Welcome to Indian Poetry - December 2006
Someone once asked me after a poetry reading why the language of my ‘personal’ poems seemed impersonal. Was it an Indian woman’s concern with propriety, he added?
Needless to say, my interlocutor was neither Indian nor a woman.
I ducked out of a reply (further proof, he probably concluded, of Indian female propriety). But I knew that an adequate response would probably be an essay in its own right.
I also had questions of my own. If an Indian woman were to write a sonnet on sex, for example, would that be testimony to her docility? Proof that she hadn’t interrogated her inheritance? If she were to use an idiom that quoted from Hollywood and Victorian novels, would that make her a slave to cultural imperialism? How does one convey the complex transactions one makes with one’s cultural and linguistic heritage?
These questions surface once again in relation to the work of the two women poets in this edition – Salma (Tamil) and Kanaka Ha. Ma. (kannada). Kanaka acknowledges her debt to the Navya (Modern) tradition of Kannada literature, but adds that she has increasingly begun to question her knee-jerk distaste for Romantic poetry. Her poetry is characterised by formal rigour and metaphoric subtlety. Does this formal concern make her work merely decorous? Should writing that celebrates a style or sensibility out of tune with literary fashion be deemed culturally ersatz?
Salma has played a pioneering role in Tamil poetry, probing unexplored areas of middle class Tamil female experience. Hers is a domestic landscape, intimate in scale, mapping a world of sexual politics, the silences in family relationships, the unquestioned hierarchies and the festering sense of not fitting into prescribed social roles. It is possible to apply a similarly narrow critique to this work as well. Is the poetry too private to be more than a diarist’s doodle? Is mere navel gazing being elevated to the status of art?
It is a double bind in which women writers often find themselves. The ‘personal’ in their work is frequently ghettoised or trivialised as autobiographical or confessional – in short, solipsistic in its concerns. But when their work speaks of a realm outside the seemingly autobiographical, or in an idiom that doesn’t seem adequately impressionistic, it is termed inauthentic. (This is frequently also a clever ploy to defang political poetry). Ergo, you are stilted and formal (read ‘unwomanly’) if you don’t ooze gender in comfortingly identifiable ways. And you’re private, indulgent, limited (read ‘irrational’, ‘feminine’) when you try to evolve a more subjective perspective.
Basically, damned if you do, damned if you don’t.
It is small wonder that poets like Kanaka are uncomfortable with the notion of a ‘female sensibility’ in art. They have realised through long years of experience just how cleverly these phrases have been manipulated and rendered toothless by a patriarchal literary establishment.
I believe the work of both Kanaka and Salma is far more transgressive and significant than one might initially realise. Salma’s ‘private’ landscape not merely challenges cultural norms; it explores core emotional and existential truths that women – and surprise, surprise, men – can recognise. And Kanaka’s preoccupation with form – so difficult to replicate in translation – is neither a rejection of gender nor an uncritical obedience to an oppressive cultural poetics. It is instead a joyful celebration of the rich goulash of literary styles and traditions to which she is heir.
Have they found idioms that adequately represent their cultural and personal realities? Perhaps not. Like every other artist, they are still in the process of growing into themselves. Yes, they are works-in-progress, but particularly accomplished works-in-progress, one might add. They are also writers who have asked uncomfortable questions of their lives, their times and their art.
Edge comes in different guises. Salma and Kanaka remind me again of how many ways there are of belonging. How many ways there are of being woman, of being Indian. And how many ways of being indecorous … .
Links
‘Poems are a garland of small freedoms’. Kanaka Ha. Ma. talks about poetry as a continuous march towards the self.
The Universe in the Closet: Tamil poet Salma on the point at which a private crisis becomes the collective biography of womanhood.
