In 2003, at a time when politicians and other establishment figures of Tamil Nadu were caught up in a surge of Tamil chauvinism, a group of men and women, setting themselves up as guardians of Tamil culture, objected publicly to the language of a new generation of women poets, particularly in the work of Malathi Maithri, Salma, Kutti Revathi and Sukirtharani. They charged the women with obscenity and immodesty.
These women poets came into prominence at the same time; their first collections of poetry were published between the years 2000 and 2002, when they were in their late twenties and early thirties. Though each of these poets is unique in what she has to say in her poetry, there are some themes which are common to all of them, notably the politics of sexuality and a woman’s relationship with her body. For the moral police, such language was not permissible for Tamil women. So the poets were condemned and vilified. The debate gained focus with the publication of Kutti Revathi’s Mulaigal (Breasts, 2002). The poets received abusive letters from individuals as well as literary organizations. The media had a field day. A popular song writer for films gave a much publicized interview to a literary journal condemning women writers in general. After this, another film-song writer, Snehithan, appeared on television declaring that these women should be lined up on Mount Road in Chennai, doused with kerosene oil and burnt alive.
It might have been easy for these self-appointed moral guardians to assume that the young women poets were all ‘powerless’ and, therefore, particularly vulnerable: none of them comes from a privileged background. Salma comes from a conservative Muslim family based in a small town near Madurai; Sukirtharani is a school teacher in Lalapet, and a Dalit. On the contrary, despite considerable persecution and even death threats, the women refused to be intimidated, insisting on their freedom to write as they chose. Malathi Maithri sought legal advice, and made a complaint to the Women’s Commission against Snehithan.
The Tamil literary world was divided in its response. Kalachuvadu, a journal which has always engaged with political and literary issues, called a meeting in Chennai on 21 November 2004 to debate the issues that had been raised by the violent response, both towards the poetry written by these four women and towards the women personally. The meeting was chaired by Indira Parthasarathy and attended by well known writers such as Prapanjan, Ambai and Ravikumar, and older women poets Krishangini and Thaamarai. Rajasekaran reports in Kalachuvadu that the discussions were mostly to do with the larger issues of freedom of expression: Ravikumar spoke at length about the need to struggle against all oppressions, Prapanjan about patriarchy’s various and subtle workings, and Krishangini about why men find it so difficult to accept it when women write in specific and personal terms about their sexuality. However, Rajasekaran also pointed out that none of the critics and writers present analysed in any detail the specific poems which were at the root of the controversy.
Meanwhile, by 2005, the national press more generally was taking up the issue of moral censorship of Tamil women by all the political parties of Tamil Nadu. Two filmmakers, Anjali Monteiro and K.P. Jayasankar, made a documentary on our four poets, entitled SheWrite. The film was important in that it brought to the notice of the nation at large the courageous stand the four women had taken; it also served to bring out many insights about their personal lives and backgrounds. However, in the film, the poetry was shown mostly as the focus of a controversy, and not examined in any detail for its own worth and value.
It is now thirteen years since the publication of Mulaigal. During this decade, each of our poets has published more than one collection, continuing to write and publish as courageously as before. Each of them has won national and international acclaim. However, the grumbling against the language and thrust of their poetry goes on, while the wider issue of what Tamil women are allowed to wear and say, and where they choose to socialize continues to be raised from time to time and debated by politicians and in the press.
When we look back at the history of Tamil poetry, the marginal status of women in the literary canon and their relatively meagre output are evident since classical times. It is true that, in modern times, Tamil women have been writing and publishing in various genres, but as far as poetry is concerned, we have seen a gradual change only since 1970. Women such as R. Meenakshi and Sugantha Subramaniam were being published throughout the 1970s and ’80s, yet it was only in the late ’80s that their poems appeared in significant numbers, both in anthologies and single volumes. Then, suddenly, in the 1990s, the contribution of women to Tamil poetry became notable. This was a poetry that had to be noticed, not because it was written by women, but because it was different from what appeared in the mainstream.
