have seen before the ones this particular book is echoing and some of which we might see again in some form. The corruption scandals, I think no one needs convincing, are repetitive though they may repeat on larger or smaller scales, in state capitals or the national one. The time scale is fictionalised because the book is a work of fiction and as a novelist I am not interested in writing a journalistic account of the events but rather hearkening to what is in our common national consciousness. All that said, the nature of the horror and the injustice in the book are real. That, much to our shame, is not fictional.

Signs of friction and fissures: A review of “Cutting for Stone”

 

Cutting for Stone
By Abraham Verghese
Publisher: Random House
Pages: 541
Price: Rs 595.

Marion Stone, son of Sister Mary Joseph, an Indian nurse-nun and Thomas Stone, a British surgeon tells the story of his life for the sake of his conjoined twin brother Shiva. Born in Missing Hospital in Addis Ababa where his parents worked, Marion and his twin come into this world as abandoned children: their mother died in childbirth, their father vanished without a trace. Brought up by two of the hospital’s doctors Hema and Ghosh (who eventually marry), the twins share a special bond with each other.

But growing up involves growing apart, and soon their relationship experiences the first signs of friction and fissures. A love triangle involving their childhood sweetheart Genet, and Shiva’s betrayal of Marion changes their lives forever. Genet is punished by having her clitoris cut off and her mother Rosina commits suicide soon after. Marion’s foster-mother Hema holds him responsible for the tragic course of events, and he refuses to even defend himself.

In the midst of family melodrama, Verghese has portrayed how the social context of Ethiopia on the brink of a revolution affects the life of every character. Whether it is Marion’s harrowing experience with a man from the army, or Ghosh’s imprisonment, the skill of story-telling shines through. Genet’s proximity with Eritrean liberation fighters gets her involved in the hijack of an Ethiopian Airlines plane. As her close friend, Marion finds himself in the middle of a muddle not of his own making, and is left with no other option but to flee Ethiopia. Normalcy continues to elude this novel; Marion, as the intern in an understaffed Bronx hospital, gets to meet Thomas Stone, his biological father. He demands details of the letter that Sister Mary Joseph wrote to him on her dying day, but his father is as unaware of its existence as he is. Disappointed, he seeks out Genet (who has also sought refuge in America) and fulfils his promise of “losing his virginity” to her. In return he is infected by the deadly hepatitis virus. On the verge of death, his life depends on the generosity of two people whom he reviles the most: his twin-brother and his father. An astonishing climax is played out at the end of this epic saga. In terms of themes, Cutting for Stone shares a great deal with John Irving’s novels: a main character searching out an absent parent, severing and amputation of body parts, deadly accidents, prostitutes with STDs, and sexual relationships between young men and older women.

Though they lend a peculiar charm and impart wisdom, the many lengthy digressions hinder the narrative flow. One can also harbour valid objections to the representation of almost all African women as easily “available”. In this novel, such generalisation perpetuates an oppressive stereotype. Despite these limitations, this novel about suffering and healing, love and redemption succeeds in leaving an indelible impression.

:)

As every four-year-old knows, the new year provides some sort of a platform for looking back, and for looking ahead. I didn’t really want to do a typical “new year post” or a “looking back at last year post”

Will not philosophize on what prevents me from doing either of these things (this year has been particularly gloomy for everybody, and things that take place in the outside world do tend to shake one to limits that are not easily determinable), but will instead share with you two links that give me enough hope to look into 2009.

Here are two of the half-a-dozen poems I wrote in 2008 (for some reasons totally beyond my understanding, this was not a year for poetry for me. i was far too involved in activist things, and far too happy in my personal life, and I didn’t get the ideal whatever it takes to write poems.  So, check into this issue of Muse India, that focuses on Indian English Literature (guest-edited by Professor GJV Prasad), and read my poems (To My Man Who Wanted To Leave No Traces, The Enlightening Lesson).

This issue is rather special to me because it includes poems of a lot of my friends: the incredibly talented and sweet Nitoo Das, Ranu Uniyal, Roselyn D’Mello, and of course, Sukrita Paul Kumar (she was on a jury that awarded my poem a prize. Hey, we became friends *after* she awarded me the prize)!

The second is a piece of information that had totally, totally escaped my knowledge. I have been selected as a Red Room Rising Star 2008 (having been featured as an upcoming poet to watch out in April–I learnt this only now). The website has been featuring a writer a week, and at the year-end they have put up this really, really cute list. Didn’t know how to come to terms with this–surprise, and shock. I don’t take myself seriously enough. All the time.

I also feel very guilty because I haven’t been writing ever since I got a job I love!

Since all this sounds so self-centric, I don’t know what to say.  I watched two really wonderful movies this week (courtesy friends who borrowed the discs): Volver and Slumdog Millionaire, and I will be writing in detail about them in my next post.