Ra Sh responds

Ra Sh: A bio-statement by a poet who was never a non-poet. I am not an academic and have not really read my William Shakespeare or William Wordsworth or T. S. Eliot. I am a ‘poet’ from a sleepy township in an agrarian region of Kerala, living almost on the border between two cultures and languages, namely Malayalam and Tamil. Tamil has a classic language status among the languages of the world and is the mother of all Dravidian languages including Malayalam. But, Malayalam is the most modern of these languages with its resilience and readiness to adopt words from the world languages like Arabic, Spanish and English. And, Malayalis (those who speak Malayalam) must also be ones most open to world literature. Hence, my experience of world literature was not by reading the English authors, but through English translations of authors from the non-English speaking world. Before I was out of college, I was acquainted with authors like Hermann Hesse, Thomas Mann, Bertolt Brecht, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Albert Camus, Franz Kafka, Samuel Beckett, Knut Hamsun, Maxim Gorky, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Kawabata Yasunari, Mishima Yukio etc. Fresh out of college, with an education in Science and not Literature, I went to Delhi and remained there for 20 years. Delhi is the place where all countries have their Embassies and some of them like the USSR, Germany, Japan, Hungary and Poland had active cultural houses where they screened their films regularly. Once again, I was more open to a world literature other than British or American. Later, I wrote two poems dedicated to two Masters of Cinema - `Solaris’ about Andrei Tarkovsky and `Whistles’ about Ozu Yasujiro. I was active in theatre during these days, both in Malayalam and Hindi, the language in North India. I was part of theatre groups in both languages. All my activities revolved around theatre and I didn’t care much about personal literature. Poetry as a personal thing was a recent phenomenon after Facebook came along and let people connect and made it possible to write our poems and show them to people without any intervention of journals, editors, or waiting time. I was charmed by the freedom it gave me and the result was an explosion of poems. I have no shame in claiming that I am a Facebook poet, a position looked down upon still by the academic world. I believe that I would have died without writing poetry (not that it matters much) if not for Facebook. One thing good was that all my years of socially relevant theatre work and all my trysts with Marxism, feminism, environmentalism, problems peculiar to the marginalized people and love came to play a role in my poetry writing. So, it became a tapestry of many intricately linked layers of my life finding expression for the first time in poetry. I am sixty now, but I write young poems which are connected to me in my 20s, 30s, 40s and 50s. I will let my wife (of 31 years) have the last word when she exclaims, “How did you suddenly become a poet? You were never one!” To prove to her that I was never a non-poet is tough, so I keep mum. 

DV: How did you become interested in writing English poetry?

RS: I come from a small township in Kerala, a strip of land, never crossing 40 miles in width, lying between the sea and the hills in the south west corner of India, where Malayalam is the language spoken. I studied, however, in a public school (more specifically a military school) where English was the medium of teaching. I believe my habit of writing in English developed from there. Very soon, I was acquainted with most great authors of the world, Kerala being a very literate State that has thousands of libraries and book shops catering to the latest in literature. I even won an all Kerala Short Story competition in English at that time. After a college education, I moved to New Delhi, the capital of India, where I encountered a cosmopolitan metro life for the first time. I was 22 then. My medium of communication became English. I was interested in doing theatre, and after office hours it was a life of rehearsals. We had a group that did street theatre, the language being Hindi, and we used to develop the scripts jointly. Our plays were noted for their colours, songs and the dances. But the topics used to be contemporary political issues. Since I also dabbled in Left politics at that time, I was useful in writing the politically loaded songs in English which others converted to Hindi. I can say that these were rudimentary forms of the poetry I was to write later. I did a lot of translations then mainly for the kind of collective work I was involved in. I still do them flitting between English, Tamil and Malayalam poetry. I never followed writing as an individual pursuit in those days. The entire attention was on collectively produced and performed forms of writing like translations of plays, translation of songs, original plays and songs etc. And, for me, the instruments of writing and the modes of publication did not suit my temperament at all. Later, I came into contact with many poets whose poems were given to me for editing or translation. Thus, I became more directly involved in the art of writing poetry. It was more or less an individual gut feeling of what is poetry than familiarity with poetic forms or knowledge of poets writing in English. There were very few journals in India that would publish English poetry. I am a very ignorant poet, mostly self-taught. Facebook gave me the opportunity to write and publish poetry as I willed. Removed from the yoke of the publishing system, I could suddenly let myself loose in a completely new world in a creative way never possible before. I can safely say that I would never have become a poet writing poetry if Facebook did not happen. Hence, at the ripe age of 55, I entered this brave new world and completely immersed myself in it as it pleased me. There was no one to guide me or check me or tick me off. All the experiences I had gathered through my life till then were poured into my poetry which many found refreshing. In a short time, I was able to get my first collection of poems ' Architecture of Flesh' published, precisely in Dec 2015. I already have enough poems now waiting to be put into a second collection. But, this first collection did have a connection to when I was 25 and had scribbled these words in a diary while speaking about women from a feminist point of view - "An architecture of Flesh, Built around a void." It meant that the male gaze viewed a woman as a complex of flesh with no soul. I adopted this line for the title of my first collection.
 

