[Reader-list] poetry: Alan Gilbert interview with Vivek Narayanan

[inder salim]

Alan Gilbert
Interview with Vivek Narayanan (Part I)

I first met Vivek Narayanan here in New York City at the Beats in
India: A Soul of Asia Symposium hosted by the Asia Society, which I
blogged about back in June. I really enjoyed talking with him, and he
agreed to being interviewed via email once he returned to India in
August. Because it's a bit long, I've divided the interview into two
parts.
Vivek was born in India to Tamil-speaking parents, grew up in Zambia,
did undergraduate and graduate work in the United States (continuing
with the latter in South Africa), and moved back to India in 2000. His
first book of poems, Universal Beach, was published in 2006 by Harbour
Line Press in Mumbai, and his poetry has appeared internationally in a
variety of print and online venues. He's also consulting editor for
the journal Almost Island.

Alan: If someone asked me to outline a few general trends in
contemporary U.S. poetry, I might be hesitant to do so because of the
risk of both generalization and overlooking something important.
Nevertheless, I'm going to ask you if you could provide a brief
introduction to a few aspects of current poetic practice in India,
especially among younger poets.

Vivek: It's especially hazardous to speak of Indian poetry in general
terms because there are dozens of languages with active literary
scenes and histories. Nevertheless, since you ask, a few broad,
tenuous points about the national scene as seen through my restricted
vision:
There are no especially influential aesthetically or formally
motivated "movements" today that would really be comparable, in verve
or sense of purpose, to the different kinds of "new poetry" or
"progressive poetry" movements that sprouted in many Indian languages
after independence. The most significant recent shift, in many Indian
languages, has been the rise of literary poetry by Dalits and other
lower castes, and this began to be significant in some languages by
the early '70s. More recently, Dalit poetry has been less innovative
on the level of form but, since Indian dialects can be very heavily
marked and shaped by caste, the rise of Dalit writing has sometimes
meant a transformation in the language and linguistic registers of
both poetry and prose.

The fact that India is home to many languages has led to various kinds
of rhetorical wars between languages and literatures; often this has
meant a collective attack on English as a somehow "inauthentic"
language, and sometimes this has also meant less publicized wars
between representatives of languages other than English, jockeying for
position on the national stage. For years, I think, there was an
unproductive standoff between what I like to think of, to simplify, as
the relative superficial and derivative quality of a lot of English
poetry written in India and the relative parochialism of much poetry
written in the bhashas. This is all changing dramatically, and the
complex linguistic ecology of India is, for my money, coming into its
own in various ways. English has become more integral, as a daily part
of life, across class and caste, across India, than ever before; at
the same time, many other languages are slowly coming into a new
cosmopolitanism and confidence. Younger Indian poets are more free of
linguistic anxieties, more nonchalantly multilingual than ever before.
There are interesting bilingual magazines starting up. I'm excited to
see where the cross-pollination leads.

The internet is completely changing the way young Indian poets read.
This is true everywhere, but note that in India libraries are very
badly stocked, bookstores are flooded with pulp, and importing books
or purchasing them off the net can be prohibitively expensive. Access
to the internet can be very cheap in India; in Africa, as a contrast,
it is often expensive. So young Indian poets lean very heavily on the
net for their reading matter, which is to say that their reading is
sometimes broader but also thinner, all singles and no albums, if you
know what I mean. To try and counter this, to be in touch with
complete collections of world poetry, some of us are constantly
getting entire books photocopied for each other.

I often find myself joking that, although creative writing workshops
are often disparaged and dismissed in India as worthless and
imitative, even dangerous, many poets write as if they had attended a
creative writing course. Which is to say, they write, in whatever
language, in the conversational, narrative, free-verse style that has
become, for the most part, the "comfort zone" of international poetry.
Alan: You and I met at the Beats in India symposium. The day's panels
and presentations centered on Allen Ginsberg, Peter Orlovsky, Gary
Snyder, and Joanne Kyger's 1962 trip to India, with particular focus
on Ginsberg's visit to Calcutta and his desire to meet poets there.
Have you encountered any equivalent to this kind of poetry sojourn?
Have you met any U.S. poets visiting India? I know that you've met
your fair share of poets while here in the United States. Is the
internet replacing the need, or desire, for poets to travel this way?

