Queering language, one poem at a time

MUMBAI: Getting asked who we are and what we do is a standard feature in our lives, but we still don’t have an answer for you. We’re two poets (who work other jobs too) that love the ocean and aloo parantha, happened to be alumni of the Barbican Young Poets programme in London, and grew up on the ‘Kuch Kuch Hota Hai’ soundtrack.

Earlier this year, in June, we were asked to perform a 20-minute poetry set in New Delhi at the launch of the British Council’s India/UK Together, a Season of Culture, which marked India’s 75th year of independence. We had two days to get to know each other’s voices, tones, work and performance styles.

It took us a few hours to realise that we are far more similar than we are different.

We’ve both been writing for some years now. We both try to work day jobs that are as impactful as possible. We share identity markers, “brown,” “South Asian,” “queer,”

“woman,” (ish) and “poet.”

Even so, collaborating over poems — for the performance, and later, for an anthology, ‘Language is a Queer Thing’, which came out in September — pushed us beyond our comfort zone. (For Amani, it was a nudge to experiment with form and style, and for Megha, a challenge in editing.)

It’s said that poets can be precious about their work, but our foundation of late night chats, a shared love of art and similar politics meant that we felt we were writing from a shared mind. This allowed us more ownership over each other’s work and greater comfort in pushing each other to experiment, because we knew what the other wanted to say.

‘Paradise’, which we wrote together, and will also perform at the Tata Lit Live! on Sunday, began from two separate pieces (‘Ganna’, by Amani and ‘Milk Bikis’ by Megha), both of which were also composed for the anthology. However, ‘Paradise’ also took shape on page in a way that expressed how our lives and thoughts have overlapped

— as a Venn diagram. The poem can be read four ways – in each circle (including the middle), across and solely in the overlap.

So often, we read about queer suffering. We were more interested in expressing queer joy.

In the notions of eudaimonia (the good life) and of families — born and found — we found points of difference and similarity.

Our brief for the anthology was to ‘queer language,’ which we interpreted in different ways.

To write in a queer way is to write something with the understanding that there are multiple perspectives. Amani brings this practise to ‘Paradise’, much like how a cubist artist captures multiple 3D perspectives in a 2D work.

Megha questioned the assumptions around what we consider natural in our societies and communities, and found that it was possible to do so with language that’s easily understandable. In ‘Hatchlings,’ simple reflections on queerness are interspersed with facts about the lifecycle of loggerhead turtles: “The sex of baby turtles is determined by the temperature of the sand (+/- 29 degrees celsius) / Who gets to tell us who we are?”

In September, we performed ‘Paradise’ in Birmingham at the BBC’s Contains Strong Language Festival. We had to figure out the ways in which our voices and presence could aid each other’s poems on stage. We also decided that we would rather have a conversation between ourselves, with the audience privy to our thoughts, to lend intimacy to our performance. As we get ready to perform it again tomorrow, it serves as a good reminder that language, much like water, takes the shape of the container that holds it. In our hands, regardless of the subject matter, it is implicitly queer.

Megha Harish (left) and Amani Saeed; and (right) the visual poem, ‘Paradise’, is structured as a Venn diagram and can be read as two separate pieces or as one.