Poetry at Sangam
Poetry at Sangam showcases poetry in English and translations as well as essays on poetics and news of new releases.
Ashwani Kumar is Indian English poet, writer, and professor at Tata Institute of Social Sciences (Mumbai). His anthologies ‘My Grandfather’s Imaginary Typewriter’ and ‘Banaras and the Other’ have been published by Yeti Books and Poetrywala respectively. His poems-translated in Indian languages and Hungarian, are noted for ‘lyrical celebration’ of garbled voices of memory and their subversive ‘whimsy’ quality. His ‘Banaras and the Other’, first of a trilogy on religious cities, was long listed for Jayadev National Poetry Award 2017. Recently his select poems have been translated for a special volume ‘Architecture of Alphabets’ in Hungarian. He is also author of ‘Community Warriors’, and one of the chief editors of LSE’s prestigious publication “Global Civil Society: Poverty and Activism”. He is co-founder of Indian Novels Collective to bring classic novels of Indian Literature to English readers and curates popular TLF (TISS Literature Fest) and Rajni Kothari lecture series in Mumbai. He is also a visiting fellow at leading global universities and think tanks including London School of Economics, German Development Institute, Korea Development Institute, University of Sussex. He writes a regular book column in the Financial Express. In his leisure, he repairs Derrida’s punctured cycle, and makes Bihari Litti- Chokha crooning ‘Ooh La, La Ooh La, La Tu Hai Meri Fantasy’!
I am a creature of scattered circumstances, odd geographies and alien languages. Sounds strange but I was deprived of a mother-language in the conventional sense, for my mother spoke Magahi, a Bihari dialect and occasionally wrote in now extinct Kaithi script. She often relished tales of infidelities in multiple languages including local Mundari. And she made yummy stew of goat’s tongue, liver and entrails. I wonder who taught her to make Mexican Burrito for my father in Gua forests, my unofficial birthplace. If my father smelled anything of his involuntary dislocations, it was his love for hydrogen peroxide and fake Havana cigars. Like the nomadic Machiguengas in the Amazon Basin jungle, we believed that if we stopped moving, disaster would befall us. So, we continued our shape-shifting journey across parrot-green illusory geographies. One day when I was returning from school, I saw torrential lightning strike forests of palash flowers (flame- of- the- forest). I could not believe when half-burnt palash trees started bleeding with buzzing of alien words. Ecstasy and fear rushed in, twittering madly in my throat. And I started speaking an entirely unknown language. I was told it was the primal language of my ancestors. It was also the language of God. Since then I have lived in the memories of trees; bleeding, secreting surreal verses of concealed truths.
In other words, poetry came to me in schizophrenic moments of self-killing. That’s why I write poems to shed my fears about sudden auto-annihilation. Where does this fear come from? It originates in the scene of a furious crowd, attacking and burning buildings, cars, and lynching people in ‘festal hunger’. But most fundamentally, it comes from the fear of dying in my own language. Does this frighten you? I ask myself. Yes. It does. For me, language is the haunted house of being, and the darkness shines here. And I sewer for a living in the claustrophobic tornado shelter of memories. In short, ‘when there is blood in the street’, you can’t dream of prelapsarian verses of utopian happiness. ‘Exile is the only way of going home’. Thus, most of my verses are partial paralytic translation of self-replicating fantasy languages. They also revel in intoxicating anamnestic experiences of ‘grammar atrocities’ in life, literature and politics. No wonder,‘after a shot of white rum punch/ Aunty Maria sang- Picotante…paralysante…picotante…paralysante’.
Searching four-armed peacock Pankha
Home Coming
← October 2019 Issue
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