Writing About Love: Why is It So Difficult?

Boy, it's so hard to write about love! Or, should I write instead, I find it hard to write about love? I mean, it kinda sou nds ridiculous, no? That very claim, that it's hard to write about love? Especially since we live in a world submerged in love poems and love lyrics? So obviously, there aren't a whole lot of poets who are having this difficulty I am having, right? I wonder, if this difficulty is also about my own discomfort about love/sexuality in real life? The fact that I can never feel at home within love itself? That I have always considered (and still do) love to be a very important site of patriarchal domination, and one of the very bases through which societies re-affirm and re-juvenate the patriarchal family? I know, lots of people I know will point me towards queer love, to the fact that lots of same-sex couples are trying to re-define family, and they are trying to do it from this very impulse to question patriarchal notions of love. I know I know I know. I know I should feel more hopeful. But is it just my problem, my inability to see the good things in life, that even in the way most queer couples i know and have met, lead their lives, there is an incredible pull towards fitting themselves within that very age-old notion of patriarchal family, while not letting go of a somewhat radical rhetoric of queerness? Not to speak of the fact that most of these people lead very consumerist lives, which never question the logic of capital even in the slightest way?

To get back to the question of writing about love, I think, one of the reasons I find it so hard, is because I have an inherent distrust of the love-language. The excessive use of the possessives in there. You are mine, I am yours kind of stuff. The politics of it. But what I am finding especially difficult is to express that distrust in poetic language and poetic forms. Probably because, poetry as a genre itself, has been so closely associated with love. The fact that poetry as a genre has facilitated, in many many ways, the institutionalization of that very love-language I find so problematic. I keep going back to Eavan Boland's prose-poem Against Love Poetry:

We were married in summer, thirty years ago. I have loved you deeply from that moment to this. I have loved other things as well. Among them the idea of women's freedom. Why do I put these words side by side? Because I am a woman. Because marriage is not freedom. Therefore, every word here is written against love poetry. Love poetry can do no justice to this. Here, instead, is a remembered story from a faraway history. A great king lost a war and was paraded in chains through the city of his enemy. They taunted him. They brought his wife and children to him--he showed no emotion. They brought his old servant--only then did he break down and weep. I did not find my womanhood in the servitudes of custom. But I saw my humanity look back at me there. It is to mark the contradictions of a daily love that I have written this. Against love poetry.

I love this one, because, amongst other things, it gives permission to me to question the idea of love poetry in my work. The text itself problematizes it. I love this sentence "marriage is not freedom," it's very close to my idea of what marriage is. But at the same time, this passage does not attempt to question marriage enough. There is an ambivalence about marriage, but there is also an acceptance of it. There is a sense of a woman's freedom coming face to face with her notions of romantic (heterosexual) love. But the lines don't push that sense of opposition enough. Instead, that feeling of contradiction is rounded out in the formulation "contradictions of daily love." As if, with problematization of all these things, there should also come a kind of acceptance. I find this acceptance deeply problematic, and er, defeatist. As a writer, this is where I want to intervene. What happens when people don't accept these contradictions as inevitable? And this is where my language is fumbling...

Revelation Friday

I am stuck with this poem I am working on. And I am anxious to get it done --- I feel I have been working on it for too long, and I need to move ahead with this chapbook project. I know that kind of anxiety is not good, but I can't help it. It seems like I know what to say, and where I want the poem to go. I have these vague images circulating inside my head, broken words, but I am struggling to put them all together in forms and language that will make me feel satisfied. At least for the time being.

I know this is very me. I get tired with projects when they drag on for too long. Although I know that in order for a writing project to culminate itself in the way I want it to, I must show up everyday, and put in bits and pieces of myself there, I am scared of that process. I am scared of the way that process exhausts me, leaves me drained, makes me feel incompetent and even embarrassed with myself at times. But it's true what I dread more is the ultimate failure. This feeling that I slogged and slogged and didn't really produce anything. Or I gave it up midway. This is something that I guess keeps me going. Consequently, in the last three years, I have only one incomplete writing project. A short story about a small-town girl that began and then realized halfway that I don't really know enough about the world I am writing about to finish it.

So, now that I have complained enough, I need to pour the tea from the kettle and sit down to write. At least try to write.

Submission Goals

I don't submit my work enough. I know I should. But I don't. Partly because I have this fear of sending my work out in the world before it's "good enough," before it's mature enough, and readable enough. Partly because in the last three years or so I have been trying to write seriously, I have met too many people who are more eager to publish than to write things that deserve to be published. Often times I am scared that I am becoming one of them. Which, for me, means that I am lacking those critical faculties which would inform me about the quality of my work. So, this is what I tell myself:

It's more important to keep going back to the writing table, than it is to seek publication.