As V. Geetha points out in her introduction to an anthology of poetry by women from Tamil Nadu and Sri Lanka, Paratthal Athan Sudandiram (Flight is its Freedom, 2001), not all the contributors to the book are feminists, nor even necessarily sympathetic to feminism, yet they bring completely new themes into Tamil poetry: an engagement with the minutiae of everyday life, new perceptions of familial lives, the truth about a sudden end to childhood, about bleak marriages, the joys and sorrows of childbirth and motherhood. And some women, at least, were writing with boldness about their inner lives in very different terms, using an awareness of their bodies and their sexuality. Drawing attention to an overall tendency in the anthology towards inwardness and the inner world, V. Geetha calls upon the Tamil women poets of her time to engage more with the outer world and its politics; to consider social and cultural oppressions and inequalities more widely. She suggests that the difference between the Sri Lankan women and those from Tamil Nadu lies in the political engagement of the former; that as far as the Sri Lankans are concerned, even when they write about ‘myself’, ‘my love’, ‘my sorrow’, there is an underlying political discourse that pushes the individual story into a wider context.
That was in 2001, and it was important to say it at the time. Since then, we have seen another generation of women poets whose poetry does indeed engage with a wider political discourse and a more nuanced feminism. Yet, in the case of Malathi Maithri, Salma, Kutti Revathi and Sukirtharani, ever since the events so publicized by the media in 2003, their poetry has been grouped together and discussed only in terms of their engagement with questions of sexuality. It is also clear that a deep divide persists in the way readers and critics perceive women poets as a whole, today. The editor of a well known literary journal observed to me that for these past years, Tamil women poets have been categorized into ‘Bad Girls’ who write ‘body poetry’ and ‘Good Girls’ who refrain from doing so.
This anthology, then, celebrates four women poets, Malathi Maithri, Salma, Kutti Revathi and Sukirtharani, and showcases, through English translation, a small sample in each case, of their work over a decade. My attempt has been to bring out the beauty, originality and above all the individuality of each of these poets. It is perhaps useful to remember that the traditional values prescribed for the ‘Good’ Tamil woman were accham, madam and naanam (fearfulness, propriety, modesty or shame). Our poets have chosen instead, the opposite virtues of fearlessness, outspokenness and a ceaseless questioning of prescribed rules. It is surely significant that at different times and variously, they have claimed as their foremothers, role models and equals, Avvai, Velliviidhi and Sappho; Anna Akhmatova, Sylvia Plath and Kamala Das. And Eve, above all, who defied divine authority to pluck the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge. Bad Girls indeed, all of them.
Malathi Maithri
Malathi Maithri grew up in a fishing community with a strong tradition of independent and working women. Although her own mother was sickly and often bedridden, her grandmothers and aunts worked hard all their lives. Life centred around the river where women fished or bought fish, after which they walked miles from one village to the next in order to sell their wares. They would rather walk home than take a bus, saving the money to buy food or treats for the children. Her poem, ‘Camels, horses and a fish basket’ (‘Ottagangal, kudiraigal, oru miin kuudai’) is a tribute to these wonderful women. Malathi herself, the eldest of six, effectively ran the household, taking charge of the younger ones and admitting herself as well as each of her siblings to school when the time came.
Yet, she was one of the very few girls in her community to continue her education into higher secondary school, to discover the local library and to read the novels of well known modern writers such as Jayakanthan and Janakiraman. All the same, it was a struggle for her to cope with the English necessary for class eleven. It was at this time that she attended a tailoring course in order to learn a trade which would at least give her financial independence. She made friends at these classes who were themselves voracious readers and whose brothers introduced them to Marxist and DMK literature as well as to the writings of Periyar. This was also the time that Malathi began attending political and literary meetings in Madurai, Puducherry and elsewhere.
