Ask The Author: Nandini Dhar

These Three Poems were published in the June Issue.

1. Why can’t a king ever marry a king?

Absolutely can. But that’s not how it happened in the world I am writing about, and I try to stay honest in writing about the lived realities of those social spaces. On the other hand, if the kingdom retains itself as a kingdom, while a king marries a king, I would be more interested in writing about lives within that kingdom with an eye towards dismantling it, rather than rejoicing over the fact that a king has married/can marry another king. In these poems, I am merely chronicling life within one kingdom as I have seen it.

2. What can’t you hide from your parents?

I have lived in a different country than my parents for the last ten years, so much of my life, for very obvious reasons, is opaque to my parents.

But if we are talking about the poems I have written, the persona and voice through which I chose to write them, those poems were written during a moment in my life when I was keen on examining the power-structures that reside within the crevices of the family. A very specific kind of family- Bengali, middle-class, post-partition, existing in the space between nuclear and extended, rejuvenating itself in the shadows of a failed political upheaval (Naxalbari). I am interested in writing about what happens when familial authority/ power is expressed in the name of love, protection and wellbeing.

There are very specific political issues in my poems, especially in “Memory.” For example, when I write “vernal archive of thunderous roars”, I am playing with a Bengali coinage- basanter bajra nirghosh- literally, thunderous roar of spring, a reference to the way the Naxalbari activists of the 1960s saw themselves and their political project.

The poems take place in a post-Naxalbari world- a post-1968 world- within the mundane realms of the domesticity. But the domestic world I write about, is one continuously shaped by politics and history in a very direct kind of a way. To the extent that the mother-allegory has dominated the Indian/Bengali anti-colonial, national, postcolonial, and even leftist imaginations, writing about mother-child relationships as a Bengali woman is political in a way it is not for writers for certain other parts of the world. Although I also believe that anything ever written, filmed, photographed, painted, or sketched in the world is political. But how things are political, differs.

When I write the dimensions of power in mother-daughter relationships in a Bengali middle-class family, the ways in which mothers commit violences upon their daughters in the name of love and well-being, police them- consciously and unconsciously- I give the mothers of my poem lots of agency. The kind of agency they do not have in the national allegories of nation-as-mother. Yes, it’s negative agency. But still, agency, a capacity to act- a very specific form of agency that lies in the interstices between gender, class, political imaginations, social status quo. To come back to the original question, there is no hiding from parents, because there is no hiding from history.

Just as one cannot really “hide” from the state, but has to confront it, there is no hiding from the parents for the persona of my poems. She confronts them by narrativizing them.

3. Who has told you to write happy poems? How did you respond?

When I wrote that line, I wasn’t necessarily thinking of it literally. I was more interested in responding to an ongoing trend in Bengali modern poetry, where the mother is the ultimate place of refuge, nostalgia, and belonging,. The mother gives the child the uncritical affirmation that cannot be found elsewhere. Supposedly. The same goes for the homeland imagined as the mother.

Incidentally, even in much of Bengali women’s poetry and narrative prose, where patriarchy has been explored quite a bit, the forms of violences the mother commits upon daughters has rarely been written about. When mother and childhood have been spoken about, they have been explored in idyllic terms- the refuge from all the violences of the rest of the world. Mother-in-laws can commit violence, and that too has been documented. But mothers, never. Patriarchal violence has been written about as paternal, marital, sexual, and sometimes abstract and political.

So, I was thinking about that kind of internalized censoring that turns women-as-mothers into cultural, national and political allegories, so much so that even the most well-intentioned writing reproduces that allegorized mother figure again and again. Instead, the mother I write about is extremely human. She is human in her internalization of patriarchal norms, although she is not without her own understanding of patriarchy. She is human in the mixed messages of independence she gives to her daughter. She is human in her belief in middle-class respectability and achievement principle as the source of women’s independence. She is also human in the way she fails to understand the ways in which her possessive love and desire to protect her daughter from everything she perceives to be dangerous, turns into a symptom of patriarchal violence for the daughter herself.

4. Where did these poems come from?

These poems come from a desire to mess with American confessional poetics. These poems come from a place that wants to play with the limits of what can be described as political poems. These poems come from an awareness that because they are written words, and that too in English, most of “my people” wouldn’t read them. These poems come from an awareness that most of my readers wouldn’t even know that there is a language called Bangla/Bengali with a literary tradition older than New World itself, let alone a poet writing in English falling back upon its intersecting alleyways to write her literary personas.

5. What have you forbidden lately?

Whining and Hipsterism.