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<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/interviews/bequest-enlightenment-interview-robert-wood/"></div>I first met Robert Wood at the University of Western Australia many years ago, where, as PhD students, we were involved in the postgraduate journal collective. After countless conversations and cups of tea, we learned that we shared a passion for contemporary Australian poetry, a childhood in the suburb of Wembley (6014), and a love of neighborhood Asian eateries. To discover Wood&#8217;s writing as a friend was to relax into fragmented experimental poems, to see his prose negotiate the constructs of nationhood and backyard spaces, and to arrive at a lyric mode that is comfortable in its space whilst welcoming you into it. Wood and I shot emails back and forth to explore some thoughts about his work.
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AMY LIN: Much of your poetry is based on the suburbs, and more recently is based on a place in the Southwest of Western Australia. Can you tell us a bit about Redgate and how it informs your poetics?
ROBERT WOOD: <a href="https://www.google.com/maps/place/Redgate+WA+6286/@-34.0191864,114.988754,10917m/data=!3m2!1e3!4b1!4m5!3m4!1s0x2a2fac2273c6bead:0x500f638247a0de0!8m2!3d-34.0272248!4d115.0283597">Redgate</a> is a very special part of the world. It always was and always will be Wardandi land and I am so grateful to be there as a guest. Although I have been going to Redgate for my whole life, thirty, forty, one hundred years are the blink of an eye in the timeline of traditional owners. That needs to be respected, now more than ever. The knowledge that families have there, including young leaders like Zac Webb, is something I continue to learn from.
Redgate includes a beach (Calgardup), a limestone quarry, a national park, a surf break, a winery, a river, a collection of houses, paddocks with sheep, a road, and a big rock (Isaacs Rock). It is where I have craypots and dive for abalone. It’s where I fish with my dad for herring and skipjack and salmon. It is where I burn off the block with my brother-in-law, where I sit around the potbelly stove with my sisters, where I cook curry with my mother. It is where there are orchids and frogs and flowers that are only found there. And it is where I go with my wife and child to take shelter and find my way along the balanced path.
Redgate is a bedrock from which I work. It is a place that matters to my poetry and my poetics. I think of it as a suburb, not country though there is nature, not city though there is culture. The town of Witchcliffe just up the road is expanding towards us too and with that there are subdivisions and quarter acre blocks, new service stations, <a href="http://www.yardbyrd.com.au">small cafes</a>, and tennis courts. Redgate informs my writing then, not only as something to write about, but as a spirit to draw upon, a case study, and somewhere to feel a sense of world historic belonging when I am in and out of the Indian Ocean itself.
You speak of world historic belonging, but there is also a place that one’s poetry belongs to or at least borrows from. Your poetic style has developed to be shorter, more lyrical, and less fragmentary than your earlier poems. Can you tell us about the departure from your earlier style, and what it has allowed you in your craft?
I had poetry around me growing up and people who had a poetic practice in words and deeds, but I learned to value writing in university. This was under <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Bernstein">Charles Bernstein</a> at the University of Pennsylvania and Philip Mead at the University of Western Australia. This education was in a Western experimental tradition. Like a good student, I wrote in this vein when I was starting out and I will always be thankful to them for those lessons in particular.
In response to this university-led attack of the difficult poems, I wanted to make something simple so my people and my history could be recognized. Beauty is for the lyricists as expressed in the Romantics, difficulty is for the avant-garde that continue Modernism’s project, and simplicity is mine as a saltwater Malayali suburbanist. It is hard to master and will take a lifetime. That is what I am after, and going to live in my ancestral country in Kerala allowed me to make a start.
When I was there, I realized that part of my self, my family and my people were being left out. This was not only on the axis of identity, of being a Malayali when I had learnt so much from white poets, but in terms of craft, voice, form, style, and taste in general. It was a political and aesthetic change that came from the ground up and was reinforced to me when I turned down a fellowship at Harvard University. I chose my community and my city rather than the higher education sector. And, in the context of the <a href="http://kochimuzirisbiennale.org/kmb_2016_curatornote/">Kochi-Muziris Biennale in 2016</a>, I read a corpus including Cheeraman, Cherushsheri, Ezhuthacchan, Poonthanam, and others. That informs this newer work.
In choosing your community but engaging with the global community, some of your published poems are accompanied by Hindi translations, and you have worked in Malayalam, Tamil, Marathi, Bengali, Burmese, Farsi, Chinese, as well. What does it mean to publish bilingual poetry, or to translate, and how does the art of translation interact with the art of poetry?
I owe a debt of gratitude to all of my translators, especially Abhimanyu Kumar who did <a href="https://www.amazon.com/dp/8194509327">a whole book</a>. His work and that of my publisher, Dibyajoti Sarma at Red River, has been incredible. They think of the possibilities of bilingualism rather than its limitations. In coming from the Indian diaspora, and mainly publishing in India, and seeing myself as an Indian poet, bilingualism and multilingualism is normal. Many poets I know happily speak six or seven languages just like tjabi poets I have worked with in the Western Pilbara where I translate poems into English in a team with my Ngarluma gumbarli Andrew Dowding and Elders. This is despite the monolingual hostilities of the official state.
As for Hindi, I realized there were hundreds of millions more people I could reach. I cannot take up space on this continent because opportunities are limited and should go to First Nations poets. But with a movement to my home, I am able to engage with people at once radically different and remarkably connected to myself. Speaking with two tongues, writing in two scripts is the beginning of this.
In general, translation helps us access new poetry in ourselves and in others. It opens us up. This is not only to decolonize and come out of Anglophone hegemony, but to keep us optimistic about transcending boundaries, of mixing, of hybridity. That happens when we begin to see continents and not only national affinities.
To engage with a hybridity is also to engage in a dialogue between the abstract and the concrete. Your poems are highly textural, corporeal and imagistic as you write of sand, salt, navels, nails, and granite. Then these are often placed alongside abstract concepts such as grief, knowledge or memory. How do you find the process of working with abstract and concrete material?
The process is somewhat intuitive so explaining it can be difficult. My engagement with the abstract and the concrete comes from what I read. I work with a number of talented emerging poets at the <a href="https://centreforstories.com">Centre for Stories</a> and I always tell them to read. To write poetry, you need to read.
For me, it includes a prior and rigorous engagement with Western philosophy such as Hegel, Weber, and Wittgenstein but all the way back to Horace. Yet, I keep reading and listening to my contemporaries, especially Noongar poets like Alf Taylor, Cyndy Moody, and Daniel Hansen through their work with <a href="http://www.canwa.com.au/project/kep-koorliny/">Community Arts Network</a>, and those who publish with <a href="https://www.magabala.com">Magabala Books</a> like Kirli Saunders, Alison Whittaker, and Ambellin Kwaymullina.
I find the balance of the abstract and concrete that continues to resonate with me comes from where I come from. This is where texts can be both poetic and philosophical, where the idea and the material are joined in their expression, where we have stars of orientation and feathered feet to help us find the way home. I get that in Lalla and Kabir and a host of others.
Another binary in your poetry is the anonymous collective self and other, and recently ‘we’ and ‘they’ mark your poems’ subjects. How do you conceive, in your poetic imagination, of these collective entities, and what did they mean for you as poet?
I have a tendency to think of others in a poetic sense and do not want to keep my “I” as central to the project. Not in my family or my work or my poetry, the last being a kind of hobby for me. “We” and “they” offer a way around it, and, are intended as a utopian frame of reference. What happens when we transcend our individuality or our class, race, gender, sexuality, privilege collectively if we so wish?
To ask that is not to deny the political reality of our daily life and our identities, but to think about the role of imagination in seeing the future as we could come to create it collaboratively. To do this is a group endeavor. It is to make “we” and “they” through the performative labor of speaking and writing itself. In other words, we create who we are when we say it, when we spell it, and when we keep going into the space of silence and violence.
It is deliberate on my behalf to make sure it is a welcoming idea that allows all sorts of people, animals, ghosts, ancestors, monsters and others to be seen together. The hope is that by being inclusive we get to change how we relate to them, and in the process, we make all of our futures better.
Speaking of political realities and making our futures better, you write of landscapes and selves burning, which resonates strongly with the bushfires in Australia and the current climate crisis. What does the poetic form afford in depicting such catastrophic events and conditions?
The time we are living in, perhaps like all times before us and those that come after, is catastrophic. Not only when it comes to climate change, but the genocide of peoples, the over consumption of resources, the repression of religion, and many other issues. That matters to COVID and it matters to Black Lives Matter as well as the bushfires.
Poets have a responsibility as eloquent citizens to change our events and conditions, especially by placing pressure on politicians and rallying the people. I have a letter writing practice in addition to going to protests and supporting others. I write to those in power every Monday on incarceration principally, and on linguistic rights, freedom of expression, media ownership, data and privacy, the role of journalists, and so on. This is all through my volunteering with <a href="http://www.penperth.org">PEN Perth</a>.
It is not only that we have to work to change the situation, but you have to enjoy the process. To be with activists means you are sustained by the camaraderie and you can cope with the ongoing and constant losses, and savor the rare and elusive victories. If we have solidarity, we find ways to express ourselves as poets in a community of belonging. The form of poetry in addition to the content and the context can be something to enjoy and something to raise consciousness through.
Our expressions of ourselves are not only confined to creative writing practice, but the daily rituals and habits we share with those around us. Your writing has rich imagery of consuming food and being consumed by food. You have also done some food writing, and I’m wondering how your food prose intersects with your food poetry?
My wife is an excellent baker and my child is a very good eater. Food has always been a part of my life and creative practice. My mother wrote a cookbook, In Memory of Mumma, which had recipes from our native place; my aunt wrote a cookbook, <a href="https://shop.epigrambooks.sg/products/never-leave-home-without-your-chilli-sauce">Never Leave Home Without Your Chilli Sauce</a>, which is about life as a migrant in Singapore. I helped write a cookbook with <a href="https://margaretriverpress.com/product/fervor/">Fervor </a>and I also had a<a href="http://foodblogbyrobertwood.blogspot.com"> Food Blog</a>, which was a diner’s diary of New York.
I like thinking about food. Food is central to life and not only as enjoyment but as ethics too. Food security is a problem from remote communities in the Pilbara to the hundreds of millions in India. I know those people and see them as my brothers, sisters, and non-binary siblings in a family of care. I would love to cook nourishing meals for all those people so they are sustained, supported, and simply fed. But I cannot. I am not a chef and I cannot be everywhere.
Books though, poetry though, can travel. And words satisfy the soul in a way that matters too. My poetry and prose get at both, with food being something that cuts across the two. We can leave bread and water (and taxes) to the Marxists, but us poets have work to do when it comes to spiritual enlightenment. My writing is chicken soup, lentils and rice, and kangaroo tail for the soul.
Words satisfy the soul, but also sometimes notions of the soul, and of spiritual enlightenment, can come through in words. Some of your writing implies that humans have an innate memory of things we usually think of as impossible to know. An example is where your poetic subject “recalled what was the origin point of souls.” Can you speak to this theme of a kind of primal, spiritual recall?