Although she did indeed finish her class twelve exams privately and even gained a place to study law, the opposition from her parents to the style of life that had gradually become hers was such that she finally left home at the age of eighteen. By this time, she had moved to Puducherry and joined a leather export company for three years as a designer before moving to Auroville. Her determination to choose an independent lifestyle is striking, as was her decision to choose her partner and have a child when she wanted to.
Malathi’s poetry and fiction have been published since 1988. She has published four collections of poetry to date: Sankarabarani (2001), Niirindri Amaiyaadu Ulagu (Without Water, There is No World, 2003), Niili (Wicked Woman, 2005) and Enathu Madhukuduvai (My Wine Jar, 2011). She co-edited, with fellow-poet Krishangini, an anthology of Tamil poetry by contemporary women poets, Paratthal Athan Sudandiram (2001). Her journalism, serialized in the magazine, Thiiranadi, were published under the title, Viduthalaiyai Ezhutthuthal (Writing about Freedom) in 2004. A further collection of articles, appeared in 2008, entitled Nam Thandaiyarai Kolvadu Eppadi? (How Should We Kill Our Fathers? ). She also edits the Tamil feminist journal, Anangu (Woman).
Malathi is a political activist committed to human rights, community welfare, and environmental issues. Many of her activities have concerned the fishing community, particularly in the Puducherry area, for example, her participation in the campaign to prevent the development of a deep water port in Puducherry and also in the protest against the proposals in the Coastal Zone Management Notification of 2008.
In his introduction to Malathi’s second anthology, the poet and critic, Brahmarajan, points to the freshness of natural imagery, the ability to imagine a child’s world and, above all, the watery landscapes which pervade the collection. Malathi Maithri herself has said in an interview with C.S. Lakshmi in 2005 that, when she began writing, contemporary Tamil poetry had become too introspective, had lost its closeness to the natural world and the five landscapes so dominant in Sangam poetry. For her part, she wanted to recreate the joyful world she knew as a child, the world of river and forest. Her own introduction to her second volume says (in verse): ‘The poetic aim of this volume / is to attempt to redeem the innocent human body / from harsh controls (of society and culture) / and allow it to be one with the great movement of Nature.’
While the imagery of river and sea pervade her early poems, what is striking is the way the perspective is transformed: the observing narrator becomes the observed subject. This is noticeable, for example, in ‘Observe the crane’ (‘Kokkai gavinitthukonde iru’), where the poet imagines a communion between River and Crane, her voice blending with the landscape. Equally, her treatment of the relationship between mother and child is unusually tender and luminous because she enters the child’s experience so completely, seeing the world through her eyes (‘She who threads the skies’ / ‘Vaanatthai korthukondiruppaval’). With Malathi’s poems about her daughter, an entirely new world is made available in contemporary Tamil poetry.
Malathi’s introduction to her third collection, Niili, points both to the continuity of themes in the shorter poems she has included and a different perspective in the longer ones. She speaks of the ebbing away of her earlier joyfulness (so vivid in poems such as ‘Swing’ / ‘Uunjal’) in view of the world she now perceives around her: the horrors of American dictatorship, natural disasters, terrorist attacks, fundamentalist uprisings. She writes of trying to find a language to write about this broken world and can only find a ‘pey mozhi’, a demon language. She mentions the many ‘mad women’ who inhabit her most recent poetry, ‘who take me to the edge of emptiness, and make me stand there, as they look at me and weep’. The poet’s voice in this collection is again and again that of the street-singer; the mad woman and niili become visionary – whose skewed sight is the one that sees the truth.
Salma
In many ways, Salma’s story is a remarkable one. She grew up leading a sheltered life in a middle-class family belonging to a Muslim community in the small town of Thuvarankurinchi, near Madurai. She was stopped from going to school after an incident which is recounted vividly in her novel, Irandaam Jaamangalin Kadai (translated into English as The Hour Past Midnight). When she was thirteen years old, she and her friends, reading in the local library, were attracted by the music coming from the cinema theatre nearby and decided to attend the show. They were shocked to find that it was a Malayalam pornographic film. Of course the girls were seen, reported and punished. In the case of Salma, her education was stopped immediately. This was also when she began questioning the social values which distinguish between girls and boys so drastically.
