Mamihlapinatapai
Yahgun (Tierra del Fuego): a look shared by two people, each of whom wish the other would initiate that which they both desire, but which neither one wants to concede.
The saddest word in the world
has a piñata nestled
within it. You will never
know the richness of
your own heart until
you have held it high
above the totem
of your body and
blessed its
rupture.
We spent a beautiful late morning yesterday at the most gorgeous cemetery I have ever been in (prettier than any park in this city, I think). The Madras War Memorial is a small, impeccably maintained place, holding the remains and/or remembrances of Commonwealth citizens who died here during the first and second world wars.
The raven that showed up as Anand read from Edgar Allen Poe, the monarch butterfly that did the same when I read a persona poem as Frida Kahlo speaking to me, and the Cohen tombstone near where we were (Deesh read from Leonard C)… Someone told me recently that the signs are everywhere, even when one doesn’t look for them. But I love metaphor, and mythology. I’ll connect the dots.
On the phone the night before, working out lunch plans: “We’ll decide at the graveyard! *cackle*”. How cool to be able to say things like that and mean them. :)
Left to right — Anand, Anita, Harish, Deesh, Chandrachoodan, Arun, Raji, Anita’s daughter (sorry!), Sharanya. Photo by Dilip Muralidharan (link goes to clearer version of pic).
Posted this on a more private space this morning. Thought I’d share it here, just for fun.
Medusa-seduca, you declared,
and crossed your legs at tea.
Rapunzel-schmunzel, I shrugged.
You don’t mean little old lady me?
But don’t take me at my bashful blush,
I was only feigning surprise.
I think we already know: my hair is
a certifiable home-wrecking device.
Please feel free to distribute! Hope to see you at this, if you’re in Chennai.
P.S. As everyone already knows, I have a kindergartener’s sense of colour. A different version should be up at Chandrachoodan’s soon.
The Viva La Vida reading: an open mic on Frida Kahlo’s 101st birthday, celebrating the spectacularly macabre.
This appeared in the Chennai edition of The Times of India today, under the “What’s Hot” section.
Years ago, I read that when a woman weaves out of her iyari, she doesn’t need to copy a design. I took this to heart, or took it back into my heart, rather – iyari is the Huichol concept of heartmemory. Eventually, I would twine this with the concepts of duende – the dangerous driving force behind Andalusian flamenco deep song – and ananku – the lost Tamil idea of the sacred malevolence in certain objects and locations, including the woman’s body.
To me, although widely divergent geographically, this trinity of concepts represent one and the same. It is what I enter and try to evoke in performance. I’ve been doing spoken word since I was 15 years old, long enough for me to know my element and try to draw others into theirs. So I teach, and co-organise events. Spoken word is my shamanism.
Having experienced firsthand the transcendental and transformative power of poetry in performance when it hits a point of alchemy somewhere between rock concert and book reading (but not, as some may have you believe, theatre), I am convinced that Chennai is ripe for it.
What I’ve said must sound terribly pretentious. And I’ll tell you the big secret: it is. Ironically, vocabulary limits us when trying to describe the overwhelming. But music, words, visuals and movement have saved my life time and again. Who hasn’t lived through a night sustained by a single song, or sat in the cinema and wept until everyone else in the hall had left? This is why I do what I do. Because art is meaningful. Ultimately I myself, my great loves and disasters and fears, may mean nothing. But what I create on this time on earth could – just maybe – make someone, somewhere, feel less lonely for just one profound moment. And that is enough.
But if each day,
each hour,
you feel that you are destined for me
with implacable sweetness,
if each day a flower
climbs up to your lips to seek me,
ah my love, ah my own,
in me all that fire is repeated,
in me nothing is extinguished or forgotten,
my love feeds on your love, beloved,
and as long as you live it will be in your arms
without leaving mine.
– Pablo Neruda
It’s funny that I was thinking of this poem and the time I read it at a friend’s wedding, because I just found out it’s their 3 year anniversary today. (Hugs to you both). The rest of the poem is here.
At their most basic, our survival needs have at least three components: food, shelter and love. The first and second are physical necessities. The third appears almost as a technical error – in no medical book will you find a prescription for causing or curing love. Yet, we know it is possible to die of heartbreak, even literally. It is the alchemy that makes the distinction between a life lived and one that is merely survived.
If Love is God, as some like to say, then it is equally contentious. Whose business is love? If recent reports are anything to go by, it is strictly under the jurisdiction of state and society. Consider two incidents in Tamil Nadu that made headlines in late May. An eloping couple in their 20s were forcibly separated with no less than the intervention of political parties. Two women, both around 40, committed suicide out of shame over their “unnatural” relationship; in an ironic twist, their families chose to cremate them together, giving them in death what was so mercilessly denied them in life.
This preoccupation with telling people how to conduct their most intimate relationships is deeply unhealthy. To enforce discipline on teenagers is one thing. To persecute adults for following their hearts is another, a malaise that reveals deep prejudices against fundamental freedoms. We live in a version of democracy which allows adults to vote for their leaders, but not for their lovers.
Race, age, gender, religion, caste, location, affluence and incompatible horoscopes have served to keep people apart not for their own good, but for the good of a system that refuses to evolve. What disturbs me is how many people continue to adhere to these codes willingly. I see shades of this mental servility even among the most intelligent people I know.
That onlookers fear love is disheartening and challenging; that those in love fear their own love is downright disillusioning.
