Struggle against amnesia
That’s how author K. Srilata envisages the role and purpose of poetry in our lives
his slim volume of poetry packs a deceptive punch, fights above its weight, and what’s more, mostly wins too. Like the title Three Women In A Single-Room House indicates, the collection has a core story as well as many stories within stories to tell, and does so with a touch of sentiment, wistfulness and the occasional preening to balance things out.
The endpaper print, the interpretation of Queen Maya’s dream, complements the evocative poetry inside the pages. As for that poetry, it’s a carefully calibrated accounting for a way of living. A selfaware celebration of the things that make a life precious, like the sky floating in through the slats of that oneroomed house. A gentle grieving that is in no way less potent, for an absent father, for all the tender moments that might have been, for the circumstances of a daughter’s birth. A wry acknowledgement of patriarchy, of suffering. A coming into own’s own, a flowering, a blooming of three women used to small spaces. Rough diamonds stuck/ in mines that ran too deep/ to catch the light.
Author K. Srilata writes in her preface
TThree Women In A SingleRoom House
K. Srilata Sahitya Akademi
₹100 that she thinks of poetry as a continual struggle against amnesia, a mode of bearing mindful witness to and remembering the lives of those we love. This book is poignant proof of her beliefs.
Portrait of a woman
At one point, she shines a soft light on a poem entirely in brackets, about the thing we don’t want to remember. You must write the poems you must write/ gently and with love for yourself. At another point, this is poetry as succour: a glimmer of a poem threw me a rope/ I think I might take hold of it.
At the heart of the collection is that old evergreen image: woman standing bloody but unbowed. Woman who handles everything that is thrown her way: an abusive marriage, straitened circumstances, relationships that crest and trough in an unsettling manner.
Who says memoirs are better told in prose? This book disproves that; the poems in it serve to give us a clear picture of three women, their singleroomed house, their trials and tribulations, things that cause them pain, things that bring them joy.
The reviewer is a Bengaluru-based author, journalist and manuscript editor. t is a haunting blend of rage and resilience, angst and dissent. There are parts dripping with defiance, moments of levity and a sense of poignancy. And together, they serve a purpose far beyond the pleasing aesthetics of art. In Tomorrow Someone will Arrest You
( Juggernaut Books), Meena Kandasamy captures the raw, intense realities of contemporary India in less abstract terms. She navigates the personal and political in what seems like a poetic pursuit to set the narrative right, especially when there is propaganda in place to misguide and manipulate. But the author says her poetry is more of a “philosophicalintellectualemotional love child” and not part of any conscious mission to battle the menace of disinformation.
“Purely from a political communication perspective, we need to combat false propaganda with data points, historical analysis, factchecks, firstperson testimonies, ground reports, and such like. A poem cannot be birthed at the factual level — that sort of stenography would only lend itself to banality,” says Kandasamy. She believes it the civic duty of every Indian citizen to battle this menace of disinformation, as she draws heavily from political intolerance, castebased violence, sexuality and cultural identity in her works. “There cannot be a more urgent task for public intellectuals, independent media and the secular opposition. As an aside, it is also extremely fascinating how a word has taken on such a meaning in the span of a century. In the 1920s, propaganda would widely mean taking the message of the working class struggle around the world. A word so associated with Leninist imagination has become a standin for the most ruthless, corporatecontrolled fakenews factories we see at work today.”
IConfronting oppression
Tomorrow Someone will Arrest You is divided into five parts: ‘The Poet’, ‘Her Comrade’, ‘Her Lovers’, ‘Her Friends’ and ‘Her Country’. The book talks about the seven stages of love called hub, uns, ishq, aquidat, ibaadat, junoon and maut, before plunging the reader into the horror of honour killing. They dared to defy, but ended up dead — this is how forbidden love that disobeys caste divides is punished. While the poem ‘Tomorrow Someone will Arrest You’ was written following the arrest of Kerala activists Jaison Cooper and Thushar Nirmal Sarathi under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Amendment (UAPA) Act in 2015, ‘Sangharsh Karna Hai’ is about Jyothi Singh, the Delhi gang rape victim.
The last part of the collection, ‘Her Country’, is a powerful, noholdsbarred explosion of dissent. Kandasamy says a poet is also a citizen who confronts oppression the same way everyone else does. “When I was going through the poems I had written in the last decade, I realised that India had such irrepressible main character literature, cinema is premeditated — these newly minted, fully sponsored footsoldiers will counter all resistance literature as antinational, unpatriotic, seditious.”
Room for hope
‘We are Not Citizens’ starts with a couplet from Tamil Bhakti poet Appar (Thirunavukkarasar), and Kandasamy says things have been in free fall for a while. “We are under the illusion that we have so much more social media and other communication channels — everything screams individual expression, a person is a brand, etc. — but opinions and news exist in silos and echochambers, and at the slightest sign of trouble, your account/ reach is restricted/ withheld. So you cannot say what you want to say because there is the threat of cases, arrests, clampdowns — or, you are screaming into the algorithmically stagemanaged void,” she says.
The anthology beautifully weaves the political with the personal and the two realms seem to work in perfect sync leaving some space for hope amidst all the unrest. Quiz her about the autobiographical nature of her works and the author says she’s decided to keep her poetry as real as possible after dabbling in fiction. “Everybody keeps reading the narrative voice as the poet’s own voice, the character as a standin for the author. I resisted a great deal, and then decided that I’ll own up to every version of me, including the imaginary ones,” she concludes.