Tuesday, October 3, 2023

Pratik's Special Australian Issue to be launched at Ubud Writers & Readers Festival, Bali in Oct


Pratik: Fire and Rain Special Australian Issue 

Artwork credit: Aaron Chapman

Edited by Yuyutsu Sharma 

Guest Editors: Sally Breen & Jennifer Mackenzie

 

POETRY by 

Alison J Barton Dan Dinsey Dan Dinsey Emilie Collyer Jill Jones Jude Aquilina Peter Boyle Rozanna Lilley Anne-Marie Te Whiu Leanne Betasamosake Simpson Samuel Watson Bebe Backhouse Stephanie Green Jennifer Mackenzie

FICTION AND NON-FICTION BY

 Mags Webster Chris Raja Dean Kerrison Gay Lynch   Indy Horobin  Patrick Allington Sally Breen  Stephanie Green  Shelley Kenigsberg

"A Stranger in a strange land." 

Yuyutsu Sharma Interviews Australian Novelist Felicity Volk

JENNIFER MACKENZIE: Top 5 Poetry Books from Australia

SALLY BREEN: Top 5 Novels from Australia

Pratik: A Magazine of Contemporary Writing by White Lotus Book Shop, Kathmandu, in conjunction with Asia Pacific Writers and Translators (APWT) present Fire and Rain – a special edition of the magazine focused on Australian literature featuring the work of 24 Australian writers, poets and artists. The edition includes a collaboration with Red Room Poetry's Fair Trade initiative to highlight the work of First Nations authors.

Fire and Rain features literature that evokes a sense of Australia – either geographically, spiritually, politically, linguistically, culturally, or otherwise.  Fire and Rain takes the pulse of current Australian literature offering unique contemporary perspectives from established and emerging contributors.

Fire and Rain is supported by Creative Australia

Fire and Rain will be officially launched at the Ubud Writers & Readers Festival in October 2023. The edition is available now on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CK8MSDBN?ref=myi_title_dp



EDITORS FOR THE SPECIAL ISSUE


Dr Sally Breen is an Australian writer, editor, and academic. Author of the iconic grunge memoir The Casuals (2011) winner of the Varuna Harper Collins Manuscript Prize and Atomic City a neo-noir novel (2013) shortlisted for the QLD Premier’s People’s Choice Book of the Year 2014. Sally’s short form creative and non-fiction work has been published widely both nationally and internationally with major features in The Guardian London, Asia Literary Review, Griffith Review, The Age, Overland, Meanjin, The Australian, TEXT, Best Australian Stories, Sydney Review of Books, Hemingway Shorts and The Age. She is a regular contributor to The Conversation. Sally has worked as Associate Editor of Australia’s most awarded literary journal Griffith Review and was fiction editor of Wet Ink Magazine for New Writing. She has co-edited an edition of MC Journal, three special editions of TEXT, and the book length international anthology Meridian – The APWT Drunken Boat Anthology of New Writing. Sally is Executive Director of Asia Pacific Writers and Translators www.apwriters.org and Senior Lecturer in Writing and Publishing at Griffith University, Australia


Jennifer Mackenzie is a poet and reviewer, focusing on writing from and about the Asian region. From a young age, she knew she wanted to be some kind of artist. Having the great fortune to have the mercurial artist, Les Kossatz, as a teacher, she thought that having an inner city studio, and meeting up with artist friends in a bar at night seemed to be the perfect way to live. However, discovering that words were more her metier than paint, she took to writing.  While a student at the University of Melbourne, she had access to the best of both worlds, owing a great deal to teachers Vincent Buckley and Chris Wallace-Crabbe, with the lively world of small magazines and inner suburban poetry gatherings near at hand. Travel to Indonesia, to Java in particular, has been formative to her own sense of poetics, something that is continuing. Since the publication of Borobudur (Transit Lounge 2009), also republished by The Lontar Foundation in 2012, she has presented her work at a number of conferences and festivals, including the Ubud, Irrawaddy and Makassar festivals, and most recently at the Mathrubhumi Festival of Literary Arts in Trivandrum. Her criticism has appeared in such journals as Sydney Review of Books, Mascara Literary Review, Cha, and Cordite Poetry Review. She has been the recipient of a number of awards, including the Marten Bequest Poetry Scholarship, and the Felix Meyer travelling scholarship from the University of Melbourne, and in 2016 she enjoyed a writing residency at Seoul Artspace, Yeonhui. She also works as an occasional editor for The Lontar Foundation in Jakarta. Her most recent book is Navigable Ink (Transit Lounge 2020), a homage to the Indonesian writer, Pramoedya Ananta Toer. She lives in Naarm (Melbourne) Australia, on the unceded land of the Woi Wurrung Wurundjeri people.


