Essay on Belinda

Last year, for my Eighteenth Century Trans-Atlantic Feminism class, I wrote a paper on Belinda's Petition. Initially, the plan was to include it in my dissertation, but then both my advisors and me thought against it. So, now I am thinking of turning it into a stand-alone article. So today, when I began to revive some of my research around it, I found couple of things: one, Rita Dove had written a poem on Belinda's petition in her book The Yellow House on the Corner, and Raymond Winbush has published a book called Belinda's Petition. So, obviously, now my article needs some re-orientation too. So, what I am thinking is, writing an article that will be more about how the contemporary social imaginary in US has "read" and "interpreted" Belinda and her petition, and what her petition actually reveals about her. In that way, it will also be a continuation of my dissertation work on memory, re-imagination of history and contemporary significances of slavery. That's why, this bibliography.

Primary Sources:

1. Belinda's Petition

2. Dove, Rita. Belinda's Petition. In The Yellow House in the Corner

3. Winbush, Raymond. Belinda's Petition

Secondary Sources:

Books:

1.Chang, Alexandra. Slavery in the Age of Reason

2.George A. Levesque, Black Boston: African American Life and Culture in Urban America, 1750–1860 (New York, 1994), 32–33, 50 n. 32.

3.Slavery and Freedom in the Age of the American Revolution, ed. Ira Berlin and Ronald Hoffman (Charlottesville, Va., 1983)

4.http://tuftsjournal.tufts.edu/archive/2002/august/calendar/royall2.shtml

5.William C. Nell, The Colored Patriots of the American Revolution (Boston, 1855)

6.Nussbaum, Felicity A. The Global Eighteenth Century

7. Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, “Dis-Covering the Subject of the ‘Great Constitutional Discussion,’ 1786–1789,”Journal of American History 79, no. 3 (December 1992)

8.David Kazanjian, The Colonizing Trick: National Culture and Imperial Citizenship in Early America (Minneapolis, Minn., 2003)

9.T. H. Breen, “Making History: The Force of Public Opinion and the Last Years of Slavery in Massachusetts,” in Through a Glass Darkly: Reflections on Personal Identity in Early America, ed. Ronald Hoffman, Mechal Sobel, and Fredrika J. Teute (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1997)

10.Thomas J. Davis, “Emancipation Rhetoric, Natural Rights, and Revolutionary New England: A Note on Four Black Petitions in Massachusetts, 1773–1777,” New England Quarterly 62, no. 2 (June 1989): 248–63 (“Lawdable Example,” 262)

11.Scott Hancock, “‘The Law Will Make You Smart’: Legal Consciousness, Rights Rhetoric, and African American Identity Formation in Massachusetts, 1641–1855” (Ph.D. diss., University of New Hampshire, 1999)

12.f African American Literature, 1680–1865 (Charlottesville, Va., 2001), 53–55; Emily Blanck, “Seventeen Eighty-Three: The Turning Point in the Law of Slavery and Freedom in Massachusetts,” New England Quarterly 75, no. 1 (March 2002): 24–51, esp. 27–28.

13.Harris, Sharon.Executing Race: Early American Women’s Narratives of Race, Society, and the Law

14. Kaplan, Sidney. The Black Presence in the Era of the American Revolution

15.Timothy Dwight, The Charitable Blessed: A Sermon, Preached in the First Church in New-Haven, August 8, 1810 (New Haven, Conn., 1810), 22–23.

There will be things to add on to this list, as I continue to work more on this article, but for now, I can live with it. Also, this is the last day of 2009. So Happy New Year to myself and everyone else out there.

Planning My Spring Class

I need to finalize my syllabus for the Spring Rhetoric and Writing Class. Couple of lessons from the Fall Semester:

a. Instead of asking my students to turn in actual journals (that wasn't a very intelligent move on my part), I am requiring them to have a semester-long blog of their own. I will probably make it mandatory for them to have 12 entries, as I did the last time. That should be enough for a 15 week class, and I hope it will help them to learn the art of free-writing a little bit. For me, it's also a way to just make them feel that writing is not something that they should be afraid of. So many of my students come to the class with these mystified ideas of writing.

b. I realized, that the only assignment where my students felt actually excited was the auto-ethnography assignment. And I think, if I have to really think about it, they wrote amazing stories. Stories that dealt with race, class, religion, gender, national borders and in couple of instances, even US Empire. Had it not been for this class assignment, I am sure, most of these would have gotten lost within the routinized structures of their everyday lives. I almost cried when I read through my students' auto-ethnographies. They trusted me enough to tell these stories! But then, I also cannot help thinking, did they at all think about trust in the way I think about it? Or was it just another assignment for them? I mean, I would have assigned a zero if someone failed to turn in their auto-ethnography essay. So, this question of trust is dicey within a classroom situation. Precisely because a classroom is inherently a powered space, and there is no way that one can begin to think about it in a different way within a corporate university. But just to see some of my students so excited to be able to tell their stories, I learnt that this needs to be a more central element of the class I teach in spring. So, right now I am trying to think of ways to do that, without necessarily compromising with the idea of "academic rigor."

Now, so much of what I do is so totally not-glamorous...reading, writing, editing, hunched over on the desk, reading student papers, talking to students, editing their work...but isn't that the idea?

The Second Draft of the Bindudi Story Done

Just finished working on the Bindudi story and send it along to some of my friends for some comments/suggestions/reactions. I always feel this relief once I am done with a draft. And this moment, when I have sent it out to some of my readers, is also one full of anticipation. And then again, there will be that dreaded phase: REVISION. Today, as I was working on this draft, I was thinking, what is it that I am really trying to say in this story. If I have to push myself a little bit away from its fundamental emotional world, I will say, it is about gender, but more than that it is about this vicious circle of violence. The way we often make certain forms of violence totally legitimate. But, I was a little bit surprised to see, how in this story of mine, violence is really institutionalized. There is an inordinate amount of violence inside the school premises. There is violence within family. This is not something I had paid close attention to while writing the story. I was more interested in developing the character, and the plot and the voice. It will be interesting to see if any of my readers pick up on this.

