The last couple of days had been good. Initially, I had not hoped to get any writing done. But, I did get a little bit of work done on the short story. I am taking a conscious break from poetry. I have received some feedback from some of my readers about the chapbook, and I had some acceptances I am proud of during these summer months. I will again get back to my chapbook and regular schedule of poetry writing and submissions once I have settled down at Miami. But, for now, I am happy being prosaic.
The story I am working on is a "we" voice story. My initial inspirations for this one came from three short stories I have read at different times: A Rose for Emily by William Faulkner, Madame Alaird's Breasts by Dionne Brand and The Treatment of Bibi Halder by Jhumpa Lahiri. Like Brand's story, the "we" in my story is a cohort of high school girls, talking about one of their teachers. The story itself moves between the past and the present. The central figure is a "bitter schoolteacher", to use an overtly familiar trope. It's set in a small-town near Kolkata, much like the one where I have grown up.
The narrator girls are fascinated by her because she is different from the other women they know. I am interested in using gossip as a form of storytelling, and that's why, I am also interested in narrating the story through this "we" voice. How gossip brings us closer to other people's lives, especially the person we are gossiping about. But one hardly gets a complete picture about the gossiped,and I was interested in seeing where that lands me.
And as I had been thinking about the "bitter schoolteacher" stereotype, I have also been thinking, how in many small- towns in India, for a lot of educated lower- middle class/middle middle-class women, this "bitter schoolteacher" persona is a space of empowerment and agency that the society would not have granted them otherwise.This bitterness they sometimes consciously cultivate, and sometimes unconsciously inherit, is often the result of a toxic cycle of repression, oppressive systems and restrictive gender roles. The teacher I write about here is not "radical" by any means. She does not completely break away from these norms and spaces. Yet, she questions them just enough. She questions them by distancing herself from the social worlds of other women, by her emphasis on achievement for the girls she educates, and also possibly other things which, of course, these girls-- the narrators of my story -- cannot possibly know or understand. But, they understand enough to see that there is a sadism in this woman, which comes out in the way she treats them. And it is in practicing this sadism that this teacher figure remains trapped inside the vicious cycle she otherwise is trying to break.
In other words, like a lot of the poems I have written this year, this story also is trying to blur the lines between resistance, conformity and complicity. To what extent I have achieved that, I am not sure.
While writing this story, I read this blog post. Now, I am thinking, does my story have enough "sense of place", so to say? In my mind, it does. The very reference to phuchka (and I am using the word phuchka, not golgappa or panipuri) makes it distinctly Bengali. The fact that it's hard, almost impossible to keep anything secret in this town, gives it the sense of a small town. It's not exactly something that happens in a big city. Besides, there are references to the railways and the old Shiva temple, things that are quite common in lots of Bengali/Indian towns, yet their very co-existence reveals a kind of palimpsestic modernity that characterizes Indian postcolonial life. But, is that enough? Or, more so, the question I am more interested in thinking through right now, is it at all necessary for this particular story to have a more distinct sense of space than I already have?
The story I am working on is a "we" voice story. My initial inspirations for this one came from three short stories I have read at different times: A Rose for Emily by William Faulkner, Madame Alaird's Breasts by Dionne Brand and The Treatment of Bibi Halder by Jhumpa Lahiri. Like Brand's story, the "we" in my story is a cohort of high school girls, talking about one of their teachers. The story itself moves between the past and the present. The central figure is a "bitter schoolteacher", to use an overtly familiar trope. It's set in a small-town near Kolkata, much like the one where I have grown up.
The narrator girls are fascinated by her because she is different from the other women they know. I am interested in using gossip as a form of storytelling, and that's why, I am also interested in narrating the story through this "we" voice. How gossip brings us closer to other people's lives, especially the person we are gossiping about. But one hardly gets a complete picture about the gossiped,and I was interested in seeing where that lands me.
And as I had been thinking about the "bitter schoolteacher" stereotype, I have also been thinking, how in many small- towns in India, for a lot of educated lower- middle class/middle middle-class women, this "bitter schoolteacher" persona is a space of empowerment and agency that the society would not have granted them otherwise.This bitterness they sometimes consciously cultivate, and sometimes unconsciously inherit, is often the result of a toxic cycle of repression, oppressive systems and restrictive gender roles. The teacher I write about here is not "radical" by any means. She does not completely break away from these norms and spaces. Yet, she questions them just enough. She questions them by distancing herself from the social worlds of other women, by her emphasis on achievement for the girls she educates, and also possibly other things which, of course, these girls-- the narrators of my story -- cannot possibly know or understand. But, they understand enough to see that there is a sadism in this woman, which comes out in the way she treats them. And it is in practicing this sadism that this teacher figure remains trapped inside the vicious cycle she otherwise is trying to break.
In other words, like a lot of the poems I have written this year, this story also is trying to blur the lines between resistance, conformity and complicity. To what extent I have achieved that, I am not sure.
While writing this story, I read this blog post. Now, I am thinking, does my story have enough "sense of place", so to say? In my mind, it does. The very reference to phuchka (and I am using the word phuchka, not golgappa or panipuri) makes it distinctly Bengali. The fact that it's hard, almost impossible to keep anything secret in this town, gives it the sense of a small town. It's not exactly something that happens in a big city. Besides, there are references to the railways and the old Shiva temple, things that are quite common in lots of Bengali/Indian towns, yet their very co-existence reveals a kind of palimpsestic modernity that characterizes Indian postcolonial life. But, is that enough? Or, more so, the question I am more interested in thinking through right now, is it at all necessary for this particular story to have a more distinct sense of space than I already have?
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