KOCHI: In a single-room house, poet K Srilata recalls growing up with her grandmother who stitched dresses two sizes too large, and her mother who wrote, leaving ink stains in the shape of “outstretched wings.” Memories of this single room, covered in seven steps and words passed on through generations, and its women “used to small spaces” — resisting society’s grip — inhabit her recently-launched collection ‘Three Women in a Single-Room House’.
Published by Sahitya Akademi, this collection of 49 poems delves into the everyday lives of women, punctuated by joy, grief, and ghutan. As Srilata writes in the preface, “These poems are an archiving of the self in a web of inter-being, a logbook of human presences and absences.” A variety of themes fill her work — an absent father, the turbulent times of lockdown, the tryst with motherhood. Experimenting with brackets and haibuns, the poet continues to unlock new ways of seeing and unexplored spaces in poetry.
Despite the struggles and shipwrecks of daily life, Srilata reminds us there will be “a flash of a kingfisher and all that’s hard will stop to watch”. In a discussion with CE, Srilata talks about spaces and disappearances, her writing desk, and the importance of documenting women’s work.
Excerpts follow:
Could you explain the choice of the title ‘Three Women In A Single-Room House’?
I have always been interested in the question of space, or rather, the lack of it, and how that is related to gender...Growing up, there was a lack of physical space because we stayed in a single-room house for many years. I could imaginatively do things in that tiny space. I’m amazed at how you can have a large physical space but feel you can’t be yourself. There’s the idea of women not being able to take up space and somehow, if you don’t ask for things, you’re not going to get it. I’ve always been fascinated by what kind of spaces women writers and artists occupy. Is there a space like that at all for them? This title poem is a hark back to my childhood. Growing up in a largely matrilineal, female genealogy, I did not know what it was to be part of a patriarchal structure. After I got out into the world, the reverse happened and it was a bit of a shock to me.
You write about your mother and daughter, and the collection delves into women resisting society and taking up that space, through writing or otherwise.
I felt I had to write the poems I always wanted to read. There is little in the public realm about poems that tackle what we think of as small, domestic themes, motherhood, having a daughter, being a granddaughter, or daughter. These are seen as touchy-feely things and not weighty enough. Male writers rarely tackle these themes and women writers tend to think ‘nobody is going to take me seriously if I do’; people are always looking for a “cerebral intellectual” theme. But these are moments of which life is made up, for most of us. If you don’t take this inner life seriously and the everyday things we do as women, we are turning our faces away from lovely material and the world itself.
You record absences, disappearances, death, and grief. You touch upon your father, the death of students, and George Floyd. Could you elaborate on the absence in your work?
I keep circling back to this because when I was two, it was the start of the divorce process. My father just disappeared from my life and never reappeared. When there’s a death, you know the person has gone away, never to return. In this case, my father was gone, never to return, but it was a different kind of absence and disappearance. That kind of grief, you can’t explain. When I grew older, I realised it was not a unique experience because with friendships and relationships, people leave for whatever reason: jobs, migration, or they drift apart. How do you carry everyone in your life throughout — you can’t. There are also political disappearances, and forced disappearances — it’s a different ball game. How do you ever come to terms with it, or fill that gap?
In the preface, you write “Poetry as a continual struggle against amnesia”. Please explain.
The reason you write, do art, or even the reason we are having this conversation is wanting to record something. It is the fighting back against the fact time is going to come and wash it all away. You and I won’t be there years later but this conversation will be there in some archive. Poetry is that, you can write even when your life is fragmented and through and of those fragmented moments. It is a good record and works against this whole frightening collective amnesia. Maybe we shouldn’t be afraid of it because it is going to go away but we like to believe lives matter, because whatever is happening in Palestine matters, and whoever is dying matters. We may not know them, but it matters. It matters that there are these struggles in families, which otherwise are not going to get recorded. It will be part of a feminist archive.
How important is it to record women’s writing because it is rarely documented or remains in oral narratives? In feminist archives, often, Dalit women writers are invisibled.
When I was a student, there was a book by Susie Tharu and K Lalita called ‘Women Writing in India’ and they did just that, looking at decades of women writing and experiences and putting together two volumes. It is important because it is talking back to the otherwise male-centric canon, and if you don’t do the work, you are not going to be there on the map. Now, we may think people are talking about women’s writing but someone had to start the conversation. It is important to continue the work because if you move on, you lose the momentum. My mother, Vatsala, started writing when she was 48 and she has two Tamil novels and a collection of poetry. I translated both those novels not just because she is my mother but because if I didn’t do it, it would remain in the Tamil world and relatively invisible…I do translations of works (of Dalit writers) like Bama. A way of engaging is not to be obsessed with one’s voice, but to look for intersectional discourse, and allow it to destabilise you. Otherwise, it’s just going to be a particular narrative or experience that gets centre stage. They’re very important voices and (we need to see) how they speak to the mainstream upper-caste, upper-class feminist voice.
You revisit childhood, and the past in your poetry, would you see this witnessing or rewriting memory?
There is an element of imaginative truth that comes into it, how it felt emotionally when you look back, there’s a certain colour we give to it, a certain way we have learned to think about and remember it. There is a re-writing and reimagining of it, a processing of what it means. The poems that I’ve written now take into account how I think about it now, looking back.
During the pandemic, how did poetry end up being a refuge for you? You also experimented with brackets and haibuns, what prompted this?
There was something we needed to cling to and retain our sanity. I learned to work with the haibun forms. I learned from a haiku poet Gitanjali and we worked on a project together, partially supported by Goethe Institut. That was comforting then, and we were able to focus on poems and not think about all the other stuff going on. I use the poems as a way of understanding the present...Being an academic for 20 years, there is a way in which you’re trained to be linear about how you think about everything, rational and logical. Poetry gives me that little space to play, which otherwise is in short supply these days. You just learn to be not afraid. There are some rules but there is a large playing field that poetry gives you. The experimenting comes from freeing myself up from shackles.
The poem ‘It’s the Thing About Being an Older Woman’ feels like a lesson in writing with the lines “You must write the poem you must write — gently and with love for yourself...” What other advice would you give writers?
First, trust yourself. Value is assigned to jobs that pay — that’s the way society is set up so with poetry, you’re not going to get that kind of economic validation, space, or prestige. But understand that there’s tremendous value in being a poet. Poetry can change things in a way that perhaps many things cannot. You have to accept when things do not go well like when your work is not well-received. It is still important that you have written what you have written. Especially for women, you have to take yourself seriously because nobody is going to take you seriously unless you do.
What does your writing desk look like?
I’m obsessed with this question. For the longest time, I had a lovely office room at IIT and even set up a table thinking I would write there during my spare time. But writing never happened there, the space felt like I had to be this official person. I grew up in a very tiny house and started writing as a child. And I wasn’t cut up that I had no space of my own. As I grew older, I read that other writers had tables, desks, and corners. When my children were young, I used to go off to Pondy for my own little writing residency, stay in a guest house for about a week with minimal contact with family. Now, I live in a modest three-bedroom apartment and my kids are still in and out of the house. My mother’s apartment has a spare room that she doesn’t use. I’ve set up a desk there. I don’t manage to go there often but I try and set aside the best part of the day for my writing.
Future plans
In 2024, I want to do some more translations. I have been working on a sequence of poems based on women characters in the Mahabharata.
Priced at Rs 100, the collection is available on Amazon