(Latheesh Mohan on the changing nature of his poetry, the politics and life experiences that inform it, and the need for a language of sexual use.)
When everyone either returns
Or goes away to go astray,
A prohibited person
Comes out of her self
And waits to say
That the green
Which flowers and sways
On hilltops and sea-slopes
Are the valleys inside my
self;
That it’s through my self
The trains climb the hills
Seeking
The shadow-complaints of
winter.
--Latheesh Mohan (Who will
write the travelogues of hilltops?)
An unapologetic sensual stylist and an even more
unapologetic campaigner of a set of
ideals that is at odds with the domineering mores of Malayalam’s
political lexicon, Latheesh Mohan’s poetry is characterized by a penchant,
bordering often on the absurd, for the riddles and spectacles of a reckless
loneliness. Described by Balachandran Chullikkad, one of Malayalam’s finest
poets, as a “test pilot of our future poetry”, Latheesh is the author of two
groundbreaking antholgies: Pulp Fiction
and Chevikal/ Chembarathikal (Ears/
Shoeflowers).
Latheesh’s
blog www.junkiegypsy.blogspot.com has a cult following and an equally raucous
set of detractors who brand him as a purveyour of affectations whose flashy
poems convey nothing—“what does this poem mean?” being a constant gripe.
His poems are also already part of various university curriculums.
While the stylistic idiom of his ouevre has changed
dramatically from an angst ridden rockstar sensibility that marked Pulp Fiction to a more complex,
ruminative and almost enigmatic sensibilty that characterizes Chevikal/ Chembarathikal, his comitment
to the set of core political idelas that gives his poems its signature texture
and flavour has remained resolute. He holds anarchism and feminism as the two
philosophical ideals on which his literature is premised; the fierce
anti-hindutwa and anti-CPI (M) traits that define the more explicit facets of
his politics being inevitable consequences of this fundamental orientation. The
latter in particular is an anomaly in Malayalam where CPI (M) is not just a
dominant political party, but also an enforcer of the prevailing hegemonic
literary sensibility that it preserves and perpetuates through the massive
legion it commands.
Presently pursuing his PhD in Philosophy from I.I.T
Delhi, his third collection of poems KSHA
Valikkunna Kuthirakal (Horses that draw KSHA)
will be published soon. The poems of this collection reflect yet another
stylistic paradigm shift with a more pronounced emphasis on elaborate
theatrical settings to stage the verse. Latheesh also writes and performs
English poetry.
Here is Latheesh speaking on his poetics and
politics.
In your relatively short career, you have already carved
out a unique space for yourself on account of the stylistic wizardry of your
idiom, for the intensity of angst that you bring to your poems and for an
unequivocal commitment to a set of core political ideals. Can you trace the
trajectory of your journey so far?
The trouble with my
life started when an upper-caste Hindu lady and a lower-caste Hindu man fell in
love 36 years ago. Because they both possessed very high intensity and because
the Indian caste system is an oppressive mechanical device against all kinds of
love, they had no choice but to elope. First they went to Mangalore where I was
born in 1982. Being neither emotionally nor financially prepared for a
long-trip, they had to soon come back to their native town, Thiruvalla, in
central Kerala , where they decided to live for the rest of their lives. They
never managed to own any land. I spent my entire childhood in rented places - a
gypsy in his ancestral town.
Looking back, my
parents were by-products of the anti-endogamy politics that was so popular in
Kerala in the first half of 20th century. It’s another matter
altogether that they themselves never realised this. They were in any case too
poor to know that. Now I see them as orphans of a social revolution. The
anti-endogamy movement in Kerala created a theoretical base for social change
but nobody really cared about cultivating a cushion structure to support its
Quixotic byproducts. Those who were affected by and ventured with the theory
were branded as romantic fools and were promptly outcast.
How significant an imprint has this ‘gypsy-in-hometown’
state of being left on the poems of Pulp Fiction, your first collection? The
idea of home, and the torment of leaving the physical manifestation of that
idea is a recurring image in many of those poems.
Even though I was born
in the 80s, I got my eyesight right only in the nineties. During vacations me
and my sister used to stay extensively with the families of our parents. Both
families believed in the same mythical-Gods. But they prayed to different
political-Gods. On the walls of my mother’s house, there hung the pictures of
Vivekananda, Paramahamsa etc. But my father’s family had only Narayana Guru’s
photo. I think I somehow developed a personal critique of both these systems
very early on in my childhood.