Just finished reading Lee Smith's collection of stories: Cakewalk. What is it about the American South that has produced such great women writers? So, my own favorites in this collection are: "Between the Lines," "Gulfport," "Artists", "Dear Phil Donahue," and the last story of the collection "Cakewalk." Most of these stories are about women stuck within domestic claustrophobia, and trying to find ways out of them. Smith's women are complicated characters, often fucked up, with layers and layers of contradictions, and they try to deal with themselves within those contradictions. Rarely in this collection do we come across characters whose rage is so deep that she leaves it all. So, as I was reading these book, I was also thinking, how does one write about women who have tried to find their voice outside of the family, the contradictions of domesticity? About women who join social movements? About women who engage in political art-making? In this particular collection, Martha Rasnick of "Dear Phil Donahue" is probably the one who comes closest to it, but then, hers is not a "collective" or "political" solution in that sense. Wouldn't it be great if someone did a collection like that?

Will It Help Me to Begin to Send Out a Chapbook-Manuscript?

I have been trying to decide on something. Right now, I do have enough material for a chapbook, but what I would really want to do is, have a more finished manuscript for a full-length poetry collection. Because, I have this feeling, that only in a full-length form, will the stuff I am dealing with, make any remote sense. Besides, I feel, I need to read more, learn more, and know more before I get into the publishing biz. But then, there are some real-world concerns too. Getting a chapbook published will add more publication credits to my name, probably will also get me more attention. So, it can be a little confusing. So far I am tilting more towards just working and learning my stuff better. But it can be a hard call sometimes. Will have to decide within the next couple of days.

"We" Voice In Short Fiction

In one of her interviews, Jhumpa Lahiri, commented on the process of her writing of the story Treatment of Bibi Halder. She said, it had been an attempt on her part to experiment with the "we" voice. I think, in lots of ways, the "we" voice works well for stories set in India, Bengal or for that matter, anywhere else in the Third World. I am not trying to generalize the "Third World" as essentially "collective" and the "First World" as primarily "individual", but I am beginning to think there is a difference in the way the very genre of the short story has developed in a lot of the Third World context and US. I am not sure to what extent, what Barbara Jane Reyes and her other friends call it, the MFA Industrial Complex, that has contributed to it. But, there is definitely a way in which the workshops teach students to read and write short stories. The emphasis is always on one individual, the so-called "change" at the end, the "conflict" etc. Not that these are not essential elements in good story-telling, but there are plenty of short stories in the world which do not necessarily depend on one individual's conflict resolution model. For me, right now, as I am working through this story (A Phuchka for Bindudi), I am also thinking, doesn't the "we" narrative dis-spell this model a little bit?

Because the "we" voice is really trying to narrate an event, a biography through the collective voice of a specific community. And it is doing so precisely because an event or a person stands out. That is, it challenges or at least complicates the communal standards in some way or the other. So, it is almost like through this story, the community is trying to re-assess its own norms. At least, when a writer adopts that "we" voice, that's how I would see what he/she is trying to achieve rhetorically. For me, then, there is almost a kind of dialectical relationship between the individual and the community within this "we" voice in a way that is not always the dominant trend within contemporary American short fiction. So, to get back to Jhumpa Lahiri, she also said in that interview that the "we" voice is inconsequential in a sense. This is what I have been thinking about a lot while revising this story. One of my workshop-colleagues asked an interesting question: who is the protagonist of your story? Bindu Didimoni or this collective "we" voice? My tentative answer is, both. But then, does it really matter if we do not have one clearly identifiable protagonist in a short story? And as I am thinking through this process, I would like to say, unlike Jhumpa Lahiri, I don't want the "we" voice to be inconsequential. If "change" is one of the things that constitutes essence of a short-fiction narrative, or any narrative, I want both Bindu Didimoni and this "we" voice to experience/perceive this change.

Now, the challenge is, how to achieve all of these within the formal elements of a short story. So, without devoting much more time to yapping, it's time for me to turant go back to that.

Working on the Story

This summer I read Faulkner's short story A Rose for Emily, and ever since I have been thinking of writing a story using this "we" point-of-view. I had also been toying for a while to do something with this idea of gendered repression and food. So, this story, A Phuchka for Bindudi, is really this attempt to bring these two together. Or, rather should I say, they came together without my always planning it this way. This "we" voice is interesting: for, it lets the writer explore and experiment with the idea of a gossipy voice, a collectivity and the kinds of voices and discourses it can produce. Consequently, it can also be an effective way of throwing back this gaze on someone who is considered to be an "other" by a specific community. In doing so, the "we" voice almost always de-constructs itself too. Or, one might say, it's basically all about the writer's intervention. A writer uses that "we" voice strategically, just so that s/he can problematize the standards the "we" voice supposedly holds up as un-problemtic, un-violable, or even sacred.

So, today, I worked on one of the scenes of the story. My old hang-out place in Austin, It's a Grind has closed shop, but now there is this cafe called The Coffee Bean and Tea Leaves in the same space. I have been hanging out here for the past hour or so, trying to write this scene. It wasn't there in the original story, but Beth Ann Bauman's suggestion was, a scene like this one, might actually help the readers understand the difference between the protagonist and the other woman in the community. So, that's what I was trying to do today. I am slow these days, I can't do more than one specific aspect of a piece within a single day. My only hope is, slow and steady wins the race. And even if I am being reaaaaaaaaaalllllllllly, reallyyyyyyyy slow, it still counts. Or, at least, it counts to me!

Going Back to Prose

For the last few days, prose has been beckoning me. So, yesterday, after emailing DRR the poem, I finally settled on working on a re-vision of this story I have written for Beth Ann Bauman's workshop at UCLA. The story is loosely based on Raha Didimoni, this formidable teacher of our Balia Nafar Chandra Balika Bidyalaya. I have never been to that school myself, but have enough stories about her from those who went. I have known almost nothing about her, so the story really began as a way for me to explore how can one think of such a figure, and once I went inside the project, Raha Didimoni began to move further and further away, although, I guess, one can still see certain traces of our Garia Station Road if one tries hard. So, yesterday, I spent some time looking through the feedbacks I received. One of them said:

The back-story was too much, too heavy.

