Reflections on the Poem Seequence

I showed the poem-sequence to D yesterday, and he liked it. According to him, the personal tone in the poems does not sound tacky or cheesy. They are not melodramatic. I can see how and where these poems will be impenetrable for an American audience. Or anyone who doesn't necessarily think of the aftermath of the Partition in symbolic terms. I have been trying to articulate to myself the objectives behind this poem-sequence. What are they trying to do. It is not that I want my explanation to do the work of the poem. It is more like I want to articulate it to myself so that I know where I want to go from here, and things look a little clearer to me. So here it is:

Part folklore, part personal narratives, part oral histories, these poems attempt to interpret the fairy-tale tradition in Bengal through the lens of the experience of Partition from the perspective of women of three generations. I am not re-interpreting any fairy-tales straight up here, but I am trying to explore what roles fairy-tales have played in the lives of these women. Where did fairy-tales lose their relevance in their lives? Where did it stay relevant? Were the fairy-tales equally relevant to all three women? Obviously not. There is a tension there in their relationship, and I have tried to reveal that anxiety through their relationships to the fairy-tale tradition. Yes, in the process I end up making fun of Rabindranath. His Introduction/Preface to Thakumar Jhuli (Tales from Grandma's Bag). The thing is, in Rabindranath's Preface, as in the very name Thakumar Jhuli (or Thandidir Thhole), the figure of the grandmother is an allegorical one. She functions as the repository of culture, one whose job is to tell stories. The way she has been written makes her own personal history, her own biography irrelevant to the stories she is telling. I am trying to give this figure of Thakuma or grandmother a little bit of personal history. And for someone of my generation, if I have to look back on the lives of my grandparents, there is no way I can ignore Partition or the ways in which it disrupted the essential fabric of their lives. In other words, I will have to take into account, how the trauma of Partition might have influenced the stories my (our) grandma (s) would tell. I am trying to do that here a little bit. Pushing the boundaries of that grandma figure, pushing the boundaries of the social history of the genre of Bengali fairy-tales.