But, then, I know it's equally important to be published, once the work is "good enough." I mean, if Toni Morrison or Pablo Neruda had kept their writings locked up in cute little journals in their reading-room drawers, I wouldn't be who am I today. So, both are equally important. Writing and publishing. I still think, it's extremely harmful for a writer to seek venues to publish one's work before it has matured fully, but once it has, it's important to work for that venue with the same enthusiasm that one has tried to seek within oneself during the process of writing.

Now, there's something that I have realized in the last one month, while working on my chapbook manuscript. Even if I think that a poem is complete now, chances are, I will get back to it, and do major revisions in the near future. In fact, two of the poems that I have been taking up lots of my revisioning time are the ones which were accepted by journals relatively easily. In short, my perceptions of a poem changes over time, and it's important to value that process.

If you're wondering, why am I engaging in this long gourchandrika, let me just get to the point: I am in an aggressive submission mode right now. My goal is to submit five of my poems to ten venues before the end of this month.

The Fairytale and the Book

I have always been interested in fairytales/folktales. Partly because they were probably the first truly-formed stories with recognizable beginning, middle and end that I was introduced to. I read Tuntunir Boi, Thakumar Jhuli and a whole lot of folktale compilations coming out of Peking/Beijing and Moscow.(Did I just give out my heritage? I think, I just did. But just for the sake of record, I claim a Bengali middle-class Naxalism-smelling milieu as my true heritage. Which, I believe, makes it impossible for me to claim any ethnic heritage squarely, my readers and friends.) Anyway, I read those in Bangla, and as I began to get fluent in English, I began to read the re-tellings of Hans Christian Anderson and Grimms Brothers stories. Yep, I always thought of them as "English", until I began to be trained as a comparatist and got to know a little bit about the vexed history of folklore and the "tales." What is intriguing to me now, is that, "folktales" came to me in the form of books, not as oral artifacts. Yes, there were stories that my grandmother told me, my mother also told me which she herself happened to hear from her dad, that is, my grandfather, who died when I was only four. But my mother's way of introducing me to folktales, both Bengali and global, was to read them out to me from books. So, in my imagination, fairytales have always been associated with the book. The book as a material object. The book as a form of re-telling. And also, when I think of the book as a mode of re-telling the fairy-tale, I am not just referring to the stories, told in words and alphabets, but also the pictures. If my experience is anything to go by, the illustration in children's books play an important role in telling the story, in giving the children important pointers as to how to interpret the story itself. And those pointers are often visual in their very nature.

I am thinking about these questions more and more as I am working through my manuscript of poems. I started out with the intention of re-telling some of the fairytales/folktales that have appealed to me. Pointing out the gaps, filling them in. But now, I am thinking, that a mere attempt to re-tell these tales isn't enough. I will have to think through a lot of these things in much more details. There are lots of complexities within these forms, within the very processes through which I got acquainted with these forms, which can form the basis of very interesting poem-projects. But for that, I will have to move beyond the mere "re-telling" mode. This morning, I have been reading this micro-essay by Barbara Jane Reyes. I am especially intrigued by her concluding lines:

I don't know where the belief that spoken word is not poetry was bom, how it has been cultivated and propagated, but I do know that spoken word artists have been othered as the fictitious line has been drawn between them and the poets. When talking to students, I don't have the time to linger on where this cleaving began. Instead, let me refer to Juan Felipe Herrera's 2005 lecture, "A Natural History of Chicano Literature":

Your friends, and your associates, and the people around you, and the environment that you live in, and the speakers around you...and the communicators around you, are the poetry makers. If your mother tells you stories, she is a poetry maker. If your father says stories, he is a poetry maker. If your grandma tells you stories, she is a poetry maker. And that's who forms our poetics.1

This is a fairly self-explanatory statement that I try my best to impart to them. Poetry is not meant to be locked up in inaccessible spaces. Poetry is about paying attention, not just to the stories all around us, but also and especially to how these stories are being told.

While there are lots of things that are of relevance to me here, what I am especially concerned with, at this point, is her concluding sentence. We, as poets and writers, need to pay attention to "how these stories are being told." So, if that's the case, then it becomes an imperative that I pay attention to THE BOOK too, when I am trying to engage with the very tradition of fairy-tales. At the same time, when my mother read these stories out loud to me, wasn't she also exercising a kind of orality, which is different from the talk-story tradition, but nonetheless interrelated?

Now, what it means for me now is that, I need to work harder on this project. Read more, write more, push myself more. Oh well...

Hibijibi I

This is what you produce when you're tired of manufacturing words...