DV: "Architecture of Flesh" is full of wonderful poems! I had no idea it was your maiden publication, it was so well-developed. Despite the book's riches, I was particularly impressed by the surrealistic "YOU are a fucking rain!" Is it possible for you to share it here and to provide us a little commentary about it? Who/what inspired it? How did it develop -- was it a work of intense labor or quick inspiration?

RS: The poem runs like this:

YOU are

A

Fucking fucking fucking rain.

Bone cracking skull bashing 

You fall from a sky I haven’t seen no one has seen will see.

You are Rain with many rainful rains pregnant within you.

Many painful pangful rainful rains.

I hide, you rain. I go to a cave. You pour within.

I drown in a sea. You lash the waves.

I stand under a tree. The tree rains with you.

You pelt hail stones. You rain sparks.

You set fire to oil fields. You quake mountains.

You make islands. You raze cities.

You rain lava. You rain ova.

You rain and rain.oh god!.so much fucking rain in you?

You tear down the roof and pick me like a bone

In the jaws of an earth moving jurassic machine.

Hurl me into the strato meso thermo spheres

And beyond.

Nanoseconds later, you wake me up in a sea of oranges.

In an orange peel boat

Cushioned in the fragrant pith

Wet in the limonene rain

Flowing into you

Like blood from

A slit orange.

Yes, this poem seems to have been written by a frenzied mind. I am many times caught in these rains of love which match the heavy downpour during the monsoon season in Kerala. These are relentless rains that pour without mercy hour after hour, day after day. This was also a period when I was involved in an intense love that was yet to hit a plateau. In fact, many of the love poems in Architecture of Flesh reflect that love. But, to me, this love rain cannot simply be a male-centric, patriarchal, romantic love. I believe in a rain in which the woman has the upper hand. I have a death wish then, death at the hands of my lover who pours on me and buries me under her love. I have no escape from her fury of love. I am completely devastated by her love. Yet, she loves me. Once she has poured herself out, she wakes me up in a calm romantic world in an orange peel boat in a sea of oranges, pouring into her like blood from a slit orange. That's when, probably, we will make love. A reader can find love poems that reflect the same point of view in many of my love poems. It is something that comes from within me. I do come from a place where Goddesses are worshiped more than male Gods. In fact, these Goddesses are local deities, specific to a place and not tied down by the iconography of a unified Hindu religion. They reside in Kavus, which are temples that exist under a tree with no roofing. They stand in rain and shine more than we do. They are one with nature more than we are. I am no worshiper or believer. I go to no place of worship. I don't pray to any God. Yet, I am attracted to these elementary concepts that go with the elements of nature. Often, I take refuge in them to express my kind of love. Writing this poem was like a downpour. It just poured out and didn't take much time too. Since you mentioned it, I had another look at it and I am surprised that it looks so well chiseled. Of course, the use of the word `fuck' many times must have been deliberate as it would offend a normal Indian reader who won't expect such a word in a romantic poem. When I started reading it out in an audience in Kerala, someone objected to the word asking me to repeat the title. So, I read it out adding two or three more `fucks' to the title. The motto is to hit the readers hard when they need to be hit. 

