womanish ink.inky madness.caffeinated stanzas...je shob galpo kobita hoi na

Harjo's Kitchen Table

2012-02-16T03:45:00.000-08:00

Perhaps the World Ends Here

BY JOY HARJO

The world begins at a kitchen table. No matter what, we must eat to live.

The gifts of earth are brought and prepared, set on the table. So it has been since creation, and it will go on.

We chase chickens or dogs away from it. Babies teethe at the corners. They scrape their knees under it.

It is here that children are given instructions on what it means to be human. We make men at it, we make women.

At this table we gossip, recall enemies and the ghosts of lovers.

Our dreams drink coffee with us as they put their arms around our children. They laugh with us at our poor falling-down selves and as we put ourselves back together once again at the table.

This table has been a house in the rain, an umbrella in the sun.

Wars have begun and ended at this table. It is a place to hide in the shadow of terror. A place to celebrate the terrible victory.

We have given birth on this table, and have prepared our parents for burial here.

At this table we sing with joy, with sorrow. We pray of suffering and remorse. We give thanks.

Perhaps the world will end at the kitchen table, while we are laughing and crying, eating of the last sweet bite.

I have been thinking about this poem a lot, especially how this one would speak to Shonto Begay's poem that I blogged about here. Harjo's poem makes visible a lot of things

which Begay's poem obscures-- women's labor, the conflicts that happen around the domestic space, the production and reproduction. There isn't any "I" in this poem.Instead, there is a "we." However, there is still something that makes me uncomfortable about this poem. What does it mean to say the world begins and ends at the kitchen table, when the struggle for a large section of women in this world had been to construct a world beyond the kitchen table. It doesn't really shrink a woman's world per se, as it happens in the Begay poem. But it shrinks the world itself to fit into the space of domesticity. I am trying to formulate a way in which to relate this shrinking to the kind of politics of indigeneity that Harjo ascribes to, but haven't been able to do it yet.

::In My Mother's Kitchen: Thoughts::

2012-02-09T14:21:00.000-08:00

I have been thinking a lot about food, because I am teaching a class on food. I like to eat, I like to experiment with ingredients in my kitchen. But when I approach food as the raw material for my scholarly and creative reflections and productions, I am primarily interested in these things: food and its relationship to concepts of power, food as a site of power, food as a site of resistance, food as a site that exists as an intersection of social processes like labor, commodification and consumption. Because I am interested in the labor that happens around food production, I am also interested in the valence of the kitchen-space. Kitchen the space within which most domestic food production happens. Kitchen the space which has, for so many centuries of human history, has been seen as the space where women belong. I can flip the equation around, and also say, because I am interested in gender, I am interested in the history and politics of the kitchen. I have been trying to find poems and memoir-pieces on kitchen. And this is one of the first things that came up when I did a Google search with the keywords In My Mother's Kitchen.

IN MY MOTHER'S KITCHEN

Fragrance of fresh tortillas and corn stew
Fills my mother's kitchen
Sparsely furnished
Crowded with warmth

Soot-grayed walls, secretive and blank
She moves gently in and out of light

Like a dream just out of reach

The morning light gives her a halo
That plays upon her crown of dark hair
Strong brown hands caress soft mounds of dough
She gazes out into the warming day
Past sagebrush hills, out towards the foot of Black Mesa
How far would she let the goats wander today
Before it rains

Childhood dreams and warmth
Tight in my throat, tears in my eyes

The radio softly tuned to a local AM station
News of ceremonies and chapter meetings

And funerals
Flows into the peaceful kitchen

Lines upon her face, features carved of hard times
Lines around her eyes, creases of happy times
Bittersweet tears and ringing silvery laughter
I ache in my heart

My mother's gentle movements light up dark corners
Her gentle smiles recall childhood dreams still so alive
My mother moves in and out of light
Like clouds on days of promising rain

—Shonto Begay

And here is Begay's website: http://shontogallery.com/wp/

What struck me about this poem is the way the poet reveals the little details of the mother's kitchen. There are so many images in this poem, much like the classic confessional/memory poem tradition of American poetry. But, all those image-work have been mobilized towards a specific impulse : to construct the mother's kitchen as an abode of peace, and the mother as a figure who embodies all that is "gentle" in life. Given Begay's personal and creative history, I am seeing in this poem a well-known trend: constructing the kitchen and the mother that provide refuge against the outside world : the world of funerals, tears and chapter meetings. In other words, the colonizing world which is only capable of generating trauma. But then, the mother in this poem is hardly a "real" figure : she "moves in and out of light", she is like a "dream that is out of reach." Yep, she becomes the classic national allegory. The allegory of the indigenous "American" nation that hasn't been born, that probably will never be born, and therefore, like the mother of this poem will always be a little elusive, its dream-like quality providing solace during moments of stressful contacts with the "mainstream" world.

But this is not just all. I am also thinking about how this elusive mother-figure keeps appearing in male poetry throughout the world. And not just the mother figure, the figure of the allegorized woman, Like Jibanananda Das's classic imageries of "kishorir chal dhoya haat" ( the young girl's rice-washed hands). In spite of their huge geographic and cultural difference, what is common in Begay and Das's kind of metaphor-making is that, it transforms women's actual labor into romanticized allegories, symbolizing some kind of inaccessible, elusive antithesis to the trauma of the outside world. So, when I read poems like this, I cannot help asking: where is the actual labor of the mother within the space of the kitchen? How does the mother-figure's frustrations and hysteria get reproduced within the kitchen space? How does the kitchen become the space where women's trauma (as against the "outside" world and its identification as the space for male trauma) gets constituted, articulated, expressed? And last but not the least, how does the mother herself see this kitchen? Does this ever become the space for expressing her creativity? What I am seeing as I am reading these lines I just wrote, what are the questions that we need to ask in order to de-naturalize the idea that kitchen is the essential space where women find belonging, and somehow, that's inherent in the very constitution of women. Unfortunately, in spite of the beauty of his images, that's what Begay's poem ends up doing.

As I am struggling through these questions, I find myself writing some poems which try to answer these questions. So far I have written six such poems. All of them are pretty short. But I am enjoying writing them. And along with finishing the first draft of the dissertation and teaching, that's what I have been up to.

;; It's Already February;;

2012-02-08T18:42:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I finished the first draft of the Introduction of my dissertation, and today my dissertation group read it. So, now I have the dissertation in FULL. It is not perfect, it is not good, but it exists. That is one step ahead from the time when I wrote my New Year Resolution post. Also, compared to what I did last semester, I am doing FAR better. So far I have written five poems. Again, not good. But still, beginnings. This is already four more than what I accomplished last semester. I have cooked almost every other day. I did eat at my friend's couple of times, but that was more in the spirit of celebration. I am not using her cooking skills and hospitality as a crutch anymore. There have been days when I have experimented with recipes. There have been days when I have just rehashed the old recipes. Sometimes I have made some easy and quick comfort food-- like tonight. I am cooking nothing more than a tomato dal and rice. But still, even the attempt to cook that really simple meal, makes me feel better about myself. In terms of my teaching, I have learnt a LOT. There have been challenges. And it is not that I didn't expect them. But just having my own class to teach, takes off so much pressure. Besides, I am really interested in the materials I am teaching and I am learning to think in a way that is different, yet related to my usual dissertation methodologies. I haven't been able to blog at all, and I am hoping to change that pretty soon. But the last one month has been challenging, but productive. And what more can I expect?

::Journalling::

2012-01-26T10:00:00.000-08:00

Journalling has been one of the best things I have done in my life. For the last three weeks, I have journaled quite a bit. The result is, I have been able to articulate in language things I have been afraid to admit to myself for a long time. It is not that I didn't KNOW these things before, but having them written down in words -- words, sentences, tangible paragraphs-- to which I will be able to go back to read-- is hugely empowering. None of these things I would be able to share in this blog. Not only because I want to protect the privacy of the individuals concerned, it's also because I want to hold on to certain forms of privacy for myself very very tightly. There are things in my life that will never show up on this blog. But then, there might also have been a part of me, which was putting off articulating these things because I couldn't say them out loud in public. Journalling has helped me move beyond that stage. It is too early to comment on anything else-- will these words, literally written in tears on page-- help me to "move on"? Do I really want to "move on"? What does "moving on" mean? Admittedly, it's one of those words that's thrown around a lot in the self-help language, but what does it really mean to move on? So, I am not necessarily sure what all these little write-ups will mean for me years from now. What I do know is that, right now, they are providing me with a strange kind of courage. My journal entries are providing me with the courage to be more accountable to myself. And as I am writing these entries, I am also beginning to think of the role "private writing" plays in human lives. Especially when, as literary scholars, historians, we look into them to validate/problematize/ something that is bigger than individuals

:: white space blank space breathing space::

2012-01-14T17:45:00.001-08:00

Not that I have much time these days between applying for jobs and the dissertation. But whenever I get some time, I try to work a little on my manuscript. A lot of my earlier poems had this tendency to put within its folds almost everything. Consequently, they ended up sounding passionate, but also had the effect of reading extremely didactic. I would load up a single poem with image after image, thus giving it a kind of sensory overload. So, now that I am revising the mss, I am paring down a lot of my poems. I am realizing, a poem is just that-- one poem. It doesn't need to do everything. On the other hand, sometimes a long poem divided into multiple sections, needs some more breathing space than say, a sonnet. I am trying to organize and re-organize my mss in a way that my poems have more breathing space. More white space. I am not someone who believes in "less is more." No, less is less. In order to make less into more, we have to expand ourselves. Work harder. Figure our more imaginative ways to think through both the material and the language. But what I have come to recognize, more needs its own space. Sometimes that "own space" means more than just 'one poem." And sometimes, it means "more than one book." Aka more work.

::Food Memoirs::

2012-01-11T19:19:00.000-08:00

Have been reading Leslie Li's culinary memoir Daughter of Heaven: A Memoir With Earthly Recipes for the class I am teaching in Spring. Apart from the fact that her writing is absolutely fascinating, I am also wondering about a few things:

a. I am glad that I took up "food" (or should I say alimentation) as the theme of my class. My dissertation is primarily about violence, resilience and resistance. There is a heaviness to the things that come with it. On the other hand, food is essentially about survival, sustenance, creativity and celebration. At this point in my life, when everything is in the air, and I can hardly afford a decent meal, reading about food keeps me happy.

b. Food is about the quotidian. Consequently, there is an everyday-ness in the very writing of food memoirs that is hard to pull off in other genres. I am enjoying that everydayness immensely as I am working through Leslie Li.

By the way, Happy New Year!

::2012 Resolutions::

2011-12-30T11:20:00.000-08:00

I have never accorded much importance to Resolutions or list-making. I am not a very organized person (euphemism for "scattered"), and lists and such have always seemed a little superfluous to me. I have always believed in going with the flow, to take things as they come, and take one day at a time. I still do. But as I am growing older, I am realizing, I don't have much time left. It's important for me to make the best use of the time I have, to be accountable to myself, to stay focused on things I want to achieve. Lists can be really helpful in that-- I can always log in to this page, and see for myself how much of my own stated goals I have achieved. So, here is my 2012 resolutions, with one caveat. I think, a year is TOO long a time. And the way my life is right now, I cannot really plan an entire year. So, here, I am trying to come up with a list of goals for the next six months of my life.

Academic

Finish my dissertation, defend and get my PhD. This can be achieved by writing and revising everyday. For that, I will also need to read articles, monographs and such everyday. Right now, I am working on my Introduction. I hope to get it done by the end of this break.

Teaching

I am teaching a class called "Food And Asian-American Popular Cultural Imagination" this Spring. I have the syllabus more or less planned. I am excited about the topic, and hope to do the best job I can. I am hoping to come up with some kind of a pedagogy article from my experience of teaching this class. So, I will try to keep extensive records of day-to-day teaching. I will also use this class as a springboard to conceptualize a conference paper, later to be developed into a journal article.

Writing

I have been working on my first collection of poems while working on my dissertation. A lot of these poems have come out individually in journals, some I am still sending out. Now, I need to make that leap-- collect, collate these poems into a coherent manuscript. I have begun that work during this break. By June 2012, I want to have a collection that is more solid, and send it out to two of my readers. Like the dissertation, for this too, I need to keep working on it everyday. I don't have any lofty goals for it yet, since my first priority is to get the dissertation done. But I want to stay with this project, keep thinking about it, revise the poems, tweak their orders, just so I am in touch. My aim here is progress, not perfection. The latter will come in the post-dissertation stage.

Reading

Three Bengali Novels: Keyapatar Nouko by Prafulla Roy, Epar Ganga Opar Ganga by Jyotirmoyee Debi, Meghe Dhaka Tara by Shaktipada Rajguru

Three English Novels: Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain, The Circle of Reason by Amitav Ghosh

I am not making a list of poetry collections here. Since, in my experience, I do a better job of reading poems while working on the dissertation and regular pressures of teaching.

Food And Cooking

Learning six new recipes and blogging about them. Fall 2011 had been plain bad in terms of this. I was so tired that I failed to cook on most nights. Either I was fed by a friend (thanks, Ani) or, I would make some mush of rice, lentils and onions. I didn't even feel like making an one-pot stew. This needs to change. I do have a few recipes memorized which I can cook, improvise on etc. at the drop of a hat. But I would also like to get a little bit more adventurous in terms of my cooking skills.

Find A Job

Keep on applying...and ....er, finish the dissertation.

Developing A Consistent Offline Reflection Journal

I have tried this before, and have consistently failed. But as I am growing older, I feel this increasing need to write, reflect on things. But very few of these can be shared online. I recognize, so many of my reflections, memories, tidbits will be lost if I don't keep a regular log of these. So, I will try it one more time this year. Devote 10 mins. to it. Everyday.

::{Me}::

2011-12-29T11:21:00.000-08:00

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.

(Bleh)

2011-12-27T10:46:00.000-08:00

These days I feel everything is a little bit up in the air. I am plowing through my dissertation, trying to finish the Introduction, and once I do so, I will have the entire first draft done. But with the job market stuff, the uncertainty over next year, I am not just in the space to do any kind of serious writing. One thing I have learnt from writing, after finishing the four chapters of my dissertation-- things will always take longer than I think. I cannot really say I know more after spending the last three years on churning these pages. All I can say is:

a. I now know what I don't know

b. I now know the questions

I was really hoping this post would be a New Year Resolution one, but instead it turned out to be a reflection of the state I am in right now. I will try to live with that.

::In My Kitchen::

2011-12-24T14:27:00.000-08:00

I don't have a fancy kitchen. What I have is more of a half-kitchen than anything else. And I am not the most organized person in this planet. But, I like to eat. And I like to cook. And as much as I problematize domesticity, there is something about walking into my (relatively) clean kitchen during the break, grind the coffee-beans, make myself a cup of coffee, sit down to work. This semester had been particularly stressful for lots of different reasons. I didn't have much time to cook at all. On most days, I depended on another friend to feed me. On other days, when I did make something for myself, I boiled rice, potatoes, lentils and eggs, mashed them up and ate them with a bit of butter or ghee. Yes, the classic Bengali shedhho-bhat. So, it would be nice to get a chance to cook some simple dishes in my modest grad-student kitchen in the next few days. So these are the things I am planning to cook during the next week or so:

Chicken Adobo

Kosha Mangsho

Some kind of a vegetarian dish (I am not sure yet).

Tonight, I will marinate the meat for the adobo. And then, tomorrow I cook.

~;; Creative Policing;;~

2011-12-23T12:14:00.000-08:00

I received some good feedback for my chapbook manuscripts from my friends. So, I am all ready to do the next set of edits. But, as I was reading through some of the comments sent by my friends, I noticed something-- a lot of them said things like "editors don't like this" or "you'll have to do this in order to impress the contest judges." And I recognized, I do it too. It was a moment of recognition, of fright. I know my poet-friends who say that, are trying to be on my side. As I try to be on their sides when I write such comments on their margins. Because, my friends want to see my work published. I want to see my friends' works published. But, at the same time, by doing this we police each others' works. And this kind of policing has nothing to do with creativity, providing rigorous feedback and critique. Instead, by reminding each other of what the editors, contest judges--the authority figures-- like, we create a culture of reinforcing established norms of creative expressions. We destroy each others' capacity to take risks, to push against the established norms of culture-making. Thereby, we take up, without necessarily being asked to, one of the most important works of the poetry industrial complex-- the production of technically competent but creatively challenged works of art.