My parents had no other
option but to force their children to study well. And so they forced me to
suffer the ruthlessness of a missionary school where I studied for ten very
long years. For a game-loving and rebellious kid, there could not have been a
more proper hell than a missionary school. When I think about all the hell-like
places I have been to, the image of that school always appears first. It was
not loneliness that I felt there, but an angst against a system that so
viciously prevented even the possibility of a serious friendship. I started
making friends only after the 10th standard. Mostly in communist
circles. I spent almost my entire teenage days with the SFI crowd. But they
were terrible. Even though they have relatively better systems of friendship,
the nature of their politics is so exclusionary and normative. You must also
keep in mind that the communist society in Central Kerala is led primarily by
upper-caste Hindus and upper-caste Christians. In my opinion both these parties
are preservationists to the core. The moment someone proposes words like
‘change’,‘freedom’ and ‘free speech’ they go hysterical.
The 90s were full of
contradictory streams. On the one hand you had the effects of liberalization:
Mtv culture and other light and sound businesses, and on the other hand the
emergence of a rabid Hindutva politics. I was stationless at that point. I had
lived and got myself bored with Hindus, Christians and Communists and was
already tired. That’s the time when I decided to hit the road. Leaving home was
the biggest risk I took in life. It was a painful decision too to make. It is
easy for the Sidhardhas of this world to leave their homes as they leave behind
no hungry souls; for the single male child of a wretched household, it is a
cruel decision to take. It hurts you like a needle left on the nerve
forever.
In many ways, Pulp Fiction was also a manifesto of sorts for the teen rebel
angst of those who grew up in the 90s.
Pulp Fiction, in my
opinion, didn’t really succeed in fulfilling it’s intended objective. I was
trying hard to bypass the obscenely patriarchal framework of modern Malayalam
poetry but I couldn’t make it happen in Pulp Fiction. Mainly because the boy
who wrote those poems was preoccuppied with using anger as his primary poetic device. And there
was too much of it: anger and angst. But Pulp Fiction did work, as you said,
like a pop manifesto of teenage poetry. There was a flood of teenage poems
after the publication of that particular book. Even now, after eight years of
its publication, I get to see crude imitations of poems from that book. I
really don’t know what to make of the aesthetic validity of that book. But I
cannot deny the fact that it did offer me a strong foundation from where I
could build brick by brick.
So, was it a process of arriving at a deeper awareness of
your own political philospohy that later led you to a poetic world vastly
different in its tone and tenor from that of Pulp Fiction’s?
In a sense, yes. Though
its never as simple as it sounds. There was a period wwhen I roamed around
South India almost aimlessly for years. Worked with many newspaper offices that
paid pea nuts and resigned from more jobs than I actually committed to. But
during that period I found out the three things that would become the binding
ideals of my poetry: feminism, anarchism and Dalit politics. Almost all the
friends I now have are either artists or feminists or Dalits or anarchists.
Even though I started writing poetry from my early childhood, I think, I found
my idiom only after I got welcomed by these four groups of people. My poetry -
the politics inherent in it - is a by product of all these structural and
situational complications. My poetic thought is pro feminist/Dalit/anarchist in
nature and it essentially hates Hindutva, Christianity and the patriarchal and
the apologetic Aadhunikatha
(‘modernity’) idiom that was so very dominant in Malayalam poetry in the last
decades of 20th century.
What was the poetic millieu of 90’s and early 2000’s? What
do you think were the factors that prompted you, after the publication of Pulp
Fiction, to develop an idiom that marked probably the sharpest rupture from
that millieu?
Poetry scene of Kerala
in 90s and the first decade of 21st century was so frenzied. Kerala
is full of poets anyway. But the last decade of 20th and 1st
decade of 21st C were more hectic with so much activity from many
sides. The Modern stream, spearheaded by people such as K Satchidanandan, K G
Sankarappillai, Ayyappa Panicker Balachandran Chullikkadu, A Ayyappan,
Vijayalakshmi, Attoor Ravivarma, Kadamanitta Ramakrishnan, D Vinayachandran and
Savithri Rajeevan was of course the most dominant one. But the postmodern
stream, locally known as Puthukavitha (New
Poetry) – which was led by poets like P Raman, P P Ramachandran, K R Tony, T P
Rajeevan, Veeran Kutty, Anvar Ali, Anita Thampi, Sreekumar Kariyad, P N
Gopikrishnan, Manoj Kuroor, Kuzhur Wilson, Vishnuparasad, S Kannan, Rupesh Paul
etc - was also dominant, at least, in the Avant Garde circles in which I was
more interested in. The school of traditional poetry - poets such as O N V
Kurupp, Madhushoodhanan Nair, Sugatha Kumari, Vishnunarayanan Namboothiri - was
popular too. And then you had the dalit stream - S Joseph, M R Renukumar, Binu
M Pallippadu, M B Manoj etc- which was already strong. And there was also bits
and pieces of feminist writing coming up - Prabha Zacharias, Dona Mayoora,
Gargi Harithakam, Sereena, Sindhu K V, Dhanya M D, Uma Rajiv, Padma etc. A group
of poets of my generation - S Kalesh, Ajeesh Dasan, M R Vishnuprasad, T P
Vinod, Pramod K M, Krispin Joseph, Sudheesh Kottembram etc - was also finding
its own voice and feet. So, you see, in this sea of poets if you want to raise
your claim you have to come up with something absolutely different. I already
had a different political content. What I needed was a different rhythm pattern
that would go well with both the urban and rural flow of my lived experiences.