DV: Poetry only rarely does that (and doesn't always need to), but it's that attitude that is so refreshing in your poem.  Long ago and far away, Ernest Hemingway frequently tussled with his publisher over the issue of profanity.  Hemingway wanted his characters to use real language, and his publisher didn't want to offend readers and damage sales. In "A Farewell to Arms" (1929) he was forced to use dashes instead of expletives; by the time "Death in the Afternoon" came out in 1932 he was allowed to slip in abbreviated forms like "F---" or even "F--k." It was not until "To Have and Have Not" (1937) that Scribner's allowed him to write in an uncensored way, in Harry Morgan's death speech: "No matter how a man alone ain't got no bloody fucking chance" (it was the first Scribner book ever to include that particular word in its entirety). Hemingway parodied the dynamics of this literary cat-and-mouse game in 1940's "For Whom the Bell Tolls," when he had uneducated peasant guerrillas say things like, "I obscenity in the milk of thy unprintable" or "I obscenity in the obscenity of thy unprintable obscenity;" the scene ended with Pilar saying "Go unprint thyself," and with Hemingway commenting "The gypsy went outside and unprinted himself." (My favorite is “What are you doing now, you lazy drunken obscene unsayable son of an unnameable unmarried gypsy obscenity?”) Times have indeed changed, at least in American literary standards. Many of your poems relish in taking on the establishment view of romance, religion, or social discourse. Do you see your role as a writer to be primarily that of an iconoclast, or do you have a broader purpose?

RS: Going by the question, I should surely have several occasions to unprint myself, especially as I am from India and Kerala. I believe (and several others too) that a false sense of sexual morality came to India during colonization through the then prevailing British morality or Christian morality or Victorian morality as it is referred to. One need not repeat once again India's glorious past from Kama Sutra onwards to demonstrate this. The natives were treated by the Europeans as possessing a loose moral sense in matters of sex or eroticism. What was not understood was that India was not a homogeneous nation. Every nook and corner of India bandied about its own God or Goddess and its own morality. The British were the first ones to standardize Indian education and social practices, giving them a pan Indian character. Morality also became a tool in this venture. While vernacular literature still possessed a great deal of freedom in this regard, Indian English literature that was mainly practiced by urban people living in the Metropolises or big cities was greatly influenced by colonial attitudes. You will find a lot of status quo-ist tendencies in Indian English writing. And, a majority of them are blissfully unaware of developments in vernacular literature. Only in recent times have urban writers begun to veer away from this. Even though I am a person from a semi-urban, semi-rural place in Kerala, I am constantly updated with the greats of world literature as well as the latest trends in Malayalam literature. I am not a person who is quarantined from both. (There is a joke in Kerala that Gabriel Garcia Marquez is a Malayali author.) Confronted with the general status-quoist nature of Indian English literature, more specifically poetry, it was natural for me to bring in my world views that germinated from Kerala. It was impossible not to bring in my political positioning vis-a-vis the Indian state and the so-called Indian homogeneous notions of morality. I sought to do it through a barrage of words that are generally considered immoral, improper, un-parliamentary etc. I had no hesitation in describing sexual acts or positions or talk about bestiality or cannibalism or vampires or use cuss-words. For me, it is a political act. In fact, all my poems are political in nature. Repression of one's sexuality, sweeping it under a false morality, will harm society. Kerala is already suffering from it because a standardized sense of morality has taken root even here. Even the `progressive' Left has fallen prey to it. A reprehensible kind of `moral policing' is active here. My poems, therefore, have become deliberate acts of provocation against the generally apolitical, straight-jacketed and moral Indian English poetry as well as the negative morality spreading in Kerala through new religious outfits and the Left. Poems like ' Kisses of Love' stand testimony to it. 

DV: With your permission, here’s “Kisses of Love”:

Prologue

After the protestors kissed in the police vans

And the moralists slunk away to the shadows

Three couples remained on the water front

Soaking in the fading sun and breeze from the sea.

They sat on three benches a hundred feet apart.

On Bench one sat two policewomen.

On Bench two sat a boy and a girl.

On Bench three sat two male poets.

Darkness surrounded them like a screen

And they felt safe from prying eyes.

All of them immersed in kissing

Overcome by the day’s events.

Bench 1

Fingers rolled like canes and batons

Lashed at bodies quivering and crooning.

‘I saw you liked the sea green top.’

‘I saw you liked the polka dots tee.’