This time, when I got comments like that, I had to stop for a minute. On the one hand, I am not one of those poets who trivializes feedback. I believe in providing and receiving feedback, revising my poems according to the feedback received, although there have been times when I have rejected feedback too. But these comments disturbed me. Poetry is important to me, it is my vocation. But it is not my profession. I do not expect my poems to pay my bills. For that, I do other kinds of work. And in my day-job, I have to accept compromises, presence of authority figures and lots of other crap, precisely because food and a place to stay are important for me. I like them! But when I come to my poems, I want to retain that little bit of creative arrogance. I do not want to bow down to the rules established by the authority figures, to the rules established by literary marketplace. That does not mean I do not believe in the art of a professional cover-letter or I want to pass my bad poems as "creative rebellion." I want to do the best job I can of my manuscript. I want to revise and re-revise it, and provided I have money, I might also put it up for contests. But what I am not ready to do yet, is to mould my work according to some arbitrarily accepted market-rules. I will try to do the best job I can, and if that is "good" enough for the market, well and good. If not, I will look for other venues of propagating my work.

::In My Father's House::

2011-12-19T19:24:00.000-08:00

I have a title for my chapbook:

In My Father's House

A working title, and it might change. But there are reasons why I went for it. Will blog about that later--when I have a more definite plan of action.

::The Chapbook Manuscript Done::

2011-12-18T14:38:00.000-08:00

I finished assembling my chapbook! I have assembled chapbooks before, but never before have I felt this sure of a particular project. During the last three days, I have succeeded to edit a lot of flabs from the poems, attain a specific narrative arc, and an ordering of poems. I just emailed it to a poet friend of mine, for her feedback and comments. I will also hand in a hardcopy to another friend of mine tomorrow. I am not hoping for great things here, since I will have to finish, edit, revise the dissertation, and find a job. Besides, I know, I still have lots of work in terms of strengthening individual poems. But I am hoping, by the next contest and publication cycle (ie, fall 2012), I will have a manuscript to send out to.

In other news, I went to Mi Madres for brunch yesterday with a friend. Their tacos were heavenly. I tried Pork Adobado,onions, avocado and Barbacoa served with picco de gallo. I will definitely go back whenever I have a chance. I need to begin to resume work on my dissertation. It will happen-- tomorrow.

Putting This And That Together

2011-12-15T10:04:00.000-08:00

I have begun to work on my poems again. Day before yesterday, I assembled my chapbook. Yesterday, I revised about half of it, taking things out, making notes to myself about the possibility of adding things in. I also made a few edits. I have assembled chapbooks before. But never before have I felt sure about the project in the way I am doing now. Probably because I have worked on these poems longer than I have done with the other ones. Probably because the chapbook-project itself, in its entirety, feels a little bit more complete to me than the previous ones did. Reading them, after assembling them together, I always felt there is something missing. This one feels relatively complete. This afternoon, I will finish reading the rest of it, and do some more edits. Hopefully, by the end of this week, I will have a draft to email to some of my friends.

One of the things I noticed while reading the poems, my lines were short. I have tried to avoid "weak" words at the end of the lines. But when I was writing these poems, I wasn't necessarily thinking about the line-breaks. My attention was more towards developing a language capable of expressing what I was trying to express: the claustrophobia of a girl growing up in an over-protective middle-class Bengali home. One almost characterized by a sort of benevolent patriarchy. Where girls are taught to be economically self-sufficient, working hard in school, while retaining the essential respectability of middle-class gendered norms. In other words, I am writing about a bag of contradictions. Some of these are very hard to pin down. Some of these, depending upon where a reader stands, might not look "oppressive" at all. But the primary focus of my manuscript is the persona-narrator. She is the one who observes, comments upon her own upbringing, her parents' lives, her own sense of claustrophobia. And most importantly, her desire to leave. In other words, in finding a language to express her own frustrations with her own upbringing, this persona-narrator is going through a process of expansion. Yesterday, as I was reading through and revising the poems, I realized my lines are too short. They do not necessarily reflect the process of expansion this girl is going through while evolving this language through which to provide a critique of Bengali middle-class benevolent patriarchy. So, one of the changes I will have to make when I begin to make the changes, is to expand the lines. Make my persona-narrator take up space on page. Visually, materially, metaphorically. I am not sure if that will give my poems the intended effect. But I am psyched to be even able to think this way! I know I wouldn't have been able to think about form this way couple of years back. This is all very exciting, and I am looking forward to my time in the coffee-shop, with a hazelnut latte, my manuscript, pen and collections of poetry.

Back!

2011-12-13T15:57:00.000-08:00

Today I got done-- not done done, but done as in grades submitted, no job-application deadlines showing its tongue at me, wanting to be taken care of NOW. Between the last time and now, I have finished a rough structure of my chapter four. Now only the introduction needs to be written. Then, I will have a "complete" dissertation. It will still need lots of work and revision to be what I want it to be, but I am desperate for it to exist as a first draft by the end of 2011. Meanwhile, I have written two poems. Yes, count them-- two. I have submitted to a few places. Some that were accepted during the summer are beginning to come out. Right now, I am sitting in a coffee-shop, and I am hoping I will get some poetry-related work done. At least, a plan of work. It is not that I will be devoid of deadlines during the next one month. But at least, I won't have to teach. And that does make a whole lot of s difference.

Updates

2011-10-09T17:39:00.000-07:00

I have been neglecting this blog—between the fourth chapter of my dissertation, teaching, writing job applications and keeping up with some other deadlines, I am all blogged out. But I have been forcing myself to spend some time with my writing, even if it's 15 mins every day. I have also enrolled in a short story workshop, just so I can get some writing done. It is not that I am hoping I will achieve some huge feat, but just trying to keep up with some deadlines, getting some feedback for my work, all these little things make me feel that I am still within the process. Meanwhile, I am doing some work on the poetry manuscript. I have a better idea of where it is going. I know what poems I need to write for it once I am done with the dissertation. I am doing lots of thinking about it, drawing up a list of books I need to read.

But I am also learning, as I am writing the dissertation, that any long project, involves lots of painstaking moments. At this point, my mind and body are really ready to jump to the finishing point without going through the hoops. At the same time, I know, this is what the process is all about—taking a few pages everyday, editing them, making notes, writing a page or two, cutting things out, adding new stuff. And it takes time. I am not the same person who started this project. So has the project changed. There are moments when I sit down with it, and think about what I am writing about, I get enormously excited. Away from it, I feel sad, listless. Even more so when I think about the institutional paradigms within which I am working on it.

In the same way, I am slowly coming to accept, I might not be the best person to write in short prose-fiction forms. This week, I met with a new friend of mine, an Iranian-American woman with an MFA. After our conversation, I felt a lot energized about beginning to think about a novel once I am done with the dissertation. So, that's something I am looking forward too.

{...}

2011-09-30T08:35:00.000-07:00

Rainmaker poems--

when Austin evenings smell of Kolkata

((Laboring))

2011-09-05T07:12:00.000-07:00

I started the day with a nice rejection from PANK--oh well! This Labor Day weekend has been tough. I have moved between intense anger, listlessness, sense of failure, depression and missing someone I really really love. And if I have to be perfectly honest, it's the last thing that has been causing a lot of the other things I listed above. There are other things, too. For example, the anxiety over my dissertation. But nothing fucks me up as a conflict with a childhood friend, someone who should have understood me better than anyone else! But this is also something I have come to realize in the last few days--I am an intensely ideological person. For me, the "personal" is really really "political" and vice versa. I tend to de-code the smallest moments in my life, our lives, and this often creates emotional problems and distances with people I otherwise love and cherish. I know a lot of the things I am extremely critical of wouldn't necessarily bother most others. But this is me, and I also recognize, this propensity of mine has also given me an unique voice, I don't really intend to change myself. I am all willing to try hard to be a better person. I am all willing to modify my rhetoric depending upon the context. But what I am not willing to do is, to enter into too many "compromises."

In other news, I am still working on the fourth chapter of my dissertation. I get very easily tired these days. I cannot write more than a page or a page-and-half. But I do work on it every day. So, I am making progress. Although I am far from being done, it does help me to see that I am adding on to the chapter, I am paving my way towards completion.

In the creative writing front, I have been revising a story I wrote a while back. I got some feedback on it from my workshop, so I am trying to do some revisions. Let's see how it goes!

[Summer Publications]

2011-09-03T11:30:00.000-07:00

I haven't updated the publications list here for a while. So, here it goes:

lingerpost

Up The Staircase Quarterly

(Tuesdays Fall 2011)

2011-08-30T20:18:00.000-07:00

I recognized today that this semester my Tuesdays are going to be crazy. Normally, I should not expect to get too much of my own work done on Tuesdays. But, it's mostly going to be preparing for my discussion sections, attending the lecture, then office hours, then teaching, and if I still retain my sanity after that, a little bit of grading. But because it was the very first Tuesday of the semester, I did succeed to revise a poem, post it for the workshop forum, write around 300 words for the dissertation. I also managed to submit to two places. Overall, it wasn't a bad day--just an extremely busy one. Now, I am waiting for the rice to cook. It's in the oven. Once that's done, all I need to do is to reheat the dal, have dinner and go to bed. Yes, I am tired.

Reception

2011-08-28T06:36:00.000-07:00

I gave a friend of mine a poem called "Just By Sheer Mistake" to read and comment on. The poem has been accepted by a journal ever since, so I cannot post it here. Otherwise, this post would have probably made more sense. Anyways, her comments were totally off-base. She did not understand what I was writing about at all, she had problems in understanding the references to the counter-culture, she misread everything in the poem. Literally. When I first read her feedback, I was confused (and sad),because this is a woman who is extremely extremely sincere. She is a very very nice person, and she wants to understand. So I talked to M, who really did help me a lot to put the whole thing in perspective. According to him, this woman writes primarily about the home-space--there is very little in her poems that problematize domesticity. Yes, there are moments when she wants that cloak of domesticity to be better repaired, but more or less, her poems are about celebrating the familial/domestic space, rather than looking for a space beyond the familial/domestic. On the other hand, my poem was about that very tension--the conflict between the familial and the more public space of artistic exploration. Now, what does it mean when you have a father who found his voice in that public space of artistic exploration too? In other words, the young men and women who in 1960s found their voices in the so-called counter-cultural spaces, are the parents of the kids, who like me, came of age in the 1990s. How does one write about the conflicts with them? In this particular poem, I chose to explore that conflict through the lens of a "benevolent patriarchy". Although nowhere in the poem did I use that term. The poem ended up being an exploration of a space where the "public" and the "familial" intersect with each other, through the presence of the character of the father. I have never really thought how complicated this poem is from the perspective of a reader. In other words, for someone who is not that familiar with lefty/countercultural childhood, there is a lot that I am presuming in this poem. So, after I processed some of my friend's initial reactions, I recognized, my poems are going to be understandable only to a small group of people. At least for now. I don't know if it's good or bad. And I am not going to worry myself thinking about it. But this is what it's going to be for now. If I have to be true to myself, I will have to keep on writing, and just hope there is someone out in the world who would know what I am talking about.

{Saturday Happy}

2011-08-27T09:09:00.000-07:00

School has started, I am teaching this year. This semester I am TA-ing for an American Lit. class. This first week wasn't that hectic, but I am sure it will become crazier as it moves along. My days are not that "interesting" right now. I wake up, make myself coffee, try to do some work on the dissertation chapter, read a little, write a little. So, yes, these were the three "happy moments" of this past week:

1. Breakfast Tacos at Cafe Medicci

Yes, I allowed myself two breakfast tacos this Thursday: bean and cheese and migas. They were delicious. But it wasn't just that. They also helped me to pay attention to the class while the professor I am TA-ing for, appreciate it, and then have a meeting with him and my co-workers during which I didn't think about food.

2. My Advisor Likes My Chapter 3

and thinks it's "bold." This did give me some impetus to keep on working on my Chapter 4.

3. Cappuccino and Revising A Poem

Yesterday, I bought myself a cappuccino and worked on revising a poem. I felt such a bliss! I haven't been able to write too many new poems, and I doubt I will, until I get the dissertation done. But I can still revise my old poems! And there was something extremely consoling about sitting in a cafe with a cup of cappuccino and revising my poem. It's like a date with a very close friend, someone who knows me better than anyone else, someone to whom I don't have to explain myself. I just emailed the poem to one of my readers, let's see what he has to say.

::Poetry Books I am Dreaming About::

2011-08-23T17:12:00.000-07:00

The poetry books I am dreaming about:

1. Dhaka Dust by Dilruba Ahmed

2. In the Bus With Rosa Parks by Rita Dove

3. Black Mesa Poems by Jimmy Santiago Baca

~~4. Wild Iris by Louis Gluck~~

5. Rooms Are Never Finished by Agha Shahid Ali

6.Burnings by Ocean Vuoung

These are the books I want to read during this semester (fall 2011) while I also try to finish ze diss and survive teaching.

(Sometimes on a Day Like This...

2011-08-23T05:27:00.000-07:00

yesterday

* Made coffee for myself

* Finished reading an article by Ranajit Guha

* Wrote a little more than 450 words on my dissertation chapter

* Finished posting critiques and reading responses for my short fiction class

* Finished reading Cindy's chapbook

*Finished reading Native Guard

*Had more coffee

*Checked emails, responded to friends

*Read two short stories by Agnes Sam

* Began a ghazal

* Heated up leftover dinner, ate it

*Did dishes

* Posted critiques (two) for my poetry workshop

*Submitted poems to four places

*Went to bed

it's okay not to know what I am made of)

Thursday Happy (Late Edition)

2011-08-21T11:34:00.000-07:00

I am still suffering from an overall feeling of listlessness--there is too much to be done, and I am always under this feeling that I am doing too little. There is the dissertation to be completed, job applications to be done, more poems to be revised, written and submitted, stories to be written and revised, feedback to be given. If I have to characterize my life, it won't be an exaggeration to say that I live within a complex cycle of relentless, continuous work. These days, I feel, time is running out. Maybe this has to do with me growing older. I don't think I have ever felt this way when I was 21 or 25. I am trying not to lose track of life in the midst of it all. So here are the three things that made me happy this week:

Receiving My Friend Cindy Hochman's Chapbook In Mail

Cindy and I met when we took Michael Montlack's poetry workshop in Gotham. We kept in touch even after the workshop, reading and commenting on each others' poems, chatting and sometimes just sharing a good joke. It's wonderful to see Cindy's work published as a book, and acknowledged by the larger poetry world. No, she didn't charge me for the book, and had written a beautiful inscription inside.

The title of her chapbook is: The Carcinogenic Bride

Breakfast at Hornitos

I have known for a while that this is one of the Austin institutions, but never had a chance to go. So, I did finally. Yesterday. With a friend. Their breakfast tacos are very very very delicious. There is something about the chorizos that I simply love. I wish I could do breakfasts more often (sigh!)

Coffee With Komrade Andy

Whose jokes cheer me up, with whom I can share my dreams of a better world, without translating...my comrade, my fellow-dreamer in diaspora...

{Ongoing Thoughts About Femininity, Motherhood and Women's Poetry}

2011-08-15T16:43:00.000-07:00

The poems about daughterhood I have written in the recent past, and which I have begun to send out recently, are generally more appreciated by men than by women. I didn't think about this part of the reception when I was writing them. It is only recently that I have come to recognize this aspect of the reception of my own work. I am still processing it, and I don't have any well-developed theorization about it.

But I have my suspicions. I think, men and women are taught/socialized to think about inter-generational relationships differently. Men think conflict as an integral element of inter-generational relationships. Women think of them more in terms of nurturing. Coming-of-age for girls often translates into accommodating themselves into the imperatives of the roles of nurturers and care-givers. Personally, I don't think these are either/or realities. Both conflict and nurturing can co-exist within a particular relationship. In fact, I would say, most relationships, which move beyond a superficial exchange of niceties, involve both. Where the whole thing gets more complicated is the place where our inter-generational experiences get constructed in specific ways by the societies and cultures we live in.

By that token, women are not expected to write about conflicts, the anger they feel for their mothers. Instead, mother-poems, like grandmother-poems, are supposed to be all about nostalgia-- of finding that space of purity where mother and daughter come to share bonds. Of course, there are plenty of women poets who have written against that expectation, but in my experience, it still throws people off, and especially women readers, when they encounter a woman writing about conflict in their relationship with the mother. It is as if the denial of the mother would come to an essential denial of the writing woman's own femininity. And this is something, I plan to write about very soon, it's still very hard for women writers (and women in general) to lay claim to their own anger. The mainstream women's poetry in this country (written mostly by white women) bears important testimony to that. I can say the same thing about Bengali women's poetry too. But that's going to be a whole different post.

::Happy Weekend Thoughts--Or Things You Tell Yourself To Survive::

2011-08-13T11:19:00.000-07:00

I often get jittery around my failures or rather my lack of success. For example, for the last two months I have been submitting to journals almost every day. I have had only one acceptance so far. While I am grateful for that, I also feel anxious that I haven't had better luck. And then I begin to think, maybe it's just that I am not good enough. Maybe. But I also keep telling myself, I have a bad habit of starting projects and not finishing them. I have wasted a big part of my 20s that way. There were other reasons why I could not be "creative" in that way during my twenties, but this is also one of it. I have had the patience or persistence to see through things. Grad school has changed that a little bit. It has made me see how sometimes you just have to show up day after day without expecting results. And then one day, you really begin to see the difference in your own work. At least that's what has happened to me.

