Sharanya Manivannan

The Venus Flytrap: My Weekly Column, Out Now!

So I woke up nearly two hours early today because I had to see the paper. After six years in journalism, my byline by itself is no longer a source of hysterical excitement. But (deep breath) I have a column!

That column is The Venus Flytrap (special thanks to Chat for suggesting the name), in the Zeitgeist section of The New Indian Express. Zeitgeist is the Saturday paper, full of “alternative-style” columns. What can you expect from me? My dirty yet political mind, of course. :) Editor wanted “Early Salon.com meets better Sex and the City meets traditional op-ed”. I thought, “I’m game! Just don’t call me Carrie.”

I’ll be posting up my unedited columns here for archiving and sharing. Here’s installment one.

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THE VENUS FLYTRAP

The City of Secret Sin

On New Year’s Day, my sisters and I were at a Barista on Chennai’s trendy Khader Nawaz Khan Road, where we were treated to something of a spectacle in this city: PDA.

Now if there’s any three-letter acronym that raises the hackles of the self-appointed moral guardians of the nation, the Tamil nation, and their general indignation – it’s this one. More specifically, if the parties in question are of opposite genders (men entangled in one another’s arms as they swagger, octopussily, down the street are as common as the cow).

So there’s all the accounting you need for where my manners went when I spotted the hetero couple on the couch, spooning, he nuzzling and kissing her neck while she affected rapturous expressions for a solid fifteen minutes. I stared like my eyelids had vanished. Curiously, the other patrons and the staff were completely blasé.

Was I offended, I asked myself? I, who pride myself on standing for liberated mores, who believes in the legalization of marijuana, the decriminalization of prostitution, the repealing of Penal Code 377? I had a problem with some mild making out within my sight?

No, I consoled myself. You haven’t gone that native yet (I’d been back in the city just a sullen three months at this point). What shocked me, I realized, was that somewhere between my last long spell in India and my present one, it looked like the social order had hiked its skirt above its head and started sprinting into the 21st century. And I had some catching up to do.

One thing I’ve learned about Chennai is that just when you’ve reconciled yourself to her conservatism, her stick-in-the-mud, tattle-to-Appa (or, more appropriately in times past, Amma) sense of staying firmly entrenched in an archaic world – just when you think you know her, she sticks a foot out to trip you up. And then you turn around and see she’s in leopard print thigh-highs.

Still, something about this particular incident uncharacteristically unnerved me. It went further than superficiality: it was actual risk-taking. And that’s when I realized that I was shocked, but not scandalized – actually, I was kind of thrilled. And not just because our voyeur-baiting couple was, well, pretty hot.

It’s been said that identity is a constant process of exchanging masks: and it may hold truer in no other place on earth. This is where women routinely carry around three different outfits to fit into various contexts, relationships are conducted exclusively via SMS, and every straight man wants Mallika Sherawat (but not as his wife). All said and done, under our hypocrisies and – most tellingly – our extraordinary abilities of subterfuge and personality adaptation, we’re as sordid as they come. We populate like we’re competing with rabbits, our HIV rate is among the world’s most rapidly increasing, yet we live in denial of these serious facts, and settle instead for pretensions of progress.

I’ve noticed that these days, everybody’s buying into the myth of New Chennai, and I would imagine, New India. Mid-length skirts and malls make us ‘modern’. As the blogger Krish Ashok put it, the city has gone from being married to tradition to being in a live-in relationship with it. Or so it seems. Because when push comes to shove, we haven’t changed. Misogyny, casteism, religious and communal prejudice – all the old brigades still rule the roost. Our taboos haven’t dissolved; we’ve just found ways to negotiate with them in temporary, individual ways that work in tandem with the system and have no bearing on society at large.