Your immediate predecessors, the poets of the Puthukavutha
movement were extremely keen on a lucid, very direct, and primarily a minimal
style. It is from them and their style
that you seem to have broken away the farthest---in terms of both developing an
elaborately circuitous narrative language and in terms of reclaiming a long
lost tradition of philosophizing the immediate political context of the poet.
I have followed the Puthukavitha tradition very keenly and many of the
poets from that tradition are close to me. They created, as an immediate
response to the rhetorical style of Modernism, a language style that was clear
and precise in its execution. But they somehow ended up making that trait a
motto of their collective effort. Saying things directly became the norm. And
that norm was followed in a very particular fashion. Over indulgence in the
idea of poetic-democracy somehow forced them to adopt a content style that is
everyday and devoid of philosophical complications. They also cultivated an
ambition to get back to the roots. Though I was fascinated by their ability to
create images that dwell deep, I soon got bored with the idea of depth. Depth
was everything they were chasing. I was interested in the river and rain than
in the idea of digging deep. They shied away from any philosophical engagement,
even though they kept the political stream alive in their corpus. The classical
tradition of Malayalam poetry which I am fond of - Narayana Guru, Kumaran Asan,
Vyloppilli Sreedhara Menon, Balamani Amma etc - was heavy with philosophical meditations.
Also there was a stream alive in the Avant Garde tradition - Maythil
Radhakrishnan, Kalpatta Narayanan, K A Jayaseelan etc - which kept its links
with philosophy even though they were more into the everyday deliberation when
compared with the classical meditation. I think the close reading of all these
people helped me to break out from all these traditions.
While angst remains a primary subject in all three of your
collections, you have moved away from the restlessness of Pulp Fiction to a sort
of volatile stillness in Chevikal/Chembarathikal, and from that to a
theatrically staged flow of both ideas and rhythm patterns in your recent
poems.
I was an avid swimmer
in the childhood. When I think about my childhood, it is about the rivers that I
think. The idea of flow was ingrained in me that way. The teenage gypsy life I
had in the Metro cities of South India further helped to fuse that childhood
idea of flow with the Hongkong-lighting you get from the night life of Metro
cities. Then there were all kind of drugs. These jumbled circumstances led me
to formulate a different idea of rhythm after the publication of Pulp Fiction:
Rhythm that also takes into consideration the play of light along with the flow
of water. A couple of broken love-relationships helped to intensify the mixture
of color, flow and freedom. Especially the tormenting end of a long
relationship made me think a lot about rhythm and relationships. One break up
and you are nowhere. All your sense of direction is lost. Down and out one
realises that what keeps you going is your ability to form rhythmic repetitive
engagement with the other. During those long stream of depression and sleepless
nights I kept a diary and noted down whatever I was thinking about the flow. I
think that was the turning point. When I came out of that dark lonely room of
depression I had a different poetic style ready with me. No more boastful, no
more down-and-out, but a container of violent flow. From a teenage rebel to a
more settled but still violent person who takes the third person seriously as
against his previous preoccupation with the melancholic first person.
And then came the internet.
It was the advent of
internet that gave me ample time to experiment with the form. The political
content was already formed but without publishing regularly it was difficult to
come up with a unique form or a rhythm-pattern. Internet helped a lot in this
regard. My blog in Malayalam had a fair share of readers. Even though the poems
I published on it created a lot of public uproar - for reasons related to
morality and intelligibility - it gave me a fare share of audience for whom I
could imagine I was making a new poetic style. Major part of my defenders on
the online space were women. It helped to maximize the feminist-side of my
poetic intentions.
You have always been a
staunch critique of the much celebrated and much romantisized Malayalam
modernity’s poetic and political projects. Could you elaborate on that?
My reluctance to
identify myself as a modern subject is probably where it all stems from. I have
never liked the word modern, especially in the context of Malayalam poetry. It
is difficult to create the notion of the modern without presupposing the binary
primitive. In my opinion the human condition is static. There is a general
tendency to transcend but it is evident that the human animal will never
transcend its condition. If the cat is always a cat, the wo/man is always a
wo/man. Modernism is actually a supra-claim that holds the view that
technological advancement transcended us from human condition. It is important
to note that the western modernism is so-closely linked with the advent of the
printing machine. It’s like claiming that ‘look, I have developed some
technical toys/tools, so I have somehow transcended the condition of my
father’. What I see here is just a
clever son branding his father as primitive and himself as modern. It is easy
for the grandson to play the same trick his father played. And that he does anyway. He proclaims himself
post-modern (another illusion of transcendence) and pushes his father
(post-primitive) back into the level of primitive. This is a nice game to play
but unfortunately it says more about the father-and-son game and maybe about Id
and Ego, if you prefer, rather than about the basic spatial human situation.
