Sumana Roy | Photo Credit: Sushil Kumar Verma
The overnight rain had washed away all the soot from the exteriors of the buildings. The rain-washed streets were lined with petunias and dogrose flowers, which now bent with effort to carry the drops on their petals. All this cried out for poetry, for the exchange of ideas in the form of literary Add a, The eighth symposium in the ‘Literary Activism Series’ at the India International Centre, organized by the Center for the Creative and the Critical, Ashoka University, could not have come at a more opportune time.
With the theme ‘The Writer-Critic and Literary Studies’, the symposium was dedicated to the memory of Croatian-born writer-critic Dubravka Ugrašić. Addressed by Amit Chowdhary, Vidyan Ravinthiran, Jane Goldman, Sumana Roy, Ashutosh Bhardwaj and Martin Cowley, among others, the meeting forced to think, reflect and explore. Why are citations needed for a literary work to be considered authentic? Why does everything have to be publicized in the paper to be considered eligible? Ravinthiran, who teaches at Harvard, quotes critic and historian Lan Watt: “The whole game that our culture is playing is that nothing really happens until it’s in the paper.”
We caught up with writer-poet Sumana Roy, whose debut book, how i became a treeA work of non-fiction, was selected for the 2017 Shakti Bhatt Award and the Sahitya Akademi Award in 2019 and 2020. Edited excerpts:
Is the Internet a sanctuary of poetry in modern times, given that most poetry books go out of print soon after publication?
The world of poetry has begun to seem to me the inverse of the agrarian situation, where farmers are few and eaters are many—there are more poets than readers. The Internet has become an extension of the personal notebook, where one writes poems only to disguise them as pornography. There is a stock exchange in this world: very few poets are published ‘selected’ or ‘collected’; Many will keep putting out books every few years, because that’s the annoying thing about poems, you see — they just don’t stop coming, even when you know there’s almost no room for them in the world. So the Internet, almost as flexible as the mind, is where our poems can live, even if they are lonely and not seen by readers.
What does a poet-professor bring to his profession? Also, is education used by the poet to pay his bills?
In my talk at the symposium, I tried to remind myself, through the examples of Samar Chakraborty, Niranjan Mohanty, and Robin Nangam, of what the poet-professor brought to the classroom and how the new curriculum and the new literature marginalized the classroom. He has given that special nature and poetic intelligence. A job in academia pays the bills for a scientist just as much as it does for a poet. The work of both is necessary.
Aren’t literature classes in college like a haunt? If so, where does the poet disguise himself as a professor?
The PowerPoint slides that give form and structure to many literature classes today leave little room for poetry, which is as essential to poetry as it is to the classroom. We should be allowed to rest our spines by being on the alert at all times – a blissful serve-and-volley between the participants Add a/ Compulsion to speak and mark their presence without any definite order to the grading consciousness of the class or even the professor.
Is it fair to expect a poet from a small town to be close to nature, its trees, its birds, its sense of peace? I believe that’s how you started in Siliguri?
It’s a natural — natural — expectation, I think. But we know from our own lives that neither the mind nor the artist behaves in any way obedient to these expectations. I am often asked if I could have written my first book how i became a tree Had I not spent almost all my life in Siliguri. How can I tell if I would have been the same person if I had been born to a different set of parents? I do not expect novelists from Delhi to write only novels set in Delhi. Then, why expect this from a writer who lives her life in a small town? It’s just a stereotype.
ziya.salam@thehindu.co.in