Meena Kandasamy: a poet for today

I'm a big fan of Indian/Tamil poet Meena Kandasamy. I keep up with her Twitter updates and read and re-read her work.

Earlier this year, she got in somewhat of a scrap when she championed her point of view after weighing in on a festival associated with a university in April. Organized by the traditionally "low-caste" Dalits, the festival which featured beef dishes being served, outraged some right-wing Hindu nationalists who threatened violence.

When Kandasamy tweeted her happiness at the ultimate success of the festival, the reaction was violent and fierce, many people making horrific threats against her. As one organization put it:

It appears that Meena Kandasamy has been singled out for abuse at least partly because she is a bold and outspoken woman who expresses her opinion freely in the public sphere. The fact that she is a Dalit, especially one whose work focuses on caste annihilation, linguistic identity and feminism, clearly makes her even more of a target.

It's eerie how universal this impulse is: that radical religious fundamentalists (no matter which variety) use violence or threats of violence to any point of view they deem threatening to their outlook.

Though things seem to have blown over for now, I have been meaning to write about Kandasamy anyway for a while and praise her passionate and powerful poems, her bravery in writing what she wants to write (despite threats and criticism), and her general intelligence and creativity. Some poems feel positively ancient in their reliance on imagism and straightforward language:



Cinquains

Morning Song

Wet pink
And dusty grey
The sky begins to blush.
Some sleepy careless charm welcomes
Daybreak.

Even Song

Azure
And pink gold hues
The smug sky at twilight
A final flush of fulfilment
Night falls.


I am almost reminded of Tang Dynasty poets, Du Fu or Li Po: bursts of images and colors which stand in for a vague emotional absence. Her book Ms Militancy contains some fascinating poems that reflect and refract the history of her caste and gender but they are highly personal and evocative as well.

On a highly personal note, when Kandasamy was in Montreal a couple of years ago for the Blue Met, we hopped a train out west and hit Ottawa and then Regina (together with two other writers including the charming and elegant Mr. K. Satchidanandan). I remember hitting a bar in Regina with them, a quiet (and chilly) Tuesday night in downtown Regina, drinking a beer in a gay bar because we were all curious what a gay bar in Regina, Saskatchewan would be like (answer: quiet). It was a nice trip and Meena and Satchi were both very likeable and down to earth.

In all three cities we traveled to, Kandasamy was raved about, people thrilled at her readings, her poems, and her quiet intelligence.

Urban Irony: yech

There is a very interesting piece over the weekend in the NYT blog about contemporary irony as a generational style and it aligns with so much that I've thought about in the past few years. I am struck particularly when I am in Mile End or parts of the Plateau: the girls with oversized 80s eyeglasses, the men with handlebar moustaches, odd posters on the wall (like the one below that I Tweeted about a couple of weekends ago: Lionel Richie on the wall at Flocon Espresso), high-waisted mom jeans on 18 year olds. Francophone young people seem less enamoured with this tendency than Anglophone young people do but the NYT writer captures perfectly an analysis of how it might have come about and why it's potentially damaging or if that's an overstatement, so pointless and banal.

Hello, is it me you're looking for?

What irks me about the whole urban irony thing is the sense that sincerity is almost subversive. Everything is one step removed from intention. Do the people who run Flocon really like 1980s Lionel Richie? Or is this a pose, an affectation? What would a poster of some funky cool new band on the wall communicate? Sincerity, so it's something you'd never see.

I think about when I was in my 20s, the kind of music and style I abhorred was anything that parents would have liked (now, of course, I appreciate Carole King and Neil Young and early 70s film) but now it's like certain allusions to the past allow young people to communicate that they are somehow capable of knowing everything that is cool now (which was how we measured how cool someone older was when I was in my 20s: if he knew Depeche Mode and the Violent Femmes and Erasure, then he was OK; if not, then he was old), not only are they aware of contemporary music and film and style, they know about everything that came prior particularly my generation's icons though it's always people who were terribly "uncool" in the 1980s: Lionel Richie (when I was young, this was middle-aged people's music), Barry Manilow (ditto: my grandmother adored Barry Manilow), etc.

This kind of ironic style isn't that new but the ubiquity of it is: in Montreal, in New York, in Portland, many cities where I have spent time recently, all have young people who look identical. I suppose that's been true for a while but I have to say that going to a new city where there is a unique kind of style is so refreshing. And it happens so infrequently...

It's odd that irony only relates to pop culture or fashion. This demonstrates the shallowness of the tendency: never do you see young people clutching paperback copies of Danielle Steele ironically.  Why aren't hipsters ever ironic about Billie Holliday or Coltrane or Henry James or Thomas Hardy? I guess that's too far away...? It's the contemporary link that contains all the resonance...? And it would require too much thought and analysis? I don't know but the piece linked above is certainly thought-provoking...