‘I need you, not the green.’ ‘I need you, not the dots.’

‘I need you’ ’I need you’ their voices mingled.

Their hands now strayed to their beating hearts.

Pain and pleasure coursed through their veins.

Their nipples hardened and swelled with love.

They settled into a long kiss wet with the mist

And mysterious hums resonating from throats.  

Bench 3

Blowing cigarette smoke into the lover’s mouth,

They exchanged smoke rings, mouth to mouth.

One poet muttered, caressing thighs.

Soft you are like burger and cheese.

He waited for his lover as he finished his smoke

And explored his mouth with his lascivious tongue.

They settled into a long kiss wet with the mist

And mysterious hums resonating from throats.

Bench 2

The boy and the girl sat in each others’ arms.

Watched the sky and the sea and the boats.

Their bodies were in pain being pushed around

And beaten by the police and the mob.

They were happy now having not kissed even once.

They were lost in the dark enveloped by its charm.

Their warm breaths slowly warmed their hearts.

They settled into a long kiss wet with the mist

And mysterious hums resonating from throats. 

Epilogue

Two sparrows watched from a tree.

“How happy they look,” chirped one.

And, they rubbed beaks.

A pair of fish swam to the surface.

Watched them from the water.

“How happy they are,” hummed one.

And, they locked lips.  

From behind a bush

Eyes watched.

They held stones

In their free hands.

DV:  Whhy did you use the order Bench 1, Bench 3, Bench 2 instead of 1,2,3?

RS: I deliberately placed the Hetero-bench in the middle of the Gay and Lesbian ones. All the couples are kissing and making up. Since the benches are numbered in a normal order, activities on Bench 1 (Les) and Bench 3 (Gay) had to be described first. Bench 2 (Hetero) being in the middle comes last. One can see that all of them are lost in their love's labour, despite all that had happened before at the very same place. Every poem has a sequential order to it. When one quickly writes the poem it may not be evident. At the stage of editing, one goes through the process of not only rewriting, but also re-sequencing. Lines are constantly shifted up and down. The order of the words are jumbled. Words are changed. I am very particular about the fact that the poem makes sense in the order I have presented. It could be disorder too.

DV: In your book you added a note referencing Kerala’s first Kiss of Love protest. What was that?

RS: Kiss of Love protests were almost spontaneous protests that broke out after certain moral policing incidents in which lovers sitting together in a cafe were assaulted. These culminated in a centralized protest in the commercial capital of Kerala which is Kochi. Various groups and people came together to declare the venue, day and time. It was declared that young couples would assemble at that place at that time and start kissing in public. It may seem absurd to a Western audience or reader, but in Kerala or even in India we never kiss in public. Hence many outfits (belonging to motley crowds of Hindu fundamentalists, Muslim fundamentalists and the general public) came out against it declaring that they would not allow the event. The police also did not give permission to the event (which was happening in a public place.) Nevertheless, many couples managed to sneak into the venue and kiss in public. They were arrested by the police and taken away. There were clashes and many got hurt. Following this, many Kiss of Love protests were held in many cities of India like Mumbai, Kolkota and Delhi. Everywhere they were mishandled either by the police or miscreants or both. My poem 'Kisses of Love' was written in this context. It describes a situation after the protest is over and people have left the place. Three benches are set in the park facing the backwaters of Kochi. One of the benches is occupied by a lesbian policewoman couple, another by a gay poet couple and the third by a heterosexual couple. I deliberately placed the Hetero-bench in the middle of the Gay and Lesbian ones. All the couples are kissing and making up. Since the benches are numbered in a normal order, activities on Bench 1 (Les) and Bench 3 (Gay) had to be described first. Bench 2 (Hetero) being in the middle comes last. One can see that all of them are lost in their love's labour, despite all that had happened before at the very same place. My describing a lesbian policewoman couple is deliberate. I wanted Love to be projected from the most vehement opponent of love which is the patriarchal State. Same is the case with Gay poets who stand at the other end of the spectrum. They are people who will be persecuted not only as poets, but also for being gay. So, Kiss of Love is not only for `normal' heterosexual couples, but also for communities/groups ostracized for their sexual orientations. The Epilogue describes how Nature views them with kindness. But, humans are part of nature and they are also watching with stones in their hands.

