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Aami is a biographical film based on the life of writer and leading Malayalam author Kamala Surayya, also known as Kamala Das or Madhavikutty.

“Her open and honest treatment of female sexuality, free from any sense of guilt, infused her writing with power, but also marked her as an iconoclast in her generation.”

“Though she never formally associated herself with the feminist movement or described herself as one, she was a feminist in many ways.  She never let anyone deter her from doing what she wanted to do by constantly rebelling against the system with her work. She created for herself a space to have the freedom of choice. She dared to find her voice in a society that actively tried to shut it down, and she used that voice to express her experiences of the feminine sensibility that were universal in many ways.”

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Did these people [in academia who claim that they are not exposed to disabled people] realize that when they encountered the work of Rosa Luxemburg (who limped), Antonio Gramsci (a crippled, dwarfed hunchback), John Milton (blind), Alexander Pope (dwarfed hunchback), George Gordon Brown (club foot), [Jorge] Luis Borges, James Joyce, and James Thurber (all blind), Harriet Martineau (deaf), Toulouse-Lautrec (spinal deformity), Frida Kahlo (osteomyelitis), Virginia Woolf (lupus), they were meeting people with disabilities? Do filmgoers realize when they watch the films of James Ford, Raoul Walsh, André de Toth, Nicholas Ray, Tay Garnett and William Wyler that these directors were all physically impaired? Why is it when one looks these figures in dictionaries of biography or encyclopedias that their physical disabilities are usually not mentioned – unless the disability is seen as related to creativity, as in the case of the blind bard Milton or the deaf Beethoven? There is an ableist notion at work here that anyone who creates a canonical work must be physically able. Likewise, why do we not know that Helen Keller was a socialist, a member of the Wobblies, the International Workers of the World, and an advocate of free love? We assume that our ‘official’ mascots of disability are nothing else but their disability.

Lennard J. Davis, Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness, and the Body (via irwonder)

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I can’t quite shake the feeling that everything I’m doing I have done before. That’s not to say that I’m living with a sense of deja vu, no, all of this is quite new, quite fresh – but each individual sensation only serves to remind me of a different time. Peculiar. I know there are a host of things I am yet to feel. But these days, every emotion, every sensation, comes with the sense that I am being sieved out of a hot whirling liquid. Slowly immersed in something old and overwhelming, and then suddenly thrown up, held up against the grey bright light.

It’s almost impossible to articulate, and I thought being alone would help with this, but no: every walk in the park, the slightest slant of light, and I’m thinking of another time I walked alone, coat swinging around my legs. A morning where I’ve eaten a light breakfast and there is coffee in my fingertips, my body feeling light and not of itself, and I’m on a train again. Ella in the kitchen and I can swear I’ve seen that same expression, those lidded wide eyes, a turn and twist of the mouth of restrained playfulness, on another face. The only thing that might be new is all the fear, the deep sense of incongruity. Once I stood against a shop window on a summer’s day, admiring the reflection that we cast in the glass. Now I catch sight of our frames passing through a mirror, fingers pushing toothpaste against teeth, and I’m concerned that this doesn’t look like an image that can imprint itself on any surface.

None of the sensations are tangible, which is further evidence of a muddling in my mind. Not only is it internal, but I have the distinct sense that others are living this way too. That the strains of a song might remind someone of another person, another time, and I can grasp at that outline in their mind even though it’s entirely a figment of mine. I can half-feel the moment I’m imagining they are in, a moment of whimsy, something easier and substantial, superimposed on everything else. I’m now in a taxi without a working air conditioner in the winter heat, and I’m also on a bus hurtling into a summer evening, reliving hands on mine, I’m giddy with happiness. Maybe it’s that some pleasures deserve repetition, and I’ve been fooled into thinking everything needs to feel like it has never happened before for me to attempt to commit every part of it to memory. I should feel, now, that there’s some hope in knowing that everything I’ve felt I can feel again. And then the idea that nothing is really out of reach, everything still somehow retrievable in the unlikeliest of places.

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Anjali Nerlekar (2017) “‘Indian’ doesn’t exclude me”: An interview with Eunice de Souza, in Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 53:1-2

Anjali Nerlekar: A common theme I find in poets of your generation is that you’re going back to much earlier literature to look for literary connections or heritage. 