The whole world is contained within us since we were children, since before our birth. My awakening happened one dawn at Redgate when I was gripped by a death delusion that a marban man would kill me because I had broken the Law. My parents drove me to the city and when we crossed the Derbarl Yerrigan I was released from all suffering. That was my <a href="https://www.setumag.com/2019/11/on-enlightenment-by-cookieman.html">personal enlightenment</a>. I was then admitted to a mental health facility and woke up three days later. After another four, I was released into the community and remained a ward of the state until thirty days had passed. That was ten years ago and it was a humbling experience that I will be forever grateful for.
In that moment on the bridge, after leaving Redgate, I saw that everything was possible. That is what we need to hold onto. That is our transcendence. It is not about being locked up for what we believe or for being sick or for other things. If you are open to it, your ancestors will visit you in dreams and stay with you in waking life. I try to bring the reality of that true mysticism into my poetry and always ground it in a consciousness that time is finite. We all die, so why not try to live a good life? Redgate allows me to do that and to say what I think is right. Lao Tzu put it better than me in the Tao Te Ching (<a href="https://www.davidhinton.net/tao-te-ching">David Hinton translation</a>, chpt. 27):
<blockquote>A sage is always perfect in rescuing people
and so abandons no one,
always perfect in rescuing things
and so abandons nothing.
This is called the bequest of enlightenment
so one who possesses this perfection is a teacher of those who don’t,
and those who don’t possess it are the resources of one who does.</blockquote>
We can recall our poetry, our spirituality, our life as being a teacher and a resource no matter who asks what we make of it all. We are in the middle, and becoming a sage with a connection to Redgate is truly worthwhile.
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The Bequest of Enlightenment: An Interview with Robert Wood

Comedy 1921 by Paul Klee 1879-1940

<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/essays/dont-write/"></div>If it seems paradoxical at first to assert that I do not write in a piece of writing, we must recognize the paradox lies at the heart of life. Like the dialectic of enlightenment, which is to say an understanding of modern barbarism, we see that opposites not only attract, but are joined in their very conception. Twins know as much in their struggle for independence.
I used to write, and in that writing there was also non-writing — days when it was all blank pages, or archives that I burnt to ash in the fire, out of an instinct that the writing was not good enough to survive out there in “the world,” or even for myself in future years. It meant understanding readers had very little time left after they bathed the kids to sit down with what I had put on paper. I did, of course, find a way to write about why I wrote back then, arguing for the kind of world I was trying to call forth, to set down, to record. And yet, that now belongs to a different era, if not simpler then at least with less at stake for me personally.
No, I don’t write, and not for reasons one might suspect. It is not because it is hard — it always came easy to me, and still does. It is not because I do not have faith in writing — I think that writing can change worlds and the world. It is not because I could not get published, or for other reasons you might suspect.
It is because the best way to write is by resisting it.
I have heard other writers describe it as a compulsion, but that seems amateur when others are paid to do it, and it is indeed labor. I have heard people suggest it is for ego, that it makes them feel good to sit at festivals and educate the readers who flock to the spectacle. I have heard other writers say that they have a message — whether experiments in research and development, or some sort of self-help. To me, all of that is valid, but it does not describe why I do or do not write.
I do not write because I can live a good life without it. Perhaps even a better one. I can also know myself and change the world. If writing for me was an aid to reflection, transcendence, and community, it is possible to realize the miracle of every day in other ways. This is about the language beneath language even as we must come to terms with what is before us. If it is about seeing the surface of a lake, it is not enough to say there are meters below, we must also ask what is rain, why is the aquifer lonely, and what are we made of, in our blood thick with salt.
I do not write because of the failure of language either, not because I am unable to make sense of myself in the logic of English or Malayalam or Gikuyu. I do not write even as language can only ever approach but never arrive. I do not write because what has been written needs time to sediment, to move from the nest to the groundwater. It is about transcendence and seeing that the writing that contains this has to move beyond itself.
I do not write to become a better friend.
I say that not only to resist the market where writing takes place, but also to remind writers there is more to life than our identity, craft, and genius. It is about seeing what is possible when we let go, when we go our own way, into and out of expression and articulation, towards a sense of collaboration. And so, if I do not write, what do I do?
I translate from a universe, from a world historic spirit, to my family as it resembles the past lives we know live within us. And, if the world cannot read, why should I be writing? Better to be talking and cooking, listening and teaching; after all, the pen might be mightier than the sword, but what use are either of them when the soul simply wants freedom? Discipline is the path to walk upon to get there, and, writing is a bridge that cultivates this within us. The island we reach after it might allow us to liberate ourselves when there is no ink, when there is no water, when paper has become ash and we ourselves have returned to the ocean.
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Banner image: Paul Klee, &#8220;<a href="https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/klee-comedy-n05657">Comedy</a>,&#8221; 1921. Photo © Tate, licensed under CC-BY-NC-ND 3.0 (Unported).
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Why I Don’t Write

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<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/essays/theorizing-home/"></div>In a September <a href="http://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/interviews/comfort-reality-conversation-robert-wood/">interview</a> for this publication, I was asked about my reading of Hegel as it applied to my new book, Suburbanism. I recalled when I first read him in graduate school in 2006 citing a passage that states “the Indian has no history.” The interview spurred in me a desire to return to Hegel and other theory, to see whether I had got this passage right. I wrote this essay because that was the final question I was asked and I felt like I had more to say. I turned once again to his Lectures on the Philosophy of World History as it had been translated by H.B. Nisbet and edited by Johannes Hoffmeister.
I scanned the pages, sifting through my own marginalia from previous readings, not only in 2006, but also 2011 and 2017. There were a number of comments about “the Indian,” and my own responses to Hegel, affirming both my own identity and negating his position as a dead white man promoting empire. I found the passage I had paraphrased previously for BLARB. In it Hegel stated:
<blockquote>It is obvious to anyone with even a rudimentary knowledge of the treasures of Indian literature that this country, so rich in spiritual achievements of a truly profound quality, nevertheless has no history. (136)</blockquote>
Aha! There it was, the sentence in full. I have no history! Plain and obvious for all to see — he silenced me. Here I was, a subaltern, not being allowed to speak. And so, in reclaiming my self as a historian I was disagreeing with Hegel. I said as much in my interview.
But now, I looked again, and what did I see? A phrase that lingered, one that complicated my own thesis, that problematized Hegel, trickster though he was — “so rich in spiritual achievements of a truly profound quality.” How could I have missed this in my youth? What had I held onto before? And why did this meaning matter here and now? It was not only that I would deny the nation, refuse being called Indian as if against the state or my heritage as it is legible in geo-political discourse. Nor was it that this aside in the middle of the sentence excused his conclusion as if trading away historians for prophets. It was that Hegel acknowledged our “rich spiritual achievements that were truly profound.” That might include my own.
I had passed from history to poetry in my own intellectual journey. On rare occasion, I do still, of course, write essays such as this, and, my works History and the Poet and Suburbanism articulated a theoretical practice through a critical investigation of poetry that was historicist. But now, I no longer wanted to focus on that in my writing life. I was transitioning towards being a poet in my own right. I had built a solid foundation through thinking about it for almost 20 years in a philosophical language. I still read the classics about poetry and participated in the semiotic economy of poetics. But, I also knew that Suburbanism would be the final book I set out to write on the topic. I could leave the theorizing and the criticism to those who knew. So what did it mean for the Hegelian — and Indian — in me to let go of history, or rather poetics as the philosophy of history, and truly pick up poetry?
It meant realizing the rich heritage that was everywhere I looked when I was in my ancestral home. This is not only about being more focused, of narrowing it down from being Indian to being a Keralite to being a Malayali to being from Putucurichy. It was about reclaiming poetry itself as a world worth living for and practicing in and reflecting on and becoming part of and expressing from inside out. And, Hegel could see that too. After all, even though we had no history, “it is obvious to anyone with even a rudimentary knowledge of the treasures of Indian literature” that we were “so rich in spiritual achievements of a truly profound quality.” It is obvious to the world that we have treasures and are so rich in profundity. We have qualities. We are not without quality. No wonder the British (and Dutch and Portuguese and capitalists and California tourists) set out to conquer us. Hegel says it later on, that we have “splendid works of poetry” (136) and elsewhere that “the Indians produced superb gems of poetry” (102).
I do not say all this to rescue Hegel or to become an Indian nationalist or even to grasp at the straws of the metropolitan compliment. I say it because my own reading of Hegel turned on my own lack in myself. I saw his absences rather than his presences. This was partly because of the rest of his statements, and, we cannot dirempt these from his general disparagement of colonies, including India. His acknowledgement of our poetry really is a Band-Aid on an axe wound in the Hegelian scheme. Hegel is no friend, but nor is he an easy foe. And, for me too, it means moving away from history in a meaningful way, letting go of the discipline I might have no disposition for. As Hegel states, India (and China) “have a settled existence of their own, and they play no active part in historical progress; nevertheless, they are points of departure for the processes of history” (216).
Poetry, and religion as the highest form of poetry, are what we find through the process of history. I see now the burgeoning reality of that subcontinent, not in the monolingual hegemony of the nationalists that are ascendant, but in the polytheistic heteroglossia of the ordinary citizen. To get there, I not only went through Hegel, but returned to looking at my own family as diasporic subjects that had made English into a truly Indian language by elevating it from a trader’s dialect stuck on a small wet island in the northern hemisphere to a spiritual poetry connected to countries of truly deep resonance. As my other friend Ludwig Wittgenstein claimed the Indian mathematicians had said, “Look at this!,” in Hegel I looked again and saw myself already speaking back to empire — we did have splendid works of poetry and it meant reclaiming one’s own heritage in a process of becoming as much as letting go.
And, in that letting go, I saw my own Indian bearing, which lead me to the fields of postcolonialism. This was where the Other had become so much a part of our everyday language that we now existed in a place where the word and the concept had been rationalized, reified, and misrepresented. It is often meant as a way not only to describe a relationship objectively, but ethically — to suggest that someone is being undermined in their own attempt at selfhood. This could be phrased in the way that Hegel was Othering the Indian.
Here, I will not recapitulate a history of “the Other,” as its popularization seems to have come through university-led literary theory, especially from Edward Said’s Orientalism onward. Instead, I want to map out a response to it as a poet’s journey of coming into consciousness. This is a journey that more adequately describes my own social relations to people outside my self, including those from identity groups not immediately seen as the same. For that, I have turned to Wittgenstein and his phrase “family resemblance,” something I mentioned in passing in that same BLARB interview.
Family resemblance comes from Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations. He writes, it can be seen as a
<blockquote>complicated network of similarities overlapping and criss-crossing: similarities in the large and small… the various resemblances between members of a family — build, features, color of eyes, gait, temperament, and so on and so forth — overlap and criss-cross in the same way… the overlapping of many fibres. (Sections 66 and 67)</blockquote>
In other words, it is complicated. It overlaps and criss-crosses. It is small to large, from minor details to a structure no matter what that is. Wittgenstein uses a metaphor to describe these family resemblances, meaning language, by referencing the corporeal body — build, features, eye color, gait, temperament. The last quality, temperament, suggests however that this is not only physical, but also includes character and personality. It can also mean other things. Wittgenstein uses “overlap” and “criss-cross” twice, and by repeating them, one gets the sense that it is not only about the qualities themselves. It also matters how they relate. Family resemblance is not a self with its negation; rather, many fibers that come in and out of view.
