#meena Kandasamy

[sivavakkiyar]

Meena Kandasamy, ‘The Noble Eightfold Path’, from Miss Militancy I think

small write up and context w/ poem here

[ardent-reflections]

I will hallucinate your halos, your holiness.

Meena Kandasamy

[susansontag]

With each progressive retelling, the hundreds became thousands, the thousands tended towards infinity, and the lice multiplied, becoming settlements and then townships and then cities and then nations. In my mother’s version of the story, these lice caused traffic disturbances on my hair, they took evening walks on my slender neck, they had civil war over territory, they recruited an enormous number of overenthusiastic child soldiers and then they engaged in out-and-out war with my mother. They mounted organized resistance, set up base camps in the soft area of the scalp above the ears and in the nape of the neck where it was always harder to reach, but they were being decimated slowly and surely by my mother’s indefatigable efforts. Every war strategy was deployed, Sun Tzu was invoked: appear weak when you are strong and appear strong when you are weak; when your opponent is of choleric temper, seek to irritate him with more chlorinated washes than he can handle; attack him when he is unprepared; force your enemy to reveal himself; be as rapid as the wind when you are wielding the paenseeppu (the merciless narrow-toothed lice comb that removed as many hairs as it removed lice and lice eggs and baby lice); make use of the sun and the strongest shampoo; above all, do not spend time bothering about lice rights and genocide tribunals when you are defending a liberated zone.

This is how my story of Young Woman as a Runaway Daughter became, in effect, the great battle of My Mother versus the Head Lice. And because my mother won this battle, the story was told endlessly, and it soon entered the canon of literature on domestic violence. The Americans had trigger warnings and graphic-content cautions attached to the course material, but otherwise it picked up a lot of traction elsewhere. It was taught in gender studies programmes, and women of colour discussed it in their reading groups (it was still a little too dirty and disorienting for white feminists, and it was perhaps considered a touch too environmentally unfriendly for the ecofeminists, and the postmodernists disregarded it because my mother’s telling ignored the crucial concept of my husband’s agency to beat me), and even those who forgot the original context of the story or the bad-marriage setting always remembered it as a fable about one mother’s unending, unconditional, over-conditioned love.

— Meena Kandasamy, When I Hit You

[figuringoutstill]

Mulligatawny dreams

anaconda. candy. cash. catamaran.

cheroot. coolie. corundum. curry.

ginger. mango. mulligatawny.

patchouli. poppadom. rice.

tatty. teak. vetiver.

i dream of an english

full of the words of my language.

an english in small letters

an english that shall tire a white man’s tongue

an english where small children practice with smooth round

 pebbles in their mouth to the spell the right zha

an english where a pregnant woman is simply stomach-child-lady

an english where the magic of black eyes and brown bodies 

   replaces the glamour of eyes in dishwater blue shades 

   and the airbrush romance of pink white cherry blossom skins

an english where love means only the strange frenzy

   between a man and his beloved, not between him and his car

an english without the privacy of its many rooms

an english with suffixes for respect

an english with more than thirty six words to call the sea

an english that doesn’t belittle brown or black men and women

an english of tasting with five fingers

an english of talking love with eyes alone

and i dream of an english

where men

of that spiky, crunchy tongue

buy flower-garlands of jasmine

to take home to their coy wives

for the silent demand of a night of wordless whispered love . . .

(By Meena Kandasamy)

[judgingbooksbycovers]

The Book of Desire

By Meena Kandasamy.

[obsessioncollector]

I have to turn insane to stay alive.

Meena Kandasamy, “Preface: Should you take offence...” in Ms. Militancy

[ashwinkumar1989]

Never Will I Forget You, Dear Comrade

Why do I write so many poems about Dr. Meena Kandasamy (celebrated author, poetess, translator, academic, intersectional feminist and anti-caste activist)? Well, you will find out in this particular poem: If I have not lost hope yet To you, goes the credit Because, you inspire thousands of people Including those who consider themselves incapable Of achieving anything noteworthy For social…

[nando161mando]

"Sanatan Dharma is the bedrock on which untouchability, caste violence, misogyny and rape culture get religious sanction in India."

— Meena Kandasamy

[purplepencilproject]

A Certain Mackerel Coloured Love

Where others senses scales that

weighed them with every glance,

you only saw the tear-waters

that makes these eyes, fish.

In them, you traced

my shattered temple-roots,

and heard the short-lived,

fish-songs of small seas.

You were given to poetry.

I was given to grand lies--

"Other eyes

are mere baits,

yours cast such strong, silken nets."

In our strange story,

you sought the sea...

She swam into you.

With a single lusty fish,

and a certain mackerel-coloured love.

Meena Kandasamy

[teawiththespleen]

never read any of meena kandasamy's stuff before accidentally came across the gypsy goddess and i have my heart in my mouth

[therukurals]

Fahadh Faasil in Aavesham (2024)

[ardent-reflections]

"I will hallucinate your halos, your holiness."

Meena Kandasamy

[calcifys]

This book I'm reading for feminist bookclub ... lol

[suchananewsblog]

New Delhi | 1,000 ways to oneness at the India Art Fair

As a witness to the India Art Fair (IAF) since its inception, I have a distinct memory from an earlier outtake — children peeking over the boundary wall of the fairgrounds, disrupting the manicured landscape with raw curiosity and unchecked laughter returned in equal compassion by waving visitors and participants. A performance of childlike spirit flowing across, uncontained. So, on engaging with…

[pyrriax]

On Holiness & Slaughterhouses

unstated, deathconsciousness / unknown / consumed, david cronenberg / @pyrriax / unknown / theophagy definition, merriam-webster dictionary / agnus dei (lamb of god), francisco de zurbaran - detail / hélène cixous, from stigmata: escaping texts; "bathsheba, interior bible" / unknown / unstated, deathconsciousness / @pyrriax / meena kandasamy, from mrs sunshine / @/detailedart / @pyrriax / alexei antonov / unstated, deathconsciousness / "stag", edwin landseer / unstated, deathconsciousness / jean bernard / silas denver melvin / sierra demulder / kim fu, 'lifecycle of the mole-woman', from how festive an ambulance / margaret atwood, 'speeches for dr. frankenstein', from the animals in that country / deep, deep - have a nice life / louise bourgeois / @pyrriax / unstated, deathconsciousness

An fic-based webweave, created for @my-little-versaille for the @mcythorrorgiftexchange!

[crimsonicarus]

Banners: Moondust, James Young Quotes: The secret history by Donna Tart - The weary blues by Langston Hughes - Unknown - Sleepless. " I Must Be Living Twice": New and Selected Poems by Eileen Myles - Privilege by Beau Taplin - Honeybee by Trista Mateer - Seizure by Louise Glück - Sappho's leap by Erica Jong - The misunderstandig by Albert Camus - The cid by Pierre Corneille - Tune: the pertridge sky by Li Qingzhao - I had a dream about you by Richard Siken - Tumbl user: inanotheruniverse - Unknown - Unknown work by F. Scott Fitzgerald - A letter to Vita Sackville-West by Violet Trefusis - A poem for Haruko by June Jordan - Mrs Sunshine by Meena Kandasamy - unknown