Anindita Sengupta

Jennie Bristow on abortion and mental illness:

The glib assumption that life’s difficulties lead directly to mental illness is a problem on two main fronts. Firstly, it simplifies this extremely complex field, and thereby acts as a barrier to understanding specific cases of mental illness, diverting expertise and resources away from those who need them. Secondly, it contributes to a brittle and one-sided understanding of normal human emotion, which implies that happiness is the emotional norm and all deviations from this should be pathologised as illness.

And:

….an attempt to regulate women’s emotions according to how they ‘should’ be feeling is profoundly unhelpful. Most would agree that it is unreasonable to expect that a woman who has had an abortion will be ‘happy’ as a result. Abortion is not a choice women make to improve their lives, but a resolution to the unexpected problem of unintended or unwanted pregnancy – the least bad option in the circumstances.

If the negative emotions that may follow this event are pathologised as markers for mental illness rather than accepted as normal and understandable reactions, this de-contextualises women’s experiences and dehumanises their emotional reactions. The question should not be whether a woman feels happy or sad immediately following an abortion, because all women may feel differently and there is no ‘right’ way of feeling. Rather, the question should be: was that decision the best one for her to make in terms of the rest of her life?

The decision being hers to make. All this should be easy to understand. Why is it not? The reason I’m linking to this is because even though abortion is legal in India, social myths and attitudes persist. I once had a conversation with someone about this. I asked what he thought happened to women who have abortions. I was very young at the time so the question was a bit clumsy but he was a bit older and his answer was ‘they probably become mentally disturbed, commit suicide maybe.’ Right.

I don’t blame him for this view really because it’s symptomatic of the larger ideas drilled into many of my generation. Men, especially, often have wide-eyed and hypersensitive ideas about what it means to get through certain tough life events. I’m not sure where they get these ideas but I think it would help if they had actual conversations with women who’ve been through them. There is a fine balance between diminishing someone’s pain and defining them by that pain. Neither extreme does a woman any favours.

This Ultra Violet post talked about how we should be able to talk about abortion more openly (though not casually). This is necessary, I think, in pin-pricking some notions or at least discussing them. Achieving this in actuality is far more difficult because it remains a society where sex and sexual mistakes are quite stigmatised. Some women may not want to talk about something that was probably traumatic or emotional but others would not have a problem if they were assured there’d be no backlash. Like a host of cyber-stalkers who think they’re ‘loose’, for example.

Things may have changed in the new gen of Indians (those in their twenties now) but clearly, the assumption that someone who undergoes such a ‘terrible thing’ really has no way to live a ‘normal’ life ever again is/was quite common. There are levels and levels, different reactions and a lot depends on what attitudes shaped you before and the coping mechanisms you had access to after. The one-size-fits-all thing is so ridiculous that it’s surprising feminists have to keep refuting this.

So is the belief that you’re meant to be feeling whoop-dee all the time or you need psychological fixing. Frankly, I would find permanent happiness dreadfully boring. Not to mention, it wouldn’t help the writing any.

The Poetry Foundation invited nine poets to talk about the decade in poetry. Interestingly,

Annie Finch on how women poets changed in their attitude towards each other:

Jane Dowson and Gilbert and Gubar have pointed out that for generations women poets renounced and ignored the women poets before them. During the last decade that pattern seemed to change as, in new physical, textual, and virtual spaces, women poets increasingly took control of the development and maintenance of the canon and poetic tradition.

And Ron Silliman on how the technology changed access, tools and poet-reader relations:

The poet’s relationship to his or her audience is undergoing a profound transformation. The poet’s relationship to the institutions and even to the tools of her or his practice is doing likewise. Everything is up for grabs.

Some poets have chosen to embrace the new with everything from flarf to technology-based visual poetries. Others have decided that the “timeless” values of tradition will outlast even this….What’s apparent is that (a) this joyride isn’t over, and (b) we’re all in this together.

Besides the talks on writing and feminism, we also had poetry readings. Because poets must, after all, do what they do best. And making speeches is not it. Highlights:

Tamil poet Salma. There were many in the audience not paying attention because of the unfamiliarity of the language but they sat up when Swarnjit Savi, a Punjabi poet who translated many of our works, started reading his translations of her poems. There were quite a few mm’s as well. This is a sound heard at poetry gatherings when the audience sort of collectively half-moans  at a line they like. I first heard it pointed out at Poetry Africa by South African rap artist Ewok when he was MCeeing one of the evenings, and have subsequently noticed that it apparently cuts across cultures. Anyway, Salma got quite a few mm’s once the language barrier had crumbled. Some of Salma’s poetry is full of brutal, even grotesque images like this one in ‘Image’: “The cockroach was crushed / To pulp. All night,/ An army of ants have / Marauded its flesh..”. This lends a starkness to her poetry, a sense of darkness to the world she inhabits. This quality is disappointingly missing from some of the poems featured  at Poetry Web International but came through abundantly in the poems she read. Update: I know this because I have heard the English translations by N. Kalyan Raman whose comment rightly reminded me that I had neglected to mention this. She read one of the translations at this reading and the other, I had heard at a previous reading.

