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Glimpses of genius

Prodigy’ is a word we associate with genius often disproportionate with age. Mozart was one such in the realm of music. We are also tempted to apply the term to sparks of genius we detect in young persons. Meena Kandasamy is one such prodigy in the world of letters—especially her poetry in English.

Since 1997, Meena Kandasamy's original essays and literary criticism have been published in magazines and journals such as Biblio, The Milli Gazette, Newsletter of the Indian Association for Women Studies, India Nest.com, Islamic Voice, The Rally, Meantime, The Media Hoot, Post-Colonial Web, and Youth Express.

She was awarded the first prize in the national-level 'Indian Horizons Poetry Contest' conducted by the Indian Council for Cultural Relations (ICCR), Government of India for her poem Mascara. Her poem My Lover Speaks of Rape won the first prize in Disha 2004. Recently, the Forum of Women Students of Loyola College, Chennai, honoured her with the Young Woman Achiever Award.

When did it dawn on you that you have a poet in you? What makes you write poetry?

Unlike most others, the first poems I wrote were not love poems, they were what could be called (to use a very out of fashion word) radical. Or militant. My poems don't rhyme and I don't really have 'influences' –like reading a great work and then wanting to write something like that. I write poetry out of my helplessness and my vulnerability ...I was young, and a woman, and pretty much highly sensitive, so... I wrote poetry. It was the least I could do about things ...A little of my poetry can be categorised as blatantfeminist, and that grows out of my own experience, of how my gender has made me the woman I am.

What is your perspective of beauty?

Perspectives are always tied up with politics— at the diverse ways of looking at the world. So, sometimes I might scream that all talk of beauty is bourgeois and at other times, I might believe something else. I think love magically transforms everything into something of beauty, so what is more essential than beauty, is understanding …I think beauty lies as much in dull gray skies as in the proverbial sunrise that paints wonders. That is again perspective.

Does any incident provoke you to poetry?

Yes, but never immediately. If any incident is capable of affecting me, then I live with that. I think over it, keep chewing on it, allow it to make me distracted, let it ruin my life for days on end, take it to bed and see it in my nightmares or wish-fulfiling dreams, talk about it to anyone who cares to listen, and someday, sometime, when I am sitting down, I have written a poem. Poetry should capture the heat of the moment, but there is no necessity that you write it like an instant transcription. It doesn't suit me at all.

How do you treat the things happening around us? War, terror, colonisation, genocide…?

I do naturally react. Being a poet, necessarily requires a certain level of politics—not just Left or Right, but at least distinguishing between the oppressor and the oppressed... Moreover, since history takes up chronicling the stories of those in power, it up to poetry to take up the chronicles of victim-hood. But I am against the institutionalisation of poetry per se...

What will happen to your poetry if the concept of love would be lost once and for all?

If I cease to love, I would cease to live. Or write, for that matter. And I don't think even the radical, angry poems of mine would survive. Only people who know how to love boundlessly get angry at society— only they become its revolutionaries, its leaders, its heroes. …

In her poem Frenzied Light she explains what she means by love—

I could be that piece of holy camphor

So safely locked away from prying hands.

And dearest, when I burn for you, that single time

Nothing shall remain of me, or of you, except that flash

Of memory. Our blending shall be so sublime, so intense, so total.

Here is Meena Kandasamy of whom Kamala Das says: “Older by nearly half a century, I acknowledge the superiority of her poetic vision and wish her access to the magical brew of bliss and tears each true poet is forced to partake of...

Lekshmy Rajeev