And, my reaction is, yeah, you know, we are an ancient people, have known life before capital, have dealt with colonialism, too many famines, genocides etc. On top of that there is gender, caste, multiple religions, a Partition. So, yes, our back-stories are heavy, and involve more that a nuclear family in the suburbia and after-hours fucks in the school-gym and a smoke in the parking lot. You just have to deal with it.

But apart from that, some of the feedbacks, especially Beth Bauman's was dot on. I am hoping to have a revised version of the story by Jan. 1. So that I can send it out to few for feedback.

Some Thoughts on "Generations" Poem

Last night, I finally finished the poem I was working on. Like a lot of the stuff I have been writing recently, it got to be this long-ish poem divided into smaller sub-sections. I don't think I will call them a "series of poems," because other than the first two, I don't think they will make much sense if read separately. So, the very way they have been written demands a kind of sequential reading.Now, the whole thing is done, at least the first draft, I was thinking, the main patriarch character of the poem needs to be developed a little bit more. For example, why do I call him Parrot King? Of course, there is a kind of fairytalish feeling in that, but the way it stands now, that fairy-talish feeling doesn't lend much to anything else. Similarly, there is a need to expand on the relationship between the narrator and the Parrot King a little bit more. There are hints within the poem of the Parrot King's paternity, but the emotional world still remains largely un-explored. I guess, everything doesn't need to be squeezed into one single poem, and possibly some of the stuff that I think this poem is lacking, can definitely go into the Cartographer's Daughter poem that I have been thinking about for a while. But still, there are certain things, I am feeling, that need to be addressed right within the body of this poem. But, for now, I can rest, and send it out to my "first reader," and see what he says!

I have been feeling this urge to go back to prose for a while now.So, I think, beginning today, I will re-visit the story I have put up for Beth Ann Bauman's workshop. The second one, that is. "A Phuchka for Bindudi." I have received some good feedback for that one, and I think, I do have some thoughts on how to tweak certain parts of it. And of course, then there are certain other parts that just need to be newly written and added to the main story. I am beginning to feel excited about it! But, then, there is also this niggling thought, that I should really be working on my dissertation now! This is it about me--I never could figure out this whole thing about being timely, and doing things on time. But for now, I will just settle on emailing the poem to some of my readers, and then working on the story!

Walking In and Out of the Skin

Fred D'Aguiar says here:

"The first thing you do as a black poet is unzip the suit of your black skin and walk away from it. The second thing you do as a poet is find that suit of yours that fits you oh so well and step right back into it. That suit paints behind your eyelids so you see it when you dream. That suit is osmotic: it lets out sweat, breathes for you – your biggest organ – and keeps out the elements. All history is in that skin. Poetry plays your skin like an instrument – listen, touch, taste, look, and sniff. Dream-skin. Skin-song. Human."

I don't know if this could have been said better. Walking in and out of one's skin(s), that's what writing is all about. And I know in so many ways, I fail to do it! There are times when I write so much from within my skin, and then, as if to compensate, I walk far away from it. So far that I can't smell the sweat, and consequently, the stuff that I end up writing, becomes nothing!

I have been feeling this acutely ever since I began to work on a re-vision of an old poem. One of the things that I often worry about, my poems tend to grow darn big and bigger as I continue with the revision process. One part of me says, I shouldn't worry too much about it. The material I am dealing with needs space, and everything doesn't have to be the sleek, market-savvy flash fiction. What is more, in my more optimistic moods, I even tend to think, the material will determine its own length. But when I am feeling not so good with myself (like now!), I tend to ask, does it mean I am innately incapable of saying more with less? Doesn't it mean I am failing essentially as a writer/poet? Like the poem I am working now. I would have really liked it to be a three-part short-ish prose poem. But once I got into the actual writing, it began to become bulky. Other voices began to peep in, demanded that I give them at least one line, and in most cases, more than one line. The narrator began to demand more explanation, and before I could understand it very well myself, I again have this nine-part poem, which looks like it could have been its own chapbook! And I am wondering, is it because I have stayed too much within my skin while writing this one?

There is an interesting discussion going on at WOM-PO listserve on this, although the language is very different.And I am wondering, aren't all artistic works autobiographical, in the sense that they are always mediated by the individual artist's sensibilities? But also, in my own experience, whenever I have tried to use autobiographical stuff, rarely could I stay faithful to what really happened. Not because my memory was failing or something, although I am sure it was, but the form itself, the logic of it, demanded that I move away from the realistic logic and pay attention to the narrative-logic instead. For me, this is what I find exciting and scary too. Exciting because I am never sure how my work will transmute the autobiographical details, and scary because almost always it leads me to discover some aspect of my life, which I wouldn't have taken into account had I not begun this process of exploring it through writing. But at the end of the day, it's not strictly autobiographical in that mimetic sense anymore!

I am thinking I should go with "Inking the Hyacinth" as the title for this particular poetry project. How does it sound?

City Rant

There is a new emphasis in Indian-English writing on cities. A lot of the publishers have begun to come out with anthologies focusing on specific cities. And although,the whole project is still struggling to find a publisher, I, myself have contributed to an edited volume of Indian women's city poetry.And of course, there is a whole cult of "urban" writing in Anglophone traditions in general. So, I have been thinking on this for the last few days. Especially since I am reading Federico Garcia Lorca's Poeta en Nueva York(Poet in New York). What a collection it is! I read one poem everyday, multiple times and then just have to shut the book. I can't continue, and the words I have just read push me towards that space within myself which will never transform into words.

But if I have to try anyway, I will put it like this: it's ultimately a way of saying fuck you to the world, a fuck you that's so intense that forgets to be angry, refuses to see hope in anything that I do within my everyday, and refuses to see redemption in any institution. The way I see it, I will have to write so long as I retain this sense of fuck-youedness within me. For, that's the only space where, for me, there is still some hope. This innate human capacity to turn experience into colors, words, lines, rhythms and shadows.

