{"id":3264,"date":"2017-09-19T11:59:48","date_gmt":"2017-09-19T06:59:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/desiwriterslounge.net\/blog\/?p=3264"},"modified":"2017-09-19T11:59:48","modified_gmt":"2017-09-19T06:59:48","slug":"interview-tishani-doshi","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/desiwriterslounge.net\/blog\/2017\/09\/interview-tishani-doshi\/","title":{"rendered":"Interview: Tishani Doshi, Author of Girls are Coming out of the Woods"},"content":{"rendered":"

Tishani Doshi is the author of five books of fiction and\u00a0poetry. At 26, an encounter with the choreographer Chandralekha led her to an unexpected career in dance. In 2006, her first book of poems, Countries of the Body<\/em>, won the Forward Prize for best first collection. She is also the recipient of an Eric Gregory Award and the winner of the All-India Poetry competition. Girls are Coming out of\u00a0the Woods<\/em><\/a>\u00a0is her third full-length collection. She lives on a beach in Tamil Nadu. More of Tishani’s work can be found on her website<\/a>.<\/p>\n

In this interview, Tishani talks about her upcoming poetry collection Girls are Coming out of the Woods (<\/em>HarperCollins India, 2017) and much more.<\/p>\n

\n

Michelle D’costa (MDC): In an interview with PORT<\/em><\/a> about the poem form, you say, \u2018It\u2019s just the sense of a pure form and it\u2019s mysterious, like I don\u2019t know exactly what makes a poem a poem \u2013 why is it not something else, why is it not cut-up prose? It\u2019s just arranging words on a page differently\u2026 and it\u2019s to do with that primal sound, with the beat, with the metre. There\u2019s something very old about it.\u2019<\/strong><\/p>\n

You are a dancer. A dance pose of yours reminded me of a contortionist. Is a poem \u2018a contortion of words\u2019 to you?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Tishani Doshi (TD)<\/strong>: On a very literal level of play\u2014to contort, to bend, to twist out of normal shape, yes, there can be playfulness in poetry, and in this collection specifically, there\u2019s more play than in previous collections. But I don\u2019t see dance or poetry as contortion. I see it as a release of movement, of stillness, of what happens between. And so if we wanted to talk about poetry in terms of shape, then I think of it as something more fluid than arriving at certain poses.<\/p>\n

MDC: In your poem \u2018Love Poem<\/em>\u2019 that I read online, the line \u2018It might be that you walk out<\/em>\u2019 gave me the impression that the man had actually walked out of the page. The effect was beautifully devastating. How do you decide on enjambment in a poem?<\/strong><\/p>\n

TD:<\/strong> It\u2019s one of the things I love about poetry\u2014deciding where the line ends. There\u2019s that lovely apocryphal story about Oscar Wilde, who said, I spent all morning taking out a comma, and I spent all afternoon putting it back, or was it the other way around? Anyway, as writers, there\u2019s a lot of time spent putting commas in and out, but also, deciding on word endings and just generally staring out of windows.<\/p>\n

\n

You cannot live life in nonstop crescendo. You will stagger and fall. At least for me, it\u2019s in the movement from slow to fast that life is lived, that books are written.<\/strong><\/h4>\n
\n

MDC: You use simple language in your poetry. It makes non-poetry readers approach your work without apprehension. What is your view on verbose poetry?<\/strong><\/p>\n

TD:<\/strong> I\u2019m not averse to using non-simple words. One of my favourite words is obfuscate! There\u2019s a difference, though between using complex words and being verbose, which is to use more words than needed, which is really anti-poetry. Poetry to me is all about distillation so it\u2019s about finding the right word. I\u2019m not sure I buy the argument about using simple language, because why do those words exist if we can\u2019t use them? I was talking to a poet friend of mine who said that Arabic had 30-40 words for sand, 70 for water! Such richness, such precision. Every language has its own treasure chambers and I feel the poet needs to excavate those. I collect words, I keep lists. If I come across a word I don\u2019t know I sometimes look it up, and sometimes let it just float over me with whatever I think it means. I\u2019m not afraid of words and I don\u2019t think readers should be either. A word that I\u2019ve never used in life but which I\u2019ve used in a poem for instance, is philtra, which is the plural of philtrum, which is the vertical groove between the base of the nose and the border of the upper lip. After a storm all the dunes in the sand were puckered up like philtra\u2014and once you see it that way, you can only use that word.<\/p>\n

MDC: Your novel Pleasure Seekers<\/em> was long-listed for the Orange Prize in 2011 and shortlisted for The Hindu Best Fiction Award in 2010. It took you eight\u00a0years to write it. I watched your TED talk Luxury of Slowness<\/em><\/a>. In this hyperlinked fast-paced world, a person looking for calm can approach your work. In an article<\/a> of yours you talk about the slowness in the way you live also: \u2018Being in a quiet place with few distractions is good for writing. It\u2019s magic for the nervous system. Everything shushes.\u2019 Any comments?<\/strong><\/p>\n

TD:<\/strong> Slowness is something we teach ourselves. I don\u2019t think it\u2019s a natural instinct at all. I live the way I do because I can stand it. But sometimes, after ten days, I need the pulse of a city, the mad horrible push of humanity to remind myself that I\u2019m part of it. I\u2019m interested in slowness not in and of itself, but in its contrast to speed. Because I do love speed. Some of the best moments in my life have been sitting behind a motorbike with the wind rushing through my hair (eeks, no helmet\u2014bad!), skydiving (never again), running till I thought my heart was going to burst out of my chest. But as I say in my TED talk, speed is only really impressive when we arrive there after slowness. I see it in musical terms. You begin with the alaap, you spend most of your time in this slow, abstract place, you move through vilambit, jor, jhala, collecting force and textures and speed along the way, and it is in this progression that the music unfolds. You cannot be in crescendo mode right from the start. You cannot live life in nonstop crescendo. You will stagger and fall. At least for me, it\u2019s in the movement from slow to fast that life is lived, that books are written.<\/p>\n

\"Tishani

Tishani Doshi. Photo credit: Peter \u00c5kesson.<\/p><\/div>\n

MDC: Your novel