But ultimately – and this is no reflection on the exhibitionists who led to this cud-chewing – these ways are like somebody’s Mami doing the Macarena – mildly amusing, briefly scandalous, but mostly just sad both in a lack of originality and in a reaction so delayed it’s turned cliché. And that’s the thing – when you throw your skirt over your head and run, you have no idea where you’re going. Call me prudish if you will, but I’ll take a full-skirted revolutionary over a panty-flashing bimbo any day.

So as wicked as I found it, I’m not about to equate a little PDA to the dawn of a liberated age. It’s probably more like 3.30am, but considering the 9pm curfews we came from, it’s still pretty cool. Kudos to the cozy duo for taking the time-honoured traditions of Marina Beach to a couch in a coffee joint. I’d gladly waive my right to enjoy my latte in peace for the sake of a little more honesty in this city of secret sin.

Sharanya Manivannan’s first book of poems, Witchcraft, will be launched in June. She blogs at https://sharanyamanivannan.wordpress.com

Talismans

One of the residues of my unfortunate upbringing in one of those disgusting godmen cults is that I place some faith in the idea of the talisman. (Other residues would include wavering agnosticism and intense hatred of said and similar godmen cults.)

It’s something that’s been shown to be at least a serendipitous belief, if not a provable one. Two years ago I endured some impossible trauma in which my life was endangered by a person obsessed with me to the point of losing all she actually loved. The experience destroyed me in ways I have yet to recoup. It was at that point that two talismans entered my life.

What I believe is not in the protection of talismans by themselves, but in their definitive, specific purposes. I believe they enter my life, do the required, and then go away once their power has played its use out. One of the talismans I got at this time was explicitly religious, a pendant of Kali which I attached onto an old necklace of slim beige beads. One night, a few months later, I woke up startled and screaming, and found that the necklace had shattered all over my body. The next morning, my mother called from another country to say that she had woken up in the middle of the previous night seized with the certainty that something terrible had happened to me. We had both been shaken from sleep at the same time.

On the day that I spoke to Evelyn Hii of No Black Tie to confirm my first solo spoken word show, a first in some ways in Kuala Lumpur also, it was raining and she was stuck in traffic. So I spent some time at the new age place next door. Everything in it was absurdly expensive, from the espresso to the books. But there was a large bowl near the entrance filled with small orange-yellow stones and a sign that invited the visitor to leave with one. I spotted it as I left, couldn’t resist putting my hand into that cool, textured heap of little gems. “They’re carnelian stones,” said the guy who worked there. “Take the one that calls to you.”

I did. It looked like a miniature mango, with a small brown flaw that could have been from where the stem would have emerged. I went to my meeting. My show was confirmed, with the stone in my pocket. I continued to carry my carnelian stone for months. But somewhere between the four hotels of my Indonesia stay, it disappeared. Its purpose had a clarity I saw right away: it came to me at a crossroads in my career, and went away once the outcome of that crucial period — a period in which opportunities came one after the other, and in which my life became enriched by the generosity of some wonderful people I met then — was sealed.

The second of the talismans I got two years ago was almost a fashion purchase, a cheap metal bangle of a two headed snake. I liked it because it looked good. It wasn’t something I needed to explain. But as soon as I saw and touched it, I understood that it would mean more to me than that. I have an embarrassing amount of jewellery, so you have to understand that this doesn’t happen very often, which is why I recognised it right away. I almost never took it off since then.

Last night, I found my bangle among a pile of clothes on the bed. I had no memory of taking it off, I did not even realise it was gone, and its size is such that it cannot have slipped. It was like it sneaked off my wrist and waited patiently until I saw it.

I wonder what that means.

Junot Díaz

Do you get frustrated by always being identified as a “Dominican” writer or a “Latino” writer, and never just as a straight-up “writer”?

No, because there’s no such thing as a straight-up writer. I think when people say a straight-up writer, what they really mean is a white writer. In other words, historically there has never been this concept of a nonracialized, nongendered writer. The fact that the word “writer” has to be modified so often is because everybody knows that when people speak of writers, we tend to mean, on an unconscious level, white males. And I don’t think that being a white writer and being a Dominican writer says anything about your talent with the material that you write about. That’s the important difference. People assume that if you put a tag on it, that immediately assumes that you’re a different kind of writer. But that’s not the case. Just because those of us that write in English in the United States are American writers, that doesn’t mean that we really have much in common.