Yuyutsu Sharma is one of the few poets in the world who make their living with poetry. Named as “The world-renowned Himalayan poet,” (The Guardian) “One-Man Academy” (The Kathmandu Post) and “Himalayan Neruda” (Mike Graves), Yuyutsu is a vibrant force on the world poetry stage. He is also recipient of fellowships and grants from The Rockefeller Foundation, Ireland Literature Exchange, Trubar Foundation, Slovenia, The Institute for the Translation of Hebrew Literature and The Foundation for the Production and Translation of Dutch Literature. Author of eleven poetry collections, most recently, Lost Horoscope & Other Newer Poems, Yuyutsu has read his works at several prestigious places and held workshops in creative writing and translation at Queen’s University, Belfast, University of Ottawa and South Asian Institute, Heidelberg University, Germany, University of California, Davis, Sacramento State University, California, Beijing Open University, New York University, New York and Columbia University, New York. 

Half the year, he travels and reads all over the world and conducts Creative Writing workshops at various universities in North America and Europe but goes trekking in the Himalayas when back home.



Monday, September 11, 2023

Pratik Current Issue Cover Story: ANNIE FINCH on Poetry Witchery: 15 Poets of Meter & Magic

ANNIE FINCH

 

Poetry Witchery

 15 Poets of Meter & Magic

 

             


For almost all of the tens of thousands of years of human history, poetry has been structured by strong repeating rhythmical language patterns that act like magical spells, activating our unconscious and conscious minds together and moving us into altered states of consciousness. Healers and shamans, sorcerers and enchantresses, medicine people and witches have used meter to transform consciousness, to heal, and to connect us with the traditions of our ancestors and with the sacred powers of the natural world.

Thalassa by Tanja Thorjussen_2020_watercolor and ink on paper

For forty years, as a witch and a poet, I have been writing, teaching, and performing metrical poetry and ritual to help reclaim this time-honored role for rhythmical language at a time of unprecedented political and environmental crisis.  I was delighted when Yuyutsu Sharma invited me to edit for Pratik a special section of poetry by poets who have been exploring poetic meter with me at PoetryWitchCommunity.org and elsewhere.  The poets gathered here are drawn to use their poetic skills to reconnect people with our rhythmical legacy and the healing gifts it offers, not only to ourselves, but to the planet of which we are part. By opening themselves to meters, they are embracing a beautiful revolution that points in a hopeful future direction for poetry. 

As you read aloud, you will discover that these poems prioritize “metrical diversity”—a range of different meters, each weaving a different mood and energy. In this section you will find poems written in accentual dimeter, accentual tetrameter, accentual pentameter, anapestic tetrameter, iambic dimeter, iambic tetrameter, iambic pentameter, trochaic tetrameter, dactylic trimeter, dactylic tetrameter, and amphibrachic tetrameter, and in forms such as acrostic, ballad stanza, triolet, sonnet, and sapphics. While this metrical range is a significant expansion on the usual metrical vocabulary available in English today (which consists almost entirely of one meter, iambic pentameter!), of course it is still a far cry from the far more immense richness and diversity of meters explored in Hindi and other ancient languages.  Yet at least it’s a start towards exploring the power of metrical diversity in English.

Dance of Five Elements by Moomey


Please be sure to read these poems aloud, because meter is a physical art that engages the body as much as the mind. Three times is the ideal number to allow meters to work their magic; as my Twitter hashtag puts it, “#speakitthrice!”  As you read aloud, you may hear an impatient voice inside your mind telling you that you already understand the poem and you are wasting your time. I suggest you thank this voice for its concern, but don’t obey it. Allow yourself to take the time to speak the poem thrice, and notice how you feel after that. If speaking aloud is impossible, the poetry can be whispered, or sounded silently in thought.  As long as you allow each line to occupy its full physical time, you will still “hear” the meters physically, in real time, like music, in the mind.

