Ten (Eleven)Things I Love to Do in Kolkata

1.Phuchka in College Square Park
2. Buroda's ghughni-egg fry and horse-piss cha
3.Hanging out in Jadavpur University Grounds, running into old friends, witnessing the transformation of cute, perfectly disciplined 17 year olds to seasoned weedheads
4. Infusion at College Street Coffee House
5. Baked Fish and Hakka Mixed Noodles there
6.Rupa and Chakraborty-Chatterjee bookstores for new English fiction
7. The corner store in College Street, which supplies me with all my Bengali books. The guy hasn't changed a single bit in the last 14 years. He used to call me "bon"(little sister) and "tumi" (informal you) in 1995, now he calls me "didi" (big sister) and "aapni" (formal you)
8. The auto ride through EM Bypass from Garia to Jadavpur
9. Taking long walks past the railway station in Garia
10.Journaling amidst the pale blue early morning in our terrace
11. Observing faces in a rally, from within and out...

I feel like going on and on...it's my city, damn it...and I can't take it out even if I try, don't you see? You can take the girl out of Kolkata, not the Kolkata out of the girl...unless of course, the girl wants it badly...this girl doesn't...

Saturday Afternoon Note

I can't work while listening to songs in Bangla, Hindi and English. The three languages I know best. Because the words get inside me and begin to do things, and very soon I am residing within the song, and not necessarily in my work. This becomes especially an issue since most of my "work" also involves dealing with words. But Portuguese is a language I don't know very well. Especially when I listen to Brazilian Portuguese, I have to pay lots of attention to figure out the words. I have found that I can work when I have Portuguese songs playing in the background.

Right now, my background music is this woman's song. And the rhythms, the joy of the notes, her voice these are slowly seeping inside my head, throat, ink and paper while I am trying to revise this poem I wrote a looooooooooooong time back.

PS. Please note I used the word song and not music. The two are not inter-changeable for me.

Breathing Finally!

It's not that I am done for the semester. But I'm breathing again. Hence this post! Meanwhile, the journal Off the Coast has published one of my poems! I have blogged about this poem a little bit here. It is indeed funny that my poem gets published in the Food Issue of a journal during a semester when I was teaching a writing class based on food! Speaking of which, some of my students have written kick-ass auto-ethnographies, which have given me a lot to think about.

Have just started Buddhadeb Basu's Tithidore. It is one of those novels I should have read long time back, but never got around it! Also, just finished Sunanda Shikdar's Dayamayir Katha. My Bengali reading has gone down phenomenally, and I am just trying to get it back these days. So, my new resolution:try to read at least one full-length novel or short fiction collection in Bengali and one poetry collection every semester.


So,Sunanda Shikdar's novel! In lots of ways, it is fascinating to me how the Bengali writers from both sides of the border are getting back to Partition.Given that Bengal is one of the regions in India whose history has been deeply affected by the occurence, the literatures in Bengali had very little on the issue. Especially when you compare it to the writings in Urdu, Sindhi, Gurmukhi etc., where Partition-narratives constitute an entire genre. But it seems to be changing. Hasan Ajijul Haque's Agunpakhi and then Sunanda Shikdar's novel. I have heard some of my friends say that Agunpakhi is the more well-written of the two. I do have issues around this term. Often times I think our pre-conceptions of what constitutes well-written, prevents us from seeing what kind of work a particular text is doing. Also, it tends to forget that aesthetics in itself is deeply historical, rooted within specific conditions of living and implicated within multiple modes of domination. And, of course, the innate human urge to find an "outside" from those space of domination. So, Agunpakhi is definitely a much more ambitious work (heck, it's written fully in a dialect! Whoever has done that in Bengali literatures in the recent times!). Not to speak of the fact that Hashan Ajijul Haque has been a well-known writer for decades before this novel(his first one!) came out. On the contrary, Sunanda Shikdar hasn't written much. This is her only published work, so far as I know.