Salma is entirely self-educated. As long as she lived at home, her parents encouraged her reading, helped her to buy books, and did not stand in the way of her writing. ‘Through extensive reading, I feel I arrived at a language of my own,’ she says of this time.
Although she protested against marriage, she was forced into it when her mother feigned a grave illness and extracted a promise from the girl when she was still in her teens. Her husband and his family were far more hostile towards her writing than her own. But she continued to write secretly. ‘I thought of writing as linked to my existence. I also thought of it as my right.’ It was around this time that she began to write under the pseudonym Salma, partly for the safety that anonymity accorded her, but also for the liberty from self-censorship.
In 1994, she was fortunate enough to meet the writer and poet, Sundara Ramaswamy, and the editorial board of Kalachuvadu, a leading literary journal in Tamil. Kalachuvadu began publishing some of her poems, safeguarding her identity. Kannan Sundaram, publisher and editor of Kalachuvadu, writes, ‘Her poems immediately drew the attention of writers and critics … [and] began to be widely acknowledged as having set a trend for a new genre. Contemporary women poets were inspired to write boldly about their bodies and their sexuality.’
All this time, although her successes were kept secret, family and community members guessed at the true identity of ‘Salma’, and her home life was one of conflict, abuse and even violence at times. Nevertheless, her first collection of poetry, Oru Maalaiyum Innoru Maalaiyum (One Evening, Another Evening ) came out in 2000. Salma attended the launch without the knowledge of her family, on the pretext of a doctor’s appointment. This was followed in 2002 by Pacchai Devadai (Green Angel ).
Then, suddenly, Salma’s life changed. Kannan Sundaram puts it like this: ‘Panchayat Raj, a scheme by which every village elects a panchayat (village assembly) had been introduced a decade ago. Elections were due in 2002, and Salma’s panchayat at Thuvarankurinchi was reserved for women that year. Salma’s husband had hoped to contest, but was now forced to ask Salma to contest. She agreed. And her chains began to break loose. From trying to keep her prisoner in the house, her family now persuaded her to go to the streets to gather votes … The Tamil and English media turned their focus on this Muslim poet who was running for election. She easily won the election. Her husband might have hoped to run the show from behind the scenes, but things did not turn to his advantage.’
Meanwhile, her novel Irandaam Jaamangalin Kadai, was published in 2004 and its English translation, The Hour Past Midnight, followed to immediate national and international acclaim. In many ways, the novel is a true original even as it complements and extends the themes and tropes of her poetry. It draws the reader into the little known world of Tamil Muslim women played out in the interwoven lives of six women. The novel demonstrates how women are inducted into the strict tenets of Islam, but always have the option to remain free in their thoughts and desires.
Salma’s early poetry is striking for its examination of thanimai or loneliness. She uses the word in conjunction with the imagery of architectural spaces to express a range of meanings: loneliness, seclusion, aloneness, but also privacy and solitude. The early poems, written during the early years of her marriage, are almost desperate in seeking a private space of her own: they capture the paradox of being almost claustrophobically enclosed, yet lacking privacy. She needs her thanimai in order to find her thanmai, selfhood. Equally despairing is her dissection of an unhappy marriage, with little communication between the couple, and sexual dissatisfaction plain to see, on both sides. Not surprisingly such poems as ‘The Contract’ (Oppandam) and ‘The hour past midnight’ (Irandaam jaamatthu kadai) were very heavily criticized by the orthodox when they appeared.
But against the despair, there are the moments of solitude when the internalized rules are questioned and set against extraordinary images of desire and hope: the tiger at her bedside, the monstrous worm with its ‘stranglehold of possibilities’, the ship waiting to sail, were she but ready.