Over the decades I have been teaching meter, my teaching has grown so streamlined that now much of what I offer to the poets who study with me is simply permission: permission to allow body, heart, will, and spirit to participate in poetry on a fully equal basis with mind; permission to become curious about meter, scansion, the craft of sound, and the depth of meaning these can convey; permission to experience physical exhilaration and pleasure in the movement of language’s rhythms; permission to allow one’s individual voice to be swept up in the momentum of an activity that predates the memory of written culture; and perhaps most of all, permission to give up the internalized judgments, the fears of being silly or sentimental, which cause so much pain and numbness in the modern world, in order to join fully in the cosmic dance of magic, play, and connection.

I now extend to you, our dear readers, this same permission. Please: #speakitthrice, and enjoy!

 

Annie Finch

Brooklyn

May 1, 2023

 


     Keeper of Shells by Moomey


Educated at Yale and Stanford University, Annie Finch is the author of seven books of poetry, most recently Earth Days (Nirala, 2023) and The Poetry Witch Little Book of Spells (Wesleyan University Press). Her poetry has appeared in the New York Times, Poetry Magazine, and the Penguin Book of Twentieth-Century American Poetry. Her other works include The Body of Poetry: Essays on Women, Form, and the Poetic Self, The Ghost of Meter; the poetry-writing guide A Poet’s Craft and Choice Words, the first international anthology of literature on abortion.

 

 

 

 

Now Available on Amazon India, USA, UK & Canada


 

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Friday, September 8, 2023

Pratik Current Issue Highlight : Celebrated American novelist and poet Sapphire's Menstruation Chant

 

SAPPHIRE

  


I use metered text in this excerpt from my novel The Harlem Triology as a way of “rooting” these women in the rhythms of their bodies. The rhythm of the chant allows the reader to bond with the characters as the women seek to control and align their lives with female values in a patriarchal society. Menstruation rituals speak to a Regular, Rhythmic, and Repeated event that will shape approximately forty years of a woman’s life.

 

Menstruation Chant

 

I bleed and do not die

I bleed and do not die

I am a woman

I ride the sky and do not die

I ride the sky and do not die

I am a woman

 

Je saigne et je ne meurs pas

Je saigne et je ne meurs pas

Je suis une femme

Je roule dans le ciel et je ne meurs pas

Je roule dans le ciel et je ne meurs pas

Je suis une femme.

 

Mwen senyen epi mwen pa mouri

Mwen senyen epi yo pa mouri

Mwen se yon fanm

Mwen kondi syel la epi mwen pa mouri

Mwen kondi syel la epi mwen pa mouri

Mwen se yon fanm.

 

 

 

Sapphire became involved in the Slam Poetry movement writing, performing, and eventually publishing her work. She is the author of two collections of poetry Black Wings & Blind Angels (1999) and American Dreams (1994), and of the New York Times bestselling novels The Kid (2011) and Push (1996), which was the inspiration for the Academy Award-winning movie Precious.

 

 

 

Now Available on Amazon India, USA, UK & Canada

 


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Monday, August 28, 2023

Pratik's Current Issue Highlight: American Poet Lisa Zimmerman's Poem, "April Moon"

 

LISA ZIMMERMAN

 


April Moon

 

Often spring arrives with only small revolts,

winter’s last-ditch effort to linger and punish

overturned in the dark as daffodils spear

carelessly from cold mud through root

tangle, earth’s black silence.

 

Tonight’s nearly full moon

interrupts tree branches, spills

onto the lawn in eerie threads to incite

purple crocus under the bird feeder.

Moonlight offers the dog

his shadow double on the driveway.

 

Over the fence a raccoon rattles a trash can lid,

setting all the neighborhood dogs on alert,

their barks and plaintive howling

the gleaming moon accepts as adoration.

 

 

 

Lisa Zimmerman’s poetry collections include How the Garden Looks from Here (Violet Reed Haas Poetry Award winner) The Light at the Edge of Everything (Anhinga Press) and Sainted (Main Street Rag). Her poetry and fiction have appeared in Redbook, The Sun, Cave Wall, Poet Lore, Vox Populi, and other journals. Her poems have been nominated for Best of the Net, five times for the Pushcart Prize, and included in the 2020 Best Small Fictions anthology.  

 

 

Now Available on Amazon India, USA, UK & Canada


 

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Saturday, August 12, 2023

POETRY FROM CÓRDOBA : SPANISH POET JOAQUÍN PÉREZ-AZAÚSTRE's "Brief History of the Gin-Tonic"

 

JOAQUÍN PÉREZ-AZAÚSTRE

Brief History of the Gin-Tonic

 


In the nineteenth century

everyone with a hidden past

used to seek out his port.