Tumhare bad tumhare shabd rahegi! Wrote a little-known woman-poet from my home country. A cliche in so many ways. But still so true. What will be lost are these endless niceties, performance of care and politeness, the meaningless smiles. What will live....

But to go back to the theme with which I began this post, why cities? And more importantly, on a personal plane, what do cities mean to me? I associate cities with a social order predicated on capital. I associate cities with the violence committed on an impoverished peasantry. I associate cities with the pain of being uprooted--a famine-clad peasant family accepting the lives of sidewalk beggars.The shanty-towns. Little kids sucking at the ice-cream cone I just tossed off in the street. The apathy. The innate feeling of helplessness on the face of so many glowing contradictions.But then,within a city, there is also that pleasure of anonymity, the walking through the crowd, the smells of sweaty armpits brushing against your nostrils, the reminder that violence, in this totally off-putting and off-handed way, has always given birth to some of the greatest works of art in this planet.And I think of Manchester. What else would have given birth to the genre of industrial novels in Victorian England? So, like it or not, we, the writers,artists, scholars thrive on aestheticizing, objectifying violence.

But then, if I have to ask one precise question, it is, is it this turn towards cities a symptom of the consolidation of the neo-liberal capital in India? And my tentative answer is, yes. In a way, I would also think this is inevitable. In the same way, it was inevitable that a branch of the Victorian Literature would turn towards examining the urban-space, and that would push it towards having to deal with class, class-conflict and gender intersecting with class!

For my own work, I try to look for a language which would hand over to me, in bits and fragments and wholes, the multi-layered nature of the violence of capital. How to do it without relegating my work to the preachiness of socialist-realism? How to do it without wriggling out of the uncomfortable questions of my own locations? How to transform in imageries and metaphors the experiences of a neo-liberal world? How to narrate my own contradictory positions within it? I am a beneficiary of neo-liberalism, the GATT of 1992.Everything I have done so far has been complacent with the ongoing project of the neo-liberal genocide. No amount of 'i-am-down-with-the-revo" rhetoric will redeem me of it. So how do I write about my own deep alienations from and repulsions of this world-system, without giving my own self a free pass? I don't know the answers,except for to try to write more and more, and to try to find the answers through the practice of writing itself. I seek refuge in Lorca thus. These lines. Only if I could write something half as good as these, I wouldn't be so jealous of you, Federico.

Out in the world, no one sleeps. No one, no one.
I've said it before.
No one sleeps.
But at night, if someone has too much moss on his temples,
open the trap doors so he can see in moonlight
the fake goblets, the venom, and the skull of the theaters.
----Sleepless City (Brooklyn Bridge Nocturne), Poet in New York

The first time I read this poem, I was almost expecting him to end with the moonlight. Not to have the "in" in there. It was a very conventional expectation on my part--it's as if I was hoping the nature would come to my rescue. To this world's rescue. Provide the necessary redemption. But it doesn't. It's as interpellated within the logic of capital as is everything else. So, when we open those trap-doors, and let the moonlight come in, that moon or its light is never enough by itself. All it can do, is to facilitate something else in us. The witnessing of a world where culture is equivalent to economy, the fake glitter of it all and the all-encompassing trauma. There is no respite, no outside.

It's within us all. And...

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.

Publications/Productivity

Have been wondering about the question of productivity/publicity recently. How important it is to get published? How important are publications as a testimony of one's productivity? My own answer to the second question would be, yes, publications do kind of testify to a writer's productivity. But it is also a very public form of acknowledgement. Yes, I mean acknowledgement. Also, it's a form of approval. We all like them. The approvals and affirmations I mean. I know I do. It's wonderful to see someone acknowledge my work in the form of publishing a poem/a story/ an essay in their journals. It also tells me, I am not writing shit. This is not to deny the fact that a lot of shit do get published and a lot of gems don't. And sometimes, it needs a huge amount of inner strength on the part of the writer/artist to keep on believing the essential quality of one's own work, keep on producing it, honing one's art and craft, even when the approvals of the publishing industry are not pouring in. Luckily, the history of world literature is full of these examples. So, whenever anyone is in doubt, one can turn to these examples, derive strength from them. But then, there is also the pressure to publish. Publish or perish, as we say it in the academic world. Honestly, who would like to perish? So we go on sending stuff out, even when they need more work, more brewing, more marination! I guess, I am one of those writers who would rather like to take one's own time to learn, before getting published.

It's okay if I am not described as "prolific." It's okay if I have only one book in me! Even if Arundhati Roy doesn't produce any more work of fiction, she will be remembered for her God of Small Things. And that's what matters. What matters is doing the hard work. Pouring oneself out for that one work that's within us. Getting ourselves to the writing table and the battle-field everyday. Pushing our work to places where it's hard to go otherwise! And after that, one can only hope to be noticed by some journal/publisher/whatever. If not, email the work to one's friends. If they like it, they will email it to their friends. And as it is, I don't expect my work to be read by more than 200 people. Hopefully, if I ever succeed to write something meaningful, it wouldn't be hard to find that number of people from amongst my friends and friends' friends and friends' friends' friends.

Like everything else, the concept of "productivity" is a historical-social construct. For me, it is important to not fall into the trap of its most dominant social definition. Rather, often times I need to re-define the term for myself, and then work accordingly. The test is, to keep myself accountable to my own definition of production and productivity.

And if you haven't guessed yet, it's not any kind of writer's block that prompted this post. But, the rejections:))))))))))

What Have I Been Writing About?

I have been looking through the poems I have written during the last couple of years. And yes, also re-visiting some of them. Ahem, trying to revise, that is. As usual, it's not an easy process. I am getting stuck at places, often wondering and asking myself what the heck was I trying to say in these lines. So basically, I am trying to go back to that phase in my life, trying to remember the psychological state I was in, trying to think back the bigger questions that were perturbing me. In a way, one can say, it's a process that requires a certain kind of continuous historicization of my own self. I mean, there is no way that such a process can be "objective," or "full-proof" in any way, but it's a very personal attempt on my part to understand my own growth as a person and writer better.I find that process hard, both artistically and emotionally.