Eunice de Souza: Well you know, that was mainly because everybody keeps going on about everything they don’t like being from the west. And the second thing is that we are not genuinely England. My thesis was about that – the critique in the postcolonial culture. And there are absolutely horrendously backward ideas of what “Indian-ness” consists of. So I spent years reading everything I could about what “Indian” was supposed to be. And in the end, you don’t really find anything. 

AN: There is no one definition or it should be left unstated? 

E de S: No, no, it is often stated. M.K. Naik says, someone like Ramanujan, because he’s a Hindu, can be Indian. You know what I mean – they treat Ramanujan as a Hindu poet. So he has access, emotionally and otherwise, to certain traditions and myths and so on, which we don’t have. That’s complete crap.

AN: You have been critiqued by some for having co-opted “Indian” for all English poetry – the interpretation being that you equate Indian to English.

E de S: I have never done that. I’m just saying, Indian doesn’t exclude me. You know, in all these fantasies, where authors in English are scribbling in their elegant drawing rooms, while in reality, the garbage can across the street smells up again – I said please come visit where I live and negotiate dead rats and garbage. You know, it’s a kind of fantasy world you imagine the English writers living in. I’m amazed at the extent to which they go on and on about it. I went to a seminar once, and Rajendra Yadav was supposed to talk about Hindi writing, yet he spent the entire lecture ranting about writers in English. I mean talk about what you’re supposed to talk about! My blood boils when I hear an Indian talking about “Indian culture”. This is a primitive impulse, finding something coherent and limited and saying, “This is Indian culture”, and everybody else is excluded. 

AN: And that naturally brings us to religion in your poems, especially with the references to the Catholic Church.

E de S: Well there’s that little poem “Conversation Piece”:

My Portuguese-bred colleague picked up a clay shivalingam one day and said: Is this an ashtray? No, said the salesman, This is our god. (de Souza 2009, 14)11

Darryl D’Monte, who was the editor of the Times of India, published a couple of my poems in a supplement they had begun publishing. One of the angry letters sent to me at the time asked me, “What if we mistook the crucifix for a fork?” I don’t understand this, but this is dangerous.

I guess I am looking at religion but I am not part of it. I am aware of it and I know that people need it. I don’t need it myself, but lots of people do.

AN: Is this because of your background, how or where you were raised? 

E de S: Yes, the ideas of hell and sin are so deeply rooted in us, that even though I am not religious at all, I still sometimes have these feelings about the possibilities of hell. Also a sense of guilt and responsibility. This is true of every Catholic woman I know. It may also be true of others but the Catholic woman always feels she can never do enough.

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no one gets over their lana del rey phase. no one. you may think you have, but you haven’t. you may not have listened to her music in years, but someday, she will drag you back. maybe not today, and maybe not tomorrow, but someday, you will hear one of her songs, and lana herself will appear to drag you by the ankle into the candy-flavored, murder-filled fog

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What do you consider as your everyday indulgences or small pleasures?

my morning cup of coffee (which i make very strong, and it’s really really good coffee) is my biggest everyday indulgence. other than that, after dinner i usually settle down with some nice fruit & moisturise my feet. small everyday pleasures i wouldn’t give up. anyway who are you! 

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what do you consider your early politicizing experiences? (sorry if this is too personal!)

hi sweetheart, not at all! i was thinking about this yesterday while listening to a podcast which always opens by asking their interviewees what drew them to radical politics, and i was reflecting on how my answer wouldn’t be interesting or really very socially situated (i.e. i did not come to politics through my family, or through any social upheaval around me). i came to politics because i liked to read (plus i had a strain of unexplained melancholy) and i spent a lot of time on the internet reading, which eventually drew me into western feminist politics. the earliest political content i remember reading and passionately agreeing with was american feminists talking about abortion, and it didn’t take long before i realised that these weren’t arguments or narratives that really fit my own context or surroundings… by then, i was lucky enough to know i liked arguing, reading, and writing and I found myself in the hands of a sociology teacher who changed me by making us read Marx, John Berger, Noam Chomsky, the Dalit Panthers, we even learned about indigenous resistance to dams in India etc. i suppose it clicked for me in a way that it didn’t for some of my peers, if only because I was reading outside the classroom and I was very certain there was something very wrong about everything around me. (maybe a stroke of chance that I ended up a Marxist instead of a punk?) then I found bloggers who taught me a lot at a young age, and by the time I was in university I found myself gravitating towards activist and organising spaces. it was a journey more of reading and reflecting, applying what i was reading to see injustices around me (of poverty, of violence, of sexism), and a lot of unlearning. i recognised my experiences as political only after the fact, i suppose, and i really do have writers and teachers to thank above all else. (ps i am in bangalore tomorrow if u are free this weekend!) 