 

Scurvy was the enemy

of these sailors and in this the cocktail was born:

they fought scurvy through lemon,

the elixir in the salve,

with a vitamin to keep it afloat.

They fought scurvy through quinine,

those white hands of the tonic.

 

Its arrival to Spain was late:

the son of Pedro Salinas

brought it overseas.

In Barcelona, he found a crew

for the ritual.

They stilled the Cognac for gin-tonics

because, among other things,

their lives were stung

by countless scurvies;

 

Gabriel Ferrater, Costafreda,

Jaime Gil de Biedma, Carlos Barral,

Manu Portal, and many others,

encouraged by Salinas,

passed up their brandy for gin.

 

There’s no school so vital

to learn how to live

as the school that teaches you

to learn how to drink.

 

You can’t explain a literature

without explaining it, likewise,

to change the shape of what’s written:

what is real with what is impossible,

is almost always possible.

 

In the ritual of the gin and tonic

we see a mirror of obedient bubbles.

The distance is not forgotten

and neither is the absence:

it depends on the length of the sip.

                                                       

 Translated from the Spanish by Hyden Bennet

Córdoba-born poet Joaquín Pérez-Azaústre won the Adonais Award in 2000 for his book, An Interpretation, the Loewe Foundation International Prize for Young Creation for The Red Sweater and the Vicente Presa Prize for The Price of a Dinner at Chez Maurice, The Loewe International Award for The Ollerías. He writes literary columns in several Spanish newspapers and has published the novels: The Orange notebook, America and The Manolete Suite.  He is also the Winner of Gil de Biedma International Poetry Award 2006, Tiflos Poetry Prize 2012 and City of Melilla International Poetry Prize 2016,

 

 


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Tuesday, May 30, 2023

Current Issue of Pratik now on Amazon

Pratik

A Magazine of Contemporary Literature

Vol XVIII No 3

Córdoba

A Celebration in Poetry and Art

Amazon USA : https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CBMTVX5K?ref=myi_title_dp Amazon Canada: https://www.amazon.ca/dp/B0CBL1DZZG?ref=myi_title_dp Amazon UK :https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0CBMTVX5K?ref=myi_title_dp Amazon India: https://www.amazon.in/dp/B0CBBWYB48?ref=myi_title_dp




Alejandro López Andrada  Balbina Prior Fernando Sánchez Mayo  Francisco Gálvez  Francisco  Onieva  Joaquín Pérez-Azaústre  José Luis Rey  Juana Castro  Manuel Gahete  María Rosal  Pilar Sanabria Cañete  Rafaela Hames

Poetry Witchery: 15 Poets Of Meter & Magic

Annie Finch  Autumn Newman Dawn Trepesta  Diane Lee Moomey  Jennifer Schomburg  Kanke  Jessica Duffy  Joanne Godley  Joshua Davis  Lisa St John  Maya Ribault  Richelle Lee Slota  Rodney Brown  Sapphire  Sunni Wilkinson  Wendy Sloan

13 Poets From Colorado

Dan Beachy-Quick  Raza Ali Hasan  Linda Hogan Joseph Hutchison  Mark Irwin  David Mason  Juan J. Morales  Veronica Patterson  Pattiann Rogers  Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer  Wendy Videlock  Lisa Zimmerman

Austrian Voices

Karin Ivancsics  Ilse Kilic  Patricia Brooks   Birgit Schwaner  Dietmar Tauchner  Herbert Pauli  Fritz Widhalm  Dine Petrik  Erika Kronabitter  Linda Kreiss Christl Greller Sophie Reyer

Featuring

A SHORT STORY by Ivan Sullivan, Peter Booth’s translations of Hafiz

New work by Sonnet Mondal Sarabjeet Garcha Chad Norman

Plus all Other Columns

 




Saturday, May 27, 2023

PRATIK SOUTH ASIA SPECIAL : AN INTERVIEW WITH DISTINGUISHED AMERICAN INDIAN POET RAVI SHANKAR

 

INTERVIEW

 

 

 

RAVI SHANKAR

The Fate of South Asian Literature

 

 


 

