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Womenswriting.com exclusively features the poems of Manjushree Mallikarjun, a lecturer of English based in Karnataka.
PEOPLE CALL ME PRODIGAL
People call me prodigal
Why exactly I know not
For having lived with some one they love not?
For doing the forbidden things they like not?
For crossing the threshold I care not?
To my sisters they say very bad model I set
because of me grooms they get not.
What’s the logic I know not.
Six meters Sari I wear not.
kumkum, turmeric I apply not
To them I am a misfit
Who wanders every where without permit.
Womanly duties I am reminded every second,
Womanly limits I am taught every minute.
Kitchen is my world,
beyond which I am a cipher they say.
I hate to be a woman I shout,
Impose on me not womanhood I scream
'Hysterical' I am declared.
'Woman gone astray' I am condemned.
'Thank you ' I say 'I am much obliged'.
Womenswriting.com meets Nitoo Das - English professor, poet, feminist and author of Boki.
What is your poetry about?
My poetry is primarily about playing around with given grammars, words and voices. I think of myself as a ventriloquist:. My poetry is about comic detachment. It is also about soundscapes: creating a sensory world with the uncanny magic of words that slip, slide and careen into each other. Finally, my poetry is about the apparently insignificant -- insects, umbrellas, razors, safety pins -- things that make up our world.
What does Boki mean?
Boki, the title of my collection, is taken from my poem "Doiboki". In this poem, a woman's name breaks up into pieces, turns into a taunt, a song. In Assamese, my first language, "to bok" means to mutter meaninglessly, almost crazily. My book works with these multiple layers: poetry as naming, as pure sound, as uncontrollable speech. Boki nearly becomes my slightly unhinged poetic muse.
How did Boki come to be?
In 2005, Steven Schroeder, one of the co-founders of Virtual Artists Collective, asked me if I wanted to publish some of my poems. At that time, I was not ready to publish and I said as much. Sometime in September 2006, I changed my mind and wrote to Steven saying that I'd be happy to work on a collection with him. I was enamoured of VAC because of the way it functions. The idea of independent publishing sounded good to me. Theoretically, I was still opposed to big publishing houses, didn't want to send a manuscript to strangers and VAC seemed like a godsend. Of course, I procrastinated a good deal and suffered from persistent spells of inertia. Around June-July of this year, I decided that enough was more than enough and sat down to tie up the final loose ends and got Boki ready for the book shelves.
What role does sexuality play in your poems?
I believe that poetry has the ability to voice the inherent performativity, playfulness and flux in gender roles/identities. I constantly seek to challenge heteronormativity in my poetry. I have explored themes of sexual orientation, taboos and alleged 'perversions'. So, yes, there is quite a bit of sexuality in my poems.
Nature also appears in your poems frequently. What inspires you to write?
Yes, nature is inspirational. I know how clichéd that sounds, but it is the truth. My childhood was spent in the lush valley of the Brahmaputra in Assam and I grew up with a very healthy respect for nature. Poetry, for me, is about the minutiae of existence. The perfection of a safety pin can inspire an ode, so can the bursting of a balsam seed.
Who are your influences?
My influences have been eclectic. In no particular order, the names that come immediately to my mind are: Ted Hughes, Kamala Das, Jayanta Mahapatra, Sujata Bhatt, Arun Kolatkar, Robert Browning, Sylvia Plath, Bhartrhari, Remedios Varo, Plato, Vladimir Nabokov, Roland Barthes, Benoit Mandelbrot, Saadat Hasan Manto, Art Spiegelman, Sharon Olds. I could go on for ever.
You teach English at Delhi University. Which poets/works do you use in your classroom and why?
Well, DU has a fixed syllabus and because of shortage of time and other such constraints, there is not much that we can do beyond the syllabus. I teach the Victorian poets [Tennyson, Browning, Christina Rossetti], Charlotte Brontë, Charles Dickens and Karl Marx to first year honours students and Jonathan Swift and Feminist Literary Theory to third year honours students. The Delhi University English Honours syllabus does give the teacher a lot of space to negotiate with various questions of class, gender, sexuality, race, etc. Within the given framework of strict attendance rules, assignments, mid-terms and final examinations, I try to orient my teaching towards the creation of an atmosphere of radical questioning.
You posted a lot of your poems on your blog, River's Blue Elephants, before putting together Boki. Why do you think blogging is so popular in India?
Perhaps it gives people a way to articulate their writerly capacities, perhaps they find anonymity seductive, perhaps they have understood that self-publication is a powerful new-age tool. Speaking for myself, I started blogging before it had become fashionable in India and poetry blogging is, anyway, still not the in-thing to do. My blog started as a kind of adjunct to my research project on poetic hypertextuality and poetry communities. Issues of writing and publication become very pertinent in the blog world. Self-publication, comment policies, the immediacy of the critical responses to a post, the maze of links to other blogs, the invisible 'statcounters' that allow opportunities for total surveillance of visitors, all these take hypertextuality to newer domains. These were the reasons why I started blogging.
Martin Amis famously said that "poetry is dead. The obituary has already been written ... I mean, it goes on, and its funny, ghoulish afterlife is in the form of tours and readings and poetry slams and all the rest of it, but not many people now curl up in the evening with a book of poetry." Is poetry dead?
There is a contradiction at the heart of Amis' pronouncement. He talks about the creators of poetry and the consumers of poetry in the same breath. The romantic image of the solitary reader curling up in the evening with a book of poetry is, historically speaking, a recent image. However, the poet doing readings, poetry slams and tours falls within an older, oral tradition of poetry. All art forms create and recreate themselves in order to remain alive and relevant. If poetry has recreated itself in a more social, less elitist grid, where lies the harm?
Would you consider yourself a feminist poet?
Yes, I wear the feminist tag with pride. However, I feel that while the feminism in my own life is of the activist, sloganeering variety, it is not so 'strident' in my poetry. The feminism in my poetry is usually less action-oriented, more conceptual. I also feel the tussles and tensions of various feminisms struggling against each other in my writing, which is not always a bad thing.
Is feminism alive in art in India?
I would definitely like to believe so. There are innumerable women artists--painters, musicians, dancers, actors, writers, publishers who have asserted their agency and declared their place in the public sphere. Perhaps it is not always an informed, ideologically charged stand, but I have no grave problems with that. One also needs to remember that the historical trajectory of feminism in India is different from other forms of feminisms in other nations. Issues of communalism, specific class structures, radical reconfiguration of the image of the Goddess, Dalit Feminism are some of the unique markers of feminist art in India. These need to be analysed and interpreted as different and not within a universal construction of feminism.
New in 2007: Contemporary Women's Writing
Contemporary Women's Writing critically assesses writing by women authors who have published approximately from 1970 to the present. The journal aims to reflect retrospectively on developments throughout the period, to survey the variety of contemporary work, and to anticipate the new and provocative in women's writing.
It welcomes theoretical, cultural, historical, geographical, formalist, and political approaches to contemporary women's writing. It is, equally, interested in the production and reception of contemporary women's writing, in terms of the practices of individual authors, the creation of cultural and literary fields, and the construction of readerships. Contemporary Women's Writing is open to work on literatures in English and other languages. It welcomes submissions relating to all literary forms and from a wide variety of theoretical and interdisciplinary perspectives.
Visit http://www.oxfordjournals.org/for_authors/ for more information or visit http://www.oxfordjournals.org/our_journals/cww/editorial_board.html for a list of email addresses.
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