::{Me}::

The past year has been hard in many many ways-- emotionally, financially. But I have learnt a great many things too. Amongst them, my realization about my own work. I have always felt that my academic and creative work are inter-related. But on a regular day, when I am struggling between grading, conversing with crazy supervisors, multiple deadlines, unpaid bills-- I mean, all the travails of an overworked, underpaid graduate student-- it is very very easy to lose track of those lofty feelings. But then, this past year, while struggling to keep sane, I recognized certain things. As much as I struggle with the institutional work of academia, I Love engaging in knowledge production. Knowledge production itself is one of the most profound political acts, and when done in a mindful kind of a way, politicizes and empowers the producer. There are lots of ifs and buts and complexities within the folds of the sentence I just wrote, but this is something I have come to believe in strongly in the last few months. In the same way, the more I engage with creative writing, art-making, I become convinced, writing a poem too is an act of knowledge-producing. A poem acts differently than a piece of academic essay-- on a more affective plane. But then, isn't my dissertation bound to my life-quest? If I didn't necessarily grow up within the politicized, lefty sub-culture, would I have been interested in writing a dissertation on representation of women in slave rebellions? Isn't my dissertation an expression of my pre-occupation with the ways in which philosophies, discourses, imaginations of class-struggle interpellate women? It is. And that is hugely autobiographical in some very fundamental way.

Apparently, the academic work I do, has nothing to do with me per se. I am not working on Bengali women's writing. I am not working on Bengali or even South Asian literatures. Although there is a strong South Asian component in my work. Yes, in amy academic work I branch out. I explore who I am not. What history is not mine. While in my poems, especially in this collection, in my insistent writing of the private-space, of domesticity, a very specific form of post-Partition, post-Naxalbari Bengali domesticity, it is all about figuring out who I am. Writing in, so to say. But then, isn't my dissertation also about figuring out who I am through an exploration of who I am not? The am exists in the guise of not. Besides, aren't the histories of slave rebellions also mine? Who will determine what history is mine and what is not mine? Is there only one way of laying claim to a history? Through a lens of ethnic-national-racial "authenticity"? I don't think so.

So, right now, I want to stop for a minute, and celebrate the fact that I can both move in and walk out. It's a rare privilege to be able to do so. And I AM privileged.