But what I find fascinating about this work is the way she has taken the genre of women's diary/personal writing format as her basis and turned it into a novel. And then, this complex intermesh of class/caste/religious identity that's rural Bengal. I am absolutely mesmerized by the way she talks about the issue of religious privilege of the caste Hindus, and uses it to talk about other things! As I am typing, I am a little bit uncomfortable about using the word privilege. When used in the context of mid-twentieth century rural Bengal, it seems to lose a lot of its connotations. Especially the connotations it has attained within US-North American identity politics. How does one begin to talk about the structures of privileges in a multi-religious society, where the belief-structure of a religion needs that the two communities maintain a safe distance in terms of touch, dining together, sharing space etc.? What does intimacy mean in that context? What does syncreticism mean? Or even being well-intentioned? I loved the fact that Shikdar's novel had Muslim characters who questioned the purity/untouchability norms of Hinduism. The norms which are the foundations of Brahmanism. I can't remember reading any novels in Bengali which has done that in this straight-faced way. But then, I wonder, would it have been possible if the protagonist wasn't a Hindu little girl? Whose life is constricted in a way a little boy's would never have been?


I guess, one can describe it as a bildungsroman at the end of the day, but I would say, it's so much more. For the protagonist Daya, the quintessential coming-of-age experience is attaining this knowledge that there is no undivided-Bengal any more. There is no undivided post-colonial nation anywhere, and as if to bring home that point, the writer brings in this theme of the broken family. A family that has been divided along the two sides of the border. Daya's biological mother lives in Calcutta, India. Daya lives in this small village in East Bengal, or then East Pakistan along with her adopted mother, her aunt, her father's sister. I could have written tons here about the divided national metaphor, the nation-mother divided into two, the confused national affiliation, the divided national allegiance. But I will leave it for an academic paper:)))...The novel ends with Daya and her aunt moving to Calcutta, India, Hindustan with a heavy heart. The village mourns their departure. Daya doesn't want to leave her childhood home. Neither does her aunt. Yet, it's something that's inevitable. In lots of ways, the whole novel goes so so much against Jameson's Third World Literature=National Allegory model. There is no stable "national allegory" anywhere in this novel. There is a possibility of the emergence of one, but that's to be mourned over, not celebrated.

And now that I have nerded myself out for the day, it's time to go back to my own writing!

What is Poetry?

I often wonder what is it about poetry that makes it poetry. It's one of those things that comes up quite often in writing workshops, and someone will say something like these are all nice and good, but somehow these are not poems. Someone said that about Adrian Blevins' poems. Personally, I am less committed to the idea of "poetry" or "prose" or "theater" or any other medium for that matter than to this idea that there are things I have to say, and I will go for that which will let me say those things best (Am I paraphrasing Ritwik Ghatak here? Yes, I am.) But then, there is also that core-level commitment to craft, which, I think, is essential for all of us to find a way to say those things that we want to say. So far, I have felt that poetry and fiction provide two different kinds of outlets for me. Although essentially inter-related. When I am writing a short-story, I am looking for a story. The concrete outline. The tangibleness of it all. Versus, when I am writing a poem, I am looking for the abstract that underlies that same story. The visceral. The theoretical, which is not always conducive to the realist-fiction form. Now, this brings me to what I was going to say.

There is something about poetry that escapes realism. Even if we are talking about the most mundane things, the most realist of experiences. And that beyond-realism of poetry is basically constituted by the way language is used in poetry. Poetic language is essentially non-realist. So, when I am writing a poem, or reading one, I am looking for that place beyond realism. Although not devoid of its relation to reality. That's why, it doesn't matter to me if the lines are too prosaic, or conversational or straightforward. I am not someone who likes to see poems recede into stories, but then, I also want to think and see what is it about poem-stories which allows for an exploration of that which would never be possible in a short story? And for me, it is that beyond-realism place. In terms of my recent readings, I think, two poets have succeeded in doing it really really well. Thylias Moss in her verse-novel The Slave Moth and Linda Susan Jackson in her What Yellow Sounds Like. And right now, I am really trying to locate their other books. Any information on that count will be really really helpful.

Meanwhile, there are some publication good news, which I am reserving for later.

A New Publication: In Search of (Non)Authenticity?

