HYDERABAD: The body houses all the recollections that it experiences and chooses to live on long after it turns to dust leaving behind trails in other minds and bodies. Preeti Vangani’s debut poetry collection ‘Mother Tongue Apologize’ which won the RL Poetry Award in national category (2017) revolves around loss, love and torture the female body goes through. The book is about her mother who died of cancer in 2008. It also explores the pain and torture the female body goes through every day. Excerpts from the interview:
Why did you choose ‘Mother Tongue Apologize’ as the title of your book?
The book is divided into two sections. While the first part speaks more directly to the mother’s loss, the second aims to open up questions of how the female body is constantly compromised. And the two in my mind are inseparable. Daughterhood is inseparable from motherhood and both are inseparable from womanhood. So I wanted the title to be a common shared language in which loss, sexuality and violence converse with each other. ‘Mother Tongue Apologize’ became that idea for me -- which unfolded itself both as a statement and as a command.
How do you see yourself as a stage-poet and a page-poet?
While spoken word and open mics in Mumbai were my earliest gateway into poetry, over the last three years, as I developed this book, I studied and read several poets who write in more classical forms. I was also inspired by how concise images have tremendous capacity to hold expansive narratives.
I absolutely love being on stage, but don’t like thinking of my poems as a rigid split of the spoken vs. the written. As I developed this collection, the question my teachers always posed to me was, how can you say a lot by saying very little. Which form is the best container to hold this obsession or can another formal strategy help you look at the same problem differently? So, in a sense, thinking about page helped me deepen the conversations I was having with my subject(s).
There’s a shift from regular to experimental in terms of the format of poems. Is it deliberate?
Some ideas lent themselves to visuals more easily than others. I was also heavily inspired by the works of Doug Kearney and Giovanni Singleton. Both masters in creating visual poems. For example, in the poem ‘Every 20 minutes’ the statistic of rape kept glaring at me in the face and no narrative retelling could hold the shock. I kept imagining it as one way of keeping time and converted it into a clock.
How much do you see food as a trigger of reliving memories?
It is impossible for me to think of my mother without the kitchen, that’s where we spent most of our time together. It’s where I sat and doodled as she cooked, it’s where she made me revise my school lessons, and through the kitchen window she kept an eye on me when I played downstairs. Smells and scents of her cooking are trails that lead me back to our time together.
Several images in the book are related to the loss of your mother. How much has writing helped you deal with it?
I don’t think writing moves the needle on grief. Some poems do feel more cathartic than others. But I think one of our greatest powers as artists and writers is to remember.
‘Being a Woman’ is a pithy, sharp poem and conveys a very powerful message in three concise lines. How much brevity do you prefer?
I love short poems. I am obsessed with haiku, for instance. And am a forever fan of Kevin Young’s writing. While developing this book, I kept a copy of his ‘Book of Hours’ very close to me and kept going back to it to understand how he folded so many worlds of emotions within a single image. Since my poems tend to lean heavily on the side of longer narrative recounts, writing a short powerful poem is always challenging.
The poems in the collection are full of pain. How much of imagery did you borrow from real life or to be precise, reality?
Most of the book is autobiographical and deeply personal. It doesn’t mirror reality chronologically but I borrowed a ton of objects and views as they existed (in reality) from the hospital, from Mumbai, from our home and from my mother’s things.