Modern Malayalam poetry
was unashamedly tripping on that binary. They positioned themselves over and
above everything else by just conceiving the other as primitive. This trend was
dominant for over three decades, considering post modernism as an essential
part of modern theory based on the rhetoric of rupture. A departure from this
trend happened when Dalit poetry arrived in the 90s. In my opinion, Dalit
poetry is the best thing to have happened in recent Malayalam literature. They
collectively claimed the domain of the non-primitive-and-the-non-modern and
problematised the notion of agency. Before Dalit poets, modern poets were
speaking for everyone without really bringing anyone to the stage. They wrote
Marxist poetry, subaltern poetry, feminist poetry, Hindu poetry and the Jesus
Christ superstar stuff without really bringing any character from these areas
to the stage. For the modern poets, women or Dalits were simply issues that
demanded sympathetic engagement. The upper caste Hindu male - the Modern poet -
stood on the stage like a solitary crusader and claimed the agency of everyone
else. In that process they also worked as the agents who blocked the entry of
others onto the stage. Patronisation was their bread and butter. And their
poetry became obituary-like.
One criticism often levelled against you is regarding the
cryptic nature of your poems, some dismissing it as gimmicry masquerading as
high art. On the other hand, your style has also spawned a legion of imitators
who pay scant attention to the poetics of your idiom. How do you react to that?
I understand the poetic activity as a process that aims to create a
language for future generations. Poetry is the laboratory where you try out
better versions of language for future use. I subscribe to Maritin Heidegger’s
idea here (only here, only in lit-crit) that postulates ‘everyday language as
used up poetry’. When you see the future generations as your target audience
it’s normal that you have trouble with the current crop. People don’t like the
idea that their language is temporal. When you suggest a change in the use of
language it is normal that they resist.
I don’t know why my poetry gets imitated in this scale. I was furious
about it at one point. Now I am cool with it as I see people using it as only
an entry point. People read you and get into the poetic activity and then break away from you. I hope
that process of breaking away happens with the people you are mentioning.
What do you think could be the reason for the widespread
popularity enjoyed by your poems like Pala Upamakalil Manjukalam (Winter in
many similies) that engage with sexuality?
My poetic engagement with sexuality is a conscious political act.
Malayalam poetry is still driven by a system of ridiculously regressive codes
of morality. Even after practicing the rhetoric of free-sex and stuff like that
you get very little poetry on this theme. Usually what happens is that you get
lot of things written on the idea of sexual frustration and then it gets
theorized as sexual poetry. My poems on sexuality are an attempt to cultivate a
new language for sexual use. Like a clear language that is useful for
activities such as phone-sex, language that can be used for foreplay etc. There
is a criminal lack of clear sexual language in Indian languages. The Malayalam
that is generally used for sexual needs is either heavy on English or the
normal lexicon of sexual language is very male-centric and offensive. It is
difficult to change the gender hierarchy without changing the language that is
used for romance and sex. I think that project will be taken forward seriously
by the future generations.
You are now writing and performing poetry in English too.
Any specific reasons?
There were many
attempts to translate my poetry. Many people tried that and I liked none. I
tried to translate them myself and then figured out that is not an easy job to
do. Because the rhythm in Malayalam poems are drawn from the images you get in
Kerala, in translation it goes up in smoke. If you want to translate the rhythm
you need to translate the landscape.This is why I gave up this whole idea of
translating and decided to stick to writing original poems in English. I had a
real struggle with the English language in the beginning. Because I was so
deeply involved with the technical details of the Malayalam language whenever I
tried to reproduce the flow in English language I found myself lost in the
syntax. I think my English writing started working after I encountered theater.
Two years of performance studies really helped me to understand how a language
performs, especially English. It also gave me a fare idea of the relationship
between page and stage. I really enjoy performing poetry. I hope I will grow in
that area.
In times like these when writers like NS Madhavan says that
the art of 21t centurys is suicide notes, how would you prefer to locate
poetry?
N S Madhavan can say
anything. I usually don’t care much about what people like him say. But what he
did here, terming Rohit Vemula’s suicide note as literature, is absolutely
cruel. Irrespective of what people like him say, the literature of our times is
still literature. Suicide notes are written with blood. One cannot write
literature with blood. You don’t produce literature with blood, even if you are
a person who takes romantic metaphors seriously.
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