Now, I am struggling with the next stage. In the last four years that I have been taking writing seriously, I have been able to generate enough raw materials. But a lot of these are just that: raw materials, early drafts. Interesting, but not piercing enough. So, I need to take my work to the next level. I need to keep on working, polishing and revising my drafts.

Today, I am finally giving myself the permission to admit that:

I am not really that writer who will get it right the first time. Or not even in the second or the third or the fourth. But maybe in the sixteenth. And if I stay true to myself and the work till that sixteenth time, I will probably produce something that's halfway decent.

The struggle, then, is to stick to it. To keep coming back, even on days when I am feeling low, or like a massive failure.

PS. The accompanying painting is by artist Silvia Gold. It speaks to my present mood!

{Thursday Happy}

2011-08-11T12:26:00.000-07:00

It is not like me to perform my "happyhappyhappy" self on blog and/or Facebook. That's why, I have mostly refrained from posting status messages on my fb page. I don't want to sound "happy" to the world, neither do I want to perform depressed. But right now, I am feeling pretty low. As I said, in one of the previous posts, I know the reasons. Some, I do have control over. But those are not things that can be taken care of right away. They need painstaking labor. Others, are beyond my control. Like the mental state of my childhood friend, whom I love deeply. Or the London riots. Or the war. So, this is an exercise I will indulge in for the next three months. I will list three things that made me happy during a particular week. This the first installment:

Cooking A New Chicken Dish

I have been on the lookout for a new chicken dish on the web for a while, and then I did run into one. It's a more spicy spin on the chicken korma that I used to cook. So, here is how I did it:

a. Marinate the chicken with ginger paste, salt, cumin and coriander powder, cayenne pepper powder.

b. Grind fennel seeds, peppercorn seeds, red chilli, cinnamon sticks and cardamom seeds.

c. Heat ghee/oil. I used ghee, since I am really keen on unhealthy eating.

d. Then pour in the ground spice mixture. Let it sizzle for a minute or two. Keep stirring the wok.

e. Slice onions, pour them into the mix, and put on a low-medium heat and cook it till the onions are brown and halfway between soft and crunchy. Sweat the onions so that the final dish is tastier.

f. Slice a tomato, and add it into the mix. Now, let everything turn slowly into a mush/paste.

g. Brown the marinated chicken. Once they have been browned, remove them into the main cooking pot. Stir and mix well with the tomato-onion spice mix. Feel free to add sugar, salt and chilli powder according to taste. I like to add a little sugar along with the spice, because I like the caramelized taste of the spices.

h. Then add1 cup of yoghurt. Add it one spoon at a time and mix thoroughly. Add chicken broth- about a cup and a half and cook it down till the chicken is cooked and the paste is thick. If the chicken isn't cooked and the broth is drying out, add more.

This turned out to be fairly good. And made me think, even if I cannot write a good dissertation or a good book of poems, or a good short story or whatever, I can still cook somewhat tasty meals for myself.

Meeting With KA

KA and I had our poems published in a journal together. So, over the last two weeks, we had gotten in touch with each other over the email, and had decided on meeting for coffee, which we did yesterday. We hit it off immediately, and are trying to plan some activities/projects together. But, this meeting, I will count from now on, as an example of positive, productive, creative "networking", as against the totally inane "professional" kind, that I have come to hate so much in the recent years.

Watching Fellini

Last night, R and I watched Luci del Varieta. As a film, it's an interesting one. But nothing that would turn my head off. But the fact that I could make time to actually sit down and see it, is something that needs to be celebrated. These days, I am so tired that I rarely find the mental peace and the intellectual energy to sit down and watch an intelligent film. I will write my thoughts on the film soon. But, for now, I am happy that I got to see it.

Writing In Forms

2011-08-10T05:55:00.000-07:00

Writing in forms brings out the alienationist in me. Especially when I attempt sestina. Why? Because my grasp over forms is still not that strong. So, it's hard for me to exercise control over both the form and the material. So, the material begins to act more and more like a fill-in-the-gap, while I try to stay faithful to the formal constraints as much as possible. It's easier to rant about my despair than anything else in forms, especially the ones where repetition is the key structural cement. Here's a sestina I finished yesterday, for my Writing In Forms class. According to the prompt, we needed to write a sestina including a beverage, a tool, a color, a language, an animal, and an artist or an author as the end words.

Alienation

Chronicler of the unborn sisters of the iconic bards in blue,

Afraid of my own room in my father's house, dark as milk-less coffee,

I wandered around the city, craving to break it open with a hammer.

Instead, I shared my park-bench with a stray dog.

In my round schoolgirl's hand, translated entire paragraphs in Bengali

from a much-used, brittle volume by a memsahib named Woolf.

These two women in a room, of whom she wrote about—this Woolf,

exploded out of words written about them, like the knee-length tweeds in navy blue,

from which I felt bursting too, cursing in homecooked Bengali.

This city,peopled by historians alone, where men drink coffee

leaving their wives behind in locked kitchens, to pant like dogs,

I roamed the sidewalks, fingers flipping through pages, hammering

curse-words in the margins. The marble angel whispers promises, hammered

in the fountain, unable to move his head for a glimpse of a page of Woolf.

In the used bookshacks of in the rusty downtown, I, with dogged

determination, looked for foremothers. Girls my age, in satin-blue,

made out with lovers behind open umbrellas, refusing to drink coffee,

thus preserving the ivory of their skins, as befits girls of Bengal.

Me, who, more than anything else, is afraid of Bengaled,

would walk around the streets, head hammering

against illegible graffitis. Strutting in alone inside coffee

houses, inserting my own scribbles in the white spaces of Woolf's.

There was a girl with a flute,her scarf deeply blue.

Her cheeks in pink glitter, she vomited her story-quests in the ear of her per dog.

The street, that day, were strewn with broken clay birds and corpses of dogs.

The girl with the flute, out of sympathy, offered to buy my scribbles in Bengali.

Just like a Scheherazade, who had just finished a story, I felt the blues.

In an almost alley, on an old banyan branch, I learnt to hammer

strangers' stories, to avoid being beheaded. Did she ever, that (Mrs.) Woolf?

The town lunatic danced around me, stopping often enough to beg for coffee.

Trying to memorize the city streets, I see blood-drops in pots of coffee.

Money for school-lunches now exhausted, I carve clay dogs

for the toy-seller in the square, relieved she wouldn't know of Woolf

or her ghosts following me around. With callouses shaped like Bengali

alphabets in her palm, in the wings of her wooden birds, she hammers

steadiness. The nails gave her bruises, violet-blue.

The historians, while sipping coffee, try to fashion a Bengali sans expletives.

The girl, in order to avoid being beheaded, hammers her tales inside the tongues of the dog.

I burn my paragraphs from Woolf, the fire swallows the blue.

Despair

2011-08-08T15:15:00.000-07:00

I am in that place again. I feel a listlessness creeping in, I am finding it hard to work on new poems, or revise old ones. I know the reasons behind my feeling like this—but I don't know the cures. Most of them don't depend on me. I am not sure what to do—so I keep on doing what I know best: I work on my dissertation every day, although I don't always find it easy. I keep submitting poems to journals. I am trying to read, although honestly, I am finding it hard to read too. I am typing these few lines, because I don't want this space to die.

Revising, Rewriting

2011-07-30T06:48:00.000-07:00

I am figuring out that I am that kind of poet who needs to figure out the political thrust and the sociological implications of the different elements of the craft and the content before moving a project forward. For years, I have been ashamed of this character of mine. As if I am a lesser poet because of it. Now, I don't think as much of the "lesser" part. Instead, what has become important is the element of getting the work done. So, now I have retrieved my Cinderella's step-sister poems again. In the first version, that was published in Pratilipi, I had reclaimed the figure of the step-sister, given her a voice, and I would even say, it was a feminist voice. Now, that I read it, I think, there are some good lines there. Some good images. I like the overall tone, which is a combination of passion, anger and lots of bitterness. And, I was also trying to problematize homogenous, easy notions of sisterhood. The step-sister clearly feels that Cinderella has been complicit with her own silencing. Cinderella, for me, became the symbol of a certain kind of neo-liberal feminism, which is trying to find its liberation within the consumer culture, commodified ethos. (Yes, I do think, Cinderella provides a wonderful conduit to rewrite neoliberalism.)

When I turned in a somewhat rough draft of a manuscript to KRA, I had modified these series of poems a lot. I had included Cinderella's voice within it, I have strengthened the step-sister's voice, and made it more specific. There was an implicit assumption running through the poems in this particular version --- the step-sis is a folklorist herself. She can break her deal with the Grimms Brothers, precisely because she is a folklorist herself, and does not need male folklorists who will tell her story. I have suggested this implicitly, but didn't really expand on it. Now that I am reading through these poems, I think, this figure of the folklorist needs to be developed and spelled out a lot more in these poems. The implicitness was a starting-point, but it won't work, until and unless the poems delve a little bit more into the politics of a woman becoming a folklorist. And how folklore as a discipline brings up all sorts of problems. I am hoping to finish giving the whole series a read within the next two or three days, and then I will have to think about the re-writing part. But at this point, I am excited just to have figured this out.

::"I Don't Like Poetry"::

2011-07-28T14:47:00.000-07:00

In the past two weeks, I have heard from two (no, three) young friends of mine, "I don't like poetry." I should have felt defensive, I guess. But I didn't. Probably because I could relate to that feeling. I loved to read, and by the time I was college-age, I was fairly well-read. Yet, I didn't sign up for an English major, inspite of getting in at Jadavpur's famous program, because I couldn't stand the thought of going through pages and pages of Romantic poetry. But then, it wasn't that I didn't like any poetry-- I spend all my allowance to buy collections by Pablo Neruda. This was in eleventh grade. I liked Mayakovosky, and a lot of the Bengali poetry I found in my parents' bookshelves. But it's also true, there were a huge number of poets whose work I didn't necessarily like or understand. The funny thing is, now I LOVE Romantic poets. A lot of the poets I dismissed then, I now love. Or, think of as plain problematic. I mean, there is no middle-ground here. Now, when I think back on the process of what brought me back to poetry, I would say, it's a combination of my increasing politicization, my conviction that art plays an extremely important role in building up a liberated world (and not just in a propagandist kind of a way), and my last twelve years of serious engagement with literature. A lot of that engagement did happen within academic spaces, but not all of it. For example, I have never studied poetry academically. But I do think, the kind of academic work I have done with prose, has helped me to think about poetry in more complex terms. The thing is, I understand the world of the Romantics much better now precisely because I am more familiar with the Euro-American social histories of those times. I have a better idea about the ideological, political, aesthetic, philosophical forces the Romantics were engaging with. Yes, it's precisely a better grasp of the social, cultural and intellectual history of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that leads me to appreciate Romantic poetry better. But the kind of poetry-teaching I encountered when I was a teenager, excluded precisely these complexities. Consequently, I had no yardstick or context to think through the poems. I guess, this is precisely the kind of literature pedagogy that Gauri Vishwanathan writes about in her book Masks of Conquest. The pedagogy that came about from the cultural/education/ideological projects of the empire. So, I would say, at the cost of sounding reductionist, one of the ways in which poetry can be democratized is by engaging more and more with the sociology and social history of the form itself. By showing how poetry is not something that stands apart from the rest of the society and world, but is one way of writing that world. And therefore, inextricably related to the social, political, other art forms of its times.

::Life Now::

2011-07-27T13:30:00.000-07:00

Writing...er...Dissertation

Drinking

Reading

::Post-Workshop Thoughts::

2011-07-25T18:14:00.000-07:00

The last five days were busy. I now have a lot to process: my trip to DC, the workshop I did with the youth. Ideally, I would have liked the workshop to be longer. It's hard to fit in discussions of a cultural/social history with discussions of art-forms and then combine the two with some kind of writing exercise--- all within 90 minutes. What would have worked better was a three-day workshop where I could divide up the stuff into little bits and pieces. Something like

DAY 1: Discussions about food, cultural/social politics of it

DAY 2: Reading and discussing the poems together

DAY 3: Writing, critiquing and reading aloud each others' poems

But I didn't have that kind of luxury. Neither did the organizers. So, after I was done facilitating the workshop, I myself felt overwhelmed. And it made me think, how everything, and especially art-making is a process. It takes time. It needs time. One of the things that came up during the discussion was, how poetry is "abstract'. One of the workshop-participants categorically stated, I don't like poetry. This is something I would have definitely liked to explore more within the space of the workshop. One of the things that I have been thinking about ever since, I had no time/opportunity to talk to the workshop-participants about their familiarity with poetry or even literature. Is poetry something they relate to at all? If they were given a choice to choose their genres for the workshop, how many of them would have chosen poetry? What would have prompted their choices? I would have loved to know. So, I was also thinking, how very very logistic concerns like time, our scanty resources often end up reproducing the very myths we are trying to dispel. When I sign up for a poetry workshop, I sign up for it because I want to work on my poems. I have chosen the form as my genre, I want to get better at it, and hence my decision to sign up for the workshop. But the youth I worked with, did not necessarily sign up for a poetry workshop. They signed up for a three-day event where they would interact with their fellow South Asians on things. My workshop was something the organizers chose to present to them. So, in spite of all the good intentions and best of efforts, when working within structures like this one, we cannot really avoid centralized decisions.

Now having said that, I would also say, I am happy that I got a chance to do what I did. Maybe some of them will think about poetry as a form of self-expression now. Maybe some of them will take to writing it. Maybe some of them will begin to read it. And that's why, I am in favor of doing workshops in all kinds of settings. I think, it's important to do writing/poetry workshops in settings where the emphasis is clearly not on poetry or writing or even art. Because, I think, something about conducting a workshop in such so-called non-literary/non-artsy setting democratizes the very process of art-production. It demystifies art-forms and encourages people who wouldn't have ever thought about these forms to engage with them. It's especially important when the form is something like poetry--a form which lends itself to abstraction, and therefore, also to elitist obscurantism.

::Imperial/Racial Privilege And Workshops::

2011-07-14T21:31:00.000-07:00

There was a time today when I was angry. It wasn't a personal sort of anger, but anger which emerges from the helplessness of someone who is trying in her own way to be a better writer. Now, I will record the same questions I was asking myself this afternoon:

a. Am I responsible as a writer for my readers' lack of sociological knowledge?

b. I am not writing an ethnography of my neighborhood in Kolkata. I am writing stories--damn it. So, no, I am not going to explain the "social and cultural differences." Yes, someone said that in my fucking workshop-- Explain the social and cultural differences! I am pissed, because I read around 50 books every year. Almost 60% of them are on contexts into which I wasn't born. No, I don't expect any of the writers to "explain" to me the "social and cultural differences." When I feel like I don't know the history, I do the work. Period. So, this very assumption that it is the responsibility of the non-American writer to explain to the American reader what's going on, the "social and the cultural differences", clearly reeks of an imperial, white privilege. There isn't any other way to think about it.

c. A lot of the feedback I get from the workshops want me to do the work for my readers. They want me to fill in the gaps in their sociological/historical/anthropological knowledge. So, I have to do a lot of separating the wheat from the chaff, if I still want to get some benefits from the workshopping.

d. This makes me mad because the white and/or American writers can throw in a story to the group, sit back and not have to ever think of how "social and cultural differences" are working within their stories.

e. I don't bring up these issues inside the workshops. Why? Because I know none of these people are being deliberately racist and/or imperialist. More importantly, none of them wants to think of himself/herself as such. So my pointing these things out will cause them to have a knee-jerk reaction, they will stop commenting on my stories frequently. I don't want that to happen. The thing is, I have signed up for these workshops so that I can learn. I am not yet in a space as a writer to take up these issues. (Yet, I am, no? Otherwise, I wouldn't be writing this post.But I am not ready to take them up publicly yet.)

f. One would think, after the work of Gloria Anzaldua et al., this country, especially those who want to write, will have a better awareness of these kinds of representational/cultural politics. Nope! No such luck! Seems like every one of us colored folks will have to launch and plunge through our individual struggle!

Now that I have vented, and written this post, I need to go back to the actual work: writing my poems and stories. Maybe some day I will be able to talk about these things more explicitly. But now is not the time! Inshallah!

.Facilitating Youth Workshop.

2011-07-13T20:52:00.000-07:00

I am going to Washington DC in a couple of weeks to facilitate a writing-workshop with South Asian youth. I do not have a whole lot of time for the workshop-- only 75 minutes. Now, it's hard to do anything remarkable during that time. What can be done though, is to open a door or two, and then hope that the young people in the workshop will pick it up. There is no substitution for long-term work, and none of the fruits of a long-term project can be attained during a 75 minute workshop. So far, I have thought of centering the workshop on food.

