Drafting "Graining Holes"

When I wrote the series of poems focusing on the interaction between the employer's daughter and the maid-servant's daughter, I was interested in writing about class as it is played out within the private spaces of a middle-class home. Too much of women's writings on domesticity focus on gender in a class-blind kind of a way, treating middle-class women's experiences as the default. 

I was also trying to write about the underlying violences of childhood. Because of who I am-- my profoundly middle-class origins-- none of these things could be written about without writing about my complicity. These poems had a hard time in getting accepted.

 One of the feedbacks that I received consistently is that, these poems are too prosaic. Part of it was just that I was playing with a language that resides between poetry and prose. So, it was intentional to a certain extent.

But part of it is also that I was encountering a difficulty. I was scared, that I have lost access to my poet's voice. But, I don't think that's the case.

 The poems I wrote from Saraswati's persona -- the maid-servant's daughter that is-- are definitely more poetic. My impression is, in this particular series, I write in a voice that claims a marginal identity, and speaks from a place of that marginality. And there is already a language out there in English, thanks to the work done by so many "minority" poets and artists throughout the years, that can lay claim to a poetic language that belongs to the marginal. 

But, in the other series, I was losing my poet's voice precisely when I was trying to write about complicity. My question then, is, how does one write poems while tearing apart and revealing one's structural complicity? Part of me wants to retain that matter-of-fact, earnest, even documentary prosaic voice. But part of me also wants to play with language a little bit more. Use irony a little bit more. Use surrealism.Use grotesque. In other words, strategies that would allow me to approach the issues and the naratives through a sideway glance.


The poem I initially wrote (Pedagogy) had a good setting, some good lines. But, it read too much like  prose, a memoir essay. And, some of my readers pointed it out. One of them said  something interesting about the conclusion of the poem.

This was what I had as the conclusion:

Saraswati, my obedient student, hung her head, keeping her eyes on the pages as she tried to memorize the words she had never heard.

And I, the fluent reader, stole what was hers, sharpened them into weapons, and I have been using them ever since

to poke holes into the walls of the words I read.

And, my reader's  comment was:

 I do feel like this last stanza here kind of makes it too pat. Like, I treated her like crap, but whatever, now I’m a PhD and know that I should ask questions of the text but who cares what happened to Sawaswati. Of course, I absolutely know this isn’t what you intend, which is why I question the wording of this last stanza and also wonder if this really is the end.

Now, what this particular reader didn't get, it isn't my PhD. It's my middle-class Bengali leftist guilt.

But, I decided to give the poem another shot. I moved away from the realist set-up of the poem, made it more violent, a little bit more surreal. I did keep a lot of the older stuff, but did some serious linguistic modifications. And that movement away from realism, that little bit of maneuvering, I think,  made it a better poem.

Complicity is creepy, precisely because so much of it is unconscious and ingrained in us. So is violence of class. And, my work has a language-worker is to bring that creep factor out. A lot of the surrealist strategies do just that. Then, I workshopped it in a workshop I was taking at that time. It helped me immensely that the workshop itself was on "Grotesque." 

A lot of the workshoppers suggested that I cut back a little bit. I did, because I think, the poem did need some paring down. I still called it "Pedagogy." Personally, I am still attached to that title. Partly because I am a theory-head, and love using critical theory language in poetry in a way that makes people stop at the academic language. Partly because the word "pedagogy" reveals the very specific place education occupies in the colonial history of the subcontinent. But, I also could see what my colleagues were telling me. The word "pedagogy" gives the poem a sense of abstraction, which might not always work well. So, their suggestion was to include the word "grain" somewhere in the title, since a big part of the poem depends on the servant girl being transformed into a sparrow feeding on grains. After some ruminations, I changed the title to "Graining Holes In Pages." 

And here are the first few lines:

The old trunk in the attic was big enough

for Saraswati to crouch, and I closed her in.

Not wide or deep enough to lie down,

she ran her fingers along the edges of

the old books