Salma has said that her poems may grow out of her own experience, or out of the shared experiences of the women of her community, but that they are also ‘the feelings commonly shared by women’. She speaks, with some surprise, of discovering the power of words. Poetry, for her, has been a means of finding a voice, a selfhood, a protest which has led out into new worlds.
Kutti Revathi
Kutti Revathi was born in Thiruverambur, Malaikoyil. She remembers a childhood of extreme poverty until her father attended a course at an industrial training institute which then enabled him to find a job with Bharat Heavy Electricals Limited. After this, their fortunes turned around, somewhat.
She remembers her father’s encouragement and affection. It was he who inculcated in her a love for Tamil poetry at an early age, bought books for her, expected her to study as much as she wished, made no distinctions in terms of gender. She says, in an interview with C.S. Lakshmi in 2005, that she owes her independent spirit to him: ‘I now realize that he had created a very natural feeling of amiable friendliness.’
After she finished school, her father wanted her to study medicine. She had, indeed, obtained the necessary high marks, but her interests impelled her towards Tamil literature rather than medicine. Two years later, she heard about the Siddha system of medicine and was immediately attracted by its central thrust, which she describes in a recent interview given to the editors of the journal Panimulai: ‘The Siddhar never put God outside themselves, but searched for God within the temple of the body.’ She was also attracted by the close relationship between Siddha medicine and poetry.
It was after she joined college that she became aware of caste sectarianism, exclusiveness and oppression. This is because the Saiva Pillais and Mudaliars of Tirunelveli have always felt that Siddha medicine was their special field and prerogative, she says. The professors at Tirunelveli college, all of them Saiva Pillai, discredited the Siddha medicine gurus of Nagercoil, Nadar by caste, and masters of the art of varmam (a method of treating nervous disorders). The college, she says, was marked by caste conflict and discrimination. She herself fell foul of the authorities, but nevertheless, finished her five years there (1993–1998), particularly enjoying her field trips to the surrounding mountains and forests in search of rare herbal medicinal plants.
Siddha medicine and other local and tribal systems of medicine continue to be important to her, but while at Tirunelveli she also became deeply interested in modern cinema and began to attend screenings of art films and film festivals all over India. It is through cinema, she says, that she first came to understand modern art forms and world politics. She also began attending literary meetings and writing literary articles and reviews. When she began to write poetry, it was, she says, a sudden and different turn to her life, but a good one. Her first collection of poetry came out in 2001, and was entitled, Puunaiyaipol Alaiyum Veliccham (Light Prowls like a Cat). This was followed in 2002 by Mulaigal (Breasts), Thanimaiyin Aayiram Irakkaigal (The Thousand Wings of Solitude) in 2003, Udalin Kadavu (The Body’s Door) in 2006, Yaanumitta Thii (The Fire I Lit) in 2011, and Maamadha Yaanai (The Lustful Elephant) in 2012.
Kutti Revathi distinguishes between the early feminist writers in Tamil and the poets of her own generation. Those early feminists, who certainly struggled hard to gain a voice, were nevertheless often from a privileged background. What is more, they tended to think of women as a single category, without cross-referencing gender with caste and class. The women poets of her generation, however, are often from subaltern groups. According to her, because the caste system insists on the rules that women must obey in terms of morality, these two dominations – male domination and caste domination – are not two separate entities but are intertwined, one within the other. For herself, she feels that disavowal of caste is central if we are to end the caste system and look to equality. Dalits should be able to look forward to such a time. She adds that underlying all poetry there ought to be an aram, a universal ethic, not a morality that is caste-bound and, therefore, relative.
The ways in which our poets have imagined and depicted the body is constantly intriguing and refreshing. Kutti Revathi’s poems are perhaps among the more erotic. A poem such as ‘Rain-river’ (‘Mazhaiyin nathi’) illustrates her use of unusual and luminously beautiful images, placed singly and in surprising juxtapositions. The poem also demonstrates how closely she identifies with the natural landscape, making it her own. It also signals to its location within a Tamil erotic tradition through its intertextual reference to one of the best known tropes from the akam poems of Sangam. The image of red earth and pouring rain is used in Kutti Revathi’s poem with the same intense passion as in the Sangam poem.