Vivek: At the symposium, Eliot Weinberger asked Gary Snyder if young
poets today no longer took that kind of daring, soul-searching,
transformative trip, the kind that we know both he and Snyder took,
and I remember that the younger poets in the audience went on the
defensive a little. There might be some uncomfortable truth in what he
was suggesting: do poets today travel more for networking than soul
searching? (Though it's also worth asking how many American poets,
even in "those days," went as far as Ginsberg did, living in India for
nearly two years.) At the same time, Alan, you remembered a trip you
took "on the rough" in India in 1999, dipping your toe in the very
same Ganges as Allen Ginsberg, though it was perhaps a little more
choked with bones and industrial effluent by then, and I remembered
the poet Michael Scharf, whom I met in India and again in the United
States, who's now gone off to settle in the small, distant,
difficult-to-access Northeast Indian hill town of Shillong, in the
state of Meghalaya, which oddly just happens to have produced an
inordinately high number of Bob Dylan impersonators as well as Indian
poets writing in English, and, indeed, I remembered my own long
hitchhiking trips across the USA in the early '90s, back when brown
men with beards were not yet quite considered dangerous, sleeping on
the side of the road or even the highway or, a little earlier,
traveling through Mississippi, the landscape somehow reminding me of
the Africa I grew up in, sleeping in parks or abandoned houses or with
people I met, hanging out with different sections of the American
underclass who took me into their lives with startling generosity,
without batting an eyelid. Later I traveled in similar ways in Africa
and India and elsewhere, but those initial trips in America were
crucial, and were possible for me precisely because I was an outsider.
On one hand, this meant I was partly a cipher to those I met, not
easily locatable in terms of social or cultural or caste background,
and that gave me room to maneuver; on the other hand, it was my lack
of information that freed me up, the fact that I didn't really know
that much about where I was going, didn't pre-judge what kind of
situations could be "dangerous" or harmful or not.
So this is one aspect of the foreign "sojourn," the search for
alienation that opens up the space for a self to reinvent itself.
Fundamentally, it's about the importance of experience. That may sound
like an obvious thing to say, but I think there was a scary "pure"
postmodernist sort of moment, one that some poets are still stuck in,
when all was irony and referentiality, when bodily lived experience,
the evidence of the senses and the innards, was considered essentially
worthless. We're coming out of that now, returning to our bodies as a
counter to the compelling but subtly distorting and deeply obscuring
mirror of the internet (read: my understanding of the American poetry
scene while sitting over here with less access to physical poets or
physical books from America), but we have to be able to do it without
relying on the naïve and simplistic identity categories of earlier
generations, or the essentialism. The Beats in India symposium
revealed to me a fascinating, doubled set of what might be called
"productive misrepresentations," with the Beats projecting an
imaginary, exaggerated spirituality onto India and the Indians
projecting a similarly inaccurate freedom onto America. But in the
'60s, it was still easy to dramatize one's journey as "West vs. East"
in ways that look comically silly to us now. In recent years we've
been trying on "U.S. vs. India," a similar—albeit more
concrete—binary, and you still see this, say, when Bush meets Singh or
in the dying, ridiculous gasp of the multiculti movie (Outsourced,
anyone?), but this is clearly not right to me either. It will be a
challenge for poets to—slowly—reconceptualize experience and the idea
of travel without falling back on identity- or nation-state based
categories, and then manifest this in their practice with each other.

Alan: For the past couple years, you've worked in Delhi at the Sarai
Programme of the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, the
former of which was co-founded by the artist group Raqs Media
Collective. Did that experience—particularly the Raqs Media
Collective's conceptual documentary approach—have any influence on
your own thinking about poetry?