In my experience, most young people in USA do not necessarily think of food as something political. Some brighter ones might think about it as cultural, but rarely have I met with kiddos who think of food as political. Consequently, they do not have the knee-jerk reaction to it in the same way they have to something like race or class, which they have always associated with politics. These young people I will be workshopping with, are more socially conscious. A lot of them are already involved with community projects. So, I do not think apolitics is going to be an issue. What is going to be an issue though, is to restrict myself. As a workshop facilitator, I need to have clear sense of goals. A 75 min workshop cannot be both a seminar on food-justice issues and a writing workshop. For that to happen, we need at least a month of regular meetings. So, I am trying to remind myself, this is primarily a writing workshop. And I am not someone who is "cool" in that edgy kind of a way. When I talk about writing, I talk about in a very old-style way. Why? Because I think, the book, the printed page and the very act of physical writing can (still) give us things which other art/media forms cannot. So, one of the things I will try to do is to, encourage the young people I will meet to be more cognizant of the form "book" as a whole--not an e-book or a kindle. But an actual paper book which one can grab between one's fingers. I will update more on this workshop as I go along! But I am EXCITED!

~Why This Blog~

2011-07-12T21:39:00.000-07:00

I am not very good in writing reviews of poetry collections, short-story collections or novels. My LONG training in academic literary criticism has taught me to think through words, plots, themes, characters in a relatively more expansive way than the usual review would permit. That's why, this blog space is important for me. Because it allows me to articulate my thoughts about writing and literature in a very different way from my formal academic training. While I wouldn't mind anyone else reading this blog, and there are some close friends of mine who read this blog, this is a space primarily for me and my own self. This is a space where I write to articulate ideas, thoughts, reflections, concerns. Maybe some day I won't feel the need for this space in the same way. And then I won't write here anymore. But for now, here I am, scribbling some fragments right before going to bed.

;;Individual Poems Vs. Manuscript;;

2011-07-11T07:56:00.000-07:00

As I am sending out poems to journals from the manuscript 2, I am learning that the book and the individual-poem-in-the-journal-from-the-book are two very different genres. Although inter-related. The individual poems, when they are being sent out to the journals, as stand-alone poems, often need to be tweaked, modified and given more definite shape, because they need to function as one whole piece, something autonomous. On the other hand, when they are part of a manuscript, especially if the manuscript itself is functioning as one whole thematic unit, they are not standing alone. Rather, they contribute to the meaning making process by being one of many. Of course, the individual poems still need to be strong enough and autonomous enough so that they can stand on their own two feet, but the pressures there are slightly different. At this point, this whole process of sending individual poems out in the world is turning out to be an extremely productive one. I am revising the individual poems, making them stronger, better. Without the deadlines of the journals, I don't think I would have done them so promptly. Besides, it's easier to take one poem at a time and revise it, rather than a whole manuscript.

Robert Frost's "Directive"

2011-07-09T15:03:00.000-07:00

I have enrolled in a form class. I think, as a general rule of thumb, my poems are too rowdy. Not very disciplined. Kind of like my mind. The things I write about, tend to find their own forms, rather than stay within the norms of the forms. But isn't that the thing about forms? But, I still think, it's good to try to write in forms. Like, this week, we are doing "blank verse." A form, which, admittedly leads itself to "imitation and reflection of thought." In other words, wordy! Now, this shouldn't scare me, the verbose person that I am. Except for the fact that all this wordiness needs to be expressed in iambic pentameter, in a fixed order of stressed and unstressed syllables. From what we read this week, I really liked Robert Frost's "Directive."
Frost's poem, I think, is very much a pastoral and anti-pastoral at the same time. I was trying to read it in conjunction with Charlotte Smith's poem, where the nature has been personified, the narrator seems to be in perfect harmony with it. But in Frost's poem, “nature” and “human history” confront each other in a somewhat antagonistic relationship. The nature is beautiful in Frost's poem too, but it changes through human intervention. It is almost as if Frost feels compelled to use the same form in which pastoral poems were written to show that his concerns are very different. I think, that sentiment has been best expressed in the opening lines: “ Back out of all this now too much for us,/Back in a time made simple by the loss/Of detail burned, dissolved, and broken off/Like graveyard marble sculpture in the weather.
It seemed to me that in lots of places Frost is lapsing into hexameter. For me, what is meant was that, he was looking for a form, which needed to be a little bit hefty. As if his thoughts are struggling to fit themselves in lines, and even a pentameter is not always adequate for him.

. Paris Spleen.

2011-07-08T20:08:00.000-07:00

I am halfway through Baudelaire's Paris Spleen. I do want to read the original French, but I thought, I should give a quick reading of the English translation before beginning to labor with the original. Yes, it's gorgeous. I am trying to put my finger on why I like it so much, but there is something in those paragraphs that resists explanation. But still, if I have to enunciate what it is about these poems that are drawing me so much to them, it is the sense of despair. The sense of despair that invades a mind which can see more than others. The sense of despair which follows the realization that individual human beings are capable of immense fuck-up and immense greatness--sometimes within seconds.The same human being who has fucked something up gloriously, can also do something which will blow away your mind. Personally, I like those poems best, where he moves beyond his own sense of despair, where he takes a character and tries to see what lies beyond what immediately meets the eye. On the other hand, when I read his self-despairing rants, I have to keep reminding myself, this is one of the original alienationists. The ones I have grown-up reading, are more like derivates, fakes. Now, keeping that in mind, it also seems that the alienationists haven't really updated themselves much after Baudelaire! Now, this is the glitch:

Paris Spleen is so beautiful that sometimes I have to pinch myself to the reminder that Baudelaire was a jackass. A fucking egotistical jackass!

{So Far}

2011-07-04T19:08:00.000-07:00

The days are hot, I am tired...I am slowly feeling that I am zoning out more and more from certain kinds of writing. The struggle is: how much to tell, and how much to keep outside the page. Not in my mind, just outside the page.

This weekend, so far:

I have read two short stories by Carol Azadeh
Worked on revising two poems
Worked on revising a story
Worked on revising/writing an academic article
cooked alu-phoolkopir dalna from The Hindi-Bindi Club, of all places. Didn't turn out to be too bad
Eaten BM's eggplant parmesan
Watched Pyasa along with my running commentary

It seems like the most common feedback for my poems is that, I need more clarity. This confuses me, because I don't want my poems to be stories, in the same way I don't want my stories to be film-scripts. I began to love poetry because it allowed imagistic, impressionistic expression. Playing with language, fragmentation. But, a lot of my readers want clarity here. I am trying to think about the issue of “clarity” in my work. Why do I need to explain myself so much?

[Explaining Kiranmala]

2011-07-02T17:08:00.000-07:00

I was recently asked by a writer-friend of mine about the storyteller-commentator divide I create in this poem. The way she put it:

commenting too has its place in the scheme of things, while stories, too, differ from each other

And this is what I wrote back to her:

For me, it's not the line between "fiction" and "non-fiction" that the words "commentator" and "storyteller" invoke. Although, that's how we understand those two words generally, especially within our commonsensical knowledge. Rather, the way I have tried to approach it in this poem, "commentators" are those who reproduce knowledge, rather than producing it. They do not essentially challenge the boundaries of dominant thoughts and well-established maxims. On the other hand, "storytellers" are those who push our accepted borders of thought, language, norms, knowledge and produce something that is, for lack of any better word,more original,organic and boundary-busting. There are lots of "commentators" in the world of creative writing. As there are many "storytellers" among the theorists, writers of non-fiction prose.

Now, you can ask me, why Kiranmala? Why am I ascribing upon her that role. Well, I was thinking about the ways in which knowledge production has always been a site of gender discrimination in South Asia (and elsewhere). It's not just gender, race, class and caste have been used too, to keep thousands of people from away from written texts and intellectual resources. Think of all the prohibitions around women and shudras listening to/speaking/ learning Sanskrit. Just think of the news that made headlines last week: a temple in Orissa does not allow the Dalits to cross its threshold. Similarly, it was illegal for slaves in the colonial plantations to learn to read and write, as it was to teach them. But does that mean that women, untouchables, the enslaved, and other marginalized folks who have been systematically excluded from literacy, did not think about the world around them? Does that mean they did not theorize about their own conditions? Not really! But they theorized differently. They theorized through songs, proverbs, stories(which "we" sometimes call folk-tale), dance-forms and numerous other aesthetic expressions. So, those very art-forms, for them, became forms of commenting. But at the same time, they are also attempts to tell stories. Stories with characters, histories, emotions embodied within the forms. They are all trying to tell a story, whether through language, through colors or through musical notes. But where they differ from, say the knowledge that was being learnt by white men, men of upper castes (esp. Brahmins) etc. is that, those forms of knowledge, as against these aesthetic expressions I have been talking about, were supported by institutions, dominant cultures. These forms of knowledge are meant to reinforce and reproduce the status quo, whereas the other forms of knowledges, often embodied in aesthetic expressions, question that social status quo. So, to put it simply,

Commentators=those who engage in institution-sponsored knowledge

Storytellers= who try to reclaim their voices from outside of the institutions

So, in my poem, I tried to give Kiranmala some agency, some creativity. As a woman, she is excluded from the world of Brahmanical knowledge production and learning. But instead of feeling victimized by that exclusion, she proclaims that she does not find that knowledge, the books her brothers are learning to memorize, aren't useful for her at all. She rejects institutional knowledge, rejects the language associated with state power/institutional power, and demands something else for herself. She is looking for alternative methods of expressing herself. The language that is specific to this context is, of course, Sanskrit. But if we move beyond that specifics, it can very well be construed as any power-language, any language that the institution upholds as exclusive and legitimate. Hence the storyteller-commentator divide.

Now, an honest admission: it does feel very weird to explain my own poem to someone. The poem, I believe, should speak for itself. And then, there is this little niggling thingie, that my years of academic training in literary criticism has taught me to decode almost all literary texts. I can justify any badly-written text, I can tear apart almost any gloriously-written piece of writing. And I don't think, those skills are useless. But at the same time, because I can do this with such ease, I prefer not to turn back my own critical gaze into my own poem after it has been published aka. gone from my hands. The poem should speak for itself.

But then, I write about things that are often considered uncomfortable-- gender, class, emotional cost of ascribing to a political ideology. Pepper this with reference to obscure texts, myths, folklore that often invade my lines. So, my poems, I do understand, can be a little dense sometimes. If I am faithful to my work as a poet, I will have to do a little bit of unpacking for my audience, precisely because I am not writing on nostalgic poems about one's childhood in an American suburb. My poems need more education than an average white-American poem. And even when the readers are Indian/South Asian/Bengali, I still might have to do some unpacking, because I am trying to debunk things that have been socially accepted. Even after all of this explanation and contextualization, some readers might not just like the poems I write. Therein, I guess, lies the test as a poet/artist.

::Publication in Hawai'i Review::

2011-07-01T06:35:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I received two copies of Hawai'i Review Issue 74 in mail. Yes, my contributors' copies. I held them in my hand, sniffed through them, and then looked through the TOC. There it was--my name in print and my poem. My work has not been published in many print journals, so this was an incredible feeling. There is something so tangible and ephemeral at the same time in holding a book, feeling its material presence, and then realizing that I, too, played a part--however small it might be--in bringing it into being.

I read my published poem after getting out of work. Some imageries sounded cool! As if someone else had written them. But there were also things I would like to change. For example, some line-breaks. There are places in the poem where I need to strive for more clarity. So, what I realized was that, even if a journal publishes a poem, it doesn't mean that it is "final." What it means is that, at a certain point in my life, I thought this poem was completed. I had sent it out in the world. It found a home, but that does not mean that the poem itself has to remain unchanged. And once it changes, it will also have to look for a new home. The book, or something a little bit lengthier than 8 pages in a journal. I grow as a human being and a writer every day. My poems and stories also grow with me.

By the way, the name of the poem is "bildungsroman." Read it!

.Mother-Daughter Poems.

2011-06-29T09:53:00.000-07:00

I have refrained from making any long-term writing goals this summer because my dissertation is wearing me out. It is hard for me to concentrate on any other big project at this time. The best I can manage is to give at least 30 minutes to my creative writing every day. Beyond that, it is hard for me to plan my creative writing projects in a more sustained kind of a way. I need to get the dissertation done first. So far I have been keeping up with that schedule-- I haven't written any new stuff recently, but I am revising. And the truth be told, I have too many first drafts lying around which need my more focused attention. So I am not too anxious that I am not producing/generating too many new texts right now. And also, revising is HARDER. At least for me. Because it demands that I dig deeper. The poems that I am working on revising right now, are more personal and autobiographical than I have ever written. So, when I try to revise, I re-visit parts of myself which I have kept hidden from my own eyes for way too long. It's almost as if the poems are holding up the mirror in front of me, and forcing me to look into the contradictions of the Post-Partition Bengali-Hindu lower middle-class/middle middle-class gender roles, and the way they played out in the everyday mother-daughter interactions. I cannot work on these poems for too long. I often feel that I am talking too much. Then there are times I feel I am saying too little. And I keep wondering, how will these poems be classified by others who read them? Confessional? Autobiographical? Will there be anyone who will consider these poems as remotely political? I don't know!

Revising the Phelna Story

2011-06-28T17:06:00.000-07:00

I started revising a short story after a while. I have had it sitting there for a while, then I turned it in for the Spring workshop, and then felt like revising it based on the feedback I got from the class. Besides, it will also help break my fiction lull. I have very modest aims--to put in 4-6 pages every week of this workshop. That is, roughly a page a day. Right now, other than the teaching philosophy, that's all I can deal with. I am definitely leading a very wordy life.

Julie Speed

2011-06-27T06:17:00.000-07:00

One of the visual artists I "discovered" during this weekend:

Julie Speed

{this sunday}

2011-06-26T18:18:00.000-07:00

This weekend I took a break from academic work. Yesterday was old bookstore and then having dessert and coffee with a friend. Today was celebration for the pubs and finally turning the chapter 3 of my dissertation to the co-director. The books I bought yesterday:

1. Harry Potter and The Goblet of Fire

2. Alcestis by Kate Beutner

3. Rice by Nikki Finney

4. Vice by Ai

5. Sin by Ai

6. Gabriela Mistral Reader

I totally shouldn't have done this given than I am SO broke. But my excuse is, I am a writer and an academic lit-critter. So, books are one of the essential components of my means of production.

Today, I finally went to Austin Museum of Art and saw the Mona Lisa Project exhibit they are hosting right now. It is an interesting concept in itself. For me, a project like this one basically boils down to an aesthetic interrogation of the notion of beauty itself. For a while now, I have ceased to think the terms beauty and aesthetics as politically neutral. There is no way one can divorce these two words from ideologies of race and gender central to modernity. So, the fact that this exhibit has taken up a visual text which has long been understood as one of the iconic documents to provide the humanity with a definition and demonstration of beauty is interesting in itself. But, I wished the artists had pushed the boundaries more. For one thing, the project does not attempt to interrogate whiteness enough. There is only one work by an artist of color. And the inclusion of that work seemed very much like tokenism.

But, I am also wary of the way the women artists themselves have tried to perform Mona Lisa. While that act does problematize the inherent passivity and all the connotations of body-beauty image, the women are still very much the object of photographic/artistic gaze. Very rarely do they assume the active creator/artist persona themselves. So, for me, most of the visual texts ended up reifying what it was trying to question. But all in all, an interesting show, and I would be interested to see if this particular group of collaborating artists take this idea further.

After the exhibit, came coffee and explorations of some new coffee-shops. And then, some writing time with tea. I am trying to revise a short story based on the feedback I got from my last workshop. Will blog about that process later.

::Why Kiranmala::

2011-06-26T08:12:00.000-07:00

A friend of mine, after reading the poem in Stonetelling, asked me, why I chose Kiranmala. Is it because she is a "Bong" heroine. There are lots of reasons why I am fascinated by Kiranmala, but I don't think her "Bongness" is one of them. This is something that I have been thinking about a lot these days: this question of identity in the way it often comes up in my discussions with friends and students who are second generation South Asians in this country. Bangla has never been about "identity" or "heritage" to me in the way American identity politics speaks about one's racial/cultural/ethnic identity. It was the first language that I learnt. My sense of music has been formed by Bangla words, the cadence of that language. I sing Bangla songs when I am alone without really thinking about it, because that's what I know, that's what there is in my sub-conscious mind. I didn't grow up in a social milieu where people were "post-colonial hybrids." English was a foreign language to them, a familiar foreign language, but a foreign language still. They were scared of it, in awe of its skilled users. Some people I know and have grown up with, managed to developed a functional knowledge of it. My father one amongst them. Most didn't. In India, how one uses English gives out one's economic and cultural class. The lower-middle class, suburban Kolkata milieu where I grew up, people spoke, read, wrote in Bangla. That's what they still do. And I know, if I have to make any attempt towards building up any thread of communication with them, I cannot give up writing in Bangla. So, Bangla is my identity in a certain way. But it's way more than that.