Solitude/Community

"My solitude was an illusion. No poet, however young or disaffected, writes alone. It is a connected act. The words on the page, though they may appear free and improvised, are on hire. They are owned by a complicated and interwoven past of language, history, happenstance." Writes Eavan Boland in her book Object Lessons: The Life of the Woman and the Poet in Our Time. The name of the particular essay is Turning Away. I have been thinking about this weird connection between writerly solitude and this feeling of being an integral part of a collective for the last few days too. On the one hand, I need my solitude. To write, to read, to unpack. Yes, I like to write in the middle of bumbling coffee-shops. Yet, I hate it when coffee-shops have loud and intrusive music. I hate it too when they put up music which I am especially drawn too. It is, as if, the music outside will prevent me from tapping into the music I nurture inside, and can only hope will be translated into words on the page. But at the same time I know this music inside me that I am writing about here, couldn't have been possible if I haven't really lived a collective life. It is what I inherited from this world, from human existence collectively lived and experienced. Then there are other things too. As I keep working on my manuscript, I can't really leave out the question of the collective, the history, the "interwoven past," as Boland terms it. Especially since I am working on re-interpretations of fairy-tales/folktales, I keep thinking of the communities. What kind of communities told these tales? How many versions were there? What were the versions that were excluded when these stories made the transition from the mouth to the page? What is the role of the folklorist here? So, there is no way I can think of my work, however insignificant it is, as being a product of my solitary creation. When I am writing, I am also continuously thinking of the ways in which I want my writing to re-interpret the existing stories. And re-interpretation itself cannot necessarily exist without interpretation. In that sense, I am adding my voice, my narratives, my specific modes of representing these stories into an already-existing archive. I am trying to insert myself and my voice into a community of people for whom these stories/tales have meant something.

All Experiences Are Valid: Really?

This last summer, R ended a conversation with me by saying, "You know, you shouldn't dismiss other perspectives than your own. Other viewpoints are equally valid too!" We had been talking about the ways in which neo-liberalism re-defines the meaning of sexuality, especially female sexuality, and the ideological ramifications of that. I am not going to get into that in this post, but what was specifically interesting to me was the way he concluded the conversation. I wasn't surprised, because this is pretty much the way our conversations conclude themselves. That is when we're not tearing each other apart. And honestly speaking, R is not alone. I have learnt to recognize that most of us, especially the male alienationist, Marxist variety, invoke a kind of absolute relativism when they do not necessarily know how to continue to engage with the debate or the questions that they have been asked to confront. More specifically, that kind of relativism raises its head when gender, race, caste etc. has been brought up. Or when the individuals concerned have been asked to revisit, re-examine their own lives or privileges in terms of the ideologies they claim they uphold. Anyways, R and I have a pretty intense history of ripping each other apart over these things. And I can't speak for him, but I can definitely say that those conversations have helped me a lot to realize things about myself and this world, to hone my arguments and to locate the flaws in them.

A couple of days back, I attended a WOC meeting, where one of the catch-phrases was, "All experiences are valid." I was intrigued, because in this proclamation I saw a reverberation of R's argument. My instinctive response is to say, "Not really." But then I stop myself, take a back step and try to re-formulate, and this is what I would have to say in a nutshell:

Yes, of course. But for whom? To what purposes? And what are the yardsticks of validity here?

For me, that yardstick consists of the following things:

A. All experiences are experienced within specific social structures, ideologies, constructed ideas of self, society and nature. These, in turn, are implicated within certain structures of power. Therefore, all or most experiences, that involve the interaction of a human with another human or a non-human entity are guided by those power structures. Any attempt to understand "experiences" need to take into account such powered interactions and formations.

B. Depending upon the historical, cultural, social, geographical parameters, all power structures assume specific concrete forms. For example, class is one expression of that specificity. Gender is another. So is race. And caste. And religion. We can keep adding on to it. You get the idea..

C. Such specific dimensions rarely or never exist independently. They intersect each other, thus giving birth to complex social formations and modes of experiencing, which cannot always be reduced to one or the other. Therefore, in order to understand what underlies a specific experience, one needs to scratch the surface. And scratch it hard. This is what I would call de-bunking, or defamiliarization. For me, literature is a mode of de-bunking. So are other forms of art.

D. Because there are power structures, experiences are almost always an expression of one's marginality or one's ability to dominate. Often times, both marginality and dominance can co-exist within a specific experience.

E. Human beings resist. In multiple forms. Experiences reveal those modes of resistance.

F. Human beings resist, often in very fucked-up ways, thus reinforcing the category they had set out to resist in the very first place. Only in a different way.

G. Human beings resist, often in very screwed-up ways. Thus, in order to question one category of mode of dominance, they end up reinforcing another.

H. Experiences thus make sense only when seen and understood within specific ideological frameworks, whatever they might be.


So, this is how I understand experience. And thus, all experiences are not valid to me. And definitely not in the same way. Most of the times, in my attempts to understand experiences, I try to keep the power structures in mind, and yes, I do admit, I tend to side with those who I think occupy the relatively marginalized position. So, in the WOC meeting I attended, which claimed to be both WOC-centric and inclusive of all experiences, there was an essential fallacy, an essential contradiction. I guess, what it signified for me, is this weird way in which even the most radical, progressive political endeavors within USA ends up replicating the primary categories of the empire. This innate desire to avoid conflict, to push conflicts under the rug. And sometimes, in a very interesting, but nonetheless frustrating way, being selective about conflicts.