Interview by Zoë Brigley
I enjoy the challenge of writing something in such a concise and precise manner because it makes me attempt to fine-tune my thoughts.
Moonshine
At the Goa and Karnataka border, India Liquor, bootlegged across the river, is what this village was once famous for, but now, alcohol is a banished word, and if you dance, you are a sinner. Cashew flowers purple the cliffs that each year the village women climb on a predestined date, armed with knives and machetes and swords. They hack off the molluscs blooming for that one day, as if cleaving the living roots from the life-giving basalt rocks is their confession. Perhaps, the past amputates, but amnesia compound-interests the present, where turn after turn of the barren runnels were once snowed by egrets. The river is mouthed by temple flags now, overshadowing the mosques and churches and gurudwaras, and othering the land into them versus us.
You have been using the prose poem quite a bit recently. What do you enjoy about that form?
While I used to write mostly free verse earlier, I have started writing (or trying to write) prose poems recently. I enjoy the challenge of writing something in such a concise and precise manner because it makes me attempt to fine-tune my thoughts. It has also taught me to edit and revise until I have managed to come up with a final version that has transformed my thoughts into words in a crystalline, as much as possible, manner. I think my enjoyment of this form goes back to my training as a scientist, where language was used both as a measure and to measure what was being done in a laboratory or simulation. The only difference is that now the laboratory has expanded to the world around us.
The poem had some gorgeous imagery that evokes a place very effectively, but it also has a strong political commentary. How do you balance those two things in poems?
First, thank you so much for your kind words! My poems start with mostly an image or something that I have witnessed or seen, and sometimes read about. Unfortunately, there is plenty going around that evokes both, strong images and political commentary, and that is why I try to combine them in my writing. I think of a poet as a witness to what is wrong in the world around us. Yet, as Emily Dickinson wrote, “Tell all the truth, but tell it slant”, I try not to write in a hectoring mode but rather as someone who brings out the layers within what is obvious and should be pointed out. And an important part of that is to describe the fast-disappearing beauty and ecological crisis of the world around us because if we become impervious to that, then we will lose whatever hope that has still remained within us.
I loved the image of the women climbing the cliffs, and how they seem to be at the center of the poem, both powerful and strong, and made to feel guilty too. How do ideas of women’s strength and vulnerability inflect your poems generally?
A lot of my work is written from the perspective of the voiceless, and women historically and currently are still struggling to have a say even in matters central to them. It feels that every time there is a step forward and some progress, there is a reactionary slide backwards. One has to only look at the current events and legislations, for example, in India and the USA, and get inspired to write about this! At the same time, I do acknowledge the privilege that my education gives me, and therefore, often write poems after talking to the person I am inspired to write about, or researching about the event I want to describe.
This poem, for instance, started when I observed a few village women climb the surrounding cliffs and start harvesting the molluscs growing on them at a place near the Goa and Karnataka border in southwest India. I spoke to them and then researched about the fascinating fact that there are flora species that blossom in that area for a very short time, and the poem grew from that point.