DV: The bulk of your poetry seems to be motivated by something immediate in your life such as a headline or a personal illness. Are you ever impelled to write from a more detached perspective, to produce a contemplative poem that addresses the “universal themes” of literature rather than your own particularities?

RS: I understand what you are pointing out. You are saying that I write poems as a reaction to immediate or topical themes and do not write on 'universal' themes. I believe that I am someone who does not like to write on topics so 'universal' that they are truisms or axiomatic. For example, topics like 'death', 'love' etc are not themes which for me can be written about unless I find a different meaning to it. At the same time, I also try to strictly keep myself away from a mundane 'topicality' which renders the poems ineffective after some time. Before I brought out my book 15 poems had appeared in an anthology titled ‘A Strange Place Other than Earlobes.’ None of the poems there, except for two, deal with a topical theme. They are more like 'universal' though they have to travel far to reach that stage. One can say that I try to balance between the 'universal' and the 'topical' or 'individual' themes. Woman power is the overwhelming theme of at least eight poems there, and two of them are titled ‘Butcher Girl I and II.' Five are about romantic love though it is not directed towards any one woman. One poem is about gender role reversal and shows an emasculated man. One poem is about rape. In AOF, most of the poems hold the same character. Only poems like ‘Architecture of Flesh,’ ‘Gundanur Gundas,’ ‘Warm Love,’ ‘Red Star Resort,’ ‘Kisses of Love,’ ‘ICU I,’ ‘ICU II,’ ‘Hopscotch’ and ‘War Trophies’ deal with the immediate world around me and its specific issues. The rest are all manifestations of my political or philosophical thinking built over a long period of time. In fact, my mind had already gone through different changes by the time I started writing poetry and what you see are the distilled contents of my thought processes. There is a poem on the new China, titled ‘Aphrodisiac,’ which though political is not merely topical. It covers a wide canvas of the progress of the idea of Communism through decades specifically relating to Chinese history. This means that the poem is not the reaction to a certain moment in history, but to a whole lot of developments from the 60s to the present. But, one can also say it handles a 'universal' theme like communism. Hence, my conclusion is that what seems 'topical' is not topical and what seems 'universal' is not universal in my poems. But, admittedly, among the poems written after the publication of AOF, a stronger element of topicality has definitely come into my poems. This is the result of recent political developments in India and the rise of neo fascist tendencies exhibited by the majority religion and its umpteen outfits right now in power in India. The situation is similar to when Hitler came to power in Germany, with popular mandate, and hence the role of being a poet has undergone changes. In fact, some of my latest poems have been very much topical and one titled 'Bullet Train' has become extremely popular and political as it deals with a political murder. And here is my latest poem which is most topical.

The Gift.

You should be on an islet.

Surrounded by a coral red sea.

With three blue coconut trees.

An ochre cave.

A copper cat and a silver dog.

Green rabbits in deep holes.

Yellow mice and indigo snakes.

A chromium lake of fresh water.

A dozen olive brown fruit laden trees.

A blood crescent in the sky.

No courts, no cameras,

No hooligans, no policemen.

No Governments, no states.

You are a gift.

Wrapped.

Untouched.

In an islet.

A magnetic storm lashes.

A galactic lightning strikes.

A diluvial rain screams.

The islet dissolves

Sand by sand

In each rainstorm.

The sea sucks you in.

The whales ferry you to the deep sea bed

Where a million iridescent flowers bloom

To welcome you and call out to you “Hadiya!”

Hadiya is a 25 year old homeopathic medical student from Kerala who converted to Islam and got married to a Muslim. Her Hindu father filed a petition in the Kerala High Court. The Court annulled the marriage and gave custody of Hadiya to her parents. In fact, Hadiya remained in virtual house custody for months. This was challenged by the husband in the Supreme Court who made several observations that the lower court's ruling may be unconstitutional and unlawful. Finally, the Court ruled that Hadiya should be admitted back in the medical college where she was still doing her course and that the Government should bear her expenses. The legal question of the annulment of her marriage has not been settled yet. The series of events had provoked much political confrontation between the Hindutva fascist elements and those supporting Hadiya.You can see that while the theme is topical, the poem itself does not exhibit that character. It is a poem that can breathe outside the topicality of the theme. It is constructed in such a way that it becomes a bizarre reaction to an actual event. But, it can also stand independently as a love poem. Protest poems are not constructed in India in this manner. They spew slogans. I am no sloganeer.

