We’re thrilled to present the sixth and final installment of our Indian Languages Special Feature here at the blog. This time, Assistant Managing Editor Janani Ganesan gives us an inside look at the life of the featured poet via the following interview. Thanks for sticking with us on our tour of the language-rich Indian subcontinent!
Images of writer Salma receiving honours and awards from Chief Ministers and Presidents line the living room walls of her Chennai flat. It’s the home of an acclaimed public figure, but she has fought to be able to declare this success as a writer, even to herself. Having grown up in an orthodox Muslim community in the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu and married at nineteen into a conservative family, Salma had to hide her identity as a writer. Her years of struggle as an imprisoned woman are well recorded, including in an award-winning documentary by Kim Longinotto. Her poems, short stories, and novels are deeply melancholic reflections on life as a woman in her culture. “I don’t think I have ever felt happy. Not even when I receive recognition for my work. I always feel a sense of sorrow, having lost a lot,” she said during our interview.
“How did you reach my apartment? Did you take a taxi?” she asks. My scooter gets a nod of approval. “Parava illaye!” [“Not bad!”] A woman must have mobility. She sits down with a newspaper upon which she cleans and removes spinach leaves from their stems to prepare lunch, while we speak about her life and art. Later, she takes a picture with me and the spinach as a rebuke to Tamil writer B. Jeyamohan, who once insulted a bank teller, suggesting she was not capable even of picking spinach leaves.
Below is an edited transcript of the interview, translated by the interviewer and Asymptote’s Assistant Managing Editor, Janani Ganesen, as well as one of Salma’s poems, translated by N Kalyan Raman.
Janani (J): Your life and struggle has been widely recorded. Yet, for the sake of our readers, I hope you wouldn’t mind answering a few questions. You grew up in a cloistered environment. How did you access books?
Salma (S): There was a library in my town that I liked going to. It wasn’t big, but I read as much as I could. In those days, New Century Book House used to bring out translations of Russian writers. I read Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and others. I read and admired Tamil writers like Balakumaran. But it is from these Russian greats that I got a sense of what literature is about. I also read Periyar and wondered, “Why am I not being allowed to go to school or do the things that my brother is allowed to do? How am I different?” I felt angry.
J: When did you start writing?
S: Although I wrote my first short story when I was in class seven, I wouldn’t look at it as my beginning. It was about a woman, whose husband abandons her and yet she goes back to help him when he is in need. I was influenced by the movies I watched and what older people told me: “Kallanalum Kanavan.” [“A husband remains a husband even when he is hard like a stone.”]
I would say my writing career began with the publication of the poem “Swasam” [“Breath”] in a little magazine called Suttum Vizhi Chuddar, when I was seventeen. I received a lot of reviews only after that poem.
J: What is “Swasam” about?
S: What is my identity? Things were happening around me without my being aware of it. My breath should be mine. Somebody else can’t breathe on my behalf. But that was how it was. Everybody else was deciding the course of my life. My education, my activities, my movements, my marriage, all of this was decided by someone else. That’s what the poem is about. The poem became controversial in my village. “How could you let a girl who has attained puberty let her name be printed? It’s a disgrace for her to show her face outside. A disgrace to the family. A disgrace to her society,” they said. I didn’t understand this then. Why could you not print my name? A girl’s name is printed in a marriage invitation; is that a disgrace too? But I couldn’t argue with them.
J: When did you find the freedom to be a writer?
S: My husband wanted to contest the Panchayat elections, but it was a seat reserved for a woman, so they asked me to contest instead. It wasn’t my choice. But winning the elections and becoming a public figure gradually gained me my freedom as a writer.
J: Have the people in your village read your works?
S: No. They are not interested in literature. Only 2000 copies of books are printed. And it takes one or two years to sell even this limited number.
J: What about your mother or your two sons – have they read your work?
S: They aren’t interested either.
J: In many of your interviews, a lot about your early life has been talked about. Do you ever wish people would focus more on your literary career?
S: Yes, I do. I have come out of those trying circumstances and yet I am asked about them again and again. I wish people would discuss my work with me, criticize me, so I can grow as a writer. Perhaps because I come from an Islamic background people ask me about it. This is why I generally don’t agree to interviews.
J: We’ll stick to your work. Who are your literary influences?
S: The sorrow in Dostoevsky’s works speaks to me. My poems aren’t happy either. The melancholy and loneliness in human life portrayed in Dostoevsky’s work attracted me. Also Mayakovsky’s and Anna Akhmatova’s poems. In that formative age, these poems were close to my heart. And (Tamil poet) Atmanam’s poems. He is also someone who lived with a lot of pain and sorrow and that’s what he expressed. He later committed suicide.
J: Most of your favourites seem to be Russian writers. What about Tamil writers?
S: I already mentioned Atmanam. As a youngster, I was impressed by Jayakanthan’s stories. It was also a period when I was attracted to socialism and communism and these ideologies informed his stories. These were revolutionary writings. So were writings of T. Janakiraman and Ambai. But these were the books available in the library. I couldn’t choose, I just read whatever came my way.
J: There’s a Tamil translation of War and Peace in my parents home, which is a joke at a hundred pages or so.
S: No, no. The one I read was a three-volume translation. These (Russian) books were about war, human relations and loss, and gave me a different, a more wider perspective of the world. I don’t think they do such translations anymore.
J: The publishing industry seems to focus on translating works from Tamil to English, which is great, but there doesn’t seem to be much translation into Tamil. Who are some of the contemporary writers you read?
S: Imayam and Devi Bharathi, for instance. They write about human life and its puzzles and you know when a writer is able to capture this well. I seek out these books.