From these two passages alone, the critic might then conclude that I am talking about the opposite of Othering, and instead proposing the ways in which we are similar, a way of denying difference by emphasizing a common humanism that flattened the distinction say, between, my Malayali mother and my white settler father. Here, we could then be forgiven for thinking that “family resemblance” overlaps with hybridity, a way in which all this is synthesized in a manner reminiscent of Edward Said’s fellow postcolonial theorist, Homi Bhabha. And yet, Wittgenstein also says, “his concept is not the same as mine, but akin to it… The affinity is just as undeniable as the difference” (Section 76).
The difference is undeniable, which allows us to acknowledge the Other, and yet to move towards a different understanding of the social relations in the world.
Later on he goes on to say that:
<blockquote>language has not the formal unity that I imagined, but is a family of structure more or less akin to one another…. The preconception of crystalline purity can only be removed by turning our whole inquiry around. (One might say: the inquiry must be turned around, but on the pivot of our real need.) (Section 108)</blockquote>
What are we to make of this? It does not foreclose the theoretical ground covered by ‘the Other’ even as we must note its all-pervasive use that has extinguished its specificity. And yet, it allows us to hold two ideas in our mind; both the affinity and the difference, the individual and the family; and the way we read texts and sources. It also means thinking about our inquiry across cross-cultural forms of understanding as if we were already related. It undermines the disciplinary frame of ethnography, for example, by thinking of new ways to connect.
In that way, when it comes to “the postcolonial” it might be about seeing the reality of our overlapping and criss-crossing lives as well as the autonomy implicit in the para-colonial. That everyday language use is actually held together by tongues even across English and German and Hindi. And yet, it is always in a family, not a family of self-Othering, but a family that has a way of being together, of being kin and akin. That might mean our next critical intervention is able to reach beyond its identity categories, and, like families themselves, imbue that with a complicated sense of relatedness. In this way, it is about reaching across the aisle, turning up at Thanksgiving, seeing what happens at weekend sports, and not assuming that all relations involve Others, but belong in a family that resembles a collective doing its best to belong in a world that can be as hard as ours. And seeing that difficulty, also meant thinking about my place in the world, not only as a poet after Hegel, not only in a family of resemblance after Wittgenstein, but also in a geography that was distant from Los Angeles.
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Theorizing at Home

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<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/essays/personal-responsibility-reparative-criticism/"></div>As many readers will be aware, there have been serious gains made by marginalized writers over the last generation. In recent times, initiatives like the Stella Count and VIDA Count have made the presence of women and non-binary writers more visible in both Australia and the United States. Together, both Counts hold literary journals to account by calculating authorial representation as a proportion of total publication over the course of a year. The <a href="https://thestellaprize.com.au/the-count/2018-stella-count/">Stella Count in 2018</a>, for example, reported that the Australian Book Review had 41% reviews of books authored by women compared to 71% in Books + Publishing.
The Stella does not, as far as I am aware, consider non-binary identity. In Australia, I know there have been discussions of undertaking a count of authors who are people of color and/or Indigenous. These initiatives are critical interventions to begin aggregating data on the gender and race prejudice of journals. Some journals seem to have taken notice, perhaps by simply seeing their unconscious biases, taking these biases into account and wanting to do better. Some have improved over time, while others have clung to the sinking ship captained by the straight white man.
So far, these interventions have focused on journals, and only critique editors and other staff by implication. Thankfully — and probably most efficaciously — there has been little ad hominem confrontation. This institution-level method allows us to think about the structure, culture, and ecosystem of journals, which includes funding bodies and readers as well. It helps us call out pervasive inequalities, to highlight how entrenched prejudice can be, and to see that the answer is not to be found simply by replacing anyone in particular.
And yet, what is the responsibility of the individual in this decentralized method of critique? In asking that question, it raises the related one: what can an individual do?
By now, calls to decolonize reading lists are common enough. And the extent to which we can add thinking about ability, gender, location, language, and sexuality will certainly help us reach a more equitable point in research and storytelling. Sure, we can change what we read, but what happens if one is also a literary journalist? Should we boycott the publications we routinely contribute to because the editorial direction remains misogynist or racist, if only structurally and subconsciously? The answer to that question is surely up to individual writers, and anyone who plies their trade in this industry deserves to be treated with a careful sense of respect in the choices they make. But for me, confronting these questions meant reflecting on my writing to see where my own unconscious biases are. In that effort, I made these graphs about my writing on contemporary literature:
<img loading="lazy" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-12873" src="http://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/count1_b.jpg" alt="" width="759" height="587" srcset="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/count1_b.jpg 759w, https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/count1_b-300x232.jpg 300w" sizes="(max-width: 759px) 100vw, 759px" />
<img loading="lazy" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-12874" src="http://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/count2_b.jpg" alt="" width="782" height="586" srcset="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/count2_b.jpg 782w, https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/count2_b-300x225.jpg 300w, https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/count2_b-768x576.jpg 768w" sizes="(max-width: 782px) 100vw, 782px" />
<img loading="lazy" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-12875" src="http://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/count3_b.jpg" alt="" width="755" height="623" srcset="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/count3_b.jpg 755w, https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/count3_b-300x248.jpg 300w" sizes="(max-width: 755px) 100vw, 755px" />
There are a few conclusions other literary journalists can draw from these. The first is the exercise itself, which helped me to reflect on where I had come from and what I need to do. In the first graph, you can see that I have written about, reviewed, or interviewed white men only 29% of the time. While the percentage of white male representation would rise considerably if I were to include writing about “the classics,” which I undertook over the course of 30 articles or so for Cultural Weekly a couple of years ago, by following the Stella Count criteria, I only included writing on contemporary literature. What might also be interesting to note about the first graph is that the percentage of white men has gradually decreased over time from 50% in 2015-16 to 44% in 2017 to 27% in 2018 to 3% in 2019. I attribute this trend to having gained more writing autonomy over the years, and also to coming into a greater consciousness of my community and myself. When I began writing about four years ago, I routinely accepted the books I was asked to review or the editorial direction that was asked of me. Over time I acquired the ability to select and promote writing and writers I think are worthy. If that means recognizing one’s own complicity at the start, it also means working towards a position that better suits one’s identity and ideology as one grows more confident and established.
As for the second graph, this represents gender proportion over time. 65% of my long articles have been about men compared to 61% of reviews and 45% of interviews. 50% of the writing about me has come from men and 50% from women. To my knowledge, I have only reviewed one non-binary author, and no non-binary person has reviewed or interviewed me. I have written about men 52% of the time, women 48%, and non-binary people less than 1%.
The third graph represents race proportion over time and by gender. 59% of my long articles have been on white writers compared to 67% of reviews and 33% of interviews. 83% of the writing about me has come from white people. The total as you can see is that I have written about white people 49% of the time, people of color 45%, and Indigenous people 6%.
These metrics about my contemporary literary journalism might also be relevant to how I situate myself in the wider literary ecosystem. I am a Malayali person, yet I am also aware of being mixed, which includes a white heritage; I do write as a straight man who is privileged by education, class, status, location, language, and other valences of identity. In thinking through the kinds of data I tabulated, it might be enough to encourage other writers to conduct their own Stella or VIDA Counts, but we might also think about the entrenched structures that make it harder to get a start if you want to write about your community and how there are few opportunities to do so unless you starts a journal yourself.
When I compare 2015 to 2019 in terms of what I felt I was allowed — let alone encouraged — to write by editors, I realize that I relied on my authorial identity as a passing white man to meet normalized expectations. In the desire for equity, though, it is about increasing the visibility, presence, and importance of women, non-binary, PoC, Indigenous, and Other writers. This is not only because it truly represents the lived diversity of our contemporary societies and the world at large — that would have us hope to simply meet our demographic fair share. Rather, it is also importantly about the responsibility, obligation, and pleasure to be gained from reparative criticism, including that of literary journalists themselves. We journalists ought to exceed expectations and make space for the marginalized in a more complete manner. This is about the return of cultural capital through networks that have often excluded Others, all in the name of furthering work that is beautiful, intelligent, and as good as anything else. It is important to account for what has happened in one’s own practice in order to work towards something better. Doing a count for yourself might be a good place to start.
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Personal Responsibility and Reparative Criticism

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<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/interviews/hand-interview-ko-ko-thett/"></div>Ko Ko Thett is a poet and translator who has written for the Los Angeles Review of Books under the pen name Jet Ni. We caught up to speak about language and territory, being “bawsi,” elbowing one’s thighs, the politics of language, and where the home resides.
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ROBERT WOOD: Can you explain for us how you became interested in poetry? I ask because there can be so many divergent paths we take to be here, and sometimes it involves disappointing our family, praying to ancestors, or going by happenstance rather than cunning. What led you to where you are now?
KO KO THETT: By being lost for words by the destructive and didactic power of language. An innocent language doesn’t aspire to have an armed force. But there’s such no thing as innocent language. Once a people have a language they could call their own those people will want to have a territory for it, and an army that will defend and expand that territory. Extinct languages were smothered at birth. Once a language is reduced to text, it won’t die.
Established languages tend to build nations, states, empires and religions. Languages are established by having a text, a structure, and a grammar that are correctable and correctional. Correct languages are taught at schools at canepoint. At military academies and insurgent outposts at gunpoint. At corporate meetings at PowerPoint. I was raised in all sorts of repressive correctness.
Traditional Burmese verse is full of Buddhist didacticism. When I am enthralled by the musicality of classical Burmese poetry, I am often repulsed by its moralistic content. More recently I have taken issue with didacticism spoken by supranational tribes such as the World Bank, the UN, the INGOs, and the like. Why is it that those competitively-salaried-jet-setting-SUV-driving-mansion-owning technocrats lecturing the underprivileged about income inequality or sustainable development? Why is it that some Hollywood luminaries are appointed “ambassadors” for some humanitarian organizations? Because the language of the dispossessed or the displaced is not refined enough?
Since my samizdat days in Yangon in the early 1990s, my interest in poetry grew out of my itch to stay on top of language. At that time I wanted to stay outside the box of populist and popular poetic language of Burma. Language of poetry appealed to me as it is disinterested — it’s not interested in any of the things established languages do.
In &#8220;The Burden of Being Bama&#8221; you conclude with the lines &#8220;your karma is you / life short / suffering tall / plenty of water / no fish, no fish at all.&#8221; The rhyme offers a type of resolution, and the poem as a whole is able to think through the situation in Myanmar with acidity, bite, and warmth. It also has religious allusions, even in these last lines where you invoke karma. What role has Buddhism, the mystical, and the soul played in your writing?
The poem emerged out of my own burden. Quite literally. When I began those lines, in the autumn of 2010, I was feeling the discomfort of the self, the weight of wokeness, what the Buddhists call dukkha.  At that time, I was working in Romania for the resettlement of Kachin refugees from Burma. The Kachin are one of the major ethnic groups from northern Burma. Many of them are still at war with the state of Burma-Myanmar. At one point I was hauling loads of second-hand clothing I collected in Brussels, Belgium for the refugees in Galati, Romania. I was working for a behemoth of an organization for refugees, and was very troubled by the thought that my burden representing that organization might be probably akin to Kiplingesque White Man’s Burden.
