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.
No comments:
Post a Comment