J: You have written short stories, poems and novels. When you feel the need to express something or write, how do you settle on a form?
S: Poetry can capture an intense emotion you feel. But a story needs to mature and you need to plan how to write it. The poem to be published along with this interview for instance, is about something that has affected me deeply, it’s about a friend’s life. I feel helpless, I can’t do anything for her. I write a poem when I feel that helplessness.
But there are some things you can’t contain within poetry. If you need to say something in detail and beyond the abstraction of emotions, prose provides you the space.
J: Yes, in your short story, “On the Edge”, which I read in translation, you write out a conversation that happens between three generations of women. The grandmother wants the car windows to be lowered so she doesn’t smell the other woman’s fart. You are able to convey the intimacy that inhabits these women’s world.
S: Yes, and it is important to do so.
J: There are many who criticize women writers for being too “sentimental” and domesticated.
S: I don’t want to distinguish between male and female writers. The gender of the writer doesn’t come into question when evaluating their work. Whatever be the gender of the writer, I do feel that it’s necessary to write beyond wallowing in the self and circumstances.
J: But doesn’t the self also become political?
S: Yes, everything is political. There is politics embedded in marriage, in the body. But it depends on how the writer handles the subject.
J: There are critics who claim that ideology sells, especially feminism. What is…
S: There are two things to note here. There is a necessity even today that we talk about what is wrong with the way women are treated. It is because we don’t speak up enough that this sorry state of women continues. On the other hand, yes, there is a lot one can write about and as a creator I completely agree with this. But there are other writers, like Imayam or Devi Bharathi, writing about these other things. As a woman writer I think it is important for me that I record my experience, especially because I think there are many things that still remain unsaid.
The impossible gift
Through her visit
today,
an absurd drama was enacted in my living room.
Dark circles lurked
beneath her eyes
like shadows cast
on arid ground.
A butterfly flitted under an armpit.
I saw dread
piled high as a mountain
in her dark blue eyes.
Setting the butterfly to crawl on the bed,
she pulled out the fear whirling in her eyes
and let it slither across the table.
Then she spat in the washbasin
the insults contained in the silence
she had nurtured within herself
and flushed them away.
Unable to crumble and scatter,
her disgust
splashed and settled
on the sticker-dot pressed
in the wall mirror.
Distress lay
trapped within
our outstretched palms.
Nobody has a forest
to gift to a woman
who seeks only forests as alms.
The butterfly at her side,
she will continue her quest
for a world bereft of homes.
In some future where deserts bloom,
may she, too, possess a forest.
That night
a pair of fear-lit indigo eyes
spun round and round on my table
and perched on the silence
of this universe,
her departing youth.
Translator’s Note
A poem is translated as it is understood by the translator. For me, the key to understanding The Impossible Gift was the recognition that the protagonist is talking, from the vantage of an established home, about her “other” self who seeks “forests as alms”. This understanding came to me only while I was trying to make sense of the rough draft I had done in English. Since a translated poem is said to be “a new utterance”, it is perhaps advantageous for the translator to chase the proverbial hedgehog in the target language than in the original.
Unlike in the poems of her earlier phase, which were direct even in their expression of grief, the tone of this poem is one of wry anguish, self-regard with a resigned air. The diction as well as the rhythm of the translated poem had to “give voice” to this tone, both instinctively and consciously.
Salma uses phrasal nouns quite often as statements complete in their drama and meaning. In English prose, phrasal nouns are considered arch, it not downright absurd. In poetry, they are less rare. I can remember offhand the opening lines of Ariel by Sylvia Plath:
Stasis in darkness.
Then the substanceless blue
Pour of tor and distances.
But the mood of The Impossible Gift doesn’t lend itself to such staccato rhythms. Therefore, I have introduced verbs (‘lurked’, ‘lay trapped’, ‘continue’, ‘perched’) absent in the original. The reader will notice that the verbs are none too active, thus perfectly attuned to the lack of resolution in the poem.
Salma (b.1968) is a writer of Tamil poetry and fiction. Her work speaks about the taboo areas of the traditional woman’s experience. She has published two volumes of poetry: Oru Malaiyum Innoru Malaiyum (An Evening and Another Evening) and Pachchai Devadhai (Green Angel). Her novel, Irandaam Jaamangalin Kadhai (2004), revolving around the lives of women in a Muslim community of rural Tamilnadu, was considered a landmark achievement in Tamil. When it was later translated into English as The Hour Past Midnight (2009), Salma made her mark as a writer in the rest of India and abroad. Salma has also published a collection of short stories, Saabam (The Curse) in 2012 and her second novel, Manaamiyangal (Dreams) in 2016. A political activist for the cause of women’s empowerment, Salma was Chairperson of Tamilnadu Government’s Social Welfare Board during 2007-11. She lives and works in Chennai.
N Kalyan Raman is a translator of contemporary fiction and poetry in Tamil into English. He has so far published nine volumes of Tamil fiction in translation, including Mole! (2004), Manasarovar (2010), The Arena (2013), Farewell, Mahatma (2014), Still Bleeding from the Wound (2016) and The Ghosts of Meenambakkam (2016). His poetry translations have appeared in several anthologies of literature in Indian languages and in journals such as Poetry Internetional, Circumference, Indian Literature, Caravan and The Little Magazine, among others. He lives and works in Chennai.
Janani Ganesan is an Assistant Managing Editor for Asymptote. Previously, she was a Correspondent for Tehelka magazine, Delhi and worked at Verso Books, New York. She has a Masters in Liberal Studies from The New School, New York.
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