I think that the reason I don’t mind being labeled or labeling myself is because I think the entire universe can be found in the Dominican experience. I don’t see the Dominican Republic as a limitation. People seem to think that coming from a tiny island with this really bizarre history in the Dominican Republic is somehow limiting. But in my mind, I think that the same way a small, cold, gray, drizzly island nation in the North Atlantic could imagine itself the center of the universe, I see no difference why a Dominican who comes from this tiny little place and time can’t also imagine himself the center of the universe.

From an interview in Newsweek.

Jerome Kugan’s Songs For A Shadow

In Indonesia. Two more famous poets were cropped out. Teehee.

Have you ever experienced a piece of art and become overwhelmed with the amazement that someone you know, a beloved friend whose fridge you’ve raided, whom you’ve fought with, whom you’ve travelled with, produced so breathtaking a creation?

Because that’s what happened to me when I heard the album version of “Flowers”, from Jerome Kugan’s debut album Songs For A Shadow, to be launched on Saturday April 12. I’d long admired him as a singer-songwriter, but to hear his familiar folksy, acoustic tunes given an electronica spin blew my mind. “Flowers” was suddenly like the moment when something cracked in me while listening to Boys For Pele that turned me into a devout Toriphile. It was some sort of breakthrough; it was the moment I realised the culthood my friend is destined for.

If I could pinpoint a single person whose impact on my life radicalised it for the better, it would have to be Jerome Kugan. I met JK when I was 15. I had just finished school and was working at a bookstore in Kuala Lumpur. I was heading nowhere, in that cute, quirky, blasé, dishonest way that precocious and rebellious teenagers head nowhere, and had no idea how that point in time and the couple of years they precipitated were going to be so pivotal for me. JK had moved to the city fairly recently. He edited and published a photocopied zine of writing and illustrations, called Poetika, which lasted for a good 9 months. He was also organising these indie events, in which people performed music or read from their work. I don’t know how many people took all these efforts seriously in the beginning, but for me, it was a whole new world. A world in which I belonged.

It was because of Jerome’s early efforts at sparking off an underground poetry scene that I have a spoken word career today. Being a part of that scene in its newborn years, before the British Council’s involvement and the visiting poets and the slams with crowds of hundreds, put me in a position I am privileged to have had. The right place, the right time, and rewards for years to follow. Through him, I met countless people, some who became confidantes or collaborators. Heck, it was because of Jerome that I met my closest friend. But above all was the chance he took on me, a kindness I try to keep in mind when I meet younger aspiring writers.

When I had to leave Kuala Lumpur last year, Jerome’s farewell present was a CD with the rough cut of the album as of September 30. Since then, I’ve listened to parts of it nearly every day. My morning auto ride to work feels incomplete without one of my favourites from it.

The album is hypnotic, addictive, mystical to a surprising depth. Omens and miracles, calls for guidance, the mysteries — all have a place. From the dangerously brooding undertone in the hum in Jerome’s voice in “Song For The Service Industry” to the alluring a cappella of “Lightfalls”, there is a powerful quality in this work that defies terminology. Jerome Kugan channels the duende, alright. Only abstraction can describe it: you either feel it or you don’t.

And of course, Jerome as poet and Jerome as troubadour are inseparable. His lyrics are complex, but not overly obscure. Conveniently, he discusses the experience of creating and recording each individual song on his blog (see sidebar index Lyrics and Notes).