Although love poetry accounts for much of her work, there is a wider political and feminist intent in a number of her most recent poems. In ‘Suicide-soldier’ (‘Tharkolai viiraangkanai’), ‘Gandhari’, and ‘Stone goddesses’ (‘Kal devadaigal’), a woman’s experience of herself and her body is either manipulated or distorted in some way by social, cultural and political means, or is denied altogether. It could be said that Kutti Revathi is deeply influenced by that strain of Siddha thought which claims that our bodies are ourselves: it is through the body that we understand the Natural world, gain knowledge of ourselves and achieve a connectedness with the universe. Perhaps it is this that drives her to call for a much more nuanced language in the current debates on sexuality and the politics of the body.
In sharp contrast to these are the triumphant ‘Childbirth’ (‘Prasavam’), and the apocalyptic ‘The fire I lit’ (‘Yaanumitta thii’), both of which envision – in two different ways – a continuing self and a new world. Yaanumitta Thii is also the title of her most recent collection. The line is taken from a poem by the Siddha poet Pattinatthaar, but Kutti Revathi gives it a completely different twist: she means by it the memory of an endless fire burning through all past times and all creative works, linking the present poet to an imagined First Mother.
Sukirtharani
Sukirtharani was born in Lalapet, a village near Ranipet, in Vellore district. She still lives and teaches there. Hers was one of ten or twelve Dalit families who lived in the cheri (as the street where the Dalits lived was known). Traditionally, their occupation was to take away the carcasses of the dead animals belonging to the upper caste people, and to bury or burn them. For this, they were paid in grain. Sukirtharani’s father only studied up to class three, although his brothers went to college. He worked as a labourer in EID Parry Company in Ranipet.
Sukirtharani was the fifth of six children. Her father was a Hindu, her mother Christian; the family grew up in the Christian faith. In an unpublished article, ‘Naanum en ezhutthum’ (‘My writing and I’), she writes of growing up as a tomboy, wandering about with the boys, riding a cycle, climbing trees, roaming through the mountains and forests, swimming in the tank ‘until my eyes were red’. Such independence began to be curtailed, however, when she reached puberty.
She began to be aware of caste distinctions when she started school. Other children would shun her. But despite this and despite her lack of notebooks and other materials, she studied well and stood at the top of her class. And she continued to study. Inspired by a teacher in class eight, she was drawn towards Tamil literature. But a serious interest in writing began only after she had finished her higher education and a teacher’s training course. Significantly, this was the time, she says, that she was tormented by the problem of gender equality, the difficulty of finding answers to her questions, the lack of a platform or venue where she might publish her own tentative answers.
She began attending literary festivals and entering debates and competitions. She also began to read more extensively. At first, she was exposed largely to the popular magazines of the time and attracted by the poetry that appeared in them, she began writing poetry in a traditional mode with prescribed features such as edugai (alliteration) and monai (assonance). The breakthrough came when a friend introduced her to literary ‘little magazines’. She began to attend more literary meetings, to meet poets and critics, to read more and more stimulating books. As she read more and more, her understanding and perspective of poetry gained greater clarity. She writes about this experience with wonderful vividness: ‘So, as an understanding of poetry seeped into me more and more, all the questions and doubts which had made me bleed within for so long, all my doubts and criticisms of past beliefs, rose to the surface of my mind and seized the form of poetry.’
Her family began to express their disapproval when her poetry moved towards feminism and started to appear in well known publications. Her poetry developed, she says, in an atmosphere of disapproval, refusal of permission to attend public meetings on the part of her parents, and evasive lies on her part. When her first collection, Kaippatri En Kanavu Kel (Hold Me and Hear My Dreams) was published in 2002 and her name was bandied about with that of other women poets and trashed for its so-called ‘obscenity’, she received no support from her family.