The poem, like much else in my work, is a case of what we Burmese call elbowing one’s own thighs — elbow your own thighs while sitting in the lotus position. The point is you won’t really hurt yourself, unless you are suicidal. Many lines in the poem are my own renditions of assorted Burmese idioms. I think of Buddhism, the mystical, or the soul — as poetical expedients. As byways and highways.
Byways and highways and rhymes to make roads, I guess we elbow our own thighs to become aware of the pressure of life itself. In poems like &#8220;cut&#8221; and &#8220;the 5000th&#8221; you engage with politics, especially commenting on violence, and it opens up ideas of form as well. Can you speak about the intersection of aesthetics and ethics in your poetry?
Aesthetics and ethics do not intersect, except at commercial or political junctions. When the two happen to meet at a runic roundabout, whoever is already negotiating the roundabout has the right of way. I like the original idea of aesthetics as sense. Sense precedes essence. Or, accent? Perhaps my sense of justice has informed the poems, but I am more concerned with the world as it is. Not so much the world as it should be.
&#8220;cut&#8221; is about all kinds of cuts: austerity measures, circumcisions (both female and male), amputations, censorships, and edits. The four-cut doctrine — cut their food, cut their funds, cut their recruit, cut their intelligence — were said to have been introduced by the British in colonial Burma against local resistance forces. They were later adopted by the Burmese military against ethnic insurgents. &#8220;cut&#8221; simply imagines a filming location, where the refrain &#8220;cut&#8221; is barked out by the director. The poem should be performed in the manner of Sergeant Hartman of Full Metal Jacket fame. “the 5000th” is just a tragic list poems of two interwoven lists, one of numbers and the other of months, and it can go on forever, as human-made tragedies would go on forever. Half a score of MFA acting students at University of Iowa performed “the 5000th” in autumn 2016, and they really nailed it.
You mention the MFA students, and, I also get a sense that you are invested in a community that is located yet diasporic. I myself am part of the Indian diaspora, and, my grandparents were born there as colonial subjects prior to Partition. Their move was not necessarily due to the violence of Independence, but it was in the atmosphere and premised on the idea that elsewhere meant a better life. In what way is language home for you then rather than nation or soil?
I am not at home in both Burmese and English. I do not subscribe to mother tongue communities. I am neither here nor there. My mother tongue is Burmese and both my parents are monolingual Burmese but, owing to my adolescent years in Shan State of eastern Burma, my Burmese is not quite Burmese, nor Shan-Burmese. A strange accent won’t be able to get you an ambulance service in most countries. The busy lady at the other end of the line will simply say, “I don’t understand a word you are saying.” Since I am tongue-tied in all the languages I speak I don’t feel home in any language.
The Burmese language has just one word for both house and home. It has no equivalence for the English notion of “home” as a family or social unit. Home in English language often is an abstract idea, but we Burmese tend to think of home in rather concrete terms. In the Burmese sense of home, I have no home to go back to in Burma. Only in the English sense of home I have a home in Burma. There was a time when I was living by Salman Rushdie’s dictum: “Exile is the dream of return.” Today I would add, “Exile is the dream of return — to a daymare.” Diaspora is ideal home for exiles. Going home? You are bound to be disappointed.
Recently I was talking to artist Patricia Kelly who has lived in San Francisco and elsewhere for decades and returned to her native UK recently. We share this dreadful experience of not being able to locate home in our native lands or anywhere else. “Home is where the heart was.” says Charles Bernstein who has always lived in New York City. Gone with the sense of home is the sense of national identity and national pride and the like. That sort of transnational experience can shake an individual to the core. Neither English nor Burmese. Anguish, me languish?
Your avatar Jet Ni is somewhat of an everyman from Myanmar yet also a wry and astute comment on the contemporary situation there. Talk us through how you created Jet Ni, their voice, and how it allows you to create a prose critique of Myanmar itself. Who is this character and why do they exist?
Christmas round robins are a British middle-classy thing. I have had a couple of friends who would post Christmas cards enclosed with a couple of pages of updates about their life every December. To quote Michael Hogan, “the content of the average round robin letter is narrow in scope yet big on smugness, they often read like a blend of faux-casual bragging about holidays, home improvements, academic achievements and career success, seasoned with tedious minutiae involving pets, petty neighborly disputes and physical ailments.” Tragic news, such as passings of relatives or friends are understated in a very typical British manner, while resilience is stressed.
I imagine what it would be like if a Third-Worlder is doing an update every new year. Jet Ni is a fictional character, but events surrounding his life are real, as I cull them from Burmese news outlets. Jet Ni, again, is a case of suicidal elbowing of my own thigh. It gives me no pleasure to pen Jet Ni. Jet Ni came into existence in 2012 because, when Myanmar’s political transition began in 2010, the world by and large was very worked up as if Myanmar had turned into the land of milk and honey overnight. In reality sudden marketization of the society that came with political transition is making most of the populace feel more deprived than they actually are.
In Perth recently, our local PEN chapter hosted a &#8220;Spotlight on Burma,&#8221; which was led by local Burmese intellectual Christopher Lin. We read some of your poems, but our Empty Chair for the evening was Kyaw Soe Oo and Wa Lone. They have since been released, but there are ongoing concerns about responsible freedom of expression there. What do you make of Myanmar’s current situation?
Kyaw Soe Oo and Wa Lone’s release was part of the mass amnesties that happened over the Burmese new year in April. The two journalists were jailed for their efforts to unearth the Burmese army’s summary execution of ten Rohinja in western Burma. Former military personnel who were serving time for their role in that massacre were included in the mass amnesties too!
“Responsible freedom of expression” comprises three loaded terms, “responsible,” “freedom,” and “expression,” none of which belongs to Burmese philosophical tradition. Just like human rights, the notion of freedom of expression (responsible or not) will remain alien to much of the population of Myanmar. In terms of artistic or poetic expression I am very much encouraged by the current situation. Today any artist or poet can do or say anything they please as long as they don’t cross the line of verbally abusing the most important people, namely Aung San Suu Kyi or commander in chief Min Aung Hlaing.
You also work as a translator, and, you and I met that way. Talk me through your process of translation, and, why it is important to engage and resist the hegemony of English?
To get back to correctable and correctional languages, English is just one among many others. Burmese is a hegemonic language in its own right. English as an imperial language is one thing. There are also numerous English dialects and creolized varieties of English that exist to resist the correctness of standard Englishes. I have always been interested in what the Burmese calls fish-paste English, as opposed to cheddar English. I am into what Ted Hughes condescendingly calls “odd English” and odd Burmese.
My translation is informed by the need to Burmese my English and to English my Burmese. “Why don’t you Finnish both your Burmese and English?”, a friend of mine who knows I had lived in Finland for several long dark winters suggests. I love contemporary Burmese slangs such as bawsi for boss. Bawsi alludes to balls or testicles. The way to resist hegemony of any language is to come up with your own. Aren’t poets poets to invent their own language?
Finally, what new poems are you working on, and, how do they return to themes of identity, corporeality, and the subject while moving towards new interests of yours?
I have so many poems in progress, but I haven’t finished any poem in a while. On the other hand I have completed a new collection of prose poems in English called “bamboophobia.” In that book my interests remain bamboo and phobia.
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On the Other Hand: An Interview with Ko Ko Thett

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<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/interviews/comfort-reality-conversation-robert-wood/"></div>Robert Wood’s new book of essays, <a href="https://scholarly.info/book/suburbanism-poetics/">Suburbanism</a>, is an exploration and interrogation of a middle ground between city and country, of suburbia as poetics — a liminal consciousness inherent to the suburbs. In my opportunity to speak with Robert about his new book, he enlightens, expands, and invites readers to understand suburbia far beyond a clichéd, cynical view. He also provides a look inside the process of gathering inspiration not only from other poets and philosophers, but from the daily wonders of living a suburban life. 
<a href="http://robertdwood.net/">Robert Wood</a> is the Creative Director of The Centre for Stories and the Chair of PEN Perth. He has lived in cities in the United States, India, and Australia, but now resides in his hometown of Perth. Robert is the author of two previous books, <a href="https://scholarly.info/book/history-the-poet/">History and the Poet</a> and Concerning a Farm. His archive is housed at the Kislak Special Collections Library at his alma mater, the University of Pennsylvania. 
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MITCHELL EVENSON: In the opening pages of this book, you state “it will take me years to realise that home is not a place at all, but a practice and a hope and a possibility that always grows.” I think that word practice is really key to what you are proposing — a poetics is about practice, about living it, not just thinking it. How do you apply these poetics in your life right now?
ROBERT WOOD: Living a poetics does mean thinking it, and then forgetting it, and then getting it in a distinct way. It is a poetics that is a bridge to life, which has been crossed but not forgotten by the child who climbed the ladder and sent their owl off at dusk.
In terms of my daily practice, I wake up, drink tea, walk to work, learn and teach, come home, cook, read, and sleep. I walk my ten thousand steps and think of the ten thousand things. I pay attention to the conversations I have with my wife, family, friends, colleagues, and strangers. I try to apply the best part of the poetics in Suburbanism to my sensibility, lifestyle, rituals in all these small interactions that accumulate into minutes, hours, days. That is what makes a life.
In the conversations you’ve had about your work on suburbanism, do you feel that poets tend to be more or less receptive than others to the idea of poetics as practice?
There are poets, and then there are poets.  They change from one to the other and from day to day. They receive and give as they can.
Perhaps being defined as a poet is about one’s relationship to language, but other people have a poetic practice when it comes to building, baking, or being. Their expressions differ, but I want to consider the language beneath the language be that nails and gyprock, self-rising flour and plain, or sitting on the porch and watching the chickens peck at grain. I mean poetic as a way to describe something that opens up yet more possibilities, of swimming in questions amidst the turtles all the way down to the limestone on the bottom of the ocean surrounded by plankton and plastics.
Here, the type of poet I am interested in is the suburbanist, an identity that represents the suburbs truly. They might go by other names, and they might not even work in language, but language is a great metaphor for thinking about practice in the world as it exists before us. As for reception, it depends on whether you can draw someone else in, someone with a family resemblance who wants to be in a conversation that is meaningful to you both. Suburbanism is the start of that for some, and it is a hinge for others that might allow us to end on a high note when the time comes. The question is then: how does the suburbanist become an Old Master?
You spend time addressing the cynic’s counter-argument directly, noting that, “to the critic, suburbia seems to be a vast, elaborate, cruel system made up of individuals who are atomised, isolated, anonymous parts of a dull, monotonous, conformist machine.” Did you ever see the suburbs as the critic does? If so, when and how did your understanding of suburbia change?
Growing up, I internalized a popular intellectual narrative about the failures of suburbia. This was the case even as my life there seemed different to this hegemonic representation, and the people I knew there felt themselves to be happy. Coming home has been a gradual realization in the possibilities that were unique to me, and hence, what may exist in suburbia.