Pushcart-prize winning poet, author, editor, translator, and professor, Ravi Shankar is the author and editor of over fifteen books and chapbooks of poetry, including most recently, the memoir Correctional called “the work of an absolutely brilliant writer” by advance reviewer and shortlisted for the 2022 CT Lit Prize; the Many Uses of Mint: New and Selected Poems: 1998-2018 (Recent Works Press); W.W. Norton & Co.’s Language for a New Century called a “beautiful achievement for world literature” by Nobel Prize winner Nadine Gordimer; the Muse India Award winning translations of 8th century Tamil poet/saint, Andal: The Autobiography of a Goddess  (Zubaan/University of Chicago Press); an anthology celebrating a new poetic form and honoring Gwendolyn Brooks, The Golden Shovel (University of Arkansas Press); a collaboration with T.S. Eliot Prize winner George Szirtes, A Field Guide to Southern China (Eyewear Books); the National Poetry Review Prize winning Deepening Groove; the Carolina Wren judges award winning What Else Could it Be; a collaboration with late American artist Sol LeWitt Seamless Matter (Rain Taxi Ohm Editions); and the finalist for the Connecticut Book Awards Instrumentality,  poems from which have appeared around the world. Translated into over 12 languages and recipient of a Glenna Luschei Award from Prairie Schooner as well as winner of the Gulf Coast Poetry Prize, Shankar has taught at such institutions as Columbia University, Fairfield University, the City University of Hong Kong and the University of Sydney. He has held fellowships from the Corporation of Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony, the Jentel Foundation, the Atlantic Center for the Arts, the Blue Mountain Center and many others. Recipient of numerous grants and awards, including multiple “Excellence-in-Teaching Awards,” his students have gone on to publish dozens of books of their own. Granted fellowships by the New York State Council on the Arts and the Rhode Island State Commission on the Arts, Shankar has been featured in The New York Times, the Chronicle of Higher Education, BBC, NPR and the PBS Newshour. His essays have appeared in such places as the Georgia Review, the Hartford Courant, and for the Poetry Society of America. He has been featured at the Poetry Foundation, the Academy of American Poets, Poetry International and he founded one of the world’s oldest electronic journals of the arts, Drunken Boat, winner of a South-by-Southwest Web Award and featured on BBC-Vietnam. He currently teaches creative writing at Tufts University and for the New York Writers Workshop and is outgoing Chairman of the Asia Pacific Writers Workshop. He currently teaches for the New York Writers Workshop and lives a nomadic existence centered around Boston, Massachusetts and Sydney, Australia. In addition to performances and lectures, he is available for individual consultancy, workshops, editing and mentoring services around the world.

 

 

Pratik: Being a prominent writer and literary activist possessing a wide range of infrastructure to get your work known internationally, in what special sense do you associate yourself with South Asian literature?

 

Ravi Shankar: In the ancient Sanskrit text and one of the minor Upanishads of Hinduism, the Kaivalya Upanishad, it is written that “Meditating on the lotus of your heart, in the center is the untainted; the exquisitely pure, clear, and sorrowless; the inconceivable; the unmanifest, of infinite form; blissful, tranquil and immortal.” I begin with that quote to underscore the fact that my association with South Asian literature is in fact universal and the wisdom of those regions that were diminished by colonialism reverberates through its civilizing lacquer. Because I was born in America, I will always be American, but because my mother tongue is Tamil and I spent good chunks of my childhood in Chennai, I feel a deep connection to the subcontinent as well. I have always advocated for those voices that are too little known outside their place of origin, which is why part of my publishing project has to translate the work of Andal, the 8th century Tamil poet/saint; to edit collections like W.W. Norton’s Language for a New Century, still the most representative collection of poetry from Asia and the Middle East; and to resuscitate ancient poetic forms from the Vedas, like the pankti, to stand alongside the sonnets and villanelles that constitute the Western canon.

 

Pratik: What do you think binds diverse and varied traditions of South Asian literature together?

Ravi Shankar: South Asian literature is united only in its multiplicity, which is made clear just by the wagonload of South Asian literary anthologies just published in the last year alone. From Penguin India’s Singing in the Dark: A Global Anthology of Poetry under Lockdown to Vinita Agrawal and Ranjit Hoskote’s Open Your Eyes: An Anthology on Climate Change which tackles the au courant issue of the “anthropocene,” it is hard to generalize about South Asian poetry in the 21st century because we have a rich polyphony of voices who are Muslim, queer, feminist, classist, avant-garde, monolingual, polyglot...it’s a rich and complex tradition.The sense of community that reciting and singing ghazals in Urdu in what’s called tarannum, derived from the Persian verb to trill and to quaver, underscores the oral and performative aspect of South Asian literature while a movement like the Prakalpana in the Bengali language is truly avant-garde, creating a magazine meant to be read from back to front and frequently including graphics within the body of the work. This is hybridity before hybridity became trendy. I mention these two distinctive traditions as examples of how various South Asian poetry can be and perhaps what ultimately binds this body of work together is the seriousness of the aesthetic attention and exploration of form across the region.

