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Meena Kandasamy
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- 1.How and when did it first dawn upon
you that you have a poet in you? Could
you remember your first ever poem? What
makes you write poetry? Life or beauty
of life?
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- Well, I have been asked this question
very often and my answers have again been
as varied as my poetic themes. I have
blushed when I have won appreciation and
arrogantly asked ‘Why Not’ when I have
been suggested to change track. Unlike
most others, the first poems I wrote were
not love poems, they were what could be
called (to use a very out of fashion word)
radical. Or militant. My poems don’t rhyme
and I don’t really have ‘influences’ –like
reading a great work and then wanting
to write something like that. I write
poetry out of my helplessness and my vulnerability.
If there is anything else I can do, I
would have rather done that. I was young,
and a woman, and pretty much ‘highly sensitive’,
so you know, I wrote poetry. It was the
least I could do about things. Frenzied
anger and long nights of anguish have
crept in. Some times, like ravishing monsoons,
I have written a bit of love poetry too.
A little of my poetry can be categorized
as blatant-feminist, and that grows out
of my own experience, of how my gender
has made me the woman I am. But my early
poems were not autobiographical, strangely.
The passion of writing about my experiences
came as I grow older, and I felt that
one has to have a certain amount of guts
to put their feelings to words. I now
think I want to be totally bare and intensely
exposed to the world through my writings.
I want it to be my rebellion against the
world. Other times, I think every poem
is just something so personal that I would
never have the courage to actually ‘say’
it to my lover. I wrote my first poem
Mascara on the pongal day of 2002, and
oddly (even to me, even now) it was about
temple prostitutes. I just don’t know
what came over me. A prostitute points
out to Kali that even she lines her eyes
with kohl. I was totally devastated that
people in service of God had their whole
karmas twisted inside out! That there
is no true consolation a violated victim
can ever find. And that beauty is patriarchy’s
most successful weapon against women,
although the whole idea of cosmetics grew
out of war paints! Looking back, this
had nothing to do with me.
- 2. What is your perspective of beauty?
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- Perspectives are always tied up with
politics—at the diverse ways of looking
at the world. So, sometimes I might scream
that all talk of beauty is bourgeois and
at other times, I might believe something
else. I think love magically transforms
everything into something of beauty, so
what is more essential than beauty, is
understanding. John Keats and his ‘truth-beauty’
statements have been twisted too much
out of context for any of us to address
beauty without sounding too philosophical,
or to counter it without sounding too
philistine. It depends on how people define
beauty. Imagine the purists for whom only
the ancient is beautiful. There are people
who retch at vers libre. I think beauty
lies as much in dull gray skies as in
the proverbial sunrise that paints wonders.
That is again perspective.
- 3. Does any incident provoke you to
poetry?
- Yes, but never immediately. If any incident
is capable of affecting me, then I live
with that. I think over it, keep chewing
on it, allow it to make me distracted,
let it ruin my life for days on end, take
it to bed and see it in my nightmares
or wish-fulfilling dreams, talk about
it to anyone who cares to listen, and
someday, sometime, when I am sitting down,
I have written a poem. Poetry should capture
the heat of the moment, but there is no
necessity that you write it like an instant
transcription. It doesn’t suit me at all.
- 4. How do you treat the things happening
around us? War, terror, colonization,
genocide, homicide and what not?
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- Yes, I do naturally react. Being a poet,
necessarily requires a certain level of
politics—not just Left or Right or whatever,
but at least distinguishing between the
oppressor and the oppressed… Moreover,
since history takes up chronicling the
stories of those in power, I guess it
up to poetry to take up the chronicles
of victimhood. But I am against the institutionalization
of poetry per se. For some people, poetry
just becomes a vehicle of protest. It
should not be so. Poetry must retain its
all encompassing nature. Pure love poems
aren’t dead just because so much else
goes on in the world.
- 5. What will happen to your poetry if
the concept of love would be lost once
and for all?
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- If I cease to love, I would cease to
live. Or write, for that matter. And I
don’t think even the radical, angry poems
of mine would survive. Only people who
know how to love boundlessly get angry
at society—only they become its revolutionaries,
its leaders, its heroes. Even to empathize
with the rawness of rebellion, you need
to love. It’s the only spontaneous thing,
like breathing, but even better.
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