My three favourites from this album are “Song For The Service Industry”, “Tomás” and “Flowers”. The first two incidentally have strong political undercurrents. There is something a little manifesto-like in the quiet conviction with which the persona in “Song For The Service Industry” says he will wait (for the day when the tables turn), and “Tomás” was written for Tomás Diego, a Cuban persecuted for his sexuality, and who was immortalised before this song in a small part in the film Before Night Falls. “Flowers” is a spiritual song, an acknowledgment of a power, higher or equal to the creator in his/her element, that will guide and allow the fullest experiences.

And so it is with every happiness that I congratulate Jerome Kugan on the launch of his first album, Songs For A Shadow, on April 12. I’m so proud of you!

Below is the video for “Tomas”. The album is available for sale in Malaysia, will be available shortly in Chennai (I am a pimp, remember?), and for you lucky credit card holders, via digital download.

April 12 — Lazy Saturday Poetry Open Mic

So, April 12 is a big day for me. It’s when the first installment of my column in The New Indian Express comes out. And it’s also when my dear buddy Jerome Kugan’s album launches. At least two reasons to celebrate, but what does one do when feeling too lazy?

Have a Lazy Saturday Micless Open Mic of course.

This time, we’re planning on being so laidback that:

1. We’re not booking the venue. Just be at the Barista on G.N. Chetty Road at 2.30pm on Saturday April 12.

2. There’s no theme.

Why? Why not? You’re here. We’re here. Everybody likes coffee. And even if you don’t, you love poetry. Right?

So bring thyselves and thy poyems. See you there. More details, and if you’re not too lazy to RSVP, email me or call Chandroo at 9844467463.

Poem: Mermaid

MERMAID

They found the mermaid the morning after.
She was the colour of homemade toffee, burnt
in places, mellow in others. Her hair fragile
as flax. Her beautiful, brittle fins. When the man
who found her, lifting the seaweed veiling her face,
knelt at her hip, his breath like broken glass, she
looked to him like she would crumble to the touch.

Around him, the shore lay shattered like the
heart of a woman who knows her mother has
turned against her. He traced with hands anxious
with liquor the aghast shape of her jaw. Her bones.
Her ribs like stacked haloes, her tough browned
skin. The delicate, exquisite patterns of her scales.
The sharp, ridged points at which her tail flared
into a crescent, a sinewed handheld fan.

His tears came slowly, at first, and then in little
detonations of despair. The first lesson of the ocean,
he had always known, was reciprocity. What the
mother took from mortals, she would return in
equal fervour. Her sleeping child coiled into
the tentacles of weed and debris, sucked deep
within the womb and expelled like so many other
bodies. He listened to her roar then and heard not
cruelty, not death, but hideous, intolerable grief.

(For back story, please see here)

Karna Poems on Kritya

The only video of my readings that I’ve seen so far and liked was shot by Sze Ying Goh at No Black Tie, Kuala Lumpur on April 1 2007. You can find this video in the ‘Narc Is I’ section of this blog.

In it, I am reading “Karna Considers Yuanfen”. This was the first of the poems that reimagine the Mahabharata’s Karna as a woman and alter-ego, juxtaposing the epic character with personal history. When I first wrote it, I was not sure — it is a prose poem, clunky with text, drenched in heavy imagery. I did not think it could translate to the stage. But I found, repeatedly, that it was among my most popular works, the kind in which the audience stays silent for a moment after it ends before they begin to clap.

Although there are other poems outside of this trilogy, “Karna Considers Yuanfen” leads into “Karna Considers Light” and “Karna and Kunti”, neither of which have been published before. The former is a rumination on the nature of Karna’s relationship to her omniscient, unattainable father, the god of the sun, the latter a more traditional retelling of her encounter with her unknown mother on the battlefield. In the first poem, the closing lines are engraved on a plaque in the crypt of the astronomer John Brashear; the second contains a phrase from Ainkurunuru 13 (trans. Ramanujan). I realise my poems and blog have niche audiences who are probably already familiar, but Yuanfen is the Chinese concept of the apportionment of love one is destined to have in one’s lifetime.