 


Pratik: Do you have some authors writing in vernacular  in South Asia in mind who you believe deserve a better, wider, international recognition?

 

Ravi Shankar: There are so many unknown and underrepresented authors from South Asia that it is difficult to just choose a few, but let me mention the Hindi poet Shrikant Verma who has been judiciously translated into English by Rahul Soni. I’d also add Kunwar Narayan and Geet Chaturvedi, who is a postmodern Hindi author who merges together philosophy, myth and poetry. Assamese poet Nirmalprabha Bordoloi is also too little known internationally, and I’d also like to give a nod to a few prominent female Tamil poets including Salma, Kutti Revathi and Sukirtharani, each of whom has been translated by Lakshmi Holmström MBE. Finally, though Arun Kolatkar, who wrote in Marthai and English, is the only Indian poet other than Kabir to be named a World Classic by the New York Review of Books, he’s still relatively unrecognized as I feel he should be in the conversation with Marianne Moore and Wallace Stevens as some of the 20th century’s greatest modernist poets. After reading his work, you’ll never look at the Kala Ghoda neighborhood in Mumbai again the same way.

 

 

Pratik:  To what extent do you represent the south Asian region you come from?

 

Ravi Shankar: I am a TamBramAm, that is a Tamliian Brahmin American and proud of it, even as I shirk from nationalisms of any kind. My family comes from South India, Chennai and Coimbatore to be precise, and my grandfather was one of the early members of the Press Corp of India and was a journalist for The Hindu, the largest English language newspaper in India. He interviewed General Mountbatten and had tea with Jawaharlal Nehru and I owe my own inclination towards letters to him. Therefore, I can’t help but represent Tamil Nadu and am prone to saying roomba nandri instead of thank you very much when I’m speaking to my amma. Because I also went to grade school for a year at the M.A.K. Convent in (then) Madras and was rapped on the knuckles with a ruler by nuns and ate lunch with my hands out of a tiffin carrier, though in the Diaspora, I secret the color, chaos, greed and generosity within me. There are a few chapters of my forthcoming memoir Correctional that delve into those experiences in India. And given that Tamil is my mother tongue, I was grateful to co-translate one of the region’s most revered goddesses/poets, Andal, in a book The Autobiography of a Goddess published by Zubaan Books in India and winner of the Muse India translation prize. She’s a figure whose Thiruppavai is still recited at South Indian weddings today. Given that my parents still go to temple and perform pooja, are devout vegetarians who watch movies with Sivakumar and Sridevi, India still flourishes within me.

 

Pratik: What role has South Asia played in shaping your writing?

 

Ravi Shankar: I would say, in all earnestness, that my earliest memories of going to Hindu temples with my parents and listening to the Hindu bhajans reciting in Sanskrit, a language that I did not understand and yet that I responded viscerally too, was my first stirring into poetry, though I wouldn’t have known it at the time. I also devoured Amar Chitra Katha comics and developed my affinity for Hanuman from them. I particularly liked the Panchatantra and the Jataka tales, a kind of Indian counterpart to Aesop’s fables. And who can forget Ravana who tore across the sky in his pushpaka vimana, a celestial chariot until receiving his comeuppance from Rama? Those stories constellated in my imagination and then later in college when I was introduced to something as spirtually erotic as Jayadeva’s Gita Govinda I was hooked. I suppose sharing the name of India’s most famous musician, which has its drawbacks, has nonetheless made me necessarily more aware of the word of ragas and rasas, patterns and moods, and as parts of the Vedas prefigure quantum mechanics and my own primary concern is the cosmic via specific manifestation, South Asia is fully present in my work. I’m also part of collectives like Matwaala, the Asia Pacific Writers & Translators (APWT) of which I am Chairman, and the Board of the IndoAmerican Arts Council and these organizations bring together South Asian writers in enlivening and supportive ways. The reading series I curate IsoBreak has featured numerous writers from South Asia and is one of the liveliest and most diverse reading online reading events around.

 


Pratik: To what extent the British Colonial presence is in attendance even today in the literary arena of South Asian literature? What role do you believe the British Empire, or the Colonists who came before the British played in shaping the literature of the continent?

