Critical and Creative: Some Reflections

For the past few days, I have been thinking about something: to what extent does my academic work as a literary critic bear any organic-symbiotic relationship with the poetry/fiction writing I do. It is not that I believe that there has to be a mechanical relationship, but still...

For one thing, in my academic work, I branch out. I branch out to places, languages, histories, literatures far away from my own. At least seemingly. In my poems and stories, I come back. I try to interrogate what has been close to me in a very direct kind of a way. I try to probe through my own childhood,my neighborhood, the people I have known in my life, the milieus that have been operative in making me who I am today.

There are times when it seems the two have nothing to do with each other. But then there are times when I recognize it is my academic work that has taught me the meaning of "reading." What it means to "read" texts. What it means to reside within a text. To take one word, one line/sentence at a time. To take it apart to put it back together again. That is precisely the approach that I try to bring to my creative writing. I try to "read" the life around me: my past, the present, the ever-changing landscape. I try to take it apart. I try to put the people in their contexts. Try to "read" them, find out what made them act the way they did. What made them so extra-ordinarily ordinary, yet singular. What made them conform. What made them rebel and how.

I don't know how life would have unfolded if I hadn't really taken up this PhD. I would have read anyway. I probably would have written too. But that's not the point. The point is, doing academic literary criticism gave me the final push towards becoming a writer. It empowered me to find the stories in my own life, and write them. Therefore, I find no contradiction between the "critical" and the "creative" in my life. In that sense, they are perfectly organic and symbiotic.