I think it is common to resist, critique, and take down as opposed to build. I wanted to create a resilient, empathetic, soft system that the collective can engage with. I write then with the suburbanite critic in mind, the person who negates me in a fundamental sense. Suburbanism carries a hope that they might change their habits and come into a truer consciousness. From that, and after unsettlement, we might come to rest in nesting. In thinking about identity too, I could have reached for my Malayali heritage and found succor in a type of ethnic notion like Négritude for the third millennium. But to me, I am also connected to other bodies politic, which could lead one to hybridity. That too was not enough. As a result, I turned to the commodities, social relations, status groups around me, and that meant thinking about the construction of &#8220;the suburban.&#8221; This was one frame that enabled me to reach out intersectionally, by acknowledging my class and race and gender and privilege and place, and so I arrived at “lifestyle” as the aesthetic, materialist, and spiritual expression of suburbia and beyond. This was about a contemporary consciousness that emerged from it.
There were also moments of intense visions about the suburbs around me, about how to write through to the critic, to translate between gods and people and animals, and to persist in the face of concrete doubt and pouring acid rain. It meant reaching back through forgotten past lives and coming up for air when one could scarcely breathe and yet somehow speak. I could not have written this book without a lot of people and the places they let me into, and it meant looking anew at what is happening from Ernakalum to Karratha to Sudbury.
The language you employ is liminal just as the suburbs are — there is an at-easeness with jumping between the material and the spiritual, the concrete and the abstract. Language is both, thus the language you use must be both, speaking of “archipelagos of language,” “a continent that grows inside us.” How did writing such liminality challenge you in your use of language to describe it?
You read, you think, you process, you think, you articulate. Liminality is a reality that I engage with, and in that way it is a kind of center, not as a third way or a negotiation or a compromise. But, like the <a href="http://www.liminalmag.com">journal Liminal itself</a>, it is truly collaborative and allows you to turn your head in all directions to find that your neck is where the axis lies.
The move then is about archipelagos, which is to say islands, as much as it is about continents, which is to say mass; and within that it is about the internal, the external, and the mixing that happens at the border between the two.
Finding the language for Suburbanism meant going foraging where there is a rich biodiversity of language as well as an audience that appreciates what you return with. It is no use catching the bag limit of crayfish without people to share them with.* And for me, this type of liminality came from a multilingual polytheism that traveled through a number of discourses to arrive at its own dynamic place.
*For those who are interested, it is eight per pot per day where I live and a person can have two pots in the water at any one time.
One of your main goals seems to be inviting readers to re-imagine the suburbs as a place where poetry happens — a place that is inherently poetic, not just because of its liminal status, but because the people that live there and how they live are poetic. This means reading poets who engage suburbia in this way (some of whom you’ve referenced throughout the collection). Are there any specific poets you find are especially helpful in this? Any that really guided your work on this collection?
It is a very kind observation to note that this book is an invitation, and there are a number of poets that inform my welcoming. They are not necessarily the ones that are written about in Suburbanism. As a spine of my thought, I would have to cite Carl von Brandenstein and AP Thomas’s collection Tarruru, which introduced me to Donald Norman and Robert Churnside, whose work I have heard since then as it was spoken and sung. Then there is John Minford’s Tao Te Ching, Emily Wilson’s Odyssey, and Ranjit Hoskote’s I, Lalla, all of whom have featured in great interviews on LARB. And there are poets I interact with on a daily basis in my work at <a href="http://www.centreforstories.com">The Centre for Stories</a>. All of these have guided the work as much as the contemporary ones that I write about in Suburbanism itself.
But, there is also philosophy because it is a work of poetics and that stretches from Horace to Boccaccio, Weber to Wittgenstein. I think here, it is also about reconciling myself to linguistics geographies that are nearby, and I think of Charles Darwin on Albany, which he detested, and Karl Marx on the Swan River Colony, where he saw that our social relations were distinct. They are both close to home and, in some way, I am speaking back to them most of all.
And finally, there are the people in my life that are poetic without writing a sonnet, pantoum, or tjabi at all. They might be art historians or curators or administrators, but in them I see the poetic possibilities that come with being alive to the world as a whole. They are the ones I am silent for because I cannot speak in their presence. I am listening to what they have to say as they draw breath and reflect.
Structurally, this collection of essays spans various styles and subject matter, at once applying Hegelian philosophy to suburbanist theory, then reflecting on your personal history, and even using parable to illustrate what it is to live with a world spirit and find “home.” How did you come to your organisation of this collection? And how do you hope your personal reflections on “home” will inform the reader?
The Hegelian idea I use the most in here is “dissemblance,” and that is a specific response to the misreadings of deconstruction, which still seem to be popular despite the abundance of rhizomes that have somewhat taken its place. But, Weber’s idea of “lifestyle” matters as a response to both class and identity politics; and in Wittgenstein’s “family resemblance” I find a way to speak back to “Othering.”
To return only to Hegel though, in writing this book, I read Philosophy of Spirit every day at work for six weeks during a residency at Columbia University in 2017-2018. That informed Suburbanism as much as eating in diners and wearing jeans and visiting galleries across the park from me. But, I first became interested in Hegel in graduate school in 2006, and I always remember a passage from his Lectures on World History. In it, he states that “the Indian has no history.” Of course, I felt a personal affront as a person of Indian origin studying history, and that may have given rise to a post-colonial reality. From that, however, I began to think of the nation, not of whether I was Indian or not, but rather what other nations could claim me as well? I also thought about how to define history, or rather, what does Hegel mean in a common-sense way with this phrase? And so it was not necessarily about finding home in a nation, or a definition, or even the past. It was not even about negating what is established.
Rather, it was about cultivating a daily practice that led me to tarruru at every sunset no matter where I was, and allowing that to grow over the course of a long and happy life. And in that, it was about seeing whether it was possible where I had grown up, in those suburbs where my idea of place had congealed so much that it was calcified in its core. I felt if I could make it there, I could make it everywhere. What would it take working together to retrofit our deep selves in a way that was an example to others?
From that, the aim of my first book, History and the Poet, became clear once again in a place I am still learning about – to know myself, to live a good life, to change the world. And that was where home was, in the comfort of this reality, which the reader can learn from too by picking up Suburbanism and giving it a go.
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Photo of Robert Wood: Leah Jing McIntosh.
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In the Comfort of This Reality: A Conversation with Robert Wood

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<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/interviews/draw-attention-abyss-conversation-ranjit-hoskote/"></div>Ranjit Hoskote is a celebrated poet living and writing in Bombay. He has a multifaceted poetic practice that engages with art, ecology, rights, translation, and belief. Hoskote was a Fellow of the International Writing Program (IWP) at the University of Iowa, a writer-in-residence at the Villa Waldberta in Munich, and won the Sanskriti Award for Literature in 1996. We caught up to speak about multilingualism, confluences, the para-colonial, ideology, and poetry.
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ROBERT WOOD: Bombay, and India as a whole, is known for the richness of its languages including any number of subcultures, slangs, and inflections on establishment verse. Your work can be situated there, for it often changes registers, moves around with a keen eye and a sense of attentiveness, and all with an ability to play in many voices. Tell us about language where you grew up and how you came to be a writer.
RANJIT HOSKOTE: I grew up in a highly multilingual family, speaking English and Konkani as my first languages from earliest childhood, learning Hindi by the age of four and Marathi by the age of seven, being instructed by my mother in Sanskrit and invited to immerse myself in Urdu by her, and being navigated towards German by my father. As a child in Goa, I overheard Portuguese. As a child in Bombay I overheard, but was never attracted to, Bambaiyya, the Bombay argot version of Hindi. Unfortunately, I never picked up the Kannada that both my parents themselves learned to speak fluently as children. Through one set of cousins, who grew up in Delhi or on Indian Air Force bases, and spoke a fine Hindustani, I imbibed a preference for this beautiful register of Hindi, with its Persian and Brajbhasha emphases. Through another set of cousins, who grew up in Hyderabad, I encountered Dakhani, the southern variant of Hindustani or Urdu. Much later, in my twenties, I applied myself to learning my ancestral language, Kashmiri, lost over centuries of diaspora.
It was experientially, rather than through systematic instruction at first, that I learned how varied, kaleidoscopic, and veined with diversity all languages are. These formative linguistic experiences sustain my committed opposition to the 19th-century Romantic model that unfortunately continues to govern the received wisdom about language in India, which privileges a &#8220;standard&#8221; version as the proper form of a language, while derogating and stigmatizing all its actual spoken and written variants as &#8220;dialects&#8221; — forms somehow primitive or superseded in a process of linguistic and literary Darwinism. I reject the idea of a dialect altogether.
As for how I came to be a writer, I didn’t come to poetry so much as poetry embraced me. It was all around me, at home, in several languages. My father introduced me to the Augustan and Romantic poets with whose poems he had grown up, to Coleridge’s &#8220;Rime of the Ancient Mariner,&#8221; from which he would sometimes recite. My mother introduced me to Keats and to Ghalib. At 12, I discovered my parents’ copy of T. S. Eliot’s Selected Poems, which, even while it made little sense to me at the time, blew me away. All the while, I was listening to the Hindustani classical music that my parents have always loved. As early as the age of eight, I knew I wanted to participate in creating the magic of word, cadence, image, and musicality.
Participating is key, and, I think part of that is also seeing oneself, and being seen by others, as involved with tradition; one that recognizes the nation but also the imagined community’s function and purpose in global literature. It challenges monolithic hegemony and interrupts established conventions. How do you regard the importance of a local poetry culture in your city and its role beyond borders be they Indian, Asian, or the global South?
RH: I have never had the slightest patience with a national conception of culture. The diasporic history of the ethnic micro-minority to which I belong makes me suspicious of all self-enclosed, hard-edged conceptions of collective identity such as nation-state and region. South Asia is, and always has been, a subcontinent of migrations. All our languages draw on the gifts of trade routes, pilgrimage routes, invasion routes, the routes that merchants, monks, soldiers, storytellers, translators, and wanderers have charted across land masses and oceans. I take, from classical Hindustani music, the idea of a gharana — literally a &#8220;family&#8221; or &#8220;lineage&#8221; of musicians, which might suggest a hidebound, dogmatic system of training and schooling, but which in practice embraces a variety of responses to the musical experience. In a gharana, traditionally, you learned from the master but also overheard what other masters are teaching, kept a fine ear tuned to the rhythms of court and marketplace, stretched your abilities and synthesised various approaches.
I have written elsewhere that I see the gharana as an experimental continuity — and it is in this spirit that I make a tradition for myself, rather than simply embodying some primordial tradition. No tradition is primordial; all traditions are continually invented and re-invented; and the classical is simply a name we give to hybridities that we have forgotten. &#8220;India,&#8221; &#8220;Asia,&#8221; and the &#8220;Global South&#8221; are tactical constructs at best — they have a specific political usefulness in the contexts of postcolonial self-assertion, but we risk stagnation if we imagine them to be immutable grounds of identity and action. The local poetry culture in Bombay is an absorbent, dynamic one — as receptive to Faiz Ahmed Faiz and Arun Kolatkar as to Adrienne Rich and Jorie Graham, to Bhartrihari, Mahmoud Darwish, Wallace Stevens, or Li Po.
