I have been doing some more re-shuffling with my chapbook, and came across this post. I have been thinking about the questions BJR asks, vis-a-vis my own manuscript:
Sanjukta Bandopadhyay represents a certain kind of "middle-brow" women's poetry, the kind of women's poetry that hinged on that thin borderline between a "feminine" and a "feminist" aesthetics. There is no explicit or deep feminist interrogation of social constructions of femininity in Sanjukta's poems. Yet, her poems could not have been written without a certain kind of dependence of feminist thought. The most mainstream, populist forms of feminist thought, yes. But, feminist thought nonetheless. Consequently, there is a recording of women's discontent in Sanjukta's poems. Her female narrators are neither "happy housewives" nor "all-enduring mothers." Yet, her poems never move beyond a kind of superficial recording of that discontent. And even that discontent never gets loud enough. As if the poet is afraid of letting her female characters have access to any other forms of agency than female hysteria, and even that female hysteria has to be tamed, domesticated, and brought within genteel middle-class aesthetics. Consequently, her characters do not shout loudly enough, their shrieks do not shake the foundation of the middle-class homes. At best, they recede into a kind of polite alienation, a form of discontented silence. And, in order to create a sense of self from within that silence, engage in a celebration of their alienated states. These are not unique by any means to Sanjukta's poems. Instead, I think of these characteristics as the central traits of post-1980s Bengali women's poetry. What is there in Sanjukta's poetry is a certain facility with images, taut lines and an overall technical competence. Consequently, it was more fun to play with some of her central images and motifs.
But, at the same time, my "preface" poem is not a poem where I am grateful. It is not a poem where I pay my dues to my elders. Instead, it talks about the cultural void -- the void within which I walked in as a poet. The void which appears to me as multiple absences in Bengali literature -- an absence of complicated feminist representations of domestic space, an absence of complicated feminist representations of mothering and motherhood, an absence of a significant body of self-conscious, theoretically astute feminist women's writing. And this is how I write about it in this prose-poem that's the "preface" to my chapbook:
How and where do you begin? Why? However you decide to begin, end on a high note, a strong note, then figure out the trajectory from beginning to end, which I think of as deciding how to move from individual poem to individual poem. How does each poem fit into each another?My chapbook begins with a "preface" poem -- as yet untitled. And, I think I will leave it that way. It is untitled because I see it as an introduction, as a poem that sets down the problematics of the chapbook : how to "break" the mother who is available in "calendar pages, book covers, archived booklets." In other words, this is the poem that comes closest to directly addressing the problem of representation. Interestingly enough, this week I read Betty Friedan's essay "Happy Housewife Heroine" along with my students. In that essay, Friedan outlines how the "happy housewife" figure was a conscious cultural and historical creation, constructed with specific socio-political imperatives in mind. One can write entire books on how the mother figure had been created in Bengali cultural sphere, in Bengali poetry. One of the things that my chapbook does is to break that image, see through it, insert what has been rendered invisible. In that sense, this chapbook pre-supposes a certain kind of familiarity of Bengali poetry, its trends. Especially Bengali poetry in its most canonical forms -- the poems that almost everyone knows, the poems that are reprinted, recited and anthologized again and again. Jibanananda Das and Sunil Gangopadhyay's ghosts are present in the pages of this collection. So are some of the more contemporary women poets' shadows, especially Sanjukta Bandopadhyay.
Sanjukta Bandopadhyay represents a certain kind of "middle-brow" women's poetry, the kind of women's poetry that hinged on that thin borderline between a "feminine" and a "feminist" aesthetics. There is no explicit or deep feminist interrogation of social constructions of femininity in Sanjukta's poems. Yet, her poems could not have been written without a certain kind of dependence of feminist thought. The most mainstream, populist forms of feminist thought, yes. But, feminist thought nonetheless. Consequently, there is a recording of women's discontent in Sanjukta's poems. Her female narrators are neither "happy housewives" nor "all-enduring mothers." Yet, her poems never move beyond a kind of superficial recording of that discontent. And even that discontent never gets loud enough. As if the poet is afraid of letting her female characters have access to any other forms of agency than female hysteria, and even that female hysteria has to be tamed, domesticated, and brought within genteel middle-class aesthetics. Consequently, her characters do not shout loudly enough, their shrieks do not shake the foundation of the middle-class homes. At best, they recede into a kind of polite alienation, a form of discontented silence. And, in order to create a sense of self from within that silence, engage in a celebration of their alienated states. These are not unique by any means to Sanjukta's poems. Instead, I think of these characteristics as the central traits of post-1980s Bengali women's poetry. What is there in Sanjukta's poetry is a certain facility with images, taut lines and an overall technical competence. Consequently, it was more fun to play with some of her central images and motifs.
But, at the same time, my "preface" poem is not a poem where I am grateful. It is not a poem where I pay my dues to my elders. Instead, it talks about the cultural void -- the void within which I walked in as a poet. The void which appears to me as multiple absences in Bengali literature -- an absence of complicated feminist representations of domestic space, an absence of complicated feminist representations of mothering and motherhood, an absence of a significant body of self-conscious, theoretically astute feminist women's writing. And this is how I write about it in this prose-poem that's the "preface" to my chapbook:
No one has taught you how to draw that mother. But you do anyway. With every etch of your pencil, your mother walks out of calendar pages, book covers, archived booklets. You smash her limbs, skeletons, ribs. You are addicted to the sound of her bones breaking. As you count the pieces you've broken her into – four six eight-- you think, you finally might have found the way to draw the rooms in the house. Especially, the kitchen.
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