Now, getting back to Kiranmala, she is someone whose life I can imagine much more easily than that a Greek goddess' or Celtic heroine's. Her story I have heard and read many many times. I can imagine how she looked like, what she ate, what colors she loved, what she wore. I can imagine her interior life in a relatively effortless way. Besides, my lit-critter's mind tells me, not a whole lot of work has been done on re-interpreting Bengali folklore, folktales, myths and fairytales. And I am not totally unqualified to do that! So, that's why I write about Kiranmala. Because I can crawl under skin, I can stay there, I can shout and shed tears from there. Yes yes yes....

Publication

2011-06-25T18:14:00.000-07:00

Here's a poem of mine recently published:

http://stonetelling.com/issue4-jun2011/dhar-kiran.html

I am proud to share space with so many others whose writings I have admired from afar. I am indeed very happy, and the issue itself is great!

Critical and Creative: Some Reflections

2011-06-20T08:03:00.000-07:00

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.

Favorite Quotes

2011-06-19T21:21:00.000-07:00

Literature is the big bonanza, and writing is getting down on one's knees each day and searching for the exact words.

---Edna O'Brien

~::Ongoing Thoughts::~

2011-06-12T09:09:00.000-07:00

I have received some "good rejections" lately. Meaning, the editors have admitted that although they are not accepting my work right now, they like it overall. Most of them have named one or two poems which came real close. And and... all of them have asked me to submit more work. I am happy. This acknowledgement, however small it might be, makes me feel that I am not writing/reading in a vacuum. I am trying to keep the work-pace going. But this work of a writer is not easy.

For example, this week I am working on revising my "Portraits" poem. And it wasn't until the fifth revision/draft that the poem began to look like something presentable. Even then I know I might come back to it a couple of months later, and think "ehhh, is this all I could manage!" In other words, there is something very intangible, very ephemeral in the process of art production. The same can be argued for knowledge production. I can spend a year trying to perfect an article only to find that I need to do some more archival work to get a better sense of my foundational argument. To use a cliche, the work is never done.

On the other hand, when I am cooking, cleaning, taking care of the housework, running errands, there is a very finite quality to these chores. I take care of them one by one. I feel done. Accomplished. It is very easy to distract oneself with housework and some such shit when I am confronting that ephemeral non-doneness in my more creative/critical work. I have heard a lot of women talk about how they use housework as a form of pro-castination. Being someone who isn't too drawn to housework beyond the imperatives of hygiene, I could never really understand that mentality until very recently. But it also makes me think ,if a lot of it has to do with internalizing the gendered norms/dominant philosophies of the world around us. The tradition "women's work" have always been more tangible, finite in nature.On the other hand, boys and men are socialized to gravitate towards work which require more abstraction of mind. This, to me, seems like one of the foundational philosophies of the gendered division of labor. Interestingly, even when women moved out of their homes into the public world of commodified production, the kinds of work in which they concentrated were/are the ones which are relatively finite and tangible in nature. Which make use of the skills they would pick up while learning to run a home swiftly. Like that of a secretary. That's why, women's participation in knowledge and art production, even today, brings up so many different kinds of anxieties, both in women themselves and those around them.

::Silence::Language:: Manuscript::

2011-06-04T15:06:00.000-07:00

I am not so concerned with silence as I am with evolving a language for writing/talking about things that have not been or rarely talked about. That is what I am struggling with in my poems. It is not my intention to throw upon the world more victimology. Nor I am interested in writing my own sob-stories. What I am interested in, is to write about the constructions of family, motherhood and familial love. I am concerned about the nation-mother equalization. The way that construction has such stronghold in Bengali cultural and literary imaginaries. There is hardly any language that I can fall back upon while I am doing this work. I am struggling with the language, with the craft. And the easiest thing would be to give it up, and fall into silence. But that silence won't speak. There are times when silence speaks. There are times when it doesn't.

!Summer!

2011-06-03T18:37:00.000-07:00

This week has been one of firsts-- the first visit to IKEA, the first installation of a table in my room, the two shelves, and a house-plant. Along with it comes the fear that am I growing up (read, am I becoming domesticated)? I keep telling myself, it's not me, it's the bugs. Yes, for the last six months, I have lived in a bug-infested apartment. So, the table, the shelves, and the visit to IKEA were more about creating the conditions for bug-removal, rather than about any desire to become anything else other than my scattered self. But, I must admit, I am enjoying the table so far. I am enjoying the fact that I can work in my room, and I haven't really visited a cafe ever since the tables have been installed.

(Writing Updates)

The individual poems in my manuscript needs to get stronger. So, that's what I am doing now. That will also mean more research, more reading, more digging ...more...more...more.

I was thinking how my writing has changed in recently--earlier, I was more concerned with protest. Now I am more concerned with construction. Manuscript 2 is a combination of the two.

::Things I Have Cooked So Far::

--Tomato Shrimp Chowder Soup

-- Bengali Murgir Jhol

Will try to put up the recipes soon

::Readings::

1. The Hour of the Goddess--Chitrita Banerjee

2. Pitamahi-- Shanta Sen

{I Like Moving Around}

2011-05-18T14:53:00.000-07:00

I just finished the second draft of the short story I was working on. I am not sure where it stands now, I will need some distance from it. Sometimes I wonder, what am I doing with this whole genre-shifting thing. During any given time, I am working between three genres--academic prose, short fiction and poetry. Part of my mind tells me, I would get things done much more quickly only if I stick to one and follow through the end. It is hard for me to stick to one thing. I tend to leap around, I have too many interests. I am not a creature of habit at all.

But at the same time, I am not sure genre-fidelity is such a good idea. Different genres respond to the complex realities of our times in different ways. I find it hard to fit all my concerns, all my interests in one genre or another. If someone asks me, what is my "favorite" genre, I would not necessarily know how to answer. What I do with poetry, cannot be accomplished via short fiction. And what I do in my short stories cannot be done in my academic writing. Now, the challenge is, to follow through the projects, keep on hacking at them, see where they take me after a considerable period of time.

I am getting better at this act of "following through." But it's still often a challenge. So, right now, I am not planning to write any new short stories. Because, I have plenty which are sitting there, after one, two or three drafts. I need to process the feedback they got, revise them and keep on revising them. Now, I am not one of those people who likes to implement something in a mechanical kind of a way. So, if I have a burning desire to write something new, I will write a new one. What I am trying to say here, that is not going to be my priority for a while.

Besides, I am finding it hard to devise new creative prose, even if it's fiction, while I am working on my dissertation. I guess, my mind is too full of prose! That is why, I feel somewhat accomplished-- I have been able to revise this story that I wasn't too sure of after the first draft. In other news, today I took the print-outs of the manuscript 2 and spira-bound it to make it look like a book (finally!). So, I will be able to read through them and see where it stands. One of my closest friends had interesting things to say. Now, I will have to plunge into the process myself.

{été}

2011-05-15T08:57:00.000-07:00

I am recognizing how hard often it is to assert myself in circumstances where folks don't really know how to recognize the very essential identity of women involved in intellectual or creative pursuits. Yet, those are the activities that make me me. It has been both un-nerving and comforting to be confirmed during the last one week that I will never be an ideal homemaker. I like to withdraw from the world because the kinds of work that I do need solitude. But that does not mean I am into domesticity. Staying a lot indoors or inside one's homespace does not make one a domesticated person. It becomes especially true for women who write, paint, theorize...in short, are involved in work which requires long hours away from the roles that are socially delineated for women. Emily Dickinson stayed inside the four walls of her home a lot. That does not make her domesticated or even remotely interested in domesticity.

* *

:Writing Updates:

--Submitted to 5 places (4 print, 1 online)

-- Have not been able to do any work with the poetry manuscript because of the overall hullabaloo in life. But in retrospect, that might be good. I believe it is allowing me a wee bit of distance from work just completed.

--Working slowly on the short story for the UCLA workshop. It's due in two weeks!

* *

Finished Nnedi Okorafor's novel Zahrah the Windseeker. Still under its spell, will try to write my thoughts about it once all the quasi-familial stuff recedes into background.

:: Manuscript::

2011-05-13T09:43:00.000-07:00

I finished compiling the first draft of the manuscript. So far I have 46 poems spanning 62 pages, divided into three section, one prologue and one epilogue. Most of them, that is, around 35 were written during the NaPoWriMo challenge and the week before that. According to this, these are the most commonly used words in the manuscript:

Word	Frequency
one	83
mother	52
did	46
word	39
without	38
story	37
way	28
never	23
ma	23
know	23
myself	22
once	22
around	22
every	21
time	21
finger	20
hand	19
through	19
ne	17
page	17
little	16
make	16
ever	16
thing	16
old	15

I am still not sure what to think about it, because I have just compiled the whole thing. I haven't yet read the whole manuscript through. Later today or tomorrow I want to print out a copy of it and read it to figure out where it stands. But for now, I am happy that I have a tangible manuscript to work with. I also have some tentative titles. But again, I want to read through the entire manuscript to see if I can find some other catchy lines to do the work of the titling.

Jane Eyre

2011-05-12T10:31:00.000-07:00

To celebrate the arrival of summer properly, I saw Jane Eyre yesterday. The latest adaptation. I do have a slight obsession with Victorian women writers and the messed up tomes they wrote. Most of them are bundles of contradictions, but if one wants to understand the complexities of the nineteenth century British capitalism, one doesn't have much option other than to go through them. I had first read Jane Eyre when I was eight or nine, an abridged edition for kids. But it wasn't that abridged. It didn't really exclude the parts which might be considered "inappropriate" for children or anything. It merely simplified the Victorian English. I have gotten back to the text again and again after that, partly because I love it, and partly because it's hard to avoid it if you're a scholar/lover of Caribbean literature.

A large chunk of the film has been told in flashbacks. The opening scene is that of Jane leaving Thornfield. I liked that choice. For me, it's one of the strongest moments of the book, and I would say it's also a coming-of-age moment for Jane: one during which she exercises her feminist agency. She rejects Rochester, rejects what Thornfield stands for. She does not ever deny that she loves Rochester, yet she leaves. A proto-feminist statement that love is not the only place where women can (or need to find) self-expression. But there are other reasons why I think this moment is one of the most significant moments of the novel. As someone who has for the last ten years of her life spent reading literatures on and about slavery, it is hard not to notice the Abolitionist sub-text that runs through that leaving. In leaving Thornfield, Jane walks out of the legacies of slavery, the supremacy of the maritime/plantation bourgeoise. And the time too, is just ripe. The novel was published in 1847. The energy of 1848 is in the air, and slavery has been abolished in British Caribbean in 1838. And of course when Jane comes back, Rochester has lost his eyesight--the total disempowerment-declassment of the plantation aristocracy, and Thornfield itself has been burned to ruins. Jane gets uplifted a little bit in terms of her class, what with her inheritance from the dead uncle and everything, and Rochester goes through a process of being disempowered. So, the class status-quo is restored. Kind of.

The film has done some serious editing of the novel. Understandable. Too little of Grace Poole. Too little of Bertha Mason, not to speak of the fact that she looks distinctly South Asian. I do think the film tries to level out the class and racial sub-texts there. But if one is careful, it can be gleaned from whatever is available. Like, the coachman is black. When Bertha spits at Jane, what comes out is a glob of black phlegm. Blood coagulated into a thick blackness? Once that lands in Jane's white wedding-dress, it makes space for an interesting symbolic blackening of Jane herself. For the white lower middle-class woman from the British empire, to walk out of the confines of imperial femininity, she needs that symbolic blackening. In other words, in order to be a feminist in imperial Britain, white women needed to go through a process of blackening/browning/racialization. I think, that was my favorite scene from the film. Because it's one of the most profoundly politically symptomatic ones. Although, I also think, Jane's childhood scenes were artistically rendered too.

Overall, it was an enjoyable film. Although, if I have to be honest, I think there is something about the best of Victorian novels that resists cinematic narrativization.

Writing Table

2011-05-11T10:57:00.000-07:00

Right now, I am in a small university town in Illinois, visiting M. I am sitting in a table right next to a big window drinking coffee. Earlier I was working on typing up some of the poems I wrote during the NaPoWriMo month. After that, I read some poems from Joseph Legaspi's book Imago. I am thinking, if I had a window and a writing-table right next to it, I probably wouldn't have spent so much money and time in the coffee-shops. This desire does make me uncomfortable. Because I recognize in that very desire, a kind of consumer materialism. And I know there are actual costs of that kind of desire. This is specifically the kind of desire that makes people crave more, take paths that will satisfy those cravings rather than stay true to their passion and creativity. In short, it makes them conform. But on the other hand, I also think, is it too much as a writer to ask for a writing-table next to a window? Shouldn't we all live in a world where everyone can have access to a workplace of their choice? Yes, but we don't live in an ideal world. And so long as we don't, I should get the most of this writing table while I am here.

Adelaide Labille

2011-05-09T19:27:00.000-07:00

I have been thinking and trying to find out works by women visual artists recently. The painter is Adelaide Labille-Guiard, and the date of this painting is 1785. I love how the teacher stares back at us, an expression of defiance in her face. It is doubly significant that she has painted herself with two students, since most male painters in those days refused to accept female students.

Dal With Cream and Salsa

2011-05-08T20:53:00.000-07:00

In the last nine years, I have discovered that being a grad student means learning skills that you wouldn't necessarily think of possessing in normal circumstances. You might not even know that they exist. One such skill is throwing random shit together. Like today, I had some salsa, some whipping cream, half of an onion and some dal sitting in my refrigerator. And what do I do? I threw them together. And the result is, NOT TOO BAD! So, here is the recipe.

Ingredients:

Dal ( I used mushur, or red lentils. Anything else will do too.)

Onion (sliced in rough pieces)

Spices (I used cumin seeds, coriander powder, red chili powder, paprika, turmeric)

Butter

Red Salsa (Store Bought Variety)

Whipping Cream

Preparation:

Boil the lentil seeds and the sliced onions together.

Heat butter in a skillet. Temper it with the spices. Let it sizzle for a while.

Pour the whipping cream. Let the spices mix well with the cream.

Now pour the salsa. Again, let them mix well.

Then, the boiled dal. Let it simmer for a while.

Slurp it with rice or rotis.

Realization!

2011-05-06T12:54:00.000-07:00

I am envious of poets who can pull of nature-imageries in skillful ways. I cannot. This is probably because I have grown up as a city-girl. I can write about how the sporadic outbursts of nature cause the city landscape to change, but I cannot, to save my life, write about nature in any consistent ways. A few years ago, I would also be unable to write food-imageries. But luckily, the experience of living alone, as a cash-strapped graduate student has changed that. I have grown a lot more sensitive about the food production process, the smell, touch and colors of different kinds of edibles and condiments than what I was during my teens and early twenties. This reveals to me how our writing and other artistic productions are often bound, in unconscious and sub-conscious ways to the kinds of lives we lead, the essential reservoir of experiences from which we draw our inspirations and sustenance.

Updates

2011-05-05T17:36:00.000-07:00

The last few days I have spent typing some of the NaPoWriMo poems. Yes, I wrote them all in longhand in a small notebook. I haven't yet gotten to the ones which are really, really bad. But, up till now, I am really enthralled. The work I have here is not stellar by my standards. They are decent--but I did them all in the course of a month! I do have material enough for at least a chapbook! They will need to be polished a lot more, edited...but still! For summer, I am planning to take Anna Maria Hong's workshop on writing in forms. I am excited because I have never taken a workshop from a woc poet. And the syllabus looks interesting. Writing in forms is definitely something I can do with lots of improvements!

Joanna Fuhrman's 1968

2011-05-04T15:13:00.000-07:00

“The Summer We Were All Seventeen”

From Pageant by Joanna Fuhrman, pg. 4

It was 1968. The clock read 10:43.

The Vietnam War was trapped in the television

like a moptop Rocky Road ice cream cone.

I was hungry ALL THE TIME,

munching on barbeque-flavored soy chips,

slurping pumpkin ravioli with a trimmed white poodle

named Betty Friedan.

It was the year I found twenty pointy virginities moist

in the fangs of a runaway wolf.

The year my voice broke like a lake and I sang

renegade karaoke naked beneath my sparkly trench coat.

Even the sun was an eyelid—

no one could see the rest of the face.

Dear Radio,

we love you

even though

we all know

you’re a big-time phony—

we call you

the secret hiding place

of rock and roll,

but we all know

the real

rock and roll

invented

by Arthur Rimbaud

with flaming tambourines

and multi-breasted albino

oranges

you crushed

years ago,

destroyed with your

beautiful

fangs.

In 1968 I was the inventor of bonfires and tie-dyed ball gowns,

the inventor of insomnia and transcendent typos. Every song ever

played was written by a monkey on a laptop.

every drum ever destroyed burst with centrifugal liquid lasers.

I was William Carlos Williams dancing

naked in front of the mirror while my wife and children were sleeping.