The idea of routes and families and reception seems to help us frame our daily existence too. In a lot of your poetry, and here I am thinking of the selected collection Vanishing Acts, you depict small moments in the lives of individuals that nevertheless connect to collectives of people, historical events, and large-scale social gatherings. What themes, through-lines and shapes do you see in your own work when you stand back and look at the connection between the quotidian and the structural? In other words, how do we connect the minor to the major in your symphony?
I am endlessly fascinated by the accordion-like nature of time, space, and sensory perception, which expand and contract under various circumstances — by the way in which we inhabit, simultaneously, intimate and epic frameworks, as well as multiple tenses, sometimes overlapping with other species, at other times condemned to our self-created solitude as self-declared sovereign beneficiaries of creation, a violent legacy of the contractarian philosophy of the Enlightenment that has legitimized our exploitation of the planet. I remain amazed by the continuing capacities of the human subject for passionate love, frenzied violence, an ability to sacrifice oneself for a cause, and a gift for unleashing epic brutality. History is a continuing armature in my poetry, as is art, the ability, simultaneously, to bear witness to history and to transcend it entirely. Such lines connect, for me, a detail in a Velasquez painting, a newspaper report, a bag left behind at a train station, and the refrain in a pop song from the 1980s.
How do we fashion ourselves constantly through the diverse materials we receive and discover; how do we craft our way through the minefield of paradox; how do continue to create liturgies when we are uncertain that there is anyone, transcendent or secular, listening? These questions preoccupy me and inform my poetry. And increasingly, I despair of the ability of the traditional form of the English lyric, with its personal ‘I’ and its singular and relatively narrow anxieties, to speak of the planetary crises and destinies that embrace us in an involuntary but urgent plural. I try and cut against the grain of the lyric, opening myself up to choric forms, the libretto or oratorio, to voices long suppressed or eclipsed. And the line, to me, is a furrow we cut into the given and accepted state of speech — again and again, I find myself asking how best to imbue it with laughter and melancholia, consolation and surprise. The answers come to me from unexpected sources, from various languages, various archives — from the bandish line of a thumri, a composition associated with women dwelling on love or grief; or from Ovid’s poems of exile; or from Shklovsky’s coded missives of dissent.
That sense of the various is important in the context of the types of writing we both do. And, there is an overlap between your own creative praxis and the critical positions you take in your art-historical writing. I am thinking of how you think through and critique modernism, of how you respond to the para-colonial, of how you maintain an interest in the aesthetic in and of itself while also thinking through ideology. In other words, the art history informs the poetry, and, the poetry informs the art history. Can you speak about what you borrow from each world, and, what you leave behind?
My poetry, my art-historical writing, my work in cultural theory, and my curatorial practice are all nourished by my unwavering belief in the dynamic of confluentiality — the name that my friend and co-author Ilija Trojanow and I gave, in our book, Confluences: Forgotten Histories from East and West, to the fluid, syncretic, transregional and astonishingly experimental energies that give birth to all memorable cultural expressions. Whether it is in Kushan Buddhism or the Jewish-Christian-Islamic cultures of the Mediterranean and al-Andalus between the 8th and 15th centuries CE, the crucible of the empire of Mali that brought African, Arab, Persian, and Central Asian culture together, in Mughal India, and in innumerable such examples, we see that inclusive, generous confluence is the rule while exclusionary, mean-spirited bloc thinking is the exception.
That said, what I take from art history into poetry is the mystery of the image and of image-making, the enigma of particular works of art, the tragic wisdom and the vibrant exhilaration that my favorite paintings, sculptures, installations, video works, and drawings evoke. What I bring into art history from poetry is the awareness of the artisanal act, the muscle memory and pragmatic experiment that form the basis of art — that awareness is a talisman against the windy abstractions and woolly generalizations that art history into which art history can sometimes lapse.
You mention my interest in the para-colonial. The great Urdu poet Ghalib is part of this narrative of a para-colonial Indian modernity, which began before the colonial encounter and continued alongside it, sometimes entangled with it, and sometimes independently of it. This adventurous and brilliant modernist in Urdu was the contemporary of Baudelaire and Whitman, but he remains trapped, for many Indians, in the unfounded notion of a Mughal mediaevalism — an unfortunate outcome of equating modernity with the European colonial intervention.
That is right, that unfortunate equation, which seems challenged by routes, daily lives, and attention to materalisms. In that way, when bringing art history and poetry together, I want to ask about the dialogue between the abstract and the real, and, some very specific touchstones, rituals, and elements of where you are. Your poetry is the work of imagination (especially in Jonahwhale), and there are elements of non-realistic word play in there as well, on a line-by-line basis. These are what we might think of as abstracting and pushing and pulling and stretching and playing with everyday speech. That is there in your art history too, and you are working on a show about M. F. Husain from what I understand, which suggests an ongoing tension between history and myth. Can you speak about abstraction and realism, fiction and fact, the imagined and the lived, and the productive synthesis between these dualities?
I love your trope of a constant push-pull. This, to me, is the key and productive tension in sensory perception, the way we make sense of our world, and the way we shape language. As a rule, although I love the work of Rothko and Agnes Martin, I distrust abstraction, and yet it is handy when we reach for large-scale explanations or ways of knitting particulars together into pattern. I enjoy the sensuous and the real, yet recognize that these can drift in a flux of perceptions without an organizing principle to bring them together into a constellation. In language, I enjoy bringing otherwise disparate registers together, rubbing them together to generate sparks.
Bakhtin, with his celebration of heteroglossia, is my patron saint here. I enjoy sparking elevated speech and everyday speech, the vocabulary of the artisan and the vocabulary of the saint, the playfulness of the jester and the high seriousness of the scholar off against one another. And we are all centaurs, are we not — one half of us anchored substantially in our animal, instinctive knowledge of the real, the other half full of hope, foolishness, uncertainty, and the desire to reach beyond ourselves?
I love the idea of being centaurs (or maybe cosmic fish, or even wearers of Golden Fleece). Shifting somewhat, your translation of Lal Ded is so evocative, so able to mediate and hold in its hands the twins I mention above as well as life and death. Tell us about your process of translating as well as the role Lalla plays in your work. Why her and you? Why then and now? And what’s next for you as a translator?
I came to Lal Ded, or Lalla, as an act of devotion and a gesture of establishing a strong bond with an ancestral homeland long lost to the vicissitudes of history. Lal Ded was a 14th-century Kashmiri woman mystic, a poet whose verses — or &#8220;utterances,&#8221; as I translate the word vaakh, which was her chosen form, a quatrain — continue to resonate for the people of Kashmir, both at home and in the Kashmiri diaspora. To me, she embodied a region, a language, and a literature that my people had lost, and which I wished to reclaim. I was 22 when I embarked on my translation of her poems, and nearly 42 when I finished it. Those 20 years marked a journey from skepticism about the religious imagination to a joyous awareness of its emancipatory potentialities, from a fascination with a single figure to the knowledge, arrived at through research, comparative study and the making of a concordance, that the historical Lalla’s signature had acted as a magnet and talisman for generations of anonymous contributors who had composed in her name, investing what I call the &#8220;LD corpus&#8221; with their own experiences as Hindus and Muslims, women and men, scholar-scribes and artisans or peasants, Pandit reciters and Sufi teachers, lettered and unlettered, including representatives of almost every group in the Valley of Kashmir. In Lalla’s utterances, we find an extraordinary range of tones, moods, moments and imagery — from yogic symbolism to earthy wisdom, ritual Tantric performances to pithy spiritual instruction, commentary on social solidarities to an insistence on the solitary nature of the quest.
As a translator, I am currently working on a book that brings together three Sanskrit poets of love from different periods: Bhartrihari, Bilhana, and Amaru. I have also been wrestling with a selection of ghazals by Ghalib, which I have — alas — temporarily abandoned in favor of what I call my ‘Mir Project’, which developed out of my love of the poetry of the 18th-century Mir Taqi Mir, the only poet who Ghalib acknowledged as his equal if not his superior. I put out a series of Mir’s she’rs or verses on Twitter, each post including the Urdu original in diacritical Roman, my translation of it, and an image chosen from the treasuries of Mughal, Safavid, Rajput and Adilshahi painting.
Finally, I also think it is necessary to highlight the political commitment you have made, and, continue to make in today’s India. This covers every aspect of your output, including poetry, criticism, translation, and your continued involvement with PEN International, which you have maintained for a very long time. How do you read the situation now? And what is the ideological commitment we make as writers to a world of polytheism, human rights, ecological safety, and the other materialist demands of our present moment?
India, as you know, is now fully in the throes of a populist authoritarianism, a form of fascism that is no less fascist for enjoying the support of enough Indians to assure electoral victory. The mere mechanism of elections, as we have now seen, is no guarantee of democracy — when the media can be manipulated, public spectacles staged, the majority infused with an irrational defensiveness, the minorities subjected to dramatic threats, and when the foundational charter of the Indian Republic is being subverted in spirit and fact, if not yet in letter. The situation is not greatly different in the US, Turkey, Russia, the UK, and large parts of Europe. Meanwhile, as a mindless ultra-nationalism is promoted and identity politics privileged over solidarity and the right to dissent, millions of individuals lose their rights, and the planet hurtles towards the ecological catastrophe of the Capitalocene. As writers, we must continue to draw attention to the abyss over which we’re dancing.
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To Draw Attention to the Abyss: A Conversation with Ranjit Hoskote

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Groucho and Me: An Interview with Charles Bernstein

chattarji

<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/interviews/set-language-interview-sampurna-chattarji/"></div>I first met the prolific poet, novelist, and translator Sampurna Chattarji in Australia in 2017, when she was touring with the Jaipur Literary Festival. Her 16 books include: two novels, Rupture (2009) and Land of the Well (2012), both from HarperCollins; a short-story collection about Bombay/Mumbai, Dirty Love (Penguin, 2013); and seven poetry titles, the most recent being Over and Under Ground in Mumbai and Paris (Context, Westland Publications, October 2018), the result of a collaboration with poet Karthika Naïr, and artists Joëlle Jolivet and Roshni Vyam. She edited Sweeping the Front Yard (SPARROW 2010), an anthology of poetry and prose by women writing in English, Malayalam, Telugu, and Urdu. She is currently Poetry Editor of The Indian Quarterly.
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ROBERT WOOD: We have spoken before about the work that you do — editing, translating, writing in many registers. Readers who are interested in this can listen to an event we did on <a href="http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Centre-for-Stories.php">PennSound</a>. But, today, I want to focus on language in a general way. Can you speak about the multilingualism of where you grew up, and, how you interacted with lots of languages from the very beginning of your life?
SAMPURNA CHATTARJI: This is a complicated question for me. On account of the way in which I seem to have constructed (and narrated) my childhood at a slight tangent from the way in which it actually unfolded.
