Nandini Dhar talks to Manjiri Indurkar about her chapbook, the archiving of histories, and the ideology of domesticity.
Read a poem from the chapbook |
MANJIRI INDURKAR
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How does one occupy one’s tongue? I find the use of the word ‘occupying’ rather intriguing. What kind of a space is this tongue, and what is it that you are filling it with?
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NANDINI DHAR
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To me, the tongue is first and foremost, a part of my body. The tongue, like other organs, performs specific functions. It lets us taste, enables us to differentiate between various forms of them. The tongue also lets us speak. As a child, I used to be a habitual tongue-biter. So, I got to learn early on, the tongue also feels pain. In this chapbook, I wasn't necessarily trying to fill my own tongue with anything per se. Rather, I was trying to figure out what it is already filled with. I was interested in thinking through the micro-histories of my tongue. The micro-histories into which I have been inserted, and over which I do not have any control so to say. It is customary in much of contemporary Anglophone poetry to think of tongue as a metaphor of language. In Spanish, for example, the word for the tongue is la lengua. La lengua often times exists as a complicated concept within the Spanish language cultural expressions in the Americas. It's the tongue, but it's also a food item that can be consumed. And, of course, when you hear the word uttered, to our English-speaking ears, it sounds like a cognate of the word “language.” For someone like me, who didn't really grow up with Spanish, but ended up living in parts of United States (Austin/Texas and Miami/Florida) where the culture is distinctly Latino, this was intriguing. I ended up thinking a lot about terms such as native tongue, mother-tongue and such. In some ways, the tongue in this chapbook resides in that intersection between food and language.
But, I was also asking, whenever we are using our tongues to take in food, aren't we also consuming the labor that prepared the food? Consequently, the tongue here is also occupied by the micro-histories of domestic labor – unpaid, often times invisible, and definitely normalized. It is also occupied by the histories of the space where this labor takes place. The kitchen as a space appears quite a bit in this chapbook. So, to go back to your question about what kind of space is this tongue, it's a historical space, it's a social space, a political space. |
MANJIRI INDURKAR
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I particularly like the suddenness of your poetry. How what seems to be a pleasant or regular memory suddenly turns violent. In the morning school routine there is suddenly the banging of the tiffin box. Or there is that Rabindranath song that the mother sings and immediately we hear the noise of a slap, and ripped scalp hair. Is this a rude awakening? Are you deconstructing the façade of normalcy? Is this rage against domesticity, and our indifference towards it?
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NANDINI DHAR
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In some ways, you can say, what you call suddenness is what occupies my tongue. If, as I said in my answer to your first question, the micro-histories of domestic labor are what that occupy my tongue, that kind of domestic labor also produces certain kinds of subjectivities. It's bound to. In much of contemporary poetry, that subjectivity has been romanticized. Think of the number of poems and stories we come across that writes about this almost mythical space called “my mother's kitchen” in nostalgic terms. Think of the ways in which this space appears in much of contemporary food-writing.
And an essential element of that nostalgia is the understanding, that the mother-figure cannot have any discontent about the food she cooks. And this nostalgia of the happy, cooking mother is something that emerges out a contract between the writer and the reader. The writer chooses not to write about the mother's discontent. The reader chooses not to ask any questions about that non-writing. I think, in this chapbook, I have attempted to break that contract in my own way. In that sense, this chapbook aspires to be a deal-breaker. Literally. But then, the mothers I know, happen to be an angry, discontented lot. I wanted to write about that discontent. I wanted to ask, what if the primary affect that's produced by the incessant, never-ending cycles of domestic labor is rage. So, yes, you can definitely say, this is an effort to deconstruct the facade of normalcy. Yes, there is a rage towards domesticity here. It's a rage I have noticed time and again in women I happen to know in real life. Yet, I also think, we don't know what to do with this rage. Even the women who possess this rage do not always know what to do with it. And, let's face it. Domestic belonging gives women – especially middle-class, upper-caste, Hindu women in India – a kind of respectability that nothing else does. So, historically, even when women have broken through the boundaries of domesticity, have questioned its constitution, they have also gotten back to it with a vengeance that can often times seem confusing, when seen from a critical distance. Again and again. I think, in some ways, it is this complicated nature of domesticity and its pull for so many women that I was trying to process in this chapbook. I am still not sure that I have done it successfully. Working on this project had been instructive. But, that work hasn't provided me with too many answers. Instead, it has given birth to many more questions. I am still trying to process most of them. |
MANJIRI INDURKAR
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Your poetry is so potent with moments of revolution. Wiping the vermilion, smashing the mirror, burning down the house, but these revolutions are always abandoned. And the mother returns to normalcy. Why are these women who don’t revolt, who are angry but keep the anger to themselves important to you?
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NANDINI DHAR
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If you read the poems in this collection carefully, you will see, the poems in here unfold within a broader social environment of an anticipation of a revolution, and the inevitable despair that comes with its failure. And, that revolution, is obviously, the Naxalbari uprising. You can say, the spectre of Naxalbari haunts this collection in ways that might not be apparent if read in a linear kind of a way. The mother comments about Naxalbari's failure, comments about her husband's domestication in the post-Naxalbari era. So, you are right in reading the existence of moments in this collection that can form the sub-text of an impending revolution. Which, obviously, begs the question – how would the revolution look like from the perspective of a middle-class woman tied to domesticity? What would a post-revolutionary domesticity look like? What place would women be granted within it? Questions that I haven't really taken up in this collection, but have hinted at them indirectly.
