::Why Kiranmala::

A friend of mine, after reading the poem in Stonetelling, asked me, why I chose Kiranmala. Is it because she is a "Bong" heroine. There are lots of reasons why I am fascinated by Kiranmala, but I don't think her "Bongness" is one of them. This is something that I have been thinking about a lot these days: this question of identity in the way it often comes up in my discussions with friends and students who are second generation South Asians in this country. Bangla has never been about "identity" or "heritage" to me in the way American identity politics speaks about one's racial/cultural/ethnic identity. It was the first language that I learnt. My sense of music has been formed by Bangla words, the cadence of that language. I sing Bangla songs when I am alone without really thinking about it, because that's what I know, that's what there is in my sub-conscious mind. I didn't grow up in a social milieu where people were "post-colonial hybrids." English was a foreign language to them, a familiar foreign language, but a foreign language still. They were scared of it, in awe of its skilled users. Some people I know and have grown up with, managed to developed a functional knowledge of it. My father one amongst them. Most didn't. In India, how one uses English gives out one's economic and cultural class. The lower-middle class, suburban Kolkata milieu where I grew up, people spoke, read, wrote in Bangla. That's what they still do. And I know, if I have to make any attempt towards building up any thread of communication with them, I cannot give up writing in Bangla. So, Bangla is my identity in a certain way. But it's way more than that.

Now, getting back to Kiranmala, she is someone whose life I can imagine much more easily than that a Greek goddess' or Celtic heroine's. Her story I have heard and read many many times. I can imagine how she looked like, what she ate, what colors she loved, what she wore. I can imagine her interior life in a relatively effortless way. Besides, my lit-critter's mind tells me, not a whole lot of work has been done on re-interpreting Bengali folklore, folktales, myths and fairytales. And I am not totally unqualified to do that! So, that's why I write about Kiranmala. Because I can crawl under skin, I can stay there, I can shout and shed tears from there. Yes yes yes....

"Fairytale Worlds"

I am not sure why folks say "fairytale ending", "fairytale reality" to suggest imaginary worlds where nothing ever goes wrong. I mean, fairy-tales are VIOLENT. And although things seem to work out at the end, they always do so at the cost of some immense violence done to at least one of the characters, mostly women.

I am trying to finish this particular sequence of poems done before the end of this year. From where I am standing now, it seems I might just be able to do it!

One of my mentors pointed out, that a lot of my poems are about the inherent symbolism of language. I haven't thought about it before, but I would have to agree. I have been taken up more and more by the act of writing itself, the politics of the writing process, the political limits of specific modes of writing. What can a manifesto do which a poem cannot? The sequence I am working on right now, thus, is more about a world where fairy-tales begin to lose their meanings rather than provide a coherent way of explaining it. It's a slippery terrain, and I am still struggling to keep my balance intact.

Why Myths? Why Fairy Tales?

I often wonder about the turn my poetry manuscript has taken. Why is it that I chose to re-write myths and tales and old stories? For one thing, I have always loved them. Plain and simple. Fairy-tales, myths and historical re-writings/revisions are my obsessions. Okay. But then, so what? I am finding myself in a space where I can't really get rid of the "so what" question. So, this post is really my feeble attempt to think aloud through some of the things.

To begin with, I am a wee-bit uncomfortable with the "confessional" poetry. Especially the way it has operated within the feminist poetry writing practices. I understand their historical importance, the importance of inscribing the "I" within the archive. But at the same time, I am a little bit wary of it now. I think, the "I" in the confessional feminist poetry often becomes an exocitized "I." And even worse, it tends to reduce itself to an "I" which only celebrates itself, but fails to be self-critical. At least, for the most part. I have often gravitated towards the "she" in my more autobiographical poems. I have always felt the use of the "she" puts a distance between me, the personal human being and the poetic persona. It allows myself to see myself as a character, and thus analyze myself more, contextualize and historicize myself more. To what extent I have been successful only future and readers can tell.

The tales and lores and the myth also perform a similar function for me. They help me to de-familiarize my material by providing a relatively pre-determined plot-arc. Of course, in lots of my poems I have broken the familiar plot-arc of those stories. But even in order to break them, I had to operate within them. So, the fairytales, lores and myths, much like the metrical and line constraints of a sonnet, sestina or villanelle, puts certain constraints upon me. I find these constraints liberating. They allow me to re-interpret not only the myths and stories within whose bellies I am re-instating my own story-poems, but they also allow me to think anew the material from life that I am writing about.

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.