 

Ravi Shankar: Well, the easiest answer remains the sustained prevalence of English! Hinglish, Tanglish, Manglish...the list goes on and the great capaciousness of the English language is that it is able to accommodate so many different tongues and I feel the legacy of the British Empire still exists in the fastidious prose and rigorous argumentation that have characterized some of my Indian students’ work. India’s political institutions owe much to the British, while its ancient culture has roots that stretch back over millennia and that concordance - some call it a conflict - has helped shape the possibilities of Indian writing, both in English and in regional dialects. Would there have been a Rabindranath Tagore or Salman Rushdie without British colonialism? We know that there would not have been a V.S. Naipaul, at least if we are to believe Edward Said he considered him a “coloniser among the colonisers. Said wrote about Naipaul’s work, “he is neither a professional Orientalist nor a thrill seeker. He is a man of the Third World who sends back dispatches from the Third World to an implied audience of disenchanted Western liberals who can never hear bad enough things about all the Third World myths — national liberation movements, revolutionary goals, the evils of colonialism — which in Naipaul’s opinion do nothing to explain the sorry state of African and Asian countries who are sinking under poverty, native impotence, badly learned, unabsorbed Western ideas like industrialisation and modernisation. These are people, Naipaul says in one of his books, who know how to use a telephone but can neither fix nor invent one.” You couldn’t manufacture that kind of self-loathing without British colonialism! It has been argued that Indians creating literature in English helped cultivate the sense of nationalism that would help rise up against imperialism. That’s one of the few good things to come out of the racist institutional practices the British implemented in India, such as Macauley’s educational reforms (1835) which basically repudiated all Indian forms of knowledge for the British; like many others in history, South Asians were able to subvert their oppressors by using their very tools, in this case, the English language, against them and to that extent, the British influence on the literature of the continent persists.

 

Pratik: How do you think the English language has shaped the making or unmaking current of south Asian literature?

 

Ravi Shankar: Here’s the thing - we can’t have a serious discussion about the English language without a corresponding discussion about late-stage capitalism, for the two forces are inextricably interrelated. The legacy of British colonialism helped shape English language writers in India, Pakistan, Burma, Ceylon, Malaysia etc. And because the soft power of American democracy is about exporting its culture to other countries, Hollywood helped accelerate this making and unmaking - let’s call it a remaking - of South Asian literature. One hardly discussed fact is that English serves as a kind of lingua franca in much of Asia so that regional communities and dialects have no direct interchange with one another. So there’s hardly a book in Tamil translated directly into Bengali, Telegu or Gujarati; instead you would have a book translated first into English and then into another language. The effect of this is to make work hew to a more Western aesthetic sensibility and likewise the books that are chosen to be translated for the English language market are those deemed to be consumable by a populace growing less literate by the tweet. Therefore, works that sensationalize and exoticize are encouraged, and books on yoga and the kama sutra, are clamored after because they provide the kind of Indian literature that the big publishing houses want. That desire can’t help but encourage writers to hoe the same furrow, in some cases very productively as in the case of Pulitzer Prize winner Vijay Seshadri whose latest book That Was Now, This is Then, which refracts the facets of longing could not have been possible without his childhood in India and his education as a creative writer in the United States.

 

There’s sadly another way in which the allure of North America and UK publishing has inflected--indeed infected--South Asian literature. It’s created in certain circles a desperation to be seen, read and validated by the Western world, and those few will hijack any social imperative if it helps them further their self-serving cause. So while it’s profoundly important that the deeply patriarchal and in many respects backwards, even oppressive gender and racial politics in India or Pakistan gets shaken up, it’s also important to call out those who glom onto #metoo or #blacklivesmatter in a spirit of vicarious moral outrage when really their public displays of virtue signaling and being offended on behalf of someone else (often without actually knowing the facts) thinly veil their own true motives, which is to call more attention to themselves.

 

 Traveling to India as an American boy, I always had a sense that the country existed in a kind of time warp, a few years behind what was happening culturally--Pac Man, parachute pants, grunge music--all seemed to arrive after the fact and seeing the fervent zeal with which these young writers are flinging themselves into identity politics and social justice movements with origins elsewhere, rather than concentrate on craft and study and local activism, it feels that way again. I suppose the pendulum always has to overcorrect, but I fear much of the work produced under this influence won’t last and perhaps that’s a good thing.

