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...