A poem of mine has just been accepted recently by the journal for their forthcoming issue on food. The acceptance email said, it was selected from amongst 600 poems, and the issue will be on mail sometime in November. The poem is what I will call an example of a kind of "feminist" revisionist aesthetics. I was trying to imagine how Mary Beton's cook would look into her relationship with her employer, how she would speak about the process of the food-production itself. So, the poem, as I myself understand it, is not about celebrating food at all, but it is more about the labor that goes into the production of food.That's why, apart from all the usual reasons, I am elated. Do you all know who is Mary Beton? Coz the first time I workshopped this poem, no one in my class knew!

Well, she is Virginia Woolf's aunt, in the book A Room of One's Own, who died from a horse-fall in Bombay and left her a legacy!

I do have a soft spot for this poem. For two reasons. One, it's one of the few poems where I was experimenting with the voice. I was trying to adopt the persona of someone who is clearly not me, and not even someone like me. Someone who belongs to a different class and time in history. So, I was stretching my imagination a whole lot. Secondly, ever since I have read Alice Walker's In Search of My Mother's Garden, I have wanted to write about A Room of One's Own from a South Asian woman's perspective. So far I have written three. In a "women's literature" class I took at my alumnus in Pacific Northwest, the instructor, a Jewish-American white woman began the class with Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own. She said to us that she was appalled that these days it is possible to graduate from a Women's and Gender Studies program without ever having read the book. I kind of identify with her emotions, partly because I guess, the first time I read the book, it was on my own.So, at some elevel, this very idea of churning out feminists in the same way the schools and colleges have churned out clerks and engineers, for example, kind of intrigues me. I go back and forth on this issue, depending upon the context, but one of the things that is undeniable is the fact that this book by Woolf enjoys this almost absolute canonical status within the WGS programs, women's lit courses.

Personally, I love the book a lot. Seriously. Especially the way she begins with this whole little narrative about Shakespeare's sister. I guess I love this book also for a very personal reason. I never had a room while growing up. But there is also a part of me, which feels helpless in front of its class and imperial privileges. I mean, gender is not the only reason why women do not always have rooms of their own. And why women, a whole lot of men do not have rooms of their own in this world either. Something that Alice Walker touches upon succinctly in her essay, so does Tillie Olsen in another one. But what attracted my attention was this sentence:My aunt, Mary Beton, I must tell you, died by a fall from her horse when she was riding out to take the air in Bombay. […] A solicitor’s letter fell into the post–box and when I opened it I found that she had left me five hundred pounds a year for ever. I mean, come on! I will have to be a real dud to just pass this on, right? So, yes, the poems I have written on this book, three so far, two of them deal with this particular sentence in two different ways.

The first one, that came out in Muse India, is one of critical appreciation. More respectful and reverential in its essential tone. I clearly express my indebtedness to Virginia Woolf and then go on to provide a soft critique of her work. The other two are more aggressive in terms of both language and sentiment, more pointed in their critique of Woolf's class and imperial politics. But the process of writing this poem also brought up some issues for me. I knew from the very beginning that there is no way this one is going to be “authentic.” I haven't done any historical research, or any research on the dialect/linguistic usages of an Indian/South Asian servant woman working in a British kitchen in late 19th/early 20th century Bombay. What kind of Hindi or Marathi will she speak? Besides, I don't know Marathi. And, there is this question that how does one reproduce in English a dialect in Bengali, Hindi, Marathi, Tamil or any other South Asian languages for that matter? Whenever I think of this question, I keep going back to Arundhati Roy's dalit character Velutha. Is this one of the reasons why he doesn't talk much throughout the novel? How does one translate dalit Malayalam into English when it's hard to reproduce even the nuances of a proper middle-class Bengali/Hindi/Marathi/Malayalam in Anglo-American English? So, in a way, it all boils down to the issue of translation to begin with, the politics of it all.

