BENGALURU: In her quest to bring Mizo poetry to the mainstream, Malsawmi Jacob has faced quite a lot of challenges. It has never been easy for her to follow her passion of writing poetry in her parent language, she said at the recently held poetry session by Bangalore Poetry Circle.
With publishing houses refusing to publish her works, she never gave up on bringing a regional language to the forefront. At an age where people write poems in English, here is Jacob, an author of nine books, who still sticks to her roots and creates art through poetry in Mizo language, which is written in Roman script. Despite not coming from a literary background in the traditional sense, the 66-year-old grew up in a society that told stories and sang songs.
Her first book titled Tinkim Dawn, a collection of English and Mizo poems, was published in 2003. It was a self-published book with financial help from Mizoram Publication Board. For her Mizo book Zorami, which is the first novel ever written by a Mizo writer in English, she did a lot of research through reading and interviewing people.
As a child, she loved listening to Mizo folktales that her mother read out to her. Gradually, she was introduced to Mizo poems in primary classes. She had a special inclination towards Mizo poetry since then.
“My husband and I first came to the city in August 2004. Our son had started working and our daughter was in college. We decided to take a break and stay with them for a while. Then we both moved to Mumbai and at the end of 2012, we both left our jobs and came back to Bengaluru, mostly because we liked the place. I continue to do my independent writing from here,” she says.
Writing in Mizo language was not easy, she recalls. “Though it is my mother tongue, writing is quite another matter. It is a tonal language and we have no traditional method of representing the tones in writing, which makes it quite complicated. And then there is a rather sharp division between ‘poetic diction’ and commonly used language. I’m still struggling to shed the old idiom and use a more contemporary language, yet with a poetic effect,” says Jacob.
Talking about how her poems develop, she says, “Sometimes, a theme comes to your head and the poem based on it is written in one go, while at other times it takes longer and once it is written, there’s editing and re-editing before it is brought out for the readers to read.”
Malsawmi, who advocates bringing regional language poetry to the mainstream, says it can be done through translations. “We need good translators who can bring out the original flavour into English and other languages. Though quite a good number of Mizo stories have been translated into English, only a few poems have been translated yet,” she says.
The biggest challenge she faces being a regional language poet is the number of readers. Also, very few copies get sold. She adds, “The only incentive for writing poetry in regional language is the satisfaction one gets in creating a piece of art.”