I was Li Po singing

on the peeling fire escape, smoking pot and cracking jokes about Taoism.

It was 1968 for a whole twenty minutes.

The television broke like fireworks. The television

exploded

like sprinklers.

It was 1968 for a whole century. It was 1968

when we made love beneath

the rainbow canopy of candy GI Joes

and gave birth to a Janis Joplin Cabbage Patch Doll.

Jimi Hendrix swallowed

the ashes and dove headfirst into the My Little Pony blow-up pool.

I was twenty years old

or I was six years old. I devoured every radio,

eating the wires.

I hooked my veins to the electrical current

and wrote emails to Gilgamesh twenty-four hours a day.

I illegally downloaded Steal this Book.

I fell down on the green carpet and stared at my bedroom’s cloud wallpaper.

I saw my face forming in every two-dimensional puff.

It was the summer

of free vowels,

damp noses, exfoliating

participles.

I was nostalgic for the idea of poetry

more than poetry itself.

I injected caesuras in the veins of my toy cadaver

and wrote the word “revolution” all over my friend’s plaster cast.

Rain-soaked toddlers photographed me

and sold the negatives on Ebay.

I covered every centimeter of my body with discarded gun wrappers.

I covered my head with a floating chuppa and sewed a colorful bikini

out of a discarded hijab.

I wore the whole city around my waist as a dangling belt.

Everyone could hear me jangling

from the other side of the globe.

----------

There is something about this poem which disturbs me immensely. 1968, here, appears to be a highly commodified year, era. There is a sarcasm in the tone here, and I think, sarcasm can often be put to really effective uses in poems. So, if I have to read it really against the grain, I will say, this poem mocks the commodification of dissent in the 1960s. But I just want to step back a little bit and ask: was 1968 only about commodification? Was it only about rock and roll, girls with flowers in their hair, and playing revolution? So, I can't really help pointing out that this is a poem that has been written out of the white, middle-class unconscious of the American empire. Yes, the references to a young woman's coming-of-age is interesting here, but even that has been explored through the mediation of a commodified culture, which thrives on appropriating dissent. Where is Black Panther, Young Lords, the demands for Ethnic Studies programs in this poem? Where is race? Where is even feminism? Not to speak of the fact that 1968 means something very different for me, for folks in the Third World. I mean, in India, we are still struggling with the legacy of 1968, what with the Indian state declaring Maoists to be the "biggest internal security threat." Today's Maoism that literally emerged out of the Naxalite movement of the 1968. There can be lots of criticisms of it, some very serious ones. There can be rejections of it too. But it meant a LOT more than a culture of commodified dissent mediated through a highly structured culture industry. Not to speak of the immensity of the state violence that was unleashed.

So I have been trying to write a poetic response to this one. It's happening in bits and pieces, but I think I am getting stuck in between a very familiar language of Leftist nostalgia, and a more inwardly drawn language of individual exploration? How to write about individual experiences of witnessing and participating in a moment of global political upheavals?What happens when one throws gender in the mix? I don't know don't know don't know...but hopefully will get to know...something...a little bit more than what I do now...

Stevens, Abeyta, Thirteen Ways of Looking At Things

2011-05-02T15:56:00.000-07:00

Have been thinking a little bit about Wallace Stevens' Thirteen Ways of Looking At A Blackbird. In one of the workshops I took once, this was a required reading. The dominant reading that was collectively produced by the class was, this poem resists the very work/act of meaning-making. I was of the opinion that it might be, but at the same time, the poem also assumes a white, masculinist, imperial gaze as its basis. That gaze works almost as a political/cultural unconscious of this poem. A closer reading of the poem reveals that it is a gaze that travels outwards from inwards. It is impossible for me to read this poem without thinking of a guy standing in a window, watching nature and the blackbird, taking it apart bit by bit. I identify this urge to look at something, especially in nature, as intrinsic to an imperial gaze. It tears open many many complicated questions: who historically had the right to "look" and "analyze"? I am thinking about this "social/cultural/political unconscious" as I am beginning to revise the poems that I wrote for NaPoWriMo. What are the assumptions about the world that I bring into my writing without even being aware? Of course, class. Caste. And all the associated cultural privileges that come with them. But how do such categories make up the symbolic realm of my work? I still haven't figured out fully yet! Maybe, the answer keeps changing! The assumptions I bring in Manuscript A might not be the same as the assumptions I bring into Manuscript B!

Anyways, whenever I read Stevens' Blackbird poem, I cannot help thinking about Aaron Abeyta's poem Thirteen Ways of Looking At A Tortilla. What Stevens leaves in the vague realm of "beyond meaning", Abeyta transforms it into meaning. The very tangible tortilla. The very tangible human hunger. Food. The process of production of food. Food as a reservoir of culture. Race. Class. Labor. And last but not the least, the US-Mexico Borderlands. In short, Abeyta breaks Stevens' almost taken-for-granted imperial setting, allegory.

Whenever I read Abeyta's poem, I become conscious of all writings as essential works of re-writings. And therefore, writings are also about "reading." What am I re-writing in these poems, then?

Well, a post for another day!

NaPoWriMo 2011 Done!

2011-04-30T21:00:00.000-07:00

30 poems in 30 days done! I am clearly exhausted. In terms of my personal goals, I have done two translations (one from Bangla, one from French), have written two myth poems (one South Asian, one from Grimms' Brothers), I could write only three poems in forms, and I didn't get to do any historical research for any of my poems. I am forgiving myself, because during this entire month, I was also stressing over my Fall funding, and finishing the third chapter of my dissertation. I have tried to stick to a specific topic, even when I wrote the myth-poems. So, I am hoping, I have at least a chapbook worth of poems from this month-long exercise.

I want to devote the month of May to some revisions, and trying to figure out the shape of the manuscript. My gut sense is that, what I have here will make a decent chapbook. It might be a little too monotonous to think of a book from the material I have, but I will see. I am planning to assemble 32 pages worth of material from here. But then again, I have barely written down the poems in my notebook. I will have to see how they look as more finished, final products.

Now, what I have learnt from doing this:

a. I can write everyday. I can write 30 poems in 30 days.

b. I like the discipline of writing everyday, although I must confess, it's hard to take a second look at some of the poems.

c. I now have a body of work, which was created without the kind of inhibition that comes with trying new material. ( There wasn't much time to feel inhibited.)

d. There is a kind of peace in knowing that I cannot really push a specific topic beyond this point right now.

Now, I will congratulate myself a little bit and reward myself by having a kulfi. Tomorrow is a new day, and a new month!

Incoherent Reflections

2011-04-30T10:33:00.000-07:00

Yesterday was a day just like others. I finally got to know I won't starve in Fall, I will have employment. And I can't help feeling grateful. Now, I just need to plough through the dissertation, and get it done. The last month has been very stressful in so many ways, not the least of which is the uncertainty over funding. Now, I can relax a little bit and actually get down to the work.

To keep myself distracted from these worries, I have been thinking about cover-art for poetry books a lot. I tend to think, the cover-art is a form of collaboration, a collaboration between the artist and the poet. Anyways, this is one of my favorite cover-arts in poetry books. The one above. I love the blue. I love the combination of the blue and the white. And I also love how the entire cover gives out the story of the verse-novel itself, in a very dexterous nutshell. What is more, I read somewhere, the poet Thylias Moss herself, designed it! I don't think I can ever be that talented, that multi-dimensional to try my hand in so many different things!

Writing A Poem

2011-04-25T17:05:00.000-07:00

Writing a poem is not like buying anything. Writing a poem is not like shifting through seeds. Writing a poem is not like cooking rice. Writing a poem is not anything else I do. Must we have metaphors for everything? Writing a poem is a metaphor in itself.

Where I Stand So Far?

2011-04-23T17:14:00.000-07:00

So, even when I was trying to finish the third chapter of my diss, I did not stop writing the poem for the day. There were days when I felt like I am dying, there were days when I felt numb, and then there were times when I just felt too dry to produce anything halfway sensible on page, let alone a poem. But I pushed myself, looked at unlikely places for inspiration, and I am learning a few things about the process:

1. Because I feel so robbed out of ideas, I am trying to look for ideas in places where I wouldn't normally go. Like, another poet's poem. Word lists. This looking for ideas in different places does make space for unlikely ideas. Things that would normally escape my attention are beginning to attract my attention.

2. I had decided, along with writing 30 poems in a month, I will also write on a particular topic. I am not disclosing the topic here right now, but again because I am running so low on ideas, I am having to approach my topic in slant. Which means, I am often writing from shifting POVs, expressing emotions I wouldn't necessarily go near because that's not my comfort-zone. So, yes, writing 30 poems in 30 days is making me push my comfort-zone quite a bit. Apart from making me dig deeper.

3. I am learning to see art as more than occasional creativity. This whole process is teaching me how much I love writing. It is teaching me, how only writing can generate ideas for writing and writing further. In other words, consistent work produces inspiration, rather than the other way round.

Halfway Through

2011-04-15T20:58:00.000-07:00

I have written 15 poems so far. I missed yesterday, but then wrote two today. There was a point when I had felt extremely "dry" inside. Didn't have a word, image, sentence, theme or idea propping up. What helped was reading other poets' work, using their work as a springboard. The other challenge was, I did this along with drafting the chapter 3 of my dissertation. So, by the time I would come to the poem, I would feel extremely word-drained. Literally. There too, reading other poems helped! Most of the poems I have written so far, other than one, are free-verses. Now, I am thinking of giving a little bit more structure to the work ahead:

1. two translations
2. one from a "Western" myth/fairy/folktale
3. one from an Indian/South Asian myth/fairy/folktale
4. five in traditional forms
5. a persona poem in the voice of a character I find out through historical research

But I have learnt a lot in the past couple of weeks. Knowing that I will have to go back to the writing-table, gave me something to look forward to.

One of My Favorites From Domestic Work

2011-04-13T12:12:00.000-07:00

Drapery Factory, Gulfport, Mississippi, 1956

She made the trip daily, though
later she would not remember
how far to tell the grandchildren--
Better that way. She could keep those miles
a secret, and her black face
and black hands, and the pink bottoms
of her black feet a minor inconvenience.

She does remember the men
she worked for, and that often
she sat side by side
with white women, all of them
bent over, pushing into the hum
of the machines, their right calves
tensed against the pedals.

Her lips tighten speaking
of quitting time when
the colored women filed out slowly
to have their purses checked,
the insides laid open and exposed
by the boss's hand.

when she recalls the soiled Kotex
she saved, stuffed into hag
in her purse, and Adam's look
on one white man's face, his hand
deep in knowledge.

Natasha Trethewey

Writing Poems Everyday

2011-04-11T10:01:00.000-07:00

So far I have succeeded to produce a poem a day. Yes, it's a struggle. Like last night I felt like giving up, felt dry, no words or ideas coming to me. But then, I did anyway. I struggled with every word, particularly because I was so tired, and felt so drained. But then, as I said, I plowed on. I reminded myself, it's a challenge I have taken up with myself and I can't give it up at this stage. I reminded myself, even if I write a bad poem, it's still going to be a poem, and I can probably use a word, an idea from it later on. It worked. I haven't dared to look at the poem I wrote yet. But it's a poem! The thing is, I already have ten poems worth working on! I will have the subsequent months to revise them, to give them more shape, to go to places where I didn't dare to in the first draft--all these things that I tend to do while I revise. But at this point, I have 10 new poems, and it already seems like a lot!

Nerd!

2011-04-07T19:28:00.000-07:00

When I am smack dab in the middle of my despair, I ask myself,what these years of academic training in literary criticism has done for me. It has done a lot. LOT. But more than anything else, it has taught me to be an active reader. An active reader as against a passive consumer. It has taught me to wriggle inside the belly of a text. It has taught me to find space within a text to stretch myself. And now that I have learnt to read this way, my relationship to the "world" and the "text" will never be the same again. I am a more complicated person to deal with now. But also probably....wiser

Where Am I Going With This Project?

2011-04-05T14:07:00.000-07:00

I have been working for the last few days on this project. It is not necessarily new. Originally, I had included it as a section in my manuscript which I had compiled for JHG's summer workshop. Someone in the workshop suggested that this can be a chapbook in itself. I had kept the thought locked in some compartment of my head, but didn't really think about it much. Because the poems, I guess, seemed to be too personal, written from an I-voice, and yes, angry and whiny. But then, I began to re-visit the project again. Revised some poems for the UCLA workshop. The folks there generally liked them. And I, too, was looking for a "manageable" book/chapbook-length project that I can lift off the ground while writing the dissertation. I began to work on it again. In the last month or so, I have written some new poems aimed exclusively for this project. I must say, the poems that I have written are not exactly in my comfort-zone. I am writing them, I am trying hard here, but I am still afraid. So what are the fears that I have for this project:

1. the poems will be read as a sort of vulgar autobiographical exercise

2. the earlier poems and the ones I am writing now are different in their essential aesthetics. That can mean both--it can be a source of strength, or a source of weakness. I am not sure how it would look in this particular project.

3. These poems are based on family dynamics. Mother-daughter, father-daughter relationships. The daughter's character/voice looms large here. She is the one who is doing the "seeing", the "narrating", the "writing." There are poems which are also on the conjugal relationships of the parents. Some on the mother's relationship to her parents. But these are all narrated by the daughter. So, the daughter's voice acts as a filter. Now, here comes my biggest fear. Will these poems mean anything to anyone other than me? What it is that I am trying to reconstruct here? Obviously, the easy answer is "the personal is political." But a lot of the American poetry, especially women's poetry I am reading these days, seems to be all personal, and no political. There are lots of re-countings of everyday details of the persona-narrator's life, without necessarily reflecting on the larger implications. Without necessarily trying to answer the "so what" question.(This demands a post in itself.) I am not too interested in writing a book of poems which would sound/read like that. So, yes, I am worried about the ideological/political implications of the work I am doing here.

But also, I don't want to stop here. I want to go on, and see where this leads me. Maybe, once I am done with the first draft, I will begin to have a better sense of it? The thing is, I know so many people who have let their fears of "implications", "ideological value" , "political relevance" of their work stop themselves midway in the project, that I don't want to go down that same path. So, let's see.

In the Middle of Rejections

2011-04-03T21:04:00.000-07:00

Ever since the NaWriPoMo began, I have written four poems. All of them are re-fashionings of older work, but still, they are more complete now, with definite arcs. They are full-fledged first drafts now. I have also submitted to a few places in the last week--some by snail mail, some electronically. This is the least favorite part of what I have to do as a writer, but also something that I have come to recognize as essential.

I have been thinking about the role rejection plays in one's growth as a creative artist/scholar etc. Why?Because, I am in the middle of rejections. Which often does make me think, maybe I am not that good enough. Maybe I should have just chosen some "safer" career-paths. Like being a secretary or a high school teacher, where the pressures to be "innovative" in this way does not exist. It is only during this last week that I have explicitly recognized, how both my chosen profession (literary/cultural scholar) and vocation(writer) are highly dependent upon subjective evaluations. Which basically translates into this: I might work very hard for a project, even put my best into it, but that does not mean I have any control over the reception. Reception, like production itself, is dependent upon too many factors.

Now, this is also an interesting life-lesson in itself. I might spend a whole lot of time talking to someone about race, gender, sexuality, sexuality, progressive politics, the intersection between political and the personal blah blah blah, but at the end of the day, my emotional investment in that person does not mean much more than my emotional investment. He/she will take it up at his/her own pace, re-mix it with things he/she is receiving from the historical/cultural/social environment around, reject some, accept some etc. And there will be lots of people in this world who will not take anything at all.This can be frustrating, especially when I am passionate about something, someone, and badly want to convince someone of something, or want my work to reach a larger audience. But I don't see any way around it. My work, my hard labor will be rejected-- probably many more times than it will be accepted. Do I stop writing then? Do I stop interacting with people about things I am passionate about? Do I stop developing the ideas for my dissertation? I don't think so!

Because that would be the ultimate defeat, the ultimate act of self-immolation. My voice, my words, my ideas have emerged out of my interactions with life, my experiences. They are by no means perfect, they are as limited as I am...but at the end of the day, they do have some relevance for ... if for no one else, for me...and hopefully, a couple of other people. So, I cannot stop working. I cannot deliberately stop myself from growing. Writing this post wouldn't really solve any of the problems right now, but it is definitely making me feel calmer, and more energized to go back to the work-table once again.

A Day In the Life Of...

2011-03-30T12:52:00.000-07:00

Reading

Lunch

What I Had For Breakfast: 2 Cups of It

Writing...er, dissertation...and a brand-new poem....