Vivek: Yes, I've learned a tremendous amount from interacting with all
the people at Sarai, as well with research fellows from CSDS, its
older parent organization that has long been committed to the idea of
the "public intellectual," interacting with a great number of
colleagues that are involved in all kinds of innovative research and
practice, including, certainly, the founding members of Sarai: Raqs
Media Collective, the anthropologist/urban theorist Ravi Sundaram and
the philosopher/historian of film, Ravi Vasudevan. There's a spirit of
restlessness, exchange, and collaborative invention that is very
alive. The attempt has been to create a space for intellectual
engagement outside of formal academia and academic departments, one in
which, for instance, art is not just assigned to the realm of emotion
but is also seen as a valid way to think about the world.
I've learnt a lot through Sarai's thematic obsessions, which try to
sniff out new ways of looking at Indian cities and the South Asian and
global "now" that go beyond the old rhetoric of "development." Partly
as a result of being here, I think, I've also moved beyond thinking of
myself as a Poet, thinking more about poetry as a practice or set of
practices than as some kind of innate identity. And yes, there's a
sense, that animates the work of Raqs, where a document of the massive
changes in our environment could be made through a whole range of
inventive forms and formal explorations, not just via the old, tired,
categorical, heavily narrated form or mode that we think of when we
hear the word (yawn) "documentary."

Alan: In an essay you wrote entitled "Four Ground-breaking Things In
Five Issues of Civil Lines or, Ways to Get Your Head Out of the
Postcolonial Sand," a brief history of the journal Civil Lines, you
mention a sociological and journalistic imperative in Indian writing,
both fiction and poetry. Can you talk about this a little more? Are
there ways of circumventing this imperative that don't entail lapsing
into an imported mode of European belles-lettrism or U.S.
blockbusterism?
Vivek: There is a great deal of energy and activity and change on
Indian streets that, unlike say with the United States, has not really
been documented; one feels the need to bring it into print, and many
Indians are happy just to see something that they know well described
nicely in a book, to experience that recognition. Many non-Indians,
needless to say, are curious, one might even say voyeuristic, to know
the "plain facts" of what goes on. Looking at it less cynically, it
seems also a shame, and a tragedy even, for literature to give up
seeing, observation. But when the writing is in English, the question
of audience is complex, and the question of legibility is troubled. To
whom are these worlds being made legible? An Indian or international
elite? So I guess it's the ease, the supposed transparency, not to
mention the streamlined commercial viability, of the journalistic or
sociological mode that sometimes troubles me.

So the question would be, how might we propose different, alternative
modes that still incorporate seeing, the evidence of the senses,
without smoothening it all out and making it easy chewing? I suppose
I've already answered this as best I can, for now, in the previous
question. Recent Indian writing has been extremely timid and
unadventurous with regard to form; the "innocent, simple writer" is an
image that's carefully constructed, duly championed in Indian letters.
I'm not saying that a "transparent" narrative form can't be brilliant
and profound, you understand, just that it shouldn't be a dogma or an
imperative, that there should be more space cleared for plurality and
the innovation of literary forms.
I should hasten to add that my (unoriginal) comment about the
"sociological and journalistic imperative" applies specifically to
Indian writing in English. Writing in some of the other Indian
languages can at times be very subjective or full of rhetorical
flourishes—which, as you can imagine, is a different kind of problem.




Alan Gilbert
Interview with Vivek Narayanan (Part II)
Alan: In "Four Ground-breaking Things In Five Issues of Civil Lines
or, Ways to Get Your Head Out of the Postcolonial Sand," you make
equations between particular historical moments in India and its
literature. Here in the United States, writers and artists have worked
for eight years under the cloud of the Bush administration, and, to a
certain extent, the lingering effects of September 11. While some
might argue that this has led to a renewed politicization among
writers and artists, in fact it's also been accompanied by an
increased interest in the fantastical, the grotesque, and the
nihilistic. Are there political conditions in India informing current
poetic and artistic practice?