Of course, re-visiting a poem actually requires that I become more rigorous with words. Rigorous with that process through which we transform raw emotions into poetic forms and speech. But more than that, I find this act of re-visiting/re-visioning needs introspection. Honest introspection. And frankly, these days, I find it's hardest to be honest with one's own self. Really! And that's why I guess, it's also hard to be honest in one's own artistic productions. It's much much easier to acquire skills, but combining skills with personal/political honesty, well, that's not just hard, but something that requires life-long commitment to art, living, and most importantly, at least for me, the will and stubbornness to change as a person. Change for better. (One of the reasons I have always been drawn to Mao's thoughts. I mean, change yourself. change this world, is pretty dense, right? And anyone who writes that, his/her thoughts have to be interesting, eh?) But, as usual, I am failing. Failing horribly in this project too as in everything else.

The other thing is, I can now reveal a pattern in my work of the last two years or so. More than anything else, I think, I have been taken up by the relationship between creativity and gender. In short, exploring some of the historical dimensions of creativity. And that does make sense. I have never been much of a believer in those theories of "spontaneous" creativity or art-making. So, it does make sense when I see in my poems, no matter how badly they have been written, I have tried to make sense of the process of artistic creation in social, historical terms. It's sometimes scary to see how your poems, written over a specific period of time, can reveal issues which you have been trying to make sense of in your real life. My writings have always given me these spaces within which I try to process and work through some of my "real-world" concerns and crises. Maybe, that's what all poets or writers do? I don't know. Or is it at all possible that one reaches a stage where all one does is to repeat oneself, without letting one's audience/readers know that it's indeed repetition? I mean, is it at all possible that you create only with your skills and not with your concerns about this world and life? The logic of capital tells me, it indeed is. My writer-self refuses to believe. Seriously?

Reading Cornelius Eady's You Don't Miss Your Water now. The very precision of his language makes me want to cry! Did I ever tell you I am an extremely sentimental reader?

Poems/Poetry/Poeta

Did some aggressive submitting of my poems this weekend. Now, comes the hardest part. The wait. I have been wondering about this recently. What binds me to poetry. I kept coming back to this question while reading Anne Blonstein's the blue pearl, an exquisite collection of poems. let me say it out loud, i envy anyone who can come up with lines like the ones blonstein have written. it's what i expect poetry to be--personal, political, abstract, concrete, accessible, inaccessible, steeped in history, universal. in short, a mode of expression which allows me to feel and think language differently. to touch the inherent theoretical and abstract in language. and that's why, i indulge in writing poetry myself. although, i am not a poet. not yet.

There have been times when I have been annoyed by the recent trend in American poetry to tell neat stories. I mean, it's not that I am averse to the idea of narrative poems. In fact, one of my most favorite piece in recent times is Slave Moth by Thylias Moss, a novel in verse. But even when I am reading a narrative poem, I expect the writing to move into spaces where conventional prose cannot. To find out the lyricism in the plot. To find out the abstract in the characters' voices. To explore the theoretical in the story which can only be done through the fragmentation of language which poetry often demands. I don't think my work has yet reached that space, but I am trying. I am trying to be both a poet and a fiction writer, and sometimes, I feel I am getting lost in the process. Although, often times, I also feel that exploring both the forms have made me aware of both the intersections and the divergences, and I feel a little bit grateful to myself.

Meanwhile, the diss is looming large in the background, demanding more and more and more attention!

Back!

Back in the hole. Or, as DRR says, more like back in the tube. Trying desperately to go back to a regular reading and writing schedule, which is proving hard with all the first-week activities and this weird feeling that my time in this country is almost up. And I need to go back where I come from! Hopefully, regular blogging will resume soon!

Rachel Kann's Workshop, Woolf and Workshops

Just finished an one-week workshop with Rachel Kann on Call and Response:Poetic Conversations. The basic idea was, all the workshop participants respond to a writer/poet and/or a poem/literary text in their poems and then turn in the finished draft for feedback and comments. A poetic dialog of sorts. I have long been interested in the idea of rewriting as a critic, and no one working on neo-slave narratives, post-coloniality, women’s writings can actually bypass the immense significance of re-writing or different modes of revisionist aesthetics and their complexities.

I did not generate any new work for the workshop, but turned in an old poem, written earlier this year. One from the series I am writing on Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own. I have long been intrigued by this text, especially the way it frames the question between women’s creativity and economic independence. And my storytelling mind keeps marveling at this whole idea of Shakespeare’s sister, through which Woolf introduces the primary concept of the book---the need for a woman to have a room in order to be creative. Much later, I had come across Alice Walker’s brilliant essay In Search of Our Mother’s Garden, where she provides an extremely insightful problematization of the very basic premise of Woolf’s work, the very idea of a woman’s separate room, through a racial/class lens. In lots of ways, the series I am writing is based on that premise pointed out by Alice Walker, although I am primarily interested in locating Woolf’s work within more of a context of the colonial drainage of wealth which directly effected the sub-continent, and in an offhand kind of a way, also led to the emergence of British Modernisms. So, one can also say, in this series, I am also trying to confront Woolf’s white feminism and some of its ideological implications, without losing sight of the fact that A Room of One’s Own is indeed a text which has influenced me profoundly, and has led me to think of the relationship between gender and creativity in more complex terms.

My colleagues at the workshop liked the poem, and Rachel herself has provided some really useful suggestions. So, right now, I am busy re-visioning and editing it. This is one of the things I love about the workshoping process ~ the way it often forces a writer to think about the aesthetic-narrative-political choices one is making, and if the need be, to defend them within a community of reader-writers. Of course, it’s not hard to see how that process can become problematic, but I must also say, that during this week, it did feel affirming and just plain good to get some positive feedback about my work from other poets and writers. Especially since, the week before had been one of receiving rejections from quite a few of the journals to whom I had turned in some of my work before leaving Austin.