Those who raise, erroneously, the flags of tradition and culture should consider this 2000 year old poem by Cempulappeyanirar, brought from the Sangam age to our Anglicized ears by the genius of A.K. Ramanujan. Way back in the glory days of Tamil culture, this is what was seen, sung about, surrendered to:
What could my mother be
to yours? What kin is my father
to yours anyway? And how
Did you and I meet ever?
But in love
our hearts have mingled
as red earth and pouring rain.
There, in a nutshell, is all I think I will ever need to know about life, and love. You love who you love. The end.
The most enduring romance I know of is between a beautiful artist in her 30s and someone twice her age, whose son she had gone to school with. When he dies, she does not know whether she will be permitted to go to his funeral. Theirs is a portmanteau love, patched together between countries and children from other marriages and the steadying force that has kept them together through years. It is a relationship that inspires me, one that shows courage. It is a relationship that sees the daggers, feels the fear, and takes the leap anyway.
Not all of us are so lucky as to find the ones who are made for us, cut from the same cloth of the soul. But those who do, do. It’s as simple as that. You love who you love. And the rest be damned, then? But here’s the thing: there is no rest, not really. No social construct, legal diktat or political enemy that cannot be dismantled. As cheesy as it sounds, love is all there is, and the rest is just window dressing.
An edited version appeared in The New Indian Express. “The Venus Flytrap” is my weekly column in the Zeitgeist supplement.
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.
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)
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.
I’m very happy to share that a specially-commissioned recording of twelve poems from my forthcoming book, Witchcraft, is up at Her Circle‘s One World Cafe Reading Series, as a feature for the month of April. Her Circle is an international website focusing on arts and activism by women. Do check out the whole website and archives — there’s some awesome work there.
I’m absolutely thrilled that it is up, with an introduction by the poet Kimberly L. Becker that’s going to have me smile to myself for the next couple of days. You can take a listen here.
Special thanks to Misty Ericson of Her Circle, and of course, my friend the sound engineer, Anand Krishnamoorthi of Prasad Studios.
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. ;)
Some very friendly boys and their dog, on Thalankuppam beach. All photos above are by me. Larger sizes and black and white versions are on my Flickr page.
Chandrachoodan Gopalakrishnan and I came up with the idea of holding a poetry reading at Thalankuppam, north of the city of Chennai, while talking about coasts. Like many artists, we are both obsessed with them to some extent. When I told him about my own favourite beach, which is widely regarded as a crappy excuse for one but stirs me still, he told me about Thalankuppam. He had discovered it by accident, while riding without any particular destination in mind, leaving the city behind. By this time, we and a few others had been having a lot of discussions about the necessity and opportunity present to create a community, one which not just writes and reveres the written word, but takes joy in the spoken.
Thalankuppam made sense on several levels — gorgeous yet discreet, it has an interesting story which few know. We wanted a small event, something in the indie spirit. No sponsors, no pish-poshness. We also wanted something that had the ethos of the city in it — an ethos which we hope to shape, in our own small ways. As I have written and said elsewhere before, I feel blessed to be at this point again for the second time in my life. The right place at the right time, just as I was six or seven years ago in KL. Chennai is pulsing with something which, if harnessed, will set the city alight. Trust me on this one. I’ve seen it once and am certain I’m about to witness it again. Or the city will, in any case, with or without me.
On the afternoon of March 9th, a small group set forth from Madras University, hugging the beach northwards for under an hour until we reached the area of Thalankuppam. We entered a settlement area, and the further into it we drove the more I realised that truly, this was the kind of beach that could only be stumbled upon. When we finally parked to walk, near a delta, we were confronted by a small hill of sand. Human-made, from sediment that clogged the factory-bordered river otherwise.
Beyond this hill was the beach. And jutting from this beach was the abandoned pier. Chandroo’s camera will say things best, so please go ahead and harass him to post his photos up.
We settled on the beach to start the reading, which was pleasantly delayed by the far from camera-shy boys above. Matthew played sacrificial lamb, reading a poem which Sivakami, who had had to leave once we reached Thalankuppam, had left with him. He delivered her homage to the masculine and feminine properties of the sea beautifully. Chandroo read three poems, one of which was a translation of Subramania Bharathy. Katia, Matilda, Sarah and Jenny — the unsuspecting newspaper interns we whisked off to this deserted, untouristy part of greater Chennai — most impressively shared some of their favourite poems by others from memory. Katia read some musings from her journal. I read a few pieces, including one about a dream I had about a sea that was startlingly similar to the view mid-way on the pier. Julian did not read, but lent his quiet support.
We had held off from actually getting on the pier and walking to its end because Chandroo, whose 25th or thereabouts trip this was, had recommended we wait until closer to sundown, when the colours of our surroundings would take on different properties. He was right — it was worth it.
Walking the pier itself was probably the most incredible experience of an altogether brilliant evening. The good kind of scary, like a rollercoaster, only more dangerous, because the only safety devices we had were each others’ sweaty hands and our own intrepid footsteps. You can’t tell from the picture we used on the flyer, but that is no bridge. It’s like a horizontal ladder. Lose your step and you plummet into the water.
It was like walking on waves, the ocean surging around us. Absolutely stunning.
At the end of the pier was a wonderful little sheltered platform. I tried to imagine watching a thunderstorm from there, the terrible thrill it must be like. We were joined by two latecomers, who hadn’t carpooled and had gotten lost hence. Here, I read two more poems before we headed back, beating the dusk.
Thank you all — who were interested but could not make it, who came, who will come to future events. We had a wonderful time and will keep you posted about the next event. Suggestions, ideas — let us know. Sivakami Velliangiri left a poem responding to the event in the comments section of the announcement post; do check it out.
Sharanya Manivannan
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