All three are published in the April issue of Kritya. Click on the “more poems by SM” link there to take you to the second and third.

Why is Karna a woman, and why have I chosen this character to explore biomythography? Because the story of Karna is the story of why art has any meaning to me. It was the first story I ever heard that devastated me, that taught me immediately of both the power and pathos of storytelling and shaped my moral universe as a very young child. Karna is my mythological archetype, and the deeper I delved into creating my own art, the more I wanted to appropriate this story in a way that was truly mine.

Eternal Love

Read this. If so brief an extract makes me weep, I wonder what the whole book will do.

I hope it’s published in English soon. (via Zigzackly)

Ameen Merchant’s The Silent Raga

Anything that combines the powerhouses that are the Madras Book Club (supposed to have a membership of 800) and the Prakriti Foundatio Ameen Merchant & Sharanya Manivannan n equals, at the very least, fantastic turnout. I calculated between 150-200 people at the Taj Connemara last night, at the launch of Ameen Merchant’s The Silent Raga. Reading from the novel were Madras Players’ Yamuna and Deesh Mariwala, classical singer Subhashri Ramachandran and yours truly, as well as the author of course.

The Silent Raga was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, and is published in Canada by Douglas & MacIntyre and in paperback (Rs 395) in India by HarperCollins. A couple of interviews with the author are here and here.

With Ameen at the post-launch gathering at Amethyst

The Shaming of Scarlett Keeling

(Cross-posted at Ultraviolet)

That violence against women rarely grabs any attention except for in the presence of gruesomeness, sensationalism, drama and tragedy is already known. But more disturbing by far than the fact that the murder of a teenage tourist in Goa last month has been making headlines precisely due its cocktail of all the above elements is the level of moral sanctimony that accompanies the media coverage, the ensuing debates, and even what are ostensibly the responses of those who knew Scarlett Keeling and her family.

On February 18, the body of 15-year old Scarlett Keeling, a British national, was found on a Goan beach. Police initially chalked up her death to drowning after consuming too much alcohol, despite evidence of severe bruising and rape. But investigations and post-mortem investigations revealed contradictory facts, as did eyewitness accounts by people who had seen the girl during her final hours. Scarlett had been in India with her mother Fiona MacKeown, MacKeown’s boyfriend, and her siblings. They were frequent visitors, and on this instance were on a six-month-long trip.

Allegations were quickly leveled against MacKeown for her negligence of Scarlett. The moral higher ground was quickly swamped by those chastising her for her irresponsible behaviour. One whiff of scandal led to another, and details about MacKeown’s private life were dug up. Scarlett’s diary entries were exposed in the media. The bottomline message was that somehow, by choosing to lead lifestyles that included partying, sex and substances, they had asked for the tragedy that befell them. Terms like “alleged murder” were popular, as though it could have been anything else, until today’s gruesome revelation: Scarlett was murdered by having her head held underwater for between five and ten minutes. She asphyxiated to death.

It is alarming to watch the cruelty of the media – from possibly every newspaper in the country to even NDTV’s usually fairly progressive We The People to the blogosphere – and what can be gauged of common opinion by it. Despite the horrifying brutality inflicted on a person who by Indian standards was still a child, and the overwhelming confusion and despair her loved ones are no doubt experiencing, the attacks made against the victim and the family censure them with only superficial demonstrations of sympathy. Political officials in Goa are calling for the revoking of MacKeown’s visa and a ban on her entering the country again, blaming her for maligning the image of the state. She has since gone into hiding, fearing for her life from both the drug mafia and state officials whom she has linked to them.