Autobiography/Fiction

The new story is happening, but very very slowly.I am not pushing myself to produce huge chunks all at once. Rather, I try to write 200-300 words everyday, and reflect on the story outline before and after producing those words. Although yesterday I did end up writing around 500 words. I wonder, if the difficulty is partly because of the fact that my main character is someone who is hugely different from me-- a small-town teenager, whom everyone reads as too shy, too burdened by social norms, and too ordinary. I have never lived in an Indian/Bengali small-town myself, although I have visited them and have friends who have grown up in there. So, it's not something I know directly in the way I knew of things when I wrote some of the stories of the Pipli series. Although, once I began to write, even in the Pipli series, things began to assume their own lives, and pushed me out of that autobiography mode. Or should I say, vulgar autobiography mode?

In that sense, I am beginning to think, that all writings are autobiographical in some way or the other. I mean, there is no way a writer can write about things if it hasn't passed through his experience or existence. I am willing to go for extremely broad definitions of the words "experience" and "existence," but I don't think it is possible to write even a fantasy tale or a historical fiction (things which are by definition beyond realism, and therefore beyond the so-called real world experience), if the writer hasn't experienced history or the fantasy world in some way or the other. So, I am not surprised, when I find myself unconsciously falling back upon my own memories of how I felt as a fifteen year old while writing about this girl who is vastly dissimilar in terms of background. Now, I just need to continue with the narrative and see where it goes.

In other words,have begun to read Rishi Reddy's debut collection Karma and Other Stories. She has a really strong voice, and a lucid way of writing about people and their complexities, which is magnetic. A little bit like Jhumpa Lahiri, but from what I have read so far, there is a bigger space for rebellion, especially young girls' rebellion in her stories. And I cannot help enjoying that!

But Where is the Conflict?

Have started the new short story, written like a page of it. Although I am still not sure where it is going, I have a better sense of the narrative. I am trying to experiment with the kind of voice Faulkner uses for his story A Rose for Emily. I am not sure if it will work fully, the we-voice thing, because already I can see the narrator becoming much more of an involved entity, more so than what becomes of him/her within Faulkner's story. So, that needs to be seen. I don't know fully yet...

In the last one year, I have been consistently told in the workshops that nothing much ever happens in the stories I write. I have also been asked, but, where is the conflict? Part of it, no doubt, is my own bad writing. I mean, I am only beginning to write, think through stories,words, representations as a crafts-woman seriously. Previously, my relationship to literature has been pre-dominantly one of a reader-critic. So, I don't expect instant success. But, I have also begun to wonder, if there isn't something more to that conflict-nothing much happens question than just my bad writing. Coming to think of it, nothing much happens in, say, Bibhutibhushan Bandopadhayay's Pather Panchali (Song of the Road) for a good length of time. Nothing much happens in Sandra Cisneros' House on the Mango Street or Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye until one comes to the tail-end.So, is it possible that this question is itself ideological in nature? A question that emerges from a generation of white American readers/writers who are used to the catastrophe model of Hollywood film-narrative? I mean, let's face it, nothing much happens in most people's lives, yet a lot happens too! So how does a writer choose a story? In Bengali, as well as in the entire gamut of post-colonial literature, there is a very rich tradition of character-sketches. Kind of a fictional version of life-writing, where the very writing of a character, reveals a lot about the complexities of history, society, culture, narrative. It is true I have been trained within that tradition, and that training has been primarily sub-conscious and un-conscious. And it is within that tradition that I want to locate myself.

So, in a way, I think, I am more interested in exploring the contradictions and the tensions in a story, rather than exploring the conflict (Thanks to UCLA-Extension Daniel Jaffe for pointing this out in a workshop.)

But I also wonder, to what extent, my readers have been expecting me to satisfy their ethnic curiosities? But then, I also want to hone my craft. So, I don't want to use that as an excuse for not working on my craft. So, my question is, where does a third world/writer of color (insert any other non-dominant identity here) go to develop their story-telling skills while clinging onto the complexities of their experiences both in terms of the forms and the contents they are embracing?

Random Rants and Fears

My productivity always goes down significantly during the months I live in Kolkata. I indulge in it, because this is the time I have ear-marked for myself for getting back to the community of friends and acquaintances whose presence and activities have helped me to be who I am right now. I don't know if there is any "back" in that sense, but the thing is, in the last seven years, I have never felt out of sync with Kolkata or India. No, it's not that I identify with everything that is happening in here. I have a fair amount of ideological/political/aesthetic/personal alienation from spaces and communities here, but it's not really the neither here nor there kind of alienation the so-called diasporic intellectuals seem to be in love with. In my opinion, all places in this planet are equally infested with problematic power relations, problematic ideologies etc. which make living hard. And in all those places, there are individuals and collectivities who are trying to deal with those structures/ideologies in their own ways. Whether I will grow as an individual or not, really depends upon how I negotiate with those individuals and collectivities and how deeply I am reflecting on them or representing those negotiations in my chosen medium.

Speaking of which, have just begun to work on a new short story. It's not coming together yet, but in my experience, some of the stories that I have gotten the biggest satisfaction from are the ones which I found the hardest to write. Probably because in those stories, I have simultaneously allowed and forced myself to go to places within which I am not exactly very comfortable. And I think, one of the biggest understandings that I have come to, through all these exercises in the last two years is that, I am kind of lacking (A LOT) in the Talent Department (Thank God!). Which means, I have to work hard, Hard, HARD, HARRRRRDDDDDD, to produce something that is halfway coherent. I am often worried that I am not putting in that amount of labor, I am slacking off, and some day, I will just get up in the morning and find that all the things I thought I had to say and write about, have vanished over-night, leaving a colorless hole in my head.

That's why, these days, I begin my writing days reading a random page from a book I love. If I can read, and still make sense of what is there in the page, probably it means, that the skin and all those other things in my head haven't eroded so much to form that hole. So, today was Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things. So, today, this is the passage I read:

While other children of their age learned other things, Estha and Rahel learned how history negotiates its terms and collects its dues from those who break its laws. They heard its sickening thud. They smelled its smell and never forgot it.
History's smell.
Like old roses on a breeze
It would lurk for ever in ordinary things. In coat-hangers. Tomatoes. In the tar on the roads. In certain colours. In the plates at a restaurant. In the absence of words. And the emptiness in eyes.

This is why, I have always believed that any good art is essentially also good theory. There is no way one can move about it.