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Is money a top priority in your life?

interesting q, i’m assuming you’re asking whether this is a personal priority (instead of a political one). ive been privileged enough to not have to think about money an excessive amount growing up and have had a wide safety net, but definitely would say being able to make enough from my career to live a reasonably good quality of life + provide for dependents is a priority for me

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Slightly Open Clam Shell

Georgia O'Keeffe

1926

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What is your inspiration? (poetry) & Where can I read your work?

hello! it’s sweet of you to ask. i answered this first question more than a year ago here, and i don’t think my answer has changed: “nothing! i never feel inspired to write! i usually just have a string of sentences that won’t dislodge themselves from my brain. i mean sometimes a really beautiful moment/landscape will make me want to write about it, but is that inspiration? i wish i were a more disciplined writer but i really can’t force words. often I’ll write to unfreeze something from my mind, thinking that if I write it out I’ll stop thinking about it. taken ahold of by a sensation to get rid of a sensation! or often I want to memorialise a moment: not forget it, try honour it but ending up desecrating it with words in the process. sometimes i’ll write as revenge (usually against a man); these days increasingly I write because I’ve had a vivid dream I want to remember/analyse. sometimes I write to my future self: to remember and remind, like i keep writing myself little snippets on my phone to refer to in case i’m grabbed by the impulse to text someone I shouldn’t. the idea is that if I write it, it’s out of my head, and through the writing process I find myself in a better place. mostly this works. i don’t know if it’s inspiration so much as recuperation.” the only thing I would add is that there are writers and people too, who inspire me to write better or be better or do better. sometimes reading their work or listening to them makes me feel like there is a hard core at the centre of something that can be put into order, or some disorder, that i can unravel through the writing process. i don’t write much anymore aside from this blog, and no poetry in the last year that’s come out under my own name. maybe i’ll return to it someday. thank you for your thoughtful question. 

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thought I was having a long miserable week – filled with all sorts of mundane mishaps like Delhi monsoon water seepage, a broken charger, being locked out of my house twice, feeling overwhelmed by the everyday – but found these photographs and remembered some pause. sometimes Delhi reminds me of London – same colonial style to the centre of the city, same sensation on a train in the drizzle going far West. same feeling in an expensive hotel with centralised air-conditioning and purified water (how does this exist here?), similar brooding quiet. not much else because i am also different. adorno wrote somewhere that he was grateful that academia had a poor division between work and leisure time – that there was no opposition between what he did for work and leisure, that work was absorbing and has his soul in it – but truly, the best thing about having a job is having an unburdened conscience outside working hours. i am good at wasting time, and even better when i’m not feeling guilty. last night, i received a thoughtful message that turned me instantly cold and I turned around and fell straight asleep. i’m seeing the limits to useless agonising, too.

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BLVR: There’s a line in I Love Dick: “The mystique of simplicity and silence—this had really fucked me up just like a lot of other women.” What is the truth of that? Like, what’s behind the mystique, in your experience?

CK: Wait, which mystique?

BLVR: The mystique of simplicity and silence. I think you’re talking about Dick and what was appealing about him.

CK: Oh, yes… oh, you know, it’s always, like, a fucking mess, right? It’s not truly a kind of Zen openness and absence of clutter. It’s just, like, an alcoholic mess.