Tarranum Riyaz was very affecting–her ghazals are poignant without being drippy and she reads like a dream. Her voice is magical and so is her language (Urdu). Quite clearly, the highpoint for me. We had sort of disagreed on something earlier during the session on feminism, mostly because I think we misunderstood each other. But after the poetry, we (literally) hugged and made up. The healing power of good poetry? Anyway, here is an excerpt from an Arundhati Subramaniam interview with her which I found telling because the tension she describes here was evident in her poetry as well. There was a great deal of passion but it was unusually tempered with something else, something not quite cynicism, a wry sort of wisdom.

I’ve always believed in the primacy of women, not the mere equality of the sexes. That premise informs my work. I don’t see the woman’s lot as one of mere misery. A woman is not a mere sacrificial goat; she has agency and volition and that belief enters the work as well. But while there’s rage, there’s also the fact that I still love men. I call myself a Draupadi with three men: my husband and two sons. And so there’s the deeper realisation that there’s no point turning this relationship into a World Wrestling tournament. This is our greatest tragedy, isn’t it? The fact that we have to fight those we love.

Naseem Shafi

I enjoyed Kashmiri poet Naseem Shafi’s recital as well. I’ve never heard the language before and I found it very mellifluous. Her poems had great sound and rhythm and, going by the translations, were reflective of the disturbed social situation in the Valley. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find anything about her online.

There were two poets from Karnataka–Hema Pattanashetty and Jayshree Kambar (who was also my roommate) and we had a private reading session among ourselves the night before which was great fun. I don’t really understand Kannada very well, I’m ashamed to say. It’s not due to lack of effort; I’m just dreadful with new languages and my learning seems to have halted with the languages of my childhood.

Jayshree Kambar

But Hema insisted on reading her poems to me in Kannada and looked at me very expectantly after each line, sometimes impatiently, to see if I got it. Surprisingly, after a while, I actually started understanding bits. Maybe, I’d be able to learn the language if someone read out poetry to me every day. It would certainly be more fun than learning the names of 15 types of vegetables which is what they focused on in the class I joined for three months.

Another thing I found interesting was that the Bodo and Nepalese poets were very socially engaged in their poetry. One had written a poem about the Mumbai attacks and another talked about insurgency and violence. It was difficult to judge levels of craft because they were reading English translations of their works and these sounded a bit bereft of rhythm or imagery.

There were a lot of Punjabi poets and some of it was good, especially Punjabi poet Nirupama Dutt who was smart and funny though I think her poems don’t work as well in translation because they rely heavily on rhyme and this gets lost. In a slightly older article, Sutinder Singh Noor, Vice President of the Sahitya Akademi, talked about the state of Punjabi poetry and I’m going to quote that here:

A lot of poetry is being created each day both good and bad. So while I would say that Punjabi novel has stagnated, poetry is one medium from where a lot of material is being generated, both good and bad. However the ground reality is that bad poetry is finding its way into the market faster than good one, there by diluting the entire genre. We need to sift the good poetry from bad one. We in Punjabi literature have grown horizontally but not vertically. From a few handfuls we are now thousands but our growth intellectually has stagnated. Lesser known languages like Bodo are producing much higher and better literature than Punjabi.

I did find some of the poetry a bit stagnant in terms of theme (the preciousness of grandchildren, beauty of nature and so on). It seems to be stuck in the romantic mode and I’m surprised about that because clearly, their world can hardly be that much more conducive to that than the rest of ours. So is it a conscious choice to write in a mode that seems untouched by contemporary movements? Or is it some notion that women must write about soft, sweet things? But it’s also true that among 50 poets, there are bound to be some whose work doesn’t appeal. As Marvin Bell put it, no good stuff without bad stuff. And perhaps, it’s through gatherings like this that ideas on aesthetics can be exchanged and borrowed.

I’m back from the Sahitya Akademi Women Writers Conference in Patiala. It was one-and-a-half days of frenetic talk and poetry with about 50 women from 21 states descending on the gorgeous and formidably well-maintained campus of Punjabi University. The opening speech by Sukrita Paul Kumar was far more interesting than one expects keynote-type speeches to be. She actually managed to clear the path towards many of the later discussions by easing into the feminism theme gently and bringing up some very useful points. The two that I remember:

Sukrita Paul Kumar

1) the necessity of a more androgynous identity in writing and in life with reference to the Ardhanarishwara myth. I was impressed that she actually said ‘androgyny’ to this seemingly conservative audience without blinking. I also thought of this when I had to take the bus from Patiala to Amritsar and I chose to wear jeans. I find it extremely difficult to travel in salwar-kameez or saree and I think this has much to do with my associations with these garments as feminine, delicate, and therefore, vulnerable. In jeans, I feel less bound by my gender and therefore less bound by the constrictions placed on it by society. But this meant that I would have to do my reading, which was right before I caught my bus, wearing the same thing. Most of the others were dressed rather more traditionally. This makes me wonder about clothes, how loaded they are with gender constructs, and what a truly gender-neutral garment would look like.