Longish Short Story Done!

Not everything is okay in K-town. Lalgarh...I am in no position to undermine or trivialize the violence that has been unleashed in there...but apart from all the co-lateral damage involved,one cannot help recognizing this plain old fact that the states, all over the world, can be extremely funny and idiotic when they are scared. And quite ridiculous too! Not too many years ago, in Kenya, Ngugi wa'Thiongo's novel Matigari was arrested. This is not a typo. I am serious. They issued a fucking arrest warrant against a novel. I wouldn't be surprised if I witness something similar in my home-state!

In terms of my writing, I finally finished the story I had been working on (yay!). It was a painful process--writing this story. For one thing, it took me almost three months to finish it. Granted, in the middle of it all, I took my comprehensive exams, wrote and defended my dissertation proposal, but still, this is the longest short story that I have ever written. And during the entire process, I kept worrying about the plot, the voice, the cris-crossing of voices, point-of-view, characterization etc. But now, I realize that this story had been influenced a lot by the general tone of Jhumpa Lahiri's latest short story collection Unaccustomed Earth, which I was reading during a big chunk of this time that I was writing this story.

I must confess, I am not a great fan of Lahiri's. I do think she is a very competent short story writer, and has a lot to teach in terms of the craft of short fiction. But for most part, she is replicating in a much more sensitive way the kind of assimilationist narrative that was popularized by Bharati Mukherjee and the ilk. No doubt Lahiri is much more sensitive and adept at representing more complex characters, but at the end of the day it is all about the American Dream. But what to do? If you are a Bengali, a writer and a poco-lit-critter, then you will end up bouncing against her. Even if you yourself choose to ignore her, people will ask your opinions about her and her work, and then you suddenly find yourself leafing through her books.

At the same time, I must confess that Unaccustomed Earth is a very important book to me. It has given me the permission to write long, novella-like short stories where nothing much happens. Where I want to deviate from Lahiri is, the whole complex question of how to represent women. My own thesis is that, Lahiri finds it extremely hard to represent feminine rebellion, feminine intellectuality, feminine radicalism. Consequently, her women characters tend to inhabit that space of demure Bengali femininity which does not nettle with either the mainstream South Asian/Bengali perceptions of womanhood, or the American/Western/white perceptions about hapless South Asian women. On the other hand, I like to think that this story is primarily about women resisting. In multiple ways. Across generational lines. And also, the failure to resist. I think the story is also about memory, destruction of memory and the vicious circle of violence within which families are often implicated.

My own sense is that, I still need to work on the concluding section of the story. Also, I know very very well that once I begin to send it out for feedback, there will be lots of things that I will need to revise. But for now, I will sit back for a while and celebrate!

Fairy-Tales, Characterization and Writing

The last week has been a breeze---the revision was turned in on time, Kolkata reached, bags unpacked etc. etc. My teacher called my work "a feminist, queer mythical-fabulist tale." I must concede, as a literary critic, who is used to deploying these and other such labels to talk about literary works, it did seem a bit strange to see them being used for my own creation. Honestly, I don't mind. Every text that has been created on the face of this planet,is inherently political, and I have no objection if someone spells out that politics in terms of such labels. But, I must say, that when I was writing, I was not thinking about these labels seriously. Rather, I was taken the act of writing itself, trying to think of the settings, the characters, the craft~the story in general. But then, the politics, the ideology have seeped in. Part of it has to do,I think, with the conscious thought I have put in behind the writing itself. After all, any choice that a writer makes vis-a-vis the craft cannot be but implicated within a complex history of signs and symbols. And therefore, politics and ideology.

Personally, I find this process exciting. At the end of the day, what it signifies for me is the fact that every word in a language is political. Every image that we conjure up in a text can be historicized.A while back, a good friend of mine, a writer and a voracious reader himself, had argued, that what matters in a text, when we read it or write it, is the "emotional resonance" that the process of reading or writing produces. The social and the political come much much later. I know it's not just my friend, but this is a very popular opinion in lots of ways. I would say, that "emotional resonance" itself is not outside of politics, society, and history. But more importantly, I don't see the social/political/ideological and the "emotional resonance" as two separate entities, or binaries. In that, I think, I am not in for that classical Marxist dichotomy between the form and the content. Rather, I would say, the form is as political as the content, and not only that, a form often times determines the content itself.

The funny thing is, I was somewhat pushed towards thinking about this specific aspect while working on this particular piece. I was trying to think of certain possibilities in the piece. For example,in this work, I am specifically interested in examining the mythical world of the Bengali folklore, and also throwing a little bit of the Grimms Brothers in the mix. So, the names of my characters are loosely based on the female characters one would find in Thakumar Jhuli, one of the classic compilations of the Bengali folktales. No, I am not trying to “rewrite” or “reform” Thakumar Jhuli. Neither am I trying to provide a more “politically correct” version of the stories therein. I am merely trying to imagine different lives for some of the female characters. Most of them either reside on the margins of the tales, or, are banished from the royal world most of these tales describe, precisely because they did something that was considered to be transgressive.

But there is something very interesting that I came up during the process. One of the feedbacks that I received from all of my writer/critic friends is that, the central characters of the piece did not always come out as full-fledged characters. Which made me think of the kind of characterization one comes across in classic fairy-tales or folk-tales. There isn’t much of detailed characterization in there. Most of the characters appear as archetypes, illuminating specific moral messages. Initially, I was thinking, if this is more of a case with female characters, but now that I think back on it, I will have to concede that no, it’s generally one of the central features of this form we call fairy-tales. I am still not very sure of the politics/sociology behind it, I am still fumbling. But, I am also concerned with another question:to what extent a contemporary writer can intervene with the characterization when one is engaging with the material that has been handed down to us by this existing body of literature commonly known as fairy-tales?

By the way, there is a beautiful translation of Thakumar Jhuli in English, called Tales My Grandmother Told Me by Rina Pritish Nandi. If you want to increase your fairy-tale repertoire beyond Grimms Brothers and Hans Christian Anderson, feel free to check it out.