Work

2011-03-29T07:43:00.000-07:00

Deliver me from writers who say the way they live doesn't matter. I'm not sure a bad person can write a good book, If art doesn't make us better, then what on earth is it for.
---Alice Walker

This is definitely not how I felt when I was younger, but as I am growing older, I feel, being a writer is about doing the writing, true. But it's also a way of being in this world.In that it is more than just writing. I feel like I have to be more critical and more loving at the same time, in order to be the writer I want to be. I am someone who believes in the autonomy of the text, the ability of the text to generate meanings irrespective of the text-maker, but as I am getting into the act of creative writing more and more, and getting introduced to more and more writers, I am beginning to see how biography too is important for the art/text we make.Our contradictions surface invariably in the art we produce. Our art, the texts we produce invite us to explore our contradictions. Whether we choose to do it or not, depends on us. Human beings, as much as they try, do not lead compartmentalized lives after all.

TidBits

2011-03-24T19:38:00.000-07:00

Left-overs always taste so much better! Couple of days ago, I made this kosha mangsho with goat meat. I followed this recipe almost verbatim. Koshano is a form of slow-cooking, I guess. But it does some magical things to the meat.

In another week, we will bang right into National Poetry Writing Month. I don't think it will be a good idea for me to try to do the challenge with the dissertation still looming large in the background. Instead, I am taking up the challenge of working on my poems everyday. I don't know if that will amount to writing a new poem, or revising an old one. Sometimes, it takes me three or four days (or more) to get a poem out of my system. I don't want to yank out a poem a day because of April happens to be some kind of poetry month. But it does feel good to see that poetry receives a kind of special attention during this April, and there are events around it.

The dissertation-chapter is moving, although not as fast as I would like it to go. But it's moving!I have a strange, inconsistent relationship to deadlines. In case of the dissertation, the deadline to submit at least once to the writing group during a semester has been very very helpful. It has made me sit down, organize my thoughts, and just to produce something. Even if that "something" happens to be very rough, sketchy, and tentative. I mean, if I have a first draft at least I can go back to it, revise,and make it better. But it's hard to produce that first draft, often times! In case of my creative writing, I prefer to write without deadlines, and then put them up for workshops. Sometimes, I have generated new stuff for a workshop, and have revised the existing stuff extensively. But in general, I do like to produce creative stuff on my own time, and then use the workshop for thinking through the feedback.

A Nice Evening

2011-03-23T17:11:00.000-07:00

Last night, RR and I went out for an impromptu “date.” Since we are both very interesting people, our idea of a “date” consists of going to Mozart, shit-talking about the yuppies who have HUGE homes up on the cliff, watching the ducks swim in the green water, trashing the spoilt-brats who knife through the water in their privately-owned yachts, and drinking cappuccino. Oh yes, we also set our timers, and wrote. For the last couple of days, I have been writing my dissertation at home, in the mornings, right after waking up and breakfast coffee. So I worked on doing some drastic revisions on a poem while RR worked on de diss.

Later, we went to Buenos Aires Cafe, did some more people-watching, and ate some really good food. Empanadas as appetizers, some very meaty stuff for entrees, and then a dark chocolate crème brulee for dessert, and talked some more about literature, film, the relationship between craft and ideology. All in all it was a productive evening which helped me get out of the hopelessness of not landing any huge fellowship yet for the next academic year!

I kind of have an idea what I want to write for this chapter of my dissertation, and I am not letting the “I need to read more before I can begin to write” impulse to get the better of me. Instead, once I am done with the writing quota of the day, I try to devote some time to the reading/catching up on the secondary materials. And then, once I am done with the first draft of the chapter, I can go back and do a more thorough finalization of the whole thing. But I need to have the basic work done before anything else. This, often, for me, is the hard work. Because at this stage, I am trying to figure out what my arguments are going to be. So, it's a lot of active brain-storming. But I think best when I write. This is something I have discovered about myself in the last one year, while writing my dissertation.

Writing in an "I" Voice

2011-03-22T17:26:00.000-07:00

I have been afraid of writing in first person, unless it's a persona poem. So far I had defined persona poem rather narrowly: I would take characters from existing stories, myths, tales and would try to write in their voice. But I have largely avoided writing in an "I" voice otherwise. Because I was scared that they would be read as confessional and autobiographical. Whatever experience I attribute to the "I" persona of the poem will be attributed to me. I think, there is a strong trend to read any poem written by a woman in "I" voice as autobiographical. But, it's especially true about the poems produced by women of color in this country. The "I" in the poem, most of the times, get read anthropologically, and I have resisted that. Now, I am in a workshop which requires that I "adopt" an "I" persona for the length of the class (ten weeks) and write from the perspective of that persona. It's challenging, precisely because this is something I have avoided so far. We still haven't progressed enough for me to generate detailed comments on the process, but I have signed up for the challenge. Let's see where it takes me!

Left Forum 2011

2011-03-20T17:19:00.000-07:00

I discovered, this weekend, after presenting at the Left Forum, that there are different issues at stake in an activist presentation than in an academic one. The responsibilities are different, and much more collective in nature. It becomes even more complicated when one is trying to represent the social movements in diaspora. In other words, solidarity work has its own complexities. There is a huge responsibility of representation, and the political fallouts of that might be much more severe than an academic presentation, where the stakes are measured much more in terms of an individual scholars' responsibility towards the issues he/she studies. Also, after an activist presentation, the audience is much more prone to ask questions like “what can I do to help” and one has to have “positive” answers without being reductionist.

Now, some stuff I heard in Left Forum:

The White Woman in Front of the Elevator: In which panel are you presenting?

Me: Contemporary Leftist Movements in India.

The Woman: Is there one?

Me: There are many.

The Woman: Oh really? Nice. Good for you that you're presenting!

I smile, the elevator comes in, we both stop conversing.

From Gautam Navlakha's presentation:

In India, we have every variety of left. One can choose from many varieties of left movements, see where one fits me. As an Indian, this is something that makes me extremely proud!

This is a rough paraphrase of what he said, and I have to kind of agree:))))

Raspberry Smoothie

2011-03-14T18:13:00.000-07:00

Ingredients:

Fresh Raspberries

Milk

Vanilla Yogurt

Brown Sugar

Preparation:

Blend and drink.

Very difficult!

As usual, I don't really know the measurements. I go by my eyes.

Reflections on Poetic Language

2011-03-09T13:25:00.000-08:00

From Dobyns' chapter “Metaphor”:

A metaphor can exist to heighten just a small part of the poem or it can be the entire poem. To be successful, however, the metaphor must be functional rather than decorative, meaning it has to further the general intent of the poem and it must be necessary to the reader's understanding and involvement in the poem. Any decorative use of metaphor is basically rhetorical; the author is trying to convince the reader by what amounts to technical effects rather than by content.

Then, he writes:

Image without object is evocative but it is dead end. The image has no function without the object, while the purpose of the metaphor is to draw attention to the relationship between its parts.

Even a symbol must give a sense of what it symbolizes.

We go to art partly to learn about the world. In a metaphor, that world is represented by the object, while the comparison with the image gives us a new sense of that world.

Like Dobyns, I am not someone who believes in empty metaphors, in language games and images which sound and read and feel merely beautiful. I have blogged about it before, but I will state it here again, just so we have a context for this post: I don't believe beautiful language or grasp over the technicalities of a language can replace a complicated historical eye and a sociological imagination. Now, having stated that, it is interesting how in the workshop I am in right now, one of the things that I have been encountering is the teacher's feeling that I get drawn into beautiful language-play and images, without necessarily thinking about their meaning and content. She has been encouraging me to “clarify my meaning rather than obfuscating my meaning.” For example, these were the lines I had:

She had a name for me.

Long before, I, heaviness-wrapped,

knifed through her

entrails

innards

skin of her thigh

a presence of my own

a sting in red, green, blue and brown.

Now, this is a revised version of a poem, and the earlier version was like this:

She had a name for me. Long before she actually gave me birth.

A different one from that which the Head of the Clan announced

in the feast, and had later scrivened in the pages of the little maroon

book.

Her comment was:

We have lost the word “birth” in this description.

Now, replacing the word “birth” with images was a conscious choice. The word “birth” seemed too direct to me, not expressing enough about the complexities of the actual birthing process. So, I was trying to find something which would express the physical pain of the birthing process itself, the actual physical discomfort, the way a child is a responsibility, the gendered nature of that very responsibility, and how becoming a mother has historically meant loss of opportunities for women. Hence, the images “heaviness-wrapped”, of the child literally knifing through her mother's body. But then, a child is also a source of joy. Hence, the colors—green, blue and red. And why “sting”? Because this is a poem about a daughter's disappointment about her mother's acceptance of silence. This is not a poem that celebrates in nostalgic terms the mother-daughter relationship. It is not glorifying motherhood, so to say. And the daughter's criticism transforms her literally into a pest, seen from the mother's perspective. Hence, the use of the “sting.” In other words, I had used the images to convey the conflict-ridden nature of this relationship, the contradictory feelings about the birthing process. I don't think the word “birth” could have done it for me. In the first version, I was using that sentence more as a placeholder than anything else. And I don't know, my feeling is that, the images are specific enough to remind the reader that it is birth we are talking about: the innards, entrails, and especially the reference to the thigh.

In other words, the “object” of this passage is the birthing process.

Now, I do want to make it “clear” for the reader. But I don't want my poems to work as guide-books for my readers. I want them to work hard, ask questions aggressively, think through each of the images and feel them. So, I think, once again, I am bumping here against a very different understanding of what a poem is supposed to do, and what's the role of metaphors. Yes, to be honest, I am someone who is attracted towards the abstract, the surreal, the magical in my metaphors. In other words, I want to push the limits of reality in my metaphors rather than reifying the everyday in a photographic way. And when I ask for feedback, I want to see, if the metaphors I am using are being effective in that endeavor. But I don't think I am willing to let go of the metaphor--the magical in the metaphor, the abstract in the metaphor—in that way.

Because it is in that abstraction, in that ability to reach the magical, the surreal that I see the political work of poetry.

Whiny Post

2011-03-07T11:57:00.000-08:00

What does one do when a journal sends a rejection letter after a week of me turning in the work? Come to the conclusion that they haven't really read my work?

Dobyns' Court Jester

2011-03-06T17:09:00.000-08:00

I am reading Stephen Dobyns' Best Words Best Orders: Essays on Poetry. I have long been looking for a book which would reflect on the process of writing poetry beyond the introductory stuff. It's not that they are bad, but personally, I don't have to work on pushing myself to sit down to write anymore. Neither does anyone else have to do the work of convincing me that in order to write, I need to read. Dobyns' book has been helpful so far. Although I have read only the first two chapters. One of the things he does in this chapter is to see the work of the poet through the figure of the court jester. Dobyns writes:

The jester laughs at the king, yet the jester himself has nothing. The dwarf reminds me of that mixture of gall and humility that one must have in order to write.

I agree whole-heartedly with the “gall and humility” part. For me, it translates to this strange combination of rejection, intellectual arrogance, hard work and plain old humility. I know I cannot really create what I want to create without rejecting a lot of stuff in this life-- social ideological and aesthetic. In fact, the way I think about it, the three are intertwined. I need to have the arrogance in me to stay true to my decisions, to explain them to people without flinching. But rejection alone, or negation alone has never done it for anyone. It won't do for me either. So, there is this immense need to come back to the work-table every day, make myself a cup of tea or coffee, munch on a banana, and just write. Sometimes read. Take notes. Look up from what I am doing to think, to process, to figure out more. Needless to say, I cannot really stick to this schedule of hard-work until and unless I also have an open mind to critiques and criticisms. The essential knowledge that whatever I am doing is nothing compared to what can be done. I am not writing about accepting all criticisms blindly, but there is a need to take all criticisms seriously, to think through them, and then reject it with a certain kind of intellectual modesty. As I am learning, criticisms/critiques are also ideological, historical and cultural in their very basic nature. So, I cannot really take them at their face-value. But at the same time, they deserve time and thought, a seriousness of consideration.

Anyways, what is disturbing me a little bit is Dobyns' attempt to see the court jester as having nothing. Of course, the jester has something very important-- the access to the royal court. His work, as I see it, is more of subverting the norms of the monarchy while staying within it, while continuing to enjoy its privileges. And there is a certain kind of utility to it. But what about the artists who prefer to stay away from the court altogether? Who sings and tells stories to people who will never get to see the court? I am not saying, that the two spheres are two air-tight containers, for, it's often that one makes way for oneself inside the court through singing to people. In the same way, there might be poets and story-tellers who make the conscious choice to be one or the other. So, to put it in a more rounded kind of a way, what relationship a poet or artist or story-teller chooses to have with the court, it all boils down to the specific context. But what I am trying to say that, it is symptomatic that Dobyns begins his book with this particular figure. I think, it reveals a lot about the politics of much of mainstream white, male (and sometimes women) American poets to the culture industry. It's all about trying to find one's space to laugh while staying within its logic. It's rarely about changing or moving beyond the rationality of a capital-centric culture-industry altogether.

Processing Feedback

2011-03-04T17:16:00.000-08:00

One of the feedbacks I received in class about the revised version “Nomenclature” poem was that:

The newer version has more of a focus on the mother and even the generation before then. That takes me away from the narrator, who I really like and care about.

So I am thinking, this is a series about the conflicts of a mother-daughter relationship. The daughter, who is the narrator, does not stand as a fully autonomous figure (if there is ever such a thing). Instead, these are poems which explore the relationality. The daughter's stories are implicated in her perceptions of her mother, of her mother's stories, and in one or two cases, even the generation before. Am I bumping here against an American aesthetics which wants to see the narrator as a self-contained individual, and nothing but a self-contained individual? I don't see the contradiction between “caring” for the narrator and getting glimpses of the generations before her. If anything, it explores the narrator even more closely within a history and thus provides more space for the reader to know about her. Although I wasn't necessarily thinking about it that way, this poem, the entire series even, go against that notion of self-contained individual autonomy. Our stories are implicated in each other's and therein lies the complexity for me. It is specifically that complexity that I want to represent in my poems, stories, essays!

Thumbelina-Charit: What's In the Name?

2011-02-24T17:46:00.000-08:00

I have been thinking of the name Thumbelina-Charit. Charit, is, of course, the biographical genre, and I always think, there is an eulogizing content to it. That's why I like this name. At least for now. Not only are the Bengali post-independence femininity made small, and thumblike, those very small women are eulogized, legitimized, glorified in the national imageries, allegories, everyday patriarchal discourses and practices. So, since it's a book on silenced women, women who participate in their own silencing in multiple ways, the pain of growing up as the daughter of a silenced mother, I think, it makes a lot of sense.

A Poem and Some Thoughts About Poetic Language

2011-02-20T18:13:00.000-08:00

My current poetry workshop is taught by a woman who is a spoken-word poet. I like to work with her, except that there are times when I think she is a little too literal. She believes in “bringing poetry from the coffee-shops to the sports bar.” Ideally, I agree with her. But I think, just from the kind of feedback she gives me, there might be some differences in the way we perceive the process. There might also be ways in which we differ in our perceptions of functions of poetry. I am not someone who believes in “dumbing down” my writings, whether creative or scholarly, for an audience. Yes, I am willing to provide contexts, and be reader/listener-friendly, but I also want the reader/listener to do the work.

Also, in my interactions with “ordinary folks”, I have found, there is an incredible amount of poetry/metaphor/magic in proverbs/sayings that they use to communicate wisdom. I believe, it's important for my poems to tap onto those reservoir of poetry/magic in everyday language, and also enrich it by adding my own metaphors. But when I am creating too literal work, because it needs to reach the masses, I am really banking upon some archaic presumption of popular literary tastes, rather than taking up the challenge of making poetry/literature be relevant to folks who are not going to be in academia, within literary circuits, amongst the blessed circles of the cultural elite. I don't have all the answers to all the questions this post will arise, but one thing I am convinced of: dumbing down in not the answer.

So, her suggestion to me is to write in more “concrete imageries.” One of the things I wrote in this poem was “rainbow-smelling oranges.” Her specific question to me was: do rainbows smell? In a literal world, perfectly magic-less, rational, it doesn't. But I see the work of poetry as stretching the limits of those perfectly rational experiences, to expand our so-called normal world of senses. So, when I write something like “rainbow-smelling”, I know perfectly well, rainbows do not smell. But I am inviting myself to imagine a rainbow that emits a smell. Simultaneously, I am also inviting my readers, to put pressures on their world of senses, and thereby, hopefully, consider the implications of what I am saying through that non-realistic imagery to think through the meaning I am trying to construct in these lines, in this poem.

The other imagery that got me in trouble with her was:

But on mornings I become

the leaf-sculpting caterpillar,

looking for the rhizome-shaped vein,

I am insistent.

Her question to me was, “What does this mean?” Well, imagine a caterpillar moving through leaves, the way it makes the leaves its habitat, the way it feeds of them, sculpting them into different shapes. Imagine those veins in the leaves. They are veins, but they also look like roots, hence the word “rhizomes.” Those veins do enable the plant to survive, and in an ironic kind of a way, they also resemble the roots in terms of their visual impact. And since this was a poem about what's often erased within a patrilineal culture, I thought, comparing the narrator of the poem to a caterpillar will make space to write about a young woman who is looking for ways to retrieve the erased/silenced women's histories.