None of this broke her spirit. Instead, she says, she was inspired to read the poetry of other women more closely: Sri Lankan and other Asian women poets, Kamala Das, the novels of Taslima Nasreen. ‘I realized then,’ she writes, ‘a woman’s body had become the property of man. I realized that it was my first duty to redeem it. So my poetry began to put forward a politics of the body.’ She stresses, however, the importance of reading widely, non-Dalits and non-feminists, too. ‘It is only then we can be clear about the path we tread, the creative projects we undertake.’ Sukirtharani now has four collections of poetry to her credit: Kaippatri en Kanavu kel (Hold Me and Hear My Dreams, 2002), Iravu Mirugam (Night Beast, 2004), Avalai Mozhipeyartthal (Translating Her, 2006), and Tiindapadaada Muttham (Untouchable Kiss, 2010), Kamaththippoo (Love’s Flower, 2012).
Because of her awareness of herself as Dalit and because of her world view as a Dalit and a feminist, Sukirtharani differs in many important ways from the other women poets included here. In poems such as ‘I speak up bluntly’ and ‘A faint smell of meat’, her poetry charts her journey as a young woman, from humiliation and shame to an assertion of pride in herself – and that includes her body and her sexual self. But there is also in her poems an acute sense of mapping a Dalit world and history through a sensitive reading of a Dalit woman’s body. For Sukirtharani, Dalit history and memories of oppression are to be understood experientially, as physical oppressions to the body; truly, they are inscribed upon the Dalit body.
Moreover, the Dalit is bound to the land; she identifies with the landscape in special ways (‘Portrait of my village’/‘En graamattin oviyam’). The poetics of landscape, where the five idealized landscapes of Tamil Nadu are each associated with a particular emotion, are deeply embedded in the sensibility of Tamil poets. It is notable that all the women poets included here (except for Salma, whose imagery is that of an urban child and young woman in a town house), describe their physical selves in close relationship to a landscape. But the Dalit aesthetic cuts across the poetics of landscape because of the close emotional link between land, labour and the body, a relationship of both love and anguish.
For Sukirtharani, it is not the only a Dalit story that the body tells, it is equally a feminist story. The body, for her, carries not only the map of a history; in its turn, it maps its own pleasures and pains, its surprises and turbulences. In ‘My body’ (‘Ennudal’) she charts this as an exotic landscape with richly imagined geographical features. The poem is one of discovery: it moves through scenes of rich, lush vegetation, to scenes of violence, danger and risk, and ends with a calm acceptance: ‘In the end, Nature becomes my body, lying still.’ ‘Nature’ here is the landscape of her own ‘nature’, her ‘self’, imagined and owned.
Sukirtharani’s poetry ranges still more widely than this. It includes highly charged love poetry, a moving critique of the Sri Lankan ethnic war, and visions of a world free of oppression.
There are many common themes and tropes among the poems presented here: light ‘prowls like a cat’, the tiger stalks within the bedroom and along the imagined mountain landscape. But there are also profound differences, which the reader will note. Each poet has struggled to find a language of her own to express her particular vision. ‘Language must be redeemed from the grave of its own inadequacy,’ Malathi Maithri wrote in 2001, in her editor’s note to Paratthal Athan Sudandiram, putting forward, later on, the possibility of a pey (demon) language. Sukirtharani seeks an ‘infant language’, with all the rough and physical reality of new birth, still sticky with blood. Kutti Revathi invents a blazing language of love. Salma reaches out, even to the ‘rust of silence’.
Above all, in this anthology, I have wanted to celebrate the courage of each of these poets in breaking out of and defying easy categories. As Sukirtharani puts it in her magnificent poem, ‘Nature’s fountainhead’ (‘Iyarkaiyin peruutru’):
I myself will become
earth
fire
sky
wind
water.
The more you confine me, the more I will spill over,
Nature’s fountainhead.
Lakshmi Holmström
December 2012