Scarlett’s boyfriend, an Indian citizen named Julio Lobo, has been taken for medical tests to see if he is “sexually active”. A DNA test of substances found on or in the victim’s body would not be unreasonable, but pray tell, what does his being or not being sexually active reveal about the horrific tragedy? Is it necessary, given that in her diary, Scarlett had written not only that she had sex with him, but that she felt he used her for it? Is there a test that proves sexual activity in males? Or is this like one of those repressed, backward ideas about broken hymens and being able to pee in a straight line? That this person’s private life is being pried into in a manner that is unlikely to shed any light on the senselessness of the incident is nothing more than one of the many ways in which the blame is being pinned on “the wanton Western way”. The boyfriend, we are to assume, has sinned by his affinity to this lifestyle of debauchery, which – we are also to assume – is imported to India by the likes of the Keeling family. But even that doesn’t quite crack it: Lobo is being tested not because of his character – but because of what the conclusiveness of science is meant to tell us about hers.

Lobo, in turn, has retaliated by attacking MacKeown because she had been aware of Scarlett’s lifestyle (but she says Scarlett was neither a binge drinker not drug abuser, to her knowledge). This, too, is reprehensible. At 25 years old, a decade older than Scarlett, his relationship with her could amount to statutory rape. Clearly, prior to the murder, MacKeown’s liberal parenting style benefited him. His attempt to deflect attention from his actual law-breaking by ganging up against the bereaved mother with the rest of the patriarchy squad is sickening.

In other words, the condemning of the murdered girl, her family, her friends, their lifestyles and their choices is a typical misogynist response – the wicked woman gets her dues. And this time, there are not one but two “wicked women”: Fiona MacKeown, mother of not just the victim, but of several more children of “varying paternity”, and Scarlett herself. That the women in question happen to be from the West (that corrupter of our chaste and virtuous ways of life!) is icing on the cake.

Rape, murder, the works – apparently, under the right (or wrong) circumstances, they can all be justified.

Make no mistake. What we see in the media today is not an enquiry into a crime. It is slut-shaming, plain and simple. The nation is not in shock because a 15 year old has been so brutally treated. Those are not the sounds of protest and outrage; they are the sounds of many hands rubbing in glee, so thrilled to be vindicated of their position that women who break the rules deserve what’s coming to them, and what’s coming to them is exactly what happened to Scarlett Keeling.

But what happened to Scarlett Keeling has nothing to do with if she had sex, if she did drugs, if she drank. What happened to Scarlett Keeling has nothing to do with why her mother so frequently chose to travel to India or lived a bohemian, unconventional lifestyle. What happened to Scarlett Keeling has only one reason: some places in the world are not safe for women, not because of culture or tradition, but because of an absence of respect for them as individuals. India is one of them. India killed Scarlett Keeling – and every day, kills many less sensationalized individuals. That Fiona MacKeown has seen this is not delusion on her part.

“The Second Coming”: The Reincarnated Poem Open Mic

After the success of the reading at Thalankuppam just over a week ago, we decided to hold something a little more mainstream, just to spread the word that poetry, open-mic style, has come to Chennai.

“The Second Coming” (all puns and cleverness intended) is going to be a mix of two formats. Original poetry, and poetry in translation. The idea is to not only encourage people to get a feel of performing their own writing, but to also hone poetry appreciation and performance poetry in itself, by sharing some of the best verses through the ages. Because March 21 is World Poetry Day we celebrate translation in particular, the gift it gives to the world at large. Basically, in addition to any poetry of your own, bring along a poem that was not originally in English. Think Octavio Paz, Rabindranath Tagore, Anna Akhmatova (for examples) and you’ll see what we’re trying to do.

Friday is a public holiday, and Mocha in the mornings is a lovely setting. This reading will be held on the upper floor, with special permission from the management. All are welcome.

Please click on the flyer below for details. It’s a little cluttered but they’re there. Really. ;)

In Today’s The New Indian Express

I don’t have a scanner, and I apologise for the clunky thing above. Please click on the image to take you to the file’s page, then click on the image again. Then, zoom in to read. Sorry!

For a change, am pleased with this print article that appeared in today’s The New Indian Express, in the City Express (Chennai) supplement. There’s a write-up on Poetry on the Pier, an interview focused on my feminism, and one of my poems.