So, when I was beginning to work on this poem, I wasn't exactly thinking of being “authentic.” I was more interested in making a political intervention, bringing up a possibility. I was more interested in what in academia we will call "problematizing" the smugness of Woolf's ideological, political and intellectual horizon. How would the world of “intellectual”, “scholarly” or even “feminist” mem-sahibs look to the women who worked for them in the kitchens? Why didn't Woolf (and so so many others like her) haven't looked into it? Honestly, too, I don't know. Precisely because my own world in India is very very similar to the world of the mem-sahibs. If anyone ever takes an honest stock of the history of the feminist movement in my own country, and that work has currently begun, my location will be very similar to the white feminists in the West. But then, what does one do with it? What does a writer/scholar do with that knowledge? For me, there are only two ways in which I can deal with the aftermath. Begin to show the problems, limitations of my own location and position. That is, engage in a ruthless criticism of myself again and again. And then, also begin to branch out beyond my own comfort zones. The way I understand it, there are two ways in which one can do that. Through one's writing, through one's life. And the two, for me, are inextricably linked. This is not the place for me to talk about what I have done with it in my own life. At least, not yet.

But, as a writer, this poem was one of the ways in which I have tried to venture into that discomfort-zone. I have repeatedly asked myself, haven't I appropriated the voice of a poor woman in the process? Isn't that problematic? The answer is yes. Very much so. But then if I have to be completely honest, there is the other reality. Writing this poem made it imperative that I think of a world very different from mine in minute, physical terms.I mean, you cannot write a persona poem and still be not explicit in terms of the physical details. Especially when the title of your poem is Ballad of a Turmeric-Tainted Palm. It was, as if while inhabiting the voice of Mary Beton's cook, I was also forced to embody her space within the world at large. I was thinking of what kind of labor she would perform and how. I was trying to imagine the world of an “other,” in a way I am never required to do within my everyday life. And believe me, when I use the word never, I am serious. No, not while engaging with any progressive political rhetoric, academic seminars on subalterneity and intersectionality, or even the leftist student movements had ever required me that I think of switching positions/roles this way. So, in a way, this poem forced me out of my classed comfort-zone, even if it was for a little while. But then this whole thing of being kicked out of one's comfort zone is tricky, precisely because there is no going back, and as I am writing this post, I am still trying to wrestle with the implications of such acts.

It is pretty common to instruct the beginning creative writers to write about the worlds they know. "Write what you know of." We are told inside workshops. I agree whole-heartedly. I mean, any writer worth his/her salt should have some capacity to de-code his/her known world, right? Similarly, I know about writers who claim that they can't really write about anything that hasn't passed through their own existence. I agree with that too! Although, I should also say, I am not very confident with that arrogant vouching for autobiographical realism. It's far more complex than that, I will like to believe.

I mean, for me to write this poem, I really had to question Woolf, read and re-read her, transplant myself to the kitchens in my own home, the homes I know of in India, the domestic-maids or even the middle-class women who provide labor in there. So, all these things were indeed "passing" through my existence. But I would also say, if we are honest and dig deeper to reveal the world we know best, as writers, we will be, at some point or the other, forced to branch out into the slightly unknown. And this is where, for me, writing is all about living! There is no other way round! And even when I was writing this poem, I was thinking, sure I don't know how it feels to work inside a colonial kitchen in those direct terms! But what if I had to work in there? What did I do when I had to work in other such closed places and leaving was not an option? Yes, I will spit on the soup-pot or the boiling tea-water. Literally and metaphorically. Without providing a whole lot of details, let me also "confess" that I have done similar things, and no, I don't feel any repentance. So, in lots of ways, I was still digging into the well of my own experience. And as writers, this is not something we can ever avoid! But imagining the "other", if done without engaging in short-cuts, can also pave the way for artistic and political solidarity.

So, one thing I am pretty sure of, writing, if done honestly and sincerely, will make you political. However you define that damn term.

Deadlines, Revisions, Literary Sexism

Deadlines can sometimes do wonders. As I discovered last week. I needed to submit a story within 4,000 words to my online workshop. Now, most of my stories are longer, and personally, I have no problems with that. Having grown up on Progress Publishers heavy doses of Tolstoy and Eisentein Cine Club screenings of Tarkovosky, I am fine with long rambling stories spanning 1500 pages and long, ranting films of four hours duration (both feudalism and state socialism, it seems, have one thing in common. It frees the artist of the obligation to have to work for putting meals on the table. Consequently, it becomes very very hard to churn out novels less than 700 pages or films less than 3 hours. But that's another story!) Now, I am a slow writer, who needs lots of time to churn out new stuff. So, there was no way I could have produced a 4,000 word coherent write-up within a week. Instead, what I did, I attempted to revisit one of my old stories. I was stuck in that in terms of the plot and the characters seemed to lack motivation. Now, as I sat down to revise it, I kind of had an epiphany. I re-moulded a lot of the directly autobiographical material into something more fictional. I let myself go where I was previously afraid to go. That is, the inherent contradictions and violences of the lower middle-class Bengali life. That desire for upward mobility which often times manifests itself through gender norms and the way children are treated. So now, although the traces of the original story will still be visible to those who had read the very first draft, a lot of the basic structure has undergone serious changes. I haven't been able to do all that I wanted to do, and I will need at least another 1,000 words or so to pull it together in the way I want. But, I can see something now, which I couldn't before.