Vivek: For a while, India was ruled by the Hindu right, and this
period reached its nadir in the dark tragedy of the Gujarat pogroms in
2002, even darker for having been written about and studied so
extensively without the murderers, to this day, once being brought to
justice. I think Gujarat did politicize even the most apolitical of
artists, and many average folk, for that matter. There was a lot of
energy gathered during this time. I can't exactly draw out chains of
causality, but I suspect that, after the electoral defeat of the Hindu
right, on the national level at least, this energy found expression in
a new openness and vibrancy, including a new openness about sexuality,
including queer sexuality, at least in the metros, and all of this in
turn informed art practice.

However, as you say, everything cuts two ways. The new liberal
coalition government shared, more or less, one thing with its
predecessor: an obsession with India's rise as a superpower, with
India's supposed "arrival." This is a nationalistic, futuristic
fantasy that's played out in the papers and on TV every day, and
writers and artists are affected by it regardless of their political
affiliation. On one hand, it means a welcome new confidence and
adventurousness among writers and artists; on the other side, it
signals shades of jingoism, insularity, careerism, smugness. To
compound the matter, the traditional left/communist parties, through
their bizarre, inconsistent, and even right-wingish politics have now
lost any last shred of credibility they ever had, so it would be
correct to say that many of us are now feeling, politically, rather
confused and disheartened. In the back rooms, all the talk is about
the Hindu right seizing the opportunity and maybe coming back to power
soon, on the "anti-terror" ticket/racket.

Alan: In a post a few months ago to the Equivocaliser blog, you wrote
that, "For some time I've wanted to find formal structures and
procedures that would address the question of ownership and authorship
in poetry and find ways to admit writers of poetry into this
discussion." Have you discovered any?

Vivek: The performance documented in the post you mention was a first
attempt to do that, and I've discussed it in detail. In part, it was
meant to be provocative, since all each writer had to part with was
one or two lines of their own poetry, written to a very simple, shared
constraint. In any case, I was thrilled to find out how many people
contributed, how many were willing, as one respondent put it, to
"disappear into the occasion." Of course, none of the writers knew
what was going to happen to their line(s) in the final performance,
and neither did I, really, until a couple of hours before.

I'm titillated by the possibility that over time we might learn to do
this thing better, give mass coordinated performances, devising our
lines carefully with a growing understanding of how our contributions
might be deployed, learn to take control and give our own variations
on the process. Of course, with regards to the larger question of
copyright and ownership, it's really remarkable how conservative
poets—not to mention the estates of poets—are on this issue,
especially given poetry's completely marginal place on the far edge of
capitalism, and the fact that a wider dissemination of poetry (or
anything else) only helps to expand the market for it.

Alan: You've recently begun to incorporate a performance component
into your poetry readings. For instance, you've started readings
sitting in the back of the audience; you began a poetry reading on a
cell phone outside the venue (reminiscent of what was perhaps Vito
Acconci's last "official" poetry reading, which he literally phoned in
from different pay phones around New York City); you've experimented
with different forms of audience participation. Can you talk about the
importance of performance to your work?
Vivek: I grew up in Africa, so fairly early on, rappers and then
people like Linton Kwesi Johnson and the great Mutabaruka were heroes.
I'm just speculating, I don't want to essentialize, but I wonder if a
great many poets who see themselves, say, as "people of color" are
simply less likely to see "performance" as somehow "tainted." They
consider it as an integral part of their idea of poetry, regardless of
how their relationship to modernism and the formal literary sphere
might have evolved over time. What's more, there's a level on which
performance is a part of writing; gradually, you grasp that if you
hear and inflect the language in a slightly non-standard way, then
performance can serve as a kind of proof, of your prosody.

