Tishani Doshi's Countries of the Body

A few days back, I finished Tishani Doshi's Countries of the Body. I have been trying to catch up on my Anglophone Indian Poetry readings. Particularly because, if I continue to write and publish, I will have to place myself within this argument at some point and I do want to educate myself before I go on to take up a position. I have been interested in Tishani's work, and I won't hide it here, she is a woman, and the very title of her book seemed like a possibility.

Her poems are well-crafted, no doubt. She is well-read, cosmopolitan (I mean, hell yeah, she has a Welsh mother, a Masters in Creative Writing from John Hopkins, and has spent quite a few years in UK). For example, she has a poem called At the Rodin Museum:

Rilke is following me everywhere
with his tailor-made suits
and vegetarian smile.

He says because I'm young,
I'm always beginning,
and cannot know love.

I am intrigued. But as the poem progresses, the language begins to recede more and more into cliches.

He speaks of the cruelty
of hospitals, the stillness
of cathedrals,

takes me through bodies
and arms and legs
of such extravagant size,

the ancient sky burrows in
with all the dead words
we carry and cannot use.

First of all, I am not feeling very good with the use of such words as "cruelty" and "stillness." For me, those words do not mean anything, and shows a lazy poet's mind which isn't trying to conjure up an image to convey those states of being. But also, I am wondering, who is this I? What is this I's historical location? How does this I locate himself/herself vis-a-vis Rilke or Rodin? What role does race, empire, class, gender, literary history play in that inter-relationship? Of course, as a literary scholar, who does museum studies on side, I can't help commenting on this total absence of delving into the politics of the museum-space. And this is what I find precisely problematic about Tishani Doshi's work. It's graceful, well-crafted, but has no sense of voice. Most of the poems have been written with a dis-engaged tone, which begins to sound like a celebration of the politics of apolitical aesthetics after a while. But it's more like, the poet is afraid of pushing her language to take a stance. Instead, she just describes.

I am inclined to say this is what one gets when one sticks too close to the American "Show, Don't Tell" maxim. For example, the poem The Fasting Season:

The rains have arrived
and my three aunts
grown maritally large
like watermelons
will starve and warm
themselves with prayers;
refuse water, food, spit,
and sex--imagine their bodies
as they were before

Beautiful! I have to admit. But I also cannot help asking, so what! I think, often times, when we push ourselves to ask that question to what we have written, that we also begin to delve into the possibilities and limits of representation in a particular form. And that's where, we also have to TELL. We cannot just stick to a kind of reel-realism which Tishani seems to be engaging in here.

Anyways, reading this book was important for my own self, and my own writing. It gave me a chance to think about how I want to write, and how do I develop my language that will accommodate my politics without encouraging a reductionist craft.