When her first collection of poetry, Oru Maalaiyum, Innoru Maalaiyum (An Evening And Another Evening, 2000), was published to great acclaim, Tamil writer Salma had to lie to her husband’s orthodox Muslim family that she had uterine problems, to be permitted to go to Chennai with her mother and attend the book launch on the pretext of a visit to the doctor. She returned home without a copy of her own book. Rajathi Samsudeen, popularly known by her pen name Salma, is now an international literary figure.
She has been a guest of honour and the only representative of Tamil literature at the Frankfurt Book Fair (2006), the London Book Fair (2009) and the Beijing Book Fair (2010). Her novel, The Hour Past Midnight, was longlisted for the Man Asian Prize (2009) and shortlisted for the Crossword Book Prize (2010). Women Dreaming, another novel, was longlisted for the Dublin International Literary Award 2022. Both the books are translations from Tamil. From the days of having to hide her identity to write the truth, Salma, the feminist writer and activist, has now carved herself a space among national and international writers.
Poems of fearlessness
i, Salma (Red River), her first collection of poetry in English translation, was launched at the India International Centre, Delhi, this week. The book discussion, between the author and the translators, K Srilata and Shobhana Kumar, shed light on Salma’s poetry as a bold statement against the oppression of women in our society and literature as a means of liberation. “Though her fiction is available to us, Salma’s poetry was hitherto inaccessible to a larger audience in the country. This translation of her selected poems is a bridge between Tamil literature and us,” says Sukrita Paul Kumar, poet and academic, at the book launch.
Salma’s poetry, much like her
fiction, is an unflinching exploration of the constricted lives of women in a patriarchal world, and draws on her own lived experiences. It is, however, more intimate and personal to the writer. Poetry is for her, she says, an expression of her “grief, criticism and anger”, her “freedom song”. The book includes over 50 of Salma’s poems along with three essays on her poetry written by renowned literary figures such as Meena Kandasamy, Perumal Murugan and Kannan Sundaram, and an extensive interview of Salma about her life and work by author and translator Chandana Dutta, who is also the one who conceptualised and curated the book.
Poetic justice
Salma’s life itself has been a prolonged act of protest, against overwhelming odds. Denied education after attaining puberty, she was practically “jailed” in her own house because she was told that “religion dictated that women should not be seen by men outside the family after having reached puberty”. She had to stay indoors for almost eight-and-a-half years, till the day of her marriage, to come out. At her husband’s family, she was ordered to stop writing, which she had been doing for a while and was getting published in small-time magazines.
She, however, continued, from then on, under the pseudonym of ‘Salma’, a name she picked up from Khalil Gibran’s love poems. “I wanted to stick to a Muslim name because I was writing about the lives of Muslim women,” says the author. It was only when she won a panchayat election after her marriage, which came by way of reservation of seats for women, that she revealed to the world that she was ‘Salma’.
Feminist assertion
Salma, who states that “politics underlies every minute of our lives”, is a member of Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK). “It is essential that women have authority. It can stem from being educated, being financially independent or being a political leader. Authority is important and men know that it is something women should not be given,” says Salma. The poems in the collection present powerful images of feminist assertion. Salma writes unabashedly about the female body and sexuality and dissects institutions such as marriage and religion to expose the hypocrisies inherent in them.
“Salma’s poetry is known for the boldness with which it sings of the female body, its mapping of female sexuality, body politics and interiority. We have attempted to preserve her signature boldness, her aesthetic and her voice in our translations, trying our best to work with the rich vocabulary and idiom of body politics that she uses in her poems,” says Srilata, a poet herself, who translated the works in close collaboration with Shobhana Kumar, also a poet.
For Dutta, Salma’s life is “a lesson in finding one’s own path”. Talking about Salma’s journey, both literary and real-life, of holding her ground against an oppressive society, against patriarchy and religious orthodoxy, she says: “For me, Salma stands for transformation, with her firm dignity and deep belief in the strength of the self that can persevere through anything.”