I was born in Dessie, Ethiopia, and came back to India (Calcutta to be precise) when I was around 8 months old. Soon after, my parents moved to Darjeeling to teach at St. Paul’s School, a British-style residential public school. I grew up in Darjeeling. What does that mean in terms of multilingualism? I realise (now) that there were four languages around me: English, Bangla, Nepali, and Hindi. My school years were dominated by English (the medium of instruction and my chosen language for dreaming, writing, reading), with Bangla playing out a parallel soundtrack at home (where Tagore’s dance dramas form not just an aural atmospheric but almost a visual memory — of false accusations and unjust executions in Shyama, for example). I read and was read to in English, but I imbibed Bangla through conversation, recitation of poems by parents, recordings of my grandparents singing, my brother reciting Sukumar Ray in a solemn voice.
When I think back to those years, I don’t recall the sound of English. I recall the Bangla-sound which seems to surround an English that was inside me as natural (and unnoticed) as breath. The only English-sound that registered from the outside was Richard Burton’s voice reciting Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” and an actor in Christopher Marlowe’s Edward II calling “Gaveston! Gaveston!” in a voice laden, I realized even then, with lament and love. Years later, a song sung by Hemant Mukherjee returned as loud as if it were playing in the room — “diner sheshe ghoomer deshe” — which I didn’t even remember hearing and registering! Nepali was onomatopoeic for me, all the trippy sounds of exclaiming over minor hurts and major surprises.
And Hindi? Hindi was torture: learning to write essays on the cow … It was my third language (Bangla being the second), and at that point I did not see why I needed it. Not till we moved to Kanpur in Uttar Pradesh in 1984, when I was thirteen and a half. There, I was plunged into Hindi (and had to learn basic Sanskrit). After one more year of terrified muteness, I was able to speak, read, and write Hindi fluently thanks to my excellent teacher, Mrs Saxena.
This question of language also brings up a question of identity and history; not only about being Indian but part of a diaspora (given you were born in Ethiopia) and also part of a community that is pre-national and post-national (Bengal). These observations challenge monolithic hegemony and interrupt established conventions. How do you regard the importance of multilingualism in today’s Bombay and beyond? And how does this fit in with your own history?
I never think of myself as having been part of a diaspora — though I suppose my parents were, for the three short years they spent in Africa, my dad teaching English in a comprehensive school in Wollo Province, part of a community of international teachers (from Sweden, France, America) and Indians (mostly from South India). This community is vivid to me from my parents’ stories and photos. The brothers Larousse teaching them French and devouring my mom’s coconut barfis and donuts. Laila Eckmann’s strawberry pancakes. Fred Bashar’s guitar lessons to my brother. Diwali parties featuring sparklers and crates of cold bira. Sri Lankan friends, the de Silvas. Mr Krishnamurthy’s obsession for maths, Mahler, his wife&#8217;s shyness, and her talent for making bondas. Just one Bengali family mentioned there: the Sils. In Darjeeling, as a kid, I was fascinated by a little yellow book that had been given to my parents by Ethiopian Airlines. A book of handy phrases in Amharic. I remember learning some of them and savoring words like dorowat, injira, watat, the numbers from 1 to 10 … Feeling obscurely, and proudly, African. My notional motherland, my actual birthplace, my Inani and Alemithu.
I never felt part of any community — Bengali or otherwise. We were Bengalis, that was a fact that I never interrogated except with the idea of rejecting some of its burdensome traditions and expectations. We were probashi Bangalis — meaning the Bengalis who dwell outside Bengal. This accentuated my fierce sense of outsiderness. I revelled in it and was antagonistic to suggestions that I become more Bengali (by reading Bankim for example, or learning robindro shongeet).
In Bombay (which I came to when I was 25) multilingualism meant adding layers of sound that I didn’t need to necessarily understand to feel at home. That was the great gift of Bombay. That Marathi, Gujarati, Konkani, Tamil could exist around me like a comforting murmur, neither challenging nor accusing me of outsiderness. I would move through it with my English, my Hindi and, yes, my Bambaiyya, dropping the chasteness of Mrs Saxena’s Hindi in favor of an ungendered, cruder patois with which I established contact and transcended divides, recovering formal Hindi inflections and vocabularies only when in a taxi driven by a person from the North.
Your work as a translator has included a book of poems by Joy Goswami. Speak to me about Goswami, but also of approaching the poetic from a place outside of English. 
Joy-da, as I call him, led me into Bangla poetry in a way no parental (or societal) urging might have. It’s almost shocking how a single book by Joy Goswami (Surjo-pora chhai) catapulted me into that world. I discovered him not through his hugely popular poetry but through one of his most obscure and difficult works. His poems hit me with their starkness, and I knew at once I had to translate them. Joy-da had read my Sukumar Ray translations, and was receptive, generous and trusting. I translated three books (and am translating three more: his prose poems this time) over nine years, and umpteen conversations.
To approach the poetic from a place outside of English simply meant that I had to test the limits of my dexterities in the language I wrote in, and re-educate myself in Bengali. I had already realized while translating Ray how much Bengali I had inside me (a shock in itself!) and translating Joy-da was a way of deepening that, in more profound and difficult ways. It was also, in a sense, becoming a child again. I remember taking my dad along with me on my first meeting with the poet in 2005 — it was on my dad’s bookshelves that I discovered Joy-da’s poetry — as if it were my first day at school! I had to proceed to a known place via a great unknown. I had to read more than the specific books I was translating, I had to translate entire areas of another poet’s experience into an understanding that would be uniquely my own. So that every word I chose in English would mysteriously, accurately and inspiredly relate to the Bangla words that were before me. There could be nothing slack about it. Mythologies embedded in single words would have to be teased out by poetic rather than annotative means. Failures would have to be acknowledged.
In a similar vein, there has been your recently released Elsewhere Where Else with Welsh poet Eurig Salisbury. It comes from a different era, culture, homeland, possibility, and space than Goswami; but can you speak to us about how you continue to share space, about voicing things together, and realising your own practice with someone else.
Collaborating with Eurig has made me more aware of being Bengali! Because of his intense Welshness, his commitment to his language and his culture, and yet his great desire to not be trapped within an insularity, to move across the hostilities between English and Welsh, to acknowledge the power structures in publishing and the need to resist dominant discourses. In my part of the world, where writing in English is taken for granted, and is no longer seen as a symptom of colonised lackey-ism, what I was able to offer him was my confidence. In choosing the language you please. In celebrating the resources of that particular language without guilt.
Over seven years, we have shared space conceptually and concretely, with the lived experience of each other’s homelands adding depth to our own. Translation is where we began — Eurig moving from my English to his Welsh, I moving from his Welsh to my Bangla — but along the way the shared space became that of writing new work — in English or in Welsh. Eurig was freer there than me — he had a choice. I cannot write poetry in Bangla! While thematic convergences enabled us to write Elsewhere Where Else — with its poems about Mumbai, Aberystwyth, and Kolkata — argument has been essential to our close working relationship. The ymryson/kobir lorai section in the book makes argument itself the form. Our new collaborative book is for children, in which Welsh and Bangla words (unexplained) trigger poems in English, each writing an interpretation based on sound alone. Along with a section where we both write poems on Indian and Welsh cultural and culinary experiences that we’ve shared.
These relationships also inform your own creative work. In other words, translation matters to your poetry, and, so too does collaboration. Can you speak about what you borrow from each world, and what you leave behind? What has been the cumulative effect of this on your own writing?
Translation has made me think about the structural nature of English (and its shortcomings!) in a way I might never have otherwise done. What I borrow from translation is ferocious attentiveness, relaxed play, and fresh conceptual fields. What I leave behind is another version of me. An English-me whose hidden core is Bengali (as if the center had been swapped).
Collaboration has energized my writerly self and saved me from despair. My collaboration with Eurig is organic and ongoing. My collaboration with Claus Ankersen for an Indo-Irish poetry project was time-bound and sharp. My collaboration with Sue Butler was epistolary and unexpected. My collaboration with Jonathan Edwards was delightfully whimsical — resulting in poems about Dylan Thomas’ home in Laugharne as well as on little brown frogs and fiendish contraptions! My collaboration with Sharon Morris for Gelynion was again time-bound — with someone I had only just met — and it was beautiful, our voices utterly different and yet utterly possible to harmonize (as we realised in performance).  And most recently, my collaboration with Karthika Naïr and the illustrator Joëlle Jolivet has been demanding, joyous, and miraculous, resulting in the book Over and Underground in Paris and Mumbai published recently by Context, an imprint of Westland Publications.
What I gain from collaboration is new rhythms of working and thinking, new rigors of form, and new possibilities in experimentation. What I leave behind is a set of poetic conversations, which, I hope, will inspire new collaborations to come.
Now, I want to shift a little and to think about the role of community. I know you are active as an editor, especially with The Indian Quarterly. Tell me about the pleasures, challenges, and hope of editing, and how it keeps you in dialogue with all kinds of poets in all kinds of languages.
Pleasures: To solicit work from poets I’ve long admired. To discover fabulous new work by emerging voices. To work with the poet and/or the translator to make existing texts better. To introduce to the Indian readers voices from other countries and vice versa.
Challenges: To find good poems in translation from the other Indian languages into English. To make the most of a limited number of pages (12-14) in every issue. To achieve surprise and coherence, newness and lastingness.
Hope: The greatest hope is, I think, to communicate to readers and contributors alike that the editorial role is one that can be assumed with clarity and confidence, openness and exactitude. To convey, especially to the younger poets and emerging translators that good editing is essential — be it for one’s own work or other’s. To make the relationship between poet and editor one of dialogue and genuine critique. To emphasize that it is a conversation. And that editorial subjectivities need to be anchored in objective analysis and robust feedback.
I think dialogue is what I love most about my editorial job. And the sheer joy of seeing someone else’s work in print — it’s unbelievable. My work with IQ has, however, alerted me to a lacuna in the Indian poetry scene — and that is the paucity of excellent translations of contemporary poets. The translations from Hindi, Marathi, Urdu, Malayalam, Tamil, Bengali are usually good. The rest makes me wish I could find resources to enable translation work on and with contemporary poets from the other languages (Assamese, Oriya, Telugu, Kannada, Khasi) … to create a new pool of practicing poet/translators.
You are also active in poetry events and readings in Bombay and across India. This includes in-depth examination and celebration of many fine local poets with some international guests. How would you describe the community of poets where you are, and how does that inform your own practice as editor, translator, collaborator, and creator?
The community of poets in Bombay makes me feel very rich. To have a few good friends who will read, critique, question, support, and care is a blessing. Enhanced by those from elsewhere, with whom exchanges across the ether and real-time encounters continue to prove that friendships are still possible in the literary world! Knowing and respecting this immediate and long-distance community makes me alive and alert to the importance of give-and-take, of exchange that is intellectually demanding and emotionally renewing. I feel responsible and invested, and it makes me want to be my best self, both in my work and in my interactions.
Finally, a simple question with many possible answers — what is the future work in language that you have planned?
In a poem from Moutat Moheswar (Shiva, My High) Joy Goswami writes (my translation):
<blockquote>In softness I’ll set out from home/ In birdness I’ll set out from language</blockquote>
I’d love to do something like that. To set out from language in a selfhood other than the one I currently inhabit. On the Paris Writer’s Residency (March–April 2019) I will be working on what I have tentatively titled The Encyclopaedia of Everyday, in which I hope new dis/continuities will emerge.
