::Why Kiranmala::

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

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

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

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::~

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::

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!

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