2) the need for women’s writing to be mainstreamed in education as opposed to being treated as a niche subject. It’s astonishing that such a simple thing needs to be pointed out and fought for, but it’s true that women writers are, by and large , relegated to the women’s studies / feminism papers. I remember reading Toni Morrison and Attia Hossain in college as part of exactly such a paper. As if they were not part of the larger literary history / canon but only significant as ‘women’ writers. The other five papers we did, as far as I can remember, did not have a single text authored by a woman.

There was a session on ‘Why I Write’ which had five writers talking about their locus and labours. The common thread here seemed to be that writing is a a compulsion. It has a je ne sais quoi quality, a “I write because I must” sort of motivation. The only voice that was different was Marathi poet and writer Dr Jyoti Lanjewar who was rather strident about the necessity for socio-political engagement in writing. ‘How can I write romances when there is so much going wrong around me,’ she asked. Which was fine in itself but she also seemed frankly judgmental about those who do write said beleaguered romances. I have arguments with that sort of logic. Surely there is space for all kinds of writing. The more various, the merrier. I don’t see why people who live in terrible times and places should be deprived of their romance or fantasy or humour. If anything, they probably need it more. Such prescriptive approaches put me off but gatherings of this sort always bring out the vehement best (or worst) in people. Speech-making is inherently so conducive to extreme  positions that people tend to shear out any tentativeness from tone. But life is tentative at the best of times. (I’m tempted to add an ‘isn’t it’ at the end of that statement but I won’t because of this article.)

There was a symposium on ‘feminism in the Indian context’ in which I read a paper. There were some interesting points made about stereotypes perpetuated by religion, the silences of women affected by partition and so on. We were all coming at it from reasonably various viewpoints, which was good because it meant we didn’t say the same things. Some speakers relied heavily on examples from literature and there were at least two references to Bhisham Sahni’s Tamas. My talk was pretty simple and focused on the need to examine our own prejudices especially towards other women who we perceive as different. I drew more from posts and discussions we’ve had at Ultra Violet as opposed to literary texts–and later wondered why. Perhaps, because UV seems more ‘right here, right now’, a constantly updated motion picture? Apparently, some people in Punjabi heartland found some of my suggestions about sharing public spaces with sex workers and not expecting daughters-in-law to be deferential a bit ‘shocking’. Or so I was told later by one of the Akademi people. Funny because I was actually trying really hard to keep it tame (without actually slipping into bovine). Maybe next time I’ll talk about what I really think of the traditional institution of marriage. That should be fun.

More on the poetry in the next post…

I’m back and still reluctant to sink into regular life. How wonderful it would be if life was a poetry festival! But then, anything permanent loses charm, I suppose. Anyway, longer posts about Poetry Africa and Kruger National Park coming up soon but in the meantime, two bits of news that made me happy as soon as I got home:

Ultra Violet has been featured in the feminist magazine make/shift. Mostly good stuff but they have said the site would benefit from a greater variety of voices, something I entirely agree with. So please, please, spread the word and ask people (men and women) to contribute with their stories, essays, poems, vignettes, whatever. No bars whatsoever. I received a copy of the magazine and it looks really good. Do consider subscribing.

Also, my poem ‘The Kitchen God’s Mistress’ has been republished in the latest issue of A cappella Zoo. (It’s been published previously in the anthology Not A Muse by Haven Books). I don’t think I’m going to send it anywhere else so here it is:

The Kitchen God’s Mistress

Did you always smell of cinnamon?

It reminded me of a long-ago kitchen.
Mustard seeds. Mutton crackle. Hot air
condensed on window mesh while I shelled peas
on stone cool enough for sleep.
I should have barred the doors

when you nuzzled in
but a weakness for spices and memory
stopped me. Besides, I glimpsed
your feet, smooth and brown, with an arch
I could fit into. The night you drowned,
I was deveining prawns and drinking beer. I thought

it would be like any other night: we’d chew
slowly, listen to the cicadas sing. Later,
they would leap indoors and crawl
under our bed where we lay side by side
in the dark, entering each other’s dreams.

I was so happy watching the kitchen
simmer in pools of light. How could I know
they would gulp you down without a ripple?
And who would have thought you’d be so
hard to pull out? You always looked so light
with your thin beard and gossamer cap.

***