You are also right in reading these moments as forms of abandoned rebellions. I would say, it's not just the mother of these poems who abandons the project of the revolution. The larger political climate of the historical moment I am writing about is characterized by a similar act of abandonment. But that abandonment, doesn't necessarily mean the death of discontent. Does it? On the other hand, if you think of the more canonical understandings of women's poetry, it is precisely these moments of abandonment that are often written as resistance, celebrated as resistance. In fact, I would claim, in Anglophone poetry, we often operate within a space where women's – especially middle-class women's – non-resistance is celebrated as resistance. Think of Sylvia Plath's poem “Lady Lazarus.” The moment of rebellion has been forever postponed. It is only in death that the narrator can hope to have some kind of agency, which, to me, quite clearly, seems like the inability of a resistant voice to emerge. Yet, “Lady Lazarus” has been read again and again in celebratory terms. I can also point out to several similar moments in contemporary Bengali women's poetry. In my poems in this collection, I refer back to these poetic traditions. I also attempt to split them open a little bit. I try to do so by showing the non-resistance in these poems as non-resistance. And, I do it loudly, you can say. Without much concern for moments of lyrical tenderness. So, you can say, I am drawing attention in this collection to conformity. And, trying to show that conformity can co-exist with discontent. |
MANJIRI INDURKAR
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Order in your poetry is an oppressive force. This is such a routine in the lives of women we know that it is almost an invisible family member. You are exposing the beauty that comes out of such order and giving us its ugly face. The shining tea cups, the smoothness of teas, mother shut inside the jasmine flower, who will eventually amputate her legs. You constantly juxtapose the beautiful with the ugly, the two sides of motherhood. The beauty being the popular narrative and the ugliness its hidden reality. So would it be fair to assume that you are with your poetry attempting to change the discourse around motherhood, and the home? Are you rewriting history or are you merely archiving what has been left behind? Why do you write what you write?
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NANDINI DHAR
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Yes, I think it is fair to assume that I am examining the discourse around motherhood and home. Change is a much more profound word in a way. I wouldn't lay claim to something that momentous. But yes, I am interrogating these discourses, as you have said. Also, I don't think rewriting history and archiving are mutually exclusive processes. What I archive in my poems – the very act of archiving – is not a neutral process. I notice certain things, I write the details in a very specific way, as you have noted. You can also say, I am interpreting the details in a particular kind of a way. That is different, from say, poets who document domestic labor almost unproblematically, making it look beautiful, inevitable, almost romantic. I am thinking of a poem by Tess Gallagher called “I Stop Writing the Poem.” You can read the poem here.
If you read the poem closely, you will see there is a discontent that's lurking in there. The narrator stopping to write the poem because she has to take care of the unfolded laundry utters this great line “I'll always have plenty to do.” Yet, this line never explodes. And, in order to stop that explosion, the poet introduces the figure of the narrator's daughter, who watches her mother fold the shirt. The poem writes that moment of the little girl's gaze as a form of informal, domestic education. It's a beautiful poem by all means. But, I also find its beauty ideologically dangerous. And, I want to write against it. In many ways, my poems derive from a similar cultural archive of tropes – mothers and daughters, domestic space, women's creativity interrupted by cycles of domestic labor, the image of the domestic labor in itself. Yet, what I want to magnify in my poems, is the violence of that interrupted creativity which Gallagher's poem accepts. And, when the daughter in my poems watches her mother performing domestic chores, she doesn't watch to learn. She watches with horror this domestic spectacle of older women's interrupted creativities, and receives a negative education, so to say. In her effort to learn, she unlearns. And, in that unlearning, this smooth passage of interrupted creativity from one generation of women to the next is also disrupted. In a very interesting kind of a way, the American MFA industrial complex is full of poems that look like Gallagher's – ideologically. And, for a long time, I was operating within that space. In some ways, I still am. So, you can also say, it is not that I am interested in archiving or rewriting history, but I am also interested in my poems to bust open the contradictions that reside within the most popular and hegemonic forms of women's poetry. |
MANJIRI INDURKAR
NANDINI DHAR
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You play a lot with the structure of your poems. For instance the poem “Interrogation,” the title sits comfortably on the left hand side and the poem is on the right. Fishbone, another poem, is placed at the centre of the page where the fishbone is found in the body of the fish. In “She Tastes Everything,” the structure is as chaotic as the poem. What do these physical structures mean to you?
Structures are everywhere. They determine what we do, how we should live our lives. Home is a structure. So, domesticity, which I often think of as a very powerful ideology – and not just a set of chores that we need to accomplish in order to keep ourselves alive – follows a structure. The structure of the home space. The structure of the family. And, these are durable, persistent structures. On the one hand, I was definitely trying to think through the structure of the home-space as I was writing these poems. I was thinking, how can I construct a home on page, and then set fire to it. But, I was also struggling with the accepted structures of the poems themselves. As readers, we almost always witness poems as visual structures. The visual impact of the poem on page, therefore, is important to me. I often think of how in the way we visually organize a poem of page, our sense of social status quo is reproduced or reinforced. How can we then break that cycle of reproduction? And, when does that act of breaking become a status quoist norm in itself?
You refer to “She Tastes Everything First.” It's a poem that many of my readers found to be disconcerting. They didn't like it. They weren't sure why I was introducing the recipe in the poem. Why was I juxtaposing these two different literary structures – the poem and the recipe – together. But, I had my reasons. I have always read recipes as forms of authoritative, prescriptive texts, whose purpose remains to instruct. A recipe is a documentation of labor that's yet to come. That should be undertaken. Yet, a recipe rarely records the complex reality within which that labor takes place. What else are you juggling with when you are trying to cook something by following a recipe? What is it that you are thinking of inside your head? So, in some ways, you might say, this poem was trying to provide the recipe with a story that's takes it beyond its customary list-form. In doing so, you have probably noticed, it uses the list-form quite a bit. |
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