DV: Protest poems always run the risk of losing their topicality, but after all they are written to object to some specific practice. To be effective they need to be quite pointed and obvious. But they are written to be primarily protest rather than poetry. A very few manage to balance the conflicting demands of their respective realms. I would argue that "The Gift" is not a protest poem at all, until the final words. And only then if the reader happens to know the reference -- and then, in retrospect, it becomes a very powerful protest poem. 

AS: Yes, that's the point I wanted to prove, when I quoted that poem. The idea is that to the poet that's me, it's a protest poem. It's my method of registering my protest as a poet. Because protests take many shapes including a violent or peaceful demonstration, a general strike, a mass gathering, a clash, a bonfire or a shoot out. A poet can be part of all that. But, when he is in front of the poem he is about to write, he is an individual. Then, at that point, his protest can speak only the language of the poem he is about to write. Poetry is a secret act. The language of the poetry is the language of the protest at that moment. I will term it a protest poem, but a reader may not. But, in the long run, I believe that the element of `protest' in the poem will ultimately be recognized and valued as such. 

DV: Neo-fascism seems to be a problem not only in India but also the US and elsewhere. What is the agent behind this contagion?

RS: Neo-fascism in India takes its roots from the racial supremacy of the upper caste Brahministic ideology. This is not far from the racial supremacy of the Aryan blood which was the basis of the Nazi ideology. This ideology is fundamentally anti-women, anti-lower caste and anti-semitic. The Partition of India along the Muslim-Hindu divide worked as a logical foundation to it. Since Pakistan is a Muslim country, they want the corollary to happen in India, to turn it into a Hindu state. This, of course, is against our Constitution which terms India as a secular democratic republic. But, by spreading anti-Muslim hatred, they have been able to come to power through the electoral process and are consolidating their position. Hence in India, the term fascism relates primarily to Hindutwa fascism. I have written many poems against this state of affairs. The latest, ‘Bullet Train’ tries to draw a parallel between the Indo-Japanese joint venture for a new Bullet Train in India and an actual bullet that killed a journalist named Gauri Lankesh who was known for her fearless writings against the Hindutwa forces. This poem received a tremendous response, though it, again, does not follow the pattern of a regular protest poem. As an aside, it is also a protest against Aadhar, the Unique Identification System introduced by the Government that links all activities of the citizen to an Aadhar card, in short making surveillance on every citizen possible with a `click'. 

Bullet Train
(The first Aadhaar linked poem in the world)

By Aadhar No: 9876 5432 1001

The Shinkensan Model accelerates to
217 miles an hour, cutting journey time
to 3 hours from Ahmedabad to Mumbai.
Mukesh sings “ Meri gaadi hai japaani”
in a soulful studio radio.
Born post-war, Shinso Abe smiles
and waves and hugs like Hirohito.

This Bullet Train is the Brahmaasthra of the epics.
Or, the Narayanasthra or the Rama Bana.
Sometimes, it is a Mohanasthra that drugs
billions of people putting them in a daze.

There is another Bullet Train.
A 7.65 Calibre Make in India model
that passes through stations with
strange names like Kalburgi South
Pansare West and Dhabolkar Central
Its destination set in Bangalore
where it rockets through a pulsating heart.

This train now will pass through
Under skin arteries and veins and nerves
Tunneling through bone marrow and muscles
Till it comes to rest on a magnificent spine bridge,
perched like a toy train in a full moon night
till the slightest breeze causes the compartments
to topple into a depthless soul, one by one.

This poem got translated into Malayalam, Kannada and Urdu languages. The killers of Gauri Lankesh are yet to be found. The stations mentioned in the poem are not real but the names of well known people who believed in reason and rationalism – Malleshappa Madivalappa Kalburgi, Govind Pansare and Narendra Dhabolkar. Their killers too have not been caught yet.  

Nevertheless, on 21st Jan, I read my love poems at the Le Sutra Bandra Literature/Poetry Festival in Mumbai, as a poet of love and not protest. 

DV: Wonderful! Even poets are not, after all, merely one-dimensional. On this loving note I want to thank you for your time and insights.