::Post-Workshop Thoughts::

The last five days were busy. I now have a lot to process: my trip to DC, the workshop I did with the youth. Ideally, I would have liked the workshop to be longer. It's hard to fit in discussions of a cultural/social history with discussions of art-forms and then combine the two with some kind of writing exercise--- all within 90 minutes. What would have worked better was a three-day workshop where I could divide up the stuff into little bits and pieces. Something like

DAY 1: Discussions about food, cultural/social politics of it

DAY 2: Reading and discussing the poems together

DAY 3: Writing, critiquing and reading aloud each others' poems

But I didn't have that kind of luxury. Neither did the organizers. So, after I was done facilitating the workshop, I myself felt overwhelmed. And it made me think, how everything, and especially art-making is a process. It takes time. It needs time. One of the things that came up during the discussion was, how poetry is "abstract'. One of the workshop-participants categorically stated, I don't like poetry. This is something I would have definitely liked to explore more within the space of the workshop. One of the things that I have been thinking about ever since, I had no time/opportunity to talk to the workshop-participants about their familiarity with poetry or even literature. Is poetry something they relate to at all? If they were given a choice to choose their genres for the workshop, how many of them would have chosen poetry? What would have prompted their choices? I would have loved to know. So, I was also thinking, how very very logistic concerns like time, our scanty resources often end up reproducing the very myths we are trying to dispel. When I sign up for a poetry workshop, I sign up for it because I want to work on my poems. I have chosen the form as my genre, I want to get better at it, and hence my decision to sign up for the workshop. But the youth I worked with, did not necessarily sign up for a poetry workshop. They signed up for a three-day event where they would interact with their fellow South Asians on things. My workshop was something the organizers chose to present to them. So, in spite of all the good intentions and best of efforts, when working within structures like this one, we cannot really avoid centralized decisions.

Now having said that, I would also say, I am happy that I got a chance to do what I did. Maybe some of them will think about poetry as a form of self-expression now. Maybe some of them will take to writing it. Maybe some of them will begin to read it. And that's why, I am in favor of doing workshops in all kinds of settings. I think, it's important to do writing/poetry workshops in settings where the emphasis is clearly not on poetry or writing or even art. Because, I think, something about conducting a workshop in such so-called non-literary/non-artsy setting democratizes the very process of art-production. It demystifies art-forms and encourages people who wouldn't have ever thought about these forms to engage with them. It's especially important when the form is something like poetry--a form which lends itself to abstraction, and therefore, also to elitist obscurantism.

::Imperial/Racial Privilege And Workshops::

There was a time today when I was angry. It wasn't a personal sort of anger, but anger which emerges from the helplessness of someone who is trying in her own way to be a better writer. Now, I will record the same questions I was asking myself this afternoon:

a. Am I responsible as a writer for my readers' lack of sociological knowledge?

b. I am not writing an ethnography of my neighborhood in Kolkata. I am writing stories--damn it. So, no, I am not going to explain the "social and cultural differences." Yes, someone said that in my fucking workshop-- Explain the social and cultural differences! I am pissed, because I read around 50 books every year. Almost 60% of them are on contexts into which I wasn't born. No, I don't expect any of the writers to "explain" to me the "social and cultural differences." When I feel like I don't know the history, I do the work. Period. So, this very assumption that it is the responsibility of the non-American writer to explain to the American reader what's going on, the "social and the cultural differences", clearly reeks of an imperial, white privilege. There isn't any other way to think about it.

c. A lot of the feedback I get from the workshops want me to do the work for my readers. They want me to fill in the gaps in their sociological/historical/anthropological knowledge. So, I have to do a lot of separating the wheat from the chaff, if I still want to get some benefits from the workshopping.

d. This makes me mad because the white and/or American writers can throw in a story to the group, sit back and not have to ever think of how "social and cultural differences" are working within their stories.

e. I don't bring up these issues inside the workshops. Why? Because I know none of these people are being deliberately racist and/or imperialist. More importantly, none of them wants to think of himself/herself as such. So my pointing these things out will cause them to have a knee-jerk reaction, they will stop commenting on my stories frequently. I don't want that to happen. The thing is, I have signed up for these workshops so that I can learn. I am not yet in a space as a writer to take up these issues. (Yet, I am, no? Otherwise, I wouldn't be writing this post.But I am not ready to take them up publicly yet.)

f. One would think, after the work of Gloria Anzaldua et al., this country, especially those who want to write, will have a better awareness of these kinds of representational/cultural politics. Nope! No such luck! Seems like every one of us colored folks will have to launch and plunge through our individual struggle!

Now that I have vented, and written this post, I need to go back to the actual work: writing my poems and stories. Maybe some day I will be able to talk about these things more explicitly. But now is not the time! Inshallah!

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.