Sheila Heti interviews Chris Kraus for The Believer

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Frank O'Hara

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I'm okay with anything tho leaning towards fiction and memoirs! x

some things I’ve read/re-read recently and enjoyed: Kamala Das’ autobiography, The Hour Past Midnight by Salma (truly amazing, and she has another novel in Tamil, Manamiyangal, which hasn’t been translated yet I think), all of Mahasweta Devi’s novels and plays are worth reading, as are Saadat Hasan Manto and Ismat Chughtai’s short stories. I’m really looking forward to Arundhati Roy’s latest (and I really did like God of Small Things, allowing for the important critiques that have been made of it), I found Upamanyu Chatterjee’s English, August fun and light (though it is very masculine in its humour, I really did like reading it), and I’ve been meaning to read Meena Kandasamy’s new book too (more memoir, I believe) and Sharanya Manivannan’s The High Priestess Never Marries. and if you like a light romance, I loved Those Pricey Thakur Girls by Anuja Chauhan. other memoirs I’ve enjoyed are A Life in Trans Activism by Revathi, and Karukku by Bama. oh also, I was at the launch of Mohanaswamy by Vasudhendra at Bangalore Pride last year (it’s about the experiences of a gay man in rural/urban Karnataka) and I hear good things from those who read it. also heard good things about Prayaag Akbar’s Leila, also haven’t read this yet. I’m sure there’s lots more I’m missing out and not thinking of… if you drop me your email address, maybe I can give you a more comprehensive list later. anyway, I hope this was helpful! 

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hahahah honestly you gave me the best one! 

tag yourself i’m antigona xxx

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Hi shruti! I hope ur having a good day, I really love the books and quotes u post/reblog about so I was wondering if u had any recs specifically for Indian literature?

hi sure! what are you most interested in – poetry, memoir, fiction? 

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Even when landing over Delhi around twenty days ago, it seemed utterly dry: broad and brown. The rivulet I thought might be water turned out to be a highway, speeding cars over glinting tarmac. I’d looked up the city on Google Maps before getting here, and it seemed to indicate a lot of forests and broad green spaces filled with promise, but it didn’t take me long to figure out that it would probably be months before I set foot in any of them. I remember saying to A that Bangalore is a profoundly alienating city: hard to get to know, since you respond to a city by being in it, and walking around Bangalore is a chore rather than a pleasure. Flaneurs need pavements, something to that effect. She said that she felt more at home in Delhi in that sense – that there was more public space, more happening, and more wandering – but I suspect that for the next months, I’ll only find myself wanting to get acquainted with the insides of a nice air-conditioned shopping mall. 

I wasn’t telling the truth before when I said I was writing, but I didn’t know that it was a lie when I wrote it: rather, the intention became inseparable from the act. You know when you lie about something and your brain constructs the story, the atmosphere for the lie, almost like it was actually happening in tandem with what you really did and where you were. For example, if you lied to your mother and said you were at a work thing when you were really perched on a plastic stool in a kitchen on the other end of town holding a beer. But you also felt, the whole time, that the alternate scenario of being at a boring work dinner was simultaneously playing out. The lie and the truth have the same starting and ending points – 5pm and 10pm, respectively – and within them, two very different evenings play out.

It wasn’t so much a lie as a genuine intention. Perhaps I’d even convinced myself that some snippets on my phone counted as writing. But I’m not accountable to you, you’re not my mother. I had vaguely jotted down a series of things that felt momentous: how Walter Benjamin loved the frottage of public transport, and that reminds me of how I’ve struggled to find a way to put something of myself in Bangalore, apart from when I’m on a train or a bus. I took a bus from Majestic and the bus conductor looked exactly like someone I hate – the same broad nose, the flecks of grey in the stubble. I imagined that in ten years their images would converge, muscles giving way to jowls. Even the metro gave way to such imaginings, watching people sign language into their phones and children swinging off the railings, I’d see something in them of every person I’ve met or known. 

I keep fantasising about cooking an elaborate dinner for someone, a full three courses – part of the menu will be saffron rice and roasted vegetables, and baking a cake. I’ve had dreams of picking out the right wine, inviting the right set of people. It’s taking over my life. And I asked someone what it might mean, and she thinks it’s that I feel undernourished in some way, or want to put energy into setting up a space of my own. But I think it’s that I want to work hard and get something right for the people I love. 

I read an essay yesterday that was gorgeously written but felt incomplete, like there was a story that hadn’t been carved out of the woodwork. Almost as if a good essay is supposed to make you feel that intangible movement, and some sense of conclusion: something has come full circle, in whatever way. But this heat makes me appreciate what's uninterrupted, an essay whose horizons are flat, whose motives are nothing but lazy indulgence, rounding off nothing, all the fingers moving restlessly to the next tab.