Now, I am not sure if this is working fully or not. But the meaning is clear inside my own head. And in certain ways, I do agree that I am expecting my reader to think through it a little bit deeply. Am I expecting too much? Yes, I am. Why should it be different? I respect my readers, and their abilities to cull meaning from the worlds and words around.

Pepperoni Fried Rice

2011-02-19T18:06:00.000-08:00

I desperately needed to clean the refrigerator. Hence, this one.

Ingredients:

Pepperoni

Onions (I used pearl onions, around 8. But others would do too.)

Tomato (1, finely chopped)

Garlic (four cloves, finely chopped)

Green chili (1, slit in the middle)

Coriander Powder

Paprika

Red Chili Powder

Turmeric

Basmati Rice

Salt

Frozen mixed veggies (anything else will do too)

Preparation:

Heat butter in a skillet.

Temper it with cumin seeds, turmeric,salt, coriander powder, red chili powder, paprika.

Let the spices sizzle.

Pour in minced garlic, tomato, green chili, onion pieces.

Let everything mix together into a mush.

Throw in the pepperonis.

Then the de-frosted veggies.

Let everything mix thoroughly.

Throw in the rice. Let it mix with everything, fry them together a little bit. (I did it for around 7 mins.)

Pour some water. Cover the skillet.

As always, I don't really keep a record of the portions. I do whatever my eyes suggest. But the result wasn't bad at all!

Feeling Heavy

2011-02-19T17:12:00.000-08:00

In a week and half, I have a campus-interview, and a 35 minute presentation to go with it. I have six pages of the presentation written down, and I feel vastly unprepared. Part of it is just that, I have too much stuff, and I feel like cutting it down to 35 mins. (15 pages roughly) will be a hard task. I am nervous, and I am procrastinating. Anyways, I will have to make myself work on it as soon as I am done with dinner. In terms of other things in life, I have been thinking of love, friendship and hurt a lot. Yes, I do have a few intense friendships in this life where things aren't always smooth. Yet, I do not want to let go of them. I know, any therapist I will go to will say exactly the opposite. But I am not someone who believes that I need to drop my friends and loved ones at the emergence of first (or second or third)sign of conflict. There was a time when I used to do that, but I think, growing older has changed me in this respect. Honestly, I have become more aware of human mortality, and this awareness of death does change things. In my present life, I am trying to do two things:

1. Letting people know I love that because I love them and support them, it doesn't mean I am letting themselves off the hook.

2. Trying to avoid meanness. In recent past, I have wished loved ones immense suffering, all because what they were doing were hurting me. But honestly, I shouldn't have done that. Meanness, and pettiness do not change things.

I am beginning to feel, and think, that if I need to see certain things change in this world, I need to set the example myself in my own little way.

I have always believed that work (creative, political, scholarly) is more important that personal dramas and personality issues. To a certain extent I still do. But I am also realizing, work is also embroiled within personal dynamics. The kinds of work I do are especially fertile grounds for them, because at the end of the day, we bring our personal histories into our creative/artistic work, political work, scholarly work.

Normally, I don't write such personal stuff in this blog. But I am writing this down, because I want to be accountable to these processes I am undertaking.

Teesta 2

2011-02-18T10:19:00.000-08:00

I had been shrinking from writing about girls who embark upon intellectual quests in my stories, who look upon reading and writing as their primary forms of connection to the world. Rini was smart, and had intellectual quests, but what I wrote about was primarily about getting to occupy a space which has been reserved for men. So, there is an intellectual quest in the narrative, but that wasn't what the story focused on. Similarly, Toi wasn't a big reader. Bindudi's story had a completely different dimension, and of course, Pipli stories were very different in their themes and textures. I am wondering, is it that I am scared of exploring intellect as a site of feminine coming-of-age in my stories? Am I scared of finding these stories too autobiographical? Am I scared of being called pretentious? And I think, the answers are yes. But now that I have dissected this, I need to address it. So, I am thinking of making that reading-writing theme more explicit in the Teesta story. Once I begin to revise it, that is. Teesta has speaking impediments, great. That is why she depends more on the written word to express herself. I don't know how the actual writing will turn out, but it does seem to be an interesting possibility right now. But before that, I will have to finish laying out the event structure, the plot structure of the story. Let's see!

Teesta: Character Development

2011-02-17T08:18:00.000-08:00

According to MD, the narrative of the Teesta story seems flat. I agree. I was trying to write about a politically naive girls' coming into some kind of social consciousness. I was trying to write about the classic teenage apathy to anything social, political that I have seen in my high-school buddies. In other words, I was trying to write about a girl very different from myself. Not only different from the person I am now, but also the person I was in my teens. Now, M's comment made me re-think something. I had been feeling the flatness even before he pointed it out to me. I had been feeling this flatness while I had been writing the story. It is as if I don't really know how to get inside Teesta's head. What I realized is that, I don't really know how to write about politically naive girls. Besides, why would a girl who is un-interested in arts, activism, politics, society be interested in anything that Teesta is taking upon herself to do in this story? None of the apathetic teens I knew in my neighborhood got involved in community leftist theater groups, would care about Anne Frank. So, I need to be upfront about it. I think I am beginning to figure out what was happening there. I was trying not to write about the classic leftist proto-type activist girl. I was afraid of falling into the socialist realist stereotype. But then, I haven't met anyone who is totally naive, totally in-interested suddenly beginning to inhabit the spaces I am trying to write about. Heck, someone totally naive and without a capacity to observe social norms wouldn't even observe and care about what I want to write as the culminating point of the story! So what am I afraid of?

Yes, I do not want to write a kind of triumphalist red-sun kind of a story. That's why I need to examine the contradictions of girlhood and an emerging political subjectivity thoroughly within this story. But a girl who is passionate otherwise, precocious, observant, with artistic impulses, but with a speaking impediment, a fear to speak out, should make for an interesting character. Because there are some glaring contradictions right there! And I need to explore those! And yes, I shouldn't really feel apologetic about the kinds of characters I explore in my stories. If I am primarily concerned about the people and subjectivities which crowd the post-Partition middle-class Bengali leftist subcultures, and the place of women within that, I need to write about their contradictions without feeling inhibited. That is my material, and while it might be too limited for some, there is no way I can be a writer without exploring the questions my life within such spaces had given rise to. Yes, basically, I need to go deeper into my own childhood, young adulthood to write about Teesta than I was daring to do in this story. So, right now, I know, I have a lot more to do in terms of the Teesta story, but I am beginning to feel a kind of peace about the whole thing too. Thanks, MD.

Broken-Ness and Language

2011-02-16T08:13:00.000-08:00

In the fiction workshop I am in now, last week's lecture focused on the "ugliness" of the characters. This was how the lecture tried to put it:

Here's a secret about writing successful fictional characters ("success" here meaning that which connects with readers): They should be broken. No good story ever came from someone being just fine and super-competent. If you think it did, and this is a main character we're talking about, look at that person again: Were they just fine and super-competent and pretending not to notice the chaos around them? Were they these things at the expense of something else? If so, guess what? Still broken.

We need this. It's an essential part of character, which makes it an essential part of drama, possibly THE most essential or at least primary part. Look at how many of Shakespeare's characters fall into this category. (Spoiler alert: All of them.) Lear, Othello, Macbeth, Hamlet, Romeo, Juliet, Caesar, and so on: prideful, myopic, covetous, self-involved bunch of motherfuckers.

I am not someone who writes about flawless characters. Long before I have attended this workshop, or any other creative writing workshop, I knew great stories emerge from representing the fucked-upness of the characters involved. Although, I didn't always put it this way: broken, or broken-ness was not a term I used. But I have been aware of it on an intuitive, instinctive level. However, as I have been trying to write about a story set in the aftermath of December 6, 1992, I have been wondering--there isn't one version of broken-ness is this world. In fact, there are many many many. My biggest problem is, I do not have a language yet to write in stories and poems the broken-ness of the people who inhabit my world. I don't know for sure, but possibly this is the biggest struggle that every writer has to go through? To evolve a language which will succeed to represent the specific kind of broken-ness of his/her world? All I can say is, I am still groping in the dark!

Children's Literature: Random Thoughts

2011-02-15T11:28:00.000-08:00

I have been reading a lot of children's literature lately. Partly because a dissertating mind is not always conducive for complex novels. Partly because I enjoy reading children's books. I have also been thinking about what makes good children's literature. I realized, children's literature is not necessarily simple writing. What one needs to do:

1. Endow children with agency

2. Give primacy to the children's inner worlds

And I keep going back to Winnie-the-Pooh. The way the book plays with words, the way it plays with both the literal and symbolic nature of words and language. And it makes perfect sense. Children, obviously, are in that stage when they are trying to learn the language. So, words assume very different meanings when one is a child. For instance, if we think about the Discovering the North-Pole chapter in Winnie-the-Pooh. It's not impossible to think of all the colonial/imperial implications of that whole thing. But then, those imperial connotations have also been debunked by reducing the North Pole to its very stark literalness. For the child Christopher Robin and his band of animals, the North Pole literally becomes a pole stuck in the ground. So language-acquisition assumes a symbolic meaning here, it gets associated with political socialization, and it becomes so by reducing language to its very literalness.

Reflections on the Poem Seequence

2011-01-16T07:48:00.000-08:00

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.

Note To Self

2011-01-13T17:26:00.000-08:00

I am feeling a little bit distracted. I have noticed, this sense of aimlessness often takes over me when I am in the middle of too-many projects. I need to tell myself to cool down, to focus, to concentrate on the work and not the results or the consequences. It is during these times that I also tell myself Walt Whitman took thirty years to yank out Leaves of Grass. Honestly, I don't know if I have the patience to work on one single project for that long, to dig that deeply into something. But I have observed, my mind works best when I divide the work into smaller, manageable chunks, and devote every day into it. And that's what I am trying to do right now. I also think of my own work in terms of longer projects, even when I am working on a short-story or a single-poem project. I don't know whether that is good or bad, but that's how I work. At least now. So, for now, I will just concentrate on the work itself, let the projects themselves decide on their own pace and length, and keep on working hard. Tomorrow I need to go to Benson to pick up some books for the third chapter of my dissertation.

Collaboration

2011-01-12T13:08:00.000-08:00

It's amazing how much of my work-related stuff I figure out when I am actually not working. Like last week in LA. I was taking a walk with my dear friend, MS, a very talented scholar of American Studies. Somehow we ended up talking about Judith Halberstam's book Female Masculinity. MS pointed out to me, that in this book, Halberstam writes as if all forms of female masculinity are liberatory and empowering for everyone at all times. And it is not so. If we begin to see the intersections of race, colonialisms and anti-colonial nationalisms with gender ideologies, the process would become much more complicated. Now, I agree with her whole-heartedly. But I have been struggling for months to put it this simply. It is MS's use of the words "empowering" and "liberatory" that did it for me. Thanks, M. The bottomline is, scholarship, writing etc. etc. although they look and feel like solitary acts, are in reality, extremely collaborative. No art-making, no knowledge production happens in COMPLETE isolation. Period.

Thinking Aloud: Frances Hodgson Burnett's The Secret Garden

2011-01-11T08:56:00.000-08:00

I had avoided Frances Hodgson Burnett for a long time. I had worked a little bit on the film adaptations of her book The Little Princess, and then didn't really dare to venture out to her other books. Or even The Little Princess. The colonial ideologies seemed too much on the face, and her little girls too stereotypical. Then,I picked up a copy of The Secret Garden from Half-Price a month ago. And I read it. Why? Because I figured, I should just try to process the colonialist shit rather than avoid it. Now, The Secret Garden does have its share of very direct colonial-racist representations. Indians are of only two kinds--the spoilt "Rajah" s and the ever-acquiescent, too-docile servants. The protagonist Mary loses both her parents in a cholera epidemic. Again, another of the stereotypes: India as the land of deathly diseases. And guess what, Mary is a spoilt brat. Why? This is what Burnett herself has to say about it:

She never remembered seeing familiarly anything but the dark faces of her Ayah and the other native servants, and as they always obeyed her and gave her her own way in everything, because the Mem Sahib would be angry if she was disturbed by her crying, by the time she was six years old she as tyrannical and selfish a little pig as ever lived (4).

Basically, some of the Indian "darkness" had rubbed off on Mary. A good part of the book is thus all about re-whitening Mary. And of course, who accomplishes that task? The honest, upright working folks of Yorkshire. Now, this is where the book gets really interesting. The white working-class has been represented as somewhat of an anti-thesis of the Indian servants and workers. The white working folks are honest, straightforward, with distinct senses of their own selves and most importantly, not willing to give in completely to the whims of their masters. What interested me personally in this book is that, there are long chapters about the inner-lives of the servants who works in Mary's uncle's mansion. There are long and complicated accounts of her relationship with them. Now, this is not the terrain of the classic Victorian novel, where the interactions between the servants and the employers are only hinted at. The servants in Victorian novel are mostly shadowy presents. But in Burnett's book, they are well-developed characters. Now, all of them, including Mary, end up working for the final rejuvenation of the white, aristocratic patriarchal authority. And it seems from reading the book, that white aristocratic women and the white working class, men and women alike, exist to assist and facilitate the smooth functioning of the white, aristocratic patriarchal order. But it's not that ideological thrust that fascinated me in this book. What fascinated me was, how a writer can have interesting portrayals of marginal characters, and still end up in an extremely problematic place. Yes, this book is making me think a lot about the relationship between craft and ideology. I don't have any answers yet, but I am trying to think about certain things which are avoided both in literary criticism and creative writing pedagogy.

MLA 2011 Presentation: Note to Myself

2011-01-10T13:28:00.001-08:00

I spent the last weekend in Los Angeles for the Modern Language Association (MLA) Annual Convention. Apart from the fact that I spent time with some of my old friends and scored some free books, I also presented a paper on Ramabai Espinet's novel The Swinging Bridge. During the Q&A session, I got into a little bit of trouble for using the words authentic Indianness. I had written it with the customary quotes and everything, but this is one of the things that people do like to pick on. I mean, honestly. My paper was talking about lots of things--plantation capitalism, gender, impossibility of writing certain histories blah blah blah. I mean, things that I would love the others to pick on. But no, most folks have to pick on that one minor ethnicity question. What to do! But one thing I realized, and this I think is going to be important for my work:

There is no authentic notion of Indianess (or blackness or brownness or anything really), but there is a dominant notion of Indianness. I mean, why "is" and "a, there are multiple dominant notions of Indianness.

So, note to myself: the next time I go back to that paper, I need to make it clear.

Heathen Me

2011-01-10T12:25:00.000-08:00

I was raised atheist. I have grown up around people who mostly believed Religion Is the Opium of People. There were plenty of evidence in our everyday life to prove that. I still believe in that, except for the fact that I think, the whole religion thing is slightly more complicated. Religion has functioned as an opium to people. It has also functioned as hope, and most importantly, as a tool of resistance. I am interested in seeing how different communities and individuals have often used religion as a rhetorical tool to argue about things which had very little to do with God. So, right now, I am an atheist who takes the ability of religion to mobilize people very very seriously. I mean, any basic reading of any kind of historical anthropology would tell anyone that this whole idea of God is a human intervention.It's kind of dumb to not realize that. And even if there IS something called God, who has the immense super-natural power to turn things around, I must admit, his sense of justice is extremely fucked up. I mean, he has no sense of justice at all. Anyone whose sense of justice and wellbeing is so fucked up, or totally non-existent, I kind of think, it's an insult on my intelligence and being to believe in him. So, I don't believe in the existence of God. But that does not mean I don't believe in the super-natural or the divine or the numinous. What can be more numinous than human creativity? What can be more divine than the human ability to tell stories, to play with colors, notes, tunes and create art? What can be more spiritual than the human efforts to create a better world for all? There is nothing natural about human creativity. In fact, most of the social hegemonies, in every kinds of human societies, have been structured to turn human masses into un-creative, acquiescent, obedient bodies. But human spirit is such that it rebels against such structures. This is what I consider to be super-natural. Something that eludes our sense of dominant, common-sense rationality. Not some idea of a BIG MAN sitting on a chair ruling the world. And because I believe in human creativity, I am also mindful of the fact that all forms of religious practices have inspired human beings to create art, to create stories, to create literatures. They have given human beings tools to argue with power-structures, to question authority. I respect that aspect of religion, I want to understand it more. But at the same time, religions themselves have exercised authority, created their own forms of power structures, allied themselves with other forms of power structures, and have been extremely useful in oppressing people in very systemic ways, conducting genocides, communal violence and riots and overall making life a living hell. In short, religions are nothing short of ideologies, and for me, it's little hard to see any kind of redemptive power in religious organizations and institutions given their problematic histories.

womanish ink.inky madness.caffeinated stanzas...je shob galpo kobita hoi na

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