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To Set Out From Language: An Interview with Sampurna Chattarji

okri

<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/interviews/new-spells-future-conversation-ben-okri/"></div>While in Perth, Australia for the Perth Writers Week, Ben Okri and I caught up over a lunch of spatchcock and fresh tomatoes. We talked about local honey, racism at customs, and the distance between generations. This was, of course, in addition to poetry, truth, and aesthetics.
Okri grew up in Nigeria before moving to the United Kingdom. He is a widely respected poet and the author of The Famished Road, which won the 1991 Man Booker Prize. Okri has also been awarded numerous prestigious international prizes and holds honorary doctorates.
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ROBERT WOOD: How did you become interested in poetry and writing? What was your initial desire to become a poet? Did you choose it or did it choose you?
BEN OKRI: That’s a hard question to answer. I think there are many pre-existences before the hunger for aesthetics and truth takes hold of the spirit in the form of narrative or poetry. If I was to speak of what turned it in me, I would have to put it down to the Civil War. The Civil War was about language, about voices, about fractures, about broken unity inside another broken unity. It was also the moment when I became first aware of myself as a being on whom conflicting narratives were written. The Civil War divided my sense of life between a time when life had a wonderful unity and an awareness of death. This is before the incident of nearly being shot. It was around the time when I saw my first corpses of young students. They had been shot and dumped in the river. It was a time when some neighbors turned against us and my mother had to suddenly go underground. The whole thing about voices, the perilous nature of language, become apparent to me. When I first came back from England, when I first returned to Nigeria, there were voices and languages, registers of voices, a new anger. You knew there was something wrong even before the war broke out. People didn’t talk; they shouted at one another. There was a new intensity to the way voices clashed. Dissension voices that echoed through the communities.
In cultivating your own voice you have spoken about opening the novel up to a new poetic voice. This has been an interest since your editing of West Africa. Where you writing back to that yet, or, was this about coming to understand your own voice?
I was still a child then. What I want to say about voices is that there were other voices — that of my mother and her storytelling, the gradually fading voices of the elders in the community, of poets who satirized, celebrated, and observed. But those voices couldn’t be heard. They were marginalized by war voices. I think when you are surrounded by many voices and in the case of Nigeria over a 100 languages, there is a sense in which the individual either surrenders to the dominant voice of their community or they start asking questions. Asking questions is the beginning of finding a voice.
This question of voice is interesting. There is a sense of polyphony and the multiplicity of voices you inhabit. Can you speak about voice as a many-sided, many-timbered understanding of the world?
In this inter-lingual universe, we often tend to speak of voice as one thing, one register, one tone. I like that you bring polyphony to the idea of voice. A voice always has so many layers. There is the combined aesthetics of what you inherited. There is the aesthetics that you have shaped. Then there is the historical layer of the times in which you find yourself. All of these are there, in any given voice that is achieved. I am thinking of what Yeats calls &#8220;his many masks&#8221; and the masks of voices. I am thinking of Okigbo’s Egungun voices. There are the multiple sides of the voice. When a voice faces the community, it is inflected in a certain way. When it faces the ancestors, it is inflected in another way. It really depends on the dialogue you are having, the ritual context you are in.
Leading from voice, I have a question about language. As you spoke I was reminded of Achebe and Thiong&#8217;o&#8217;s debate about English in Africa, where Achebe wrote in English and Thiong’o wrote in Gikuyu. Hearing you speak about Nigeria and the multiplicities within multiplicities, can you comment on the relationship of voice to languages. 
I am tempted to say that what you are saying works both ways. The Africanization of English, but also the Anglicization of Gikuyu. We don’t talk about this, but to what degree was Ngugi [wa Thiong&#8217;o]’s writing in Gikuyu inflected by his submersion in the English language? The transaction is the two-way thing. We try to give the impression that there is a wall between languages when in fact there is a constant dialogue, a subterranean leakage. And so for me, language is never pure, in the sense that it is divorced, that is separated from the under-stream that informs its usage. For me, language is informed by my father’s people, my mother’s people, the composite aesthetic sense of being a Nigerian, even of being an African, alongside a South London upbringing and subsequent years in England. It is all in there. So the dialogue between Achebe and Ngugi was too polarized. There are many spaces in the middle where they leak into one another, where they inform one another.
I think partly what you are saying is your comment on how language exists in the real world, but also about code switching and translation. And translation helps me think through your work from imagination to reality and in between. This calls to mind dream logic and returning to a community. 
The dream logic is something I discovered. It came from my fascination with the fact that life is not as linear as we think it is. The linearity of life only exists when you remove consciousness from the picture, which is impossible. As soon as you put consciousness in there, the narrative becomes unworkable, a fantasy, if for no other reason than we are constantly invaded by a sense of the future, constantly altered by streams of the past that haven’t arrived yet. Consciousness is constantly flickering between all of these territories. So how can we speak of linearity, when you have all these time breakages that are part of consciousness itself?
When you say dream logic is a discovery for you, is it a point of origin where you depart from, that you compose from? 
The bringing it back itself has to be qualified by a conscious aesthetic application. It cannot be a pure bringing back from dream.
Tell me about the bringing it back. What is the aesthetic application in a conscious way?
It is difficult to express this, but the conscious bringing back is a part bringing back, a part glimpsing, a part making, a part shaping, a part listening, and then a part uncovering. All of these practices are what we can call the ongoing progress of a work of art — an essay, a poem, a short story.
This brings me to your latest work, The Freedom Artist. Tell us about it.
I will speak obliquely because if I speak obliquely I will speak more clearly. It is a story and a poem and a dream and a nightmare, a fear and a hope, an alchemy and a spell and a liberation. I have been wanting to write this book for thirty years, maybe even longer, for many different reason. The initial reason was something I glimpsed about the human condition, something about us, about the perceived freedom of our state, which is an illusion, and I perceived this even before the war. But that got qualified. Society is a circle of prisons that we inhabit and which inhabit us. The prisons could be policies, perceptions, cultural mores, state sanctioned ideas of the human, class, gender, race, religion, etc. But a book can only be written when the essence of the book is in tune with or resonates with the moment we live in. Something about the air suddenly made this book right to compose. Something about freedom being threatened, the distortion of truth, something about the violence that has been inflicted on &#8220;the human&#8221; and the way that violence has been normalized by politics, the normalization of profound violence against the human. I am not only talking about blacks, gays, women. But something fundamental about the human is undergoing a deep compression. Certain things you could talk about ten years ago, that you cannot talk about now. The novel has come out of that, a toxic air.
What do you think the deep compression is? What can’t we talk about now?
Many things. The more relevant question is what has been normalized that allows such great violence against us. What has been normalized is the idea that the humanity of some people is structurally and fundamentally less than the humanity of other people. The fact that this has been normalized ought to be a trauma for us. We are living with deep fracture.
What do you see the role of the novelist and the poet and the dreamer in that deep fracture?
The roles are manifold and self-chosen. Poets and dreamers can function any way they see fit. For me, it is to draw the collective ear of humanity to the howl in that fracture. Because where there is a fracture there is a howl. But we are not hearing it. I think part of our job is to magnify the unheard scream that is in the fracture. The scream is not only the scream of the wounded. It is all of our screams. You cannot wound somebody without wounding yourself. We are all screaming.
This goes back to dialogues, to polyphony, to bringing things back from dream.
Bringing things back to a reality that we are not facing. There is an aspect of reality that is a dream in the sense that it is unreal to us. Dream for me has many meanings. There is a dream that is a source, a resource; a dream that is a homeland of the psyche. There is another dream, which is the dream of the world that is asleep. The word dream is like the word voice. It has many faces. The Freedom Artist is about the many faces of this dream, this nightmare.
And to give voice to a dream that might be real for fellow travelers. Can you speak about community in that way, in terms of responsibility, but also what it is to travel to the other side of the world and how we encounter strangers?
What is it to encounter strangers, what it is to be a stranger, is at the root of everything that we are talking about, is at the root of this world we find ourselves in, the world that we have created, at the root of this nightmare, at the root of this hope. The story of colonialism is the story of strangers violating their hosts. It is the story of The Odyssey and The Iliad and Things Fall Apart and Death and the King’s Horseman. When you think about it, it all comes down to deeply abused hospitality. In 1413, the Portuguese land in Africa on their way around to South America, looking for gold. They stop off in Africa. They hear about this gold that can be found. They start off being welcome strangers, and we know what happened after that. It began a deep fracture, a deep wounding of the continent; that continued for five, six hundred years. It began with a story of strangers and hosts. Fast forward five or six hundred years, what is the discourse in the western world, at the heart of Brexit, Trump’s wall?  Migrancy, immigration, strangers, it is the same thing. That is the same simple thing running through the history of different civilizations that have encountered one another in violence and abuse.
When you ask me about the relationship between poetics and community, I would say that poetry is really about creating the highest kind of community. Poetry is about sustaining the highest kind of community. Poetry is about passing on the richness, the validity, the truth, the ancestral wisdom of a community, whatever that community is. But poetry is not only about giving, about passing on, about composing and imposing. It is also about receiving in the listening. Because that is at the basis of community. We have a saying back home, when a storyteller gets up to tell a story, he says, &#8220;I have come to tell you a story, have you come to hear it?&#8221; The one cannot exist without the other. The community prepares itself for listening. The community creates itself by listening.
And this is where we no longer become strangers.
I think poetry is the strangest thing. Poetry is an outsider and an insider thing. Even in a community where the poet is central and secure, where he or she belongs to the land, and holds the treasures, the poet is still an outsider because they are operating from psychic and spiritual territories that are not entirely of this earth.
What is the role of poets now and into the future then?
I think the poet has to be braver with their humanity. The poet has to embrace the difficult questions that politicians are not prepared to ask anymore. I feel, and it is a risky thing I am about to suggest, that we have allowed the politician to usurp the central territory of the poet, which is dream speaking to dream, high truth to high truth. I think the poet has stepped back a bit too much, has left a certain territory of public discourse to people who abuse strangers. All of us are wanderers through the earth. We ought to awaken in one another both a sense of our temporality here and a sense of eternity in one another. But there is this way people have of dividing humanity, creating a sense of them and us, home and stranger. But our world has to co-mingle. Our fates are too linked. We have done enough poisoning of one another’s destiny. We need to bring something of the healer back. We need a poetics of healing. I am not only talking about bandages, but about the depths of language and the heart. Perhaps even a revolution in our idea of what it means to be human. Words in their highest configuration can re-align us in magical new ways. I have always dreamed of a new aesthetics that counteracts the poison of our times. An aesthetic that is also a high act of politics. Or a politics that is also a high act of aesthetics. Politics is too important to be left to politicians. We need to cast new spells for the future.
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New Spells for the Future: A Conversation with Ben Okri

Robert Wood is a Malayali writer living on Whadjuk country. The author of three books, he is interested in dream, language, enlightenment, joy, and ethics. At present, Robert is Creative Director of the Centre for Stories and Chair of PEN Perth.

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"I have nothing to say, and I am saying it, and that is poetry." — John Cage