"Performance" in that wider sense was something I believed in, and
worked on, more or less from the time I began to go public with
poetry, maybe 15, 20 years ago. What did happen, however, was a
disenchantment a) with the slam/spoken word style, and b) with poetry
recited to a musical backdrop. Both modes I think are dead ends by
now, or cul-de-sacs at best—the first because it has settled too
easily into a set of mannerisms (the best poets from the movement,
such as Lemn Sissay, are still great because their performances are in
many ways an attack on, refusal or negation of everything the audience
has come to see), the second, because hip hop with its offshoots has
taken the whole word-music equation to such unbelievable heights of
skill that "spoken word" just seems unable to compete.

So in thinking about what to do differently with performance in the
aftermath of these disenchantments, I found myself going back to
fundamentals beyond language—the context of the performance above all,
which might include the temporality of a poem, the interplay between
ephemeral and lasting effects in a poem, the presence or absence of
the body, the role of the audience, the possibility of collaboration,
the possibility of "remote" performances, how to channel and recover
the long, varied history of poetry performance styles available to us
on record, and so on. It made sense to look to the history of
avant-garde performance and to the kinds of things that have been
happening in the art world, a visionary like Acconci leaping across
that border. A lot of what I end up doing depends just on visiting the
site where I have to perform, ideally with a collaborator, and seeing
what it is that can and needs to be done. There are people in Delhi
like the mesmerising performance artist Inder Salim who are doing far
more extreme stuff, using their bodies, poetry, language, performance.
I don't personally want to get too far away from representational and
composed poetry, just to learn to hold it in tension with its context.
For me, the key question, the only one that really matters, is still,
"How and why do we make poems public?"

Alan: In your manuscript "Mr. Subramanian" you utilize a lyrical,
disjunctive prose to ask: What and where is a "native place"? How are
we to think about origin, history, and tradition in a new century that
already feels broken? The poems in your somewhat ironically titled
"Lectures in Indian History" manuscript are also lyric in mode, but
shorter, more personal. At the same time, they seem to be very much
about movement—though in this instance more literally, less
transculturally. How does the relationship between form and
location/dislocation play out in your poetry?

Vivek: Yes, it's strange, one is full of contradictions, and poetry is
the place where one can get at and investigate those contradictions
most nakedly; the poems, sometimes veering off unpredictably, always
seem just a little bit ahead of where one's theoretical
self-understanding is at. My first book, Universal Beach, which came
out two years ago, was really meant to be a big "tata-byebye" to the
very possibility of roots or place or single location, to defend my
own, inescapable, rootlessness. I should mention that a few years
before it came out, I had left South Africa, the place where I
envisioned spending my whole life, unable, for a variety of reasons,
to return. "The Subramanians" and the "Lectures in Indian History," on
the other hand, suddenly seemed to open a kind of "Indian chapter" in
my poems, albeit with all kinds of dislocations and
interruptions—sometimes I think, well, I'm not really an Indian, but
I'm forced to play one on TV—which leads me to think of it as a kind
of retro book, retro also because it sometimes shows nostalgia for
aspects of '80s India that are being obliterated or changed beyond
recognition in the current, epic transformation.
So, yes, I guess there's some attempt there to make a new, tentative
relationship to the past given, as you say, the "already broken," to
try and see what would happen if one thought (so-called) "tradition"
and "experimentation" together, as if they were the same thing. This
seems to sometimes lead me to go back to historical forms but maul or
rework them in some way that can get to their more fundamental
properties. I seem to have gone, for instance, from writing ghazals to
writing various kinds of choric forms that people say are
"ghazal-like," using refrains, repetitions, disjunctions, mixing it up
with some of the repetitive "bhajan" forms I sang in my childhood.
There are attempts—ultimately absurd, inaccurate, quixotic attempts—to
imitate Tamil metres in English, and to get at, say, the percussive
sound of Tamil in English, to run a prose line that could suddenly get
lyrical without warning. There seem to be attempts by a lot of poets
today to try and gradually alter the sound and movement and syntax of
the English language for once and for all, to gradually make it more
and more malleable and porous—I like that. Mostly, like any struggler,
I'm just trying to bring all the different aspects of me together on
the page, to pay that price.



-- 

h