Sharanya Manivannan

The Venus Flytrap: Is Marriage The New Singledom?

I find myself, at 22, an old maid.

No, I’m just being dramatic. But you can’t fault me for my dour mood considering that in the past year or so, I’ve discovered that I’ve turned into a minority: unbetrothed, un-hypenated-surnamed and barely past legal age, I’m surrounded by people in my age group who’re taking the leap into holy and not-so-holy matrimony. From primary school friends with Facebook albums full of wedding pictures to discussions about fiancée visas to perfectly serious queries about whether I am married myself (and why not), everyone seems to be quite cozily committed, and more than willing to shout it from the rooftops.

I’m perplexed. Shouldn’t I expect this to happen in, say, five years’ time? Or is there some kind of generational trend in action here – have young women become so chastised by all the pop culture out there about successful, single, “independent” and really very lonely 30-somethings that they’re taking the plunge sooner?

As a census category, the average age of first marriage for Indian women is an almost juvenile 19. But the women I’m thinking of are from all over the world, exclusively urban, with the English language and exposure to its media in common. All the old bugaboos that we associate with early marriage are noticeably absent. Family pressure is no factor – if anything, their families have tried to talk them out of it. With the exception of one friend who doesn’t believe in premarital sex, religious reasons don’t figure either. All these young women are doing it because they want to.

It’s been a very long time since postponing marriage was rebellious; if anything, it’s now the safe choice. True, the right to delay or opt against marriage were some of the great struggles of our foremothers’ lives. But this was at a time when it was one or the other: career or crèche. Feminism is contextual. Our struggles evolve as society does. And if the experiences, anecdotes and celluloid versions thereof of the popular idea of the modern woman are anything to go by, the fine line between real agency and shallow imitation is lost.

Because here’s reality: women who are actually single by choice remain outside the mainstream. Condi Rice, Sushmita Sen and Geri Halliwell are prominent examples. Their legitimate choices are questioned and analyzed, whereas the temporarily unattached statuses of those who imitate that choice to disastrous results, ignoring the fact that it is simply not suited to them as individuals, are perfectly acceptable. It’s no challenge to the system, after all. Same shackles, different shtick.

Extended (but impermanent) singlehood gives one great company: a hundred chick lit novels, a hundred more TV and film characters, and millions of insecure women hellbent on convincing the world that their impersonations are the good life. But look a little closer. Does anything preoccupy those lives to the extent that men do? Money and Manolos alone do not a happy woman make. My generation reads between the lines while women less than a decade older gullibly swallowed hook, line and clichéd cosmopolitan. Frankly, I can’t think of anything any more conformist than that.

So I’m happy that my generation sees the sense in not buying so completely into myths of superficial empowerment. If we’ve learnt this vicariously from observing the failings of those before us and not through actively participating in the experience of decade-long serial monogamy and glossing over loneliness with lies and pretty trinkets, all the better.

Something tells me that because we are more honest, both to ourselves and in what we choose to project publicly, we’re also more likely to succeed in cracking that modern riddle: what does it take for a woman to have it all?

Maybe most of us are built like chopsticks: perfect when paired, good for nothing but to poke out an eye or tuck in a ponytail otherwise. There’s no shame in that. Getting that baggage out of the way could really help when it comes down to the tasks of pursuing real success and happiness.

And the baggage of divorce? There are no guarantees in life. Marriage, late or early, is always a risk. Staving it off for as long as possible doesn’t actually negate it. It just means you die sooner.

Now all that’s left is for me to get over my engagement envy.

An edited version appeared in The New Indian Express. “The Venus Flytrap” is my weekly column in the Zeitgeist supplement.

The Blasphemy Reading

**Venue is a mystery because it is extremely cool.**

RSVP to find out.

Ok, we discussed it and changed our minds.

It’s the Rama temple in Koyambedu, near the outstation bus stand and the market. Meet us at the little cupola-like thing (CC’s description: small platform with a roof) outside. 10am. Bring poems that fit the theme.

Man Twitters Out Of Jail

I’m not on Twitter because my life is way too hyper-connected as is. And because I am an egoistical artist type prone to enjoying shocking people (though not on this prim little blog), I would be totally addicted to inflicting the minutiae of my fabulous life on everyone who declares themselves curious.

So I don’t.

But here’s one hell of a reason to. Someone owes the Twitter folks a drink or fifty.

Review: “The Palace of Illusions” by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

First published in today’s The New Sunday Express.

Because I work with the reimagined archetypes of Draupadi and a (female) Karna in my own writing, I cracked open Divakaruni’s retelling of the Mahabharata expecting, even hoping, to feel some envy. The Palace of Illusions presents the epic via the voice of Draupadi/Panchaali. It’s an ambitious project, and not without predecessors, choosing as its medium one of world mythology’s most idiosyncratic women.

To rework an epic is like writing a ghazal: there is infinite variety within the constraints of its key identifiers. But Divakaruni’s Mahabharata bears little difference to what we popularly understand to be the epic. That Panchaali is the narrator offers only a slight, undistinguished shift in perspective.

Plot-wise, the story is largely faithful to the original. The author succeeds in conveying depth and nuance in almost every character, portraying for example both Kunti’s resentfulness and righteousness, or Drona’s cruelty and greatness, in different lights. But when it comes to rendering her protagonist, the results are unadmirable.

Curiously absent are elements that truly challenge the misogyny of the original epic. Where is Panchaali’s famous lust, which in some retellings (but not this one) caused her husband in a previous birth to have cursed her with five husbands to quench it? Despite unexplored hints at her temper and capacity for vengeance, she is depicted mostly as obedient, pleading codes of honour as a ruse to mask cowardice. Even the single attempt at subversion, the centering of Panchaali’s secret love for Karna as the great regret of her life, is trite.

This Panchaali is obsessed by her roles, self-conscious – never is there a moment when she is not a princess, a queen, a wife, an exile, a woman wronged. Weighted down by these, she markedly lacks individuality – an enormous pity because what good is it to retell a familiar story without injecting it with a special spirit? Ultimately, the reader never manages to be fooled into believing that it is Panchaali speaking, as the best first-person narratives can do. Nowhere remains the intense, resilient, dangerous Draupadi we know of, who undoubtedly inspired the author herself.

Panchaali, in the final reckoning, is a weak, malleable character. She is unlikable, consumed by her ego, lacking the essential humanity that makes us love our heroes; the only thread that keeps the reader concerned for her is the memory of other, more fully-fleshed Draupadis.

Divakaruni seems to have juxtaposed one of the near-identical female protagonists of her previous books onto an epic setting. But positioning an indistinct character in a grand plotline cannot make the transposed character inhabit that skin comfortably by default. One wishes that Divakaruni had been bolder, dared to manipulate the epic in a manner that could have made this Draupadi truly hers.

Perhaps what draws the reader back to Divakaruni’s books regardless of their clichés has always been her impeccable stylistic craft, particularly her extraordinary gift for metaphor. But her writing in The Palace of Illusions is functional, stripped of lyricism. The closings chapters have their gripping moments, riding on the emotional crescendo of the original, but it is too late by then for the novel itself.

The Palace of Illusions succeeds as an introduction to the Mahabharata. But both its feminist and artistic aspirations seem shallow. Divakaruni’s reinterpretation of the Mahabharata falters above all because of an absence of imagination. The pathos of the original tale and its powerful heroine as raw canvas, combined with her gift for imbuing beauty in even the most repetitive storylines, should have made this book the author’s masterpiece.

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.

~~~

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)