Revision/Writing

I am afraid of revisions. And being a slow person, who takes ages to process things, it's always hard for me to digest any feedback quickly and then jump right on to the revisions. That's why, this week will be interesting. I am trying to revise the first chapter of a novella for a writing workshop I am in right now. The whole thing developed out of a 2,500 word short story I wrote last year. So, when I enrolled for the workshop, I was thinking more in terms of revising this short-story, and making it into a more complete piece. I realized during the revision process, that this is the first prose/fiction piece I have written which is not realist. I guess, if I have to categorize it, it will fall somewhere between speculative, revisionist-mythical and fantastic. But then, once I turned in the short story, I realized, especially after receiving the initial round of feedback, that the material I have put out there within that 4,111 word long narrative, would need a slightly longer treatment. More fleshing out, more research, more exploration. So, now I am hooked into this process of writing a novella (yes yes along with a dissertation), and right now, revising the first chapter of it. As I said, I take a huge amount of time to revise, to make sense of things in a more organic, personalized way and to churn out materials which are halfway coherent. So, I don't know what am I going to do within a week! But I am finding this process exciting, as I am sitting in a window seat inside a cafe at Austin and reading a draft of the chapter, sipping on this weird beast called chai. I plan to write a little bit before I leave, maybe 500 words or so. So, let's see how that goes.

Coffee-Shops and Inky Madness

I love to read and write in coffee-shops.In the middle of the smell of baked goods, brewing coffee, bad metal music and the general din. I can spend hours in a coffee-shop, reading, writing and sipping some cheap-ass drink. Although I like to work together with friends or colleagues, often times, I just want to hang out alone in the coffee-shops, while reading and writing. I don't want the disruption of having to engage in a chit-chat or casual conversation. A friend of mine had once asked me why I like coffee-shops so much, and I had answered, Because I can be alone in there. The moment I said that, the irony of the whole thing struck me a little too much. Besides, there is no way I would ever go to Indian Coffee House, either in College Street or in Jadavpur in Kolkata, to read and write. I go there to meet with my friends, chat with them, and I have no desire to work in there. So, I often think about the notion of privacy that haunts us when we bring our work to cafes. I know, I work in coffee-shops because it provides me with a break from the monotony of my matchbox-apartment, it allows me to enjoy a private moment which is also intensely public. Similarly, often times I think about the racial dynamics in coffee-shops. How intensely white sometimes they are in this country!

And I keep thinking, wouldn't it be cool if someone does a project somewhere on the history, sociology, cultural studies of coffee-shops? Like, I would say, without hesitating at all, that the emergence of the coffee-shops in most Indian cities is inextricably linked to the emergence of neo-liberalism.

Shining Coffee-Shops=Shining India

But, I am not so sure of the social history of the coffee-shops in here! But just writing this post makes me think that currently I don't have any stories which are set in coffee-shops! It might actually be interesting to try to write one over the summer or at some point in my life. Speaking of which, I am thinking: writing indeed is a form of memorializing. So, I am wondering, what's the role of writer's own experience, or experience in general , in writing? I guess, it's a very old question. But the way I think about it, it's still a relevant one, something which every writer has to think through while figuring out one's own craft, aesthetics and politics!

What do you all think?

Responding to Elle's Post

I have often wondered what it is about the sound m. Why in so many languages in the world the word mother starts with this m sound. Mother. Ma. Madre. Mata. Maman. And a lot of the other variants we can think of.

I am not a mother.

I have been infantilized countless times in my life because I am not a mother.

My own mother, as her last weapon, often times, says to me, "Just wait till you become a mom. I will see how you feel when your own child behaves with you the way you are doing with me." I have told her every time, "Ma, I don't want to become a mom." I don't think she takes me seriously. It's just another sign of my not growing up, I guess.

I love kids. I smile at them in public places. And when I am in India, I touch them, play with them, make them giggle. I love kids because I see in them what this world can be. What I can be. What I could have. I love kids. My womb doesn't throb every time I see a kid, though.

I know plenty of "feminist" women who have written poems celebrating motherhood, and quite good ones too, while being crappy mothers themselves.

I don't equate my femininity with my capacity to reproduce. I shudder when my student says in class, now that i am a mom, i dont worry about my body image, you, know. i feel my body is now utilitarian. I shudder because I don't believe in utilitarianism. I don't believe women need to give birth in order to prove that they can be of use. I don't believe women need to be "beautiful" in order to be anything. I don't believe it's only motherhood which can somewhat replace that idea of mass-cultural beauty.

I don't get worried when I see that the most potent political alliance in my home-state West Bengal in India coins the slogan Ma Mati Manush(Mother, Land, Man) for the elections. After all, nationalism has a long history in using women as mother-symbols. I get hysteric when I see my leftist male friends, many of whom I consider my comrades, not feeling troubled by this coinage. I shed tears in silence when one of them calls me Euro-centric, coz I pointed it out. And then another says, you won't get it. you are not a mother, after all...guess what, by the time my mother was your age, i was 12.

I tell him, " I am not mother to anyone. I am teacher to many."

So, when Elle writes

outside and within some feminist communities, childfree women are under excessive pressure to conform to what is considered normative. Those who choose not to have children are regarded as suspect, strange, threatening. Their choices are dismissed as temporary or mean. Those who don’t have children, but for reasons other than choosing not to, are pitied, regarded as incomplete and barren--which has to be one of the coldest words I’ve ever heard used to describe a human being.

I find words of solace. solidarity.love.

And when she asks,

But how do you nurture and create community when things like this stand? When women are called “moos,” “breeders,” and “placenta-brains” and their children “widdle pweshuses” and “broods?”^^ When you cast your community as one in which women who have children and women who are childfree are diametrically (perhaps, diabolically) opposed and that mothers (gasp) are taking over the movement and leaving slack that others have to catch up? When it becomes clear that some of us are not welcome into your community? When your remarks indicate that you are, in fact, chillingly “independent of community?”

I know, here is someone who has raised the crucial questions in a far more competent way than I ever could have. So, a nod to this post. And a warm hug for writing this.

May we be never afraid of thoughts, debates, and impossible quests.