 

Pratik: India being so big in every sense of the world, geographically and demographically, do you feel smaller south Asian nations feel subdued by India’s giant literary presence in the sub- continent?

 

Ravi Shankar: Yes, absolutely. India is the elephant in the room, while countries like the Maldives or Bhutan barely rate a mention in our conversations about global literature, which is a shame, because that means that we have not done enough work to translate the work that is being produced there. The rise of Indian nationalism hasn’t helped because it has helped bring Brahmanical constructs of superiority back to the forefront, just as Trumpism has emboldened racism under the guise of patriotism in the US. The tension between Pakistan and India also has given rise to this sense of territorialism which is intrinsically silly since bounded together, the voices in South Asia, collectively, have a much better chance of penetrating the attention of readers across the globe. Parochialism is almost as bad as patriotism when it comes to stifling originality.

 

Pratik: What are your fond memories of traveling to the south Asian nations?

 

Ravi Shankar: Ah, as a young boy I travelled all over India and got my head shaved at many of the great temples, including Tirupati Venkateswara. I ate mangos and drank freshly squeezed sugarcane juice at my grandparent’s house in Coimbatore and toured the slums in Mumbai which is seared into my memory: we were welcomed into the home of a family of six living in shack with walls made of newspaper and no running water, and they offered us dal and chai, though they had next to nothing themselves. Then later in my life I had the great good fortune to make multiple trips to South Asia to visit family and participate in literary happenings. I would say some of the most meaningful trips I have ever taken to South Asia included performing at the Jaipur Literary Festival in front of over 10,000 readers at a Rajasthani palace; meeting the Dalai Lama on a plane to Dharamshala; staying with family in Trivandrum and a dear friend in Dhaka where I saw the Lalbagh Fort, textile mills, and ate begun bhaja and labra; launching my translations of Andal in New Delhi; and finally how can I ever forget the amazing time that I had in Kathmandu with the Editor of Pratik, Himalayan poet Yuyutsu Sharma, where I was treated to a private performance of Newari dancers and feted like visiting royalty. And perhaps that’s the ultimate truth in the end; just as at land’s end India, Kanyakumari, there’s an enormous statue of the Tamil poet and philosopher Valluvar, so in many parts of South Asia I was treated with warmth, respect and dignity, all for writing literature and devoting myself to its propagation around the world.

 

 

 

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Wednesday, April 19, 2023

Pratik South Asia Special : Three poems by Pakistani-British poet Moniza Alvi

 

Moniza Alvi

Three Poems

from Fairoz : A book-length sequence of poems in which a schoolgirl Fairoz has been drawn to extremism and has become involved with Tahir, a man she has met online

 


1.

The eye

 

O hardware shop.

O faithful eye –

 

has it seen anything unusual?

The hardware shop is dark

 

and so closely forested.

How can the recording eye see?

 

But it does. It’s well-trained.

The forester is quick and deliberate.

 

The hammers are ranged like

strong-beaked birds

 

on the bristling wall-rack.

A claw hammer, that’s it.

 

And a club hammer.

Drops them into the open cage

 

of his basket. Adds long nails.

Hurries to the wooden counter.

 

Something not right? He’s too

intent, no glancing around.

 

Someone wants to hammer a nail

through the universe.

 

Does the eye weep?

The eye is dispassionate.

 

 

2.

She’s heard nothing from Tahir

 

‘Speak Soon’. That’s what he said.

‘Speak soon love you Fairoz.’

 

And now she  

 

              cuts herself on the ice of waiting

              cuts herself on the ice of not knowing

              cuts herself on the ice

 

3.

Call him three times

 

Tahir? said the woman in the wood.

Who’s Tahir? Oh you mean Abdul.

He’s really Abdul. Sometimes

Anwar. Names are a risk.

 

I don’t think you’ll see him,

not for a while. Maybe

not in this life.

He was always careful,

 

so skilled at

covering his tracks.

But it’s hard

to hide in these woods.

Don’t despair. Inshallah,

no one needs be lonely here.

Friendship, marriage –

just footsteps away.

 

But try calling him now.

Three times, once for each name.

Abdul – Anwar – Tahir.

He’ll answer, if he hasn’t moved on.

 

Moniza Alvi was born in Lahore and grew up in Hertfordshire. Three of her collections The Country at My Shoulder, Europa and At the Time of Partition, have been shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize.

Moniza received a Cholmondeley Award in 2002.

 

 

Now Available on Amazon India, USA, UK & Canada

 

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