Therefore,yayyyyyyy to deadlines!

In other words, I came across this while surfing the blog:
There was a nice, short girl from the riverside of a Kerala village who wrote a book in the mid-nineties. A sweet, small novel which was likeable but immensely forgettable. But it was not the case. The staccato style she employed got the attention of the Booker judges and it went on to win that coveted award, thanks to which millions of copies were sold, and still counting.
Arundhati Roy became a household name since then

.

In an Indian publisher's blog.

I was a little stunned to read this one, and am just wondering, am I the only one to read a kind of intense sexism which I thought has become really really obsolete? Especially since none of the commentators point it out in their comments? "Nice, short girl from the riverside of a Kerala village"---come on now! I am a little bit weirded out to see that an upcoming publisher can use such infantilizing, diminutive terms about a writer and just get away with it! Or is it just that, globalization has brought in the nineteenth century all over again? (Remember Twain's comments about Harriet Beecher Stowe....the little lady?) And it's me who should feel obsolete in here?

Camus and Poems in Kritya

Having just finished reading Camus' The Stranger, I was wondering about the ways this novella has often been received in my hometown Kolkata. I was only in Eleventh Grade when I first read it. I have friends, who in college, could recite passages from it without having to look into the book. I also have friends who began to learn French after reading The Stranger. In one of my short stories, I have dealt with that legacy a little bit, and it is partly because that I want to revise this story that I went back to the novel. Now, Camus is one of those writers who intrigues me. I just don't know how to categorize him sometimes. I am totally in awe of his sleekness, I try to move myself back to his world. How metropolitan France must have looked to this rectum-ripe working class white kid from Algeria! But still, my primary reaction to Camus has been in the past, "dude, stop celebrating alienation!" and I still kind of think of him the same way!

So, the way I get it, the crux of The Stranger is this idea of state power performing itself (I keep thinking of Ngugi wa' Thiongo's essay "Acts of Power" whenever i come across this idea of state performing itself anywhere.) Also, Joseph Roach in Cities of Dead, says something similar, "[...]law as performance that appears to operate in almost any culture: regulatory acts and ordinances produce "a routine of words and gestures" to fit the myriad of protocols and customs remembered with the law or evoked by it"(56). Camus takes lot of pain to point out to this theater of law, so much so that his protagonist Mersault doesn't always understand if he is an actor or just a passive audience. In a way, then, it's not hard to understand, Camus is trying to deal with state violence in a really complicated way throughout the narrative. But then...yes, but then...the only accidental violence that happens within this book are upon women and Arabs. Is this accidental? I think not. And, I think, it totally ends up revealing the centrality of both male-supremacy and reliance upon empire within the mid-twentieth century European social-aesthetic movements, modernist or otherwise. Camus' novel only articulates those contradictions, wittingly or unwittingly.

Two of my poems came out in this month's Kritya. You can find them here and here. In order to read the first one, please scroll down a little bit, ok? Both of them were written a while back, and does not exactly represent my present aesthetics. But they do represent an important phase in my development as a writer and poet. The first one is an interpretation of a very common Bengali lore, that there is an old woman with a spinning jenny inside the moon. The second one, yes, it's about sexual violence and rape. A poem that nearly broke me. The line "pain penetrates me drop by drop" is a line by the ancient Greek poet Sappho. It's an one-liner, so far as I know no one knows if the full poem is lost, or Sappho just wrote this one sentence. Anyway, this poem is also my reading of that one-liner by Sappho, my tribute to her. So, please stop by and let me know what you think about them.