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Arjun Rajendran talks to Mihir Vatsa about his chapbook,
Your Baby is Starving, and the experience of working on FIVE. Read an extract from the chapbook |
MIHIR VATSA
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So, Arjun! Here we are.
First of all, thank you so much for being with us through the entire journey. We started with seven poets and ended with five. It has been quite something, and sometimes I perversely imagine the entire project playing out as a private reality show - people going home, people joining in, squabbles, discussions, confessions. I think, in future, I will personally remember you for your unwavering, unnerving enthusiasm for the project - the mails, the Facebook messages, the calls, you pretty much had me on my toes. So tell me, as a participating poet, what was it like to wait? Can you draw a narrative of this anticipation? |
ARJUN RAJENDRAN
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I admit it's been some journey! But it is I who must thank you and Nandini for inviting me to be
a part of this project. I did have reservations initially, notwithstanding the fact you both are experienced editors: ("how are we going to fund this?"; "from the air!" ) Yes, we've had lulls, poets dropping out, deadlines being extended... I think it took you more than an year to bring more structure and discipline, to streamline expectations and the peer-review process. All of us have had our personal and professional disappointments, be it shifting jobs or countries, emotional setbacks and self-doubt. I was also not satisfied with my initial manuscript - the poems weren't thematically speaking to each other, and seemed at odds with a project of this nature; that is, striving to showcase poems innovative enough to make history — in however small a way — that mainstream publishing cannot. I think you both did an outstanding job of curation, rekindling the fire just as it threatened to die out. I must also confess that I became fully engaged, and thoroughly excited about the project only in the last year. The reasons being that although our preoccupations were diverse in terms of tropes, experimentation and culture, I felt that going from seven to four was detrimental to the project (fortunately, we became FIVE). However, the postponements allowed me to begin afresh, and produce a body of work that I felt was more suited to the spirit of this collective. In all my experience with publishing, I have not enjoyed a comparable level of freedom to experiment, to bicker, to goad, and to receive and learn: about editing, about the collective experience, and most significantly, about camaraderie. |
MIHIR VATSA
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Your chapbook marks quite a distinct shift in the style of your poetry. In your first book,
Snake Wine, it was hard to differentiate the poet from the narrator - there was always this feeling of Arjun Rajendran, the poet, lingering around. While your second book, The Cosmonaut in Herge's Rocket, readies us for your inclination towards the speculative, it still retains that presence which I have grown to identify as yours. Yet, in this chapbook, you have created this person as the narrator. He not only takes us on a vivid tour of his life but his persona is so strongly assertive throughout the work that by the end of it, I am left hopelessly looking for the presence of the Arjun Rajendran I knew from the first two books. Did you ever feel while writing this chapbook that this unnamed guy may just annihilate you in the process, or were you always in control of him? |
ARJUN RAJENDRAN
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I reckon my state of mind while working on the chapbook was seeking such an annihilation.
The controlled, usually short pieces, in my first two books were built around stable recollections ranging from nostalgia to speculative rumination into my past, touching upon pop-culture, science and science fiction. In Your Baby is Starving, I felt compelled to shed that voice, and speak in utter mockery and delirium. To not craft guilt into conventional structures that become palliative but to retain it, expose it as it were, and set the narrator up for a free fall. This is writing that’s deeply informed by paranoia. I am specifically referring to my own fears (however improbable they might be), of being falsely implicated for murder and ending up on death row at the Polunsky Unit in Texas-- a state that’s perfected execution— and where I lived for years. Also sometimes, I have contemplated settling down in a part of the world where no one knows me, and in turn, no one knows where I am, and where I make-do with sign language. I think I found my way there through this poem, by losing the voice I had grown so familiar with, that others associate me with. Through a voice that's cussing the world and itself in an invented language. That's obsessed with hoarding nightmares, conspiracies and depraved visions of the society at large, and is brash and confident in its assertions and allegations. I didn't want fine metaphors. I wanted nuisances that might prevail, and lead to discomfiture. The voice had to demonstrate the presence of emotions, beasts, acquaintances, delusions, footnotes, conversations and meetings without inflating them with the usual beauty and grandeur poetry conventionally aims for. |
MIHIR VATSA
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And what about the process? How long did it take you to complete this work? When I read the text, I can feel the spontaneity of it. Editing and revisions aside, was the writing as spontaneous as it seems?
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ARJUN RAJENDRAN
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It took me me about two weeks to complete the first draft. Yes, the writing was spontaneous, and
by that, I don’t mean some sort of auto-writing where you pen down whatever pops into your head. I did not inhibit my inner-demons from throwing images and recollections, or prevent my imagination from running wild - but at the same time, I was scrutinizing patterns. I was leaving breadcrumbs. I was aiming for a narrative arc. |
MIHIR VATSA
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Much of what we learn about this person is accomplished through interrogation. However, his answers are not always coherent, and he seems morally ambiguous. Tell me, what kind of a person is he? Do you sympathise with him? I want to sympathise with him, but he also appears to be a big troll, so I won't lie that I am a bit scared!
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ARJUN RAJENDRAN
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There are different interrogation sequences in the chapbook (psychiatric/polygraphic/punitive);
the incoherence in these sessions is characteristic of the communication breakdown in relationships. It also refers to a society governed by absurd principles—take for instance the double homicide (see note 1) that’s at the core of this chapbook. Now think of society as an editor who is more preoccupied with linguistic precision in the murderer’s ransom letter (see note 2) than in the urgency of the content, and suggests corrections: your baby will be cut into pieces and found dead: tautological (can a baby live if cut into pieces?) cop/human: aren’t cops humans too? your wife have to bring money: has to [Source: Wren and Martin’s] I am situating this person in such a society. I’m also, in a manner reminiscent of another line from the ransom letter, our people are monitoring all your moves all the time, building the interrogation mechanisms of this surveillance state that’s supernaturally and technologically empowered. All his responses originate from an acute awareness of being gaslit by authoritative figures. It’s resisting a society that defines hope in the same way a condemned man associates hope through the delusion that he will sprout into an olive tree post-execution. [Notes: 1. Raghunandan Yandamuri, sentenced to death in Pennsylvania for murdering a baby and her grandmother 2 Yandamuri’s ransom letter, labeled “Exhibit A”, has been scanned and is available online] |
MIHIR VATSA
ARJUN RAJENDRAN
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How comfortable would you be if I were to categorise your chapbook as "diaspora writing"?
It's true that the chapbook is set in America, but it couldn't have been written unless I wasn't as
alienated as I was with the diaspora. My understanding of diaspora writing is that it revolves around the immigrant experience, a quest for belonging, and a misplaced nostalgia for the country of origin and its traditions. I think what I am doing here is irreverent to the typical sort of writing that emanates from the diaspora. I'd be more comfortable if it were seen as a blot on diaspora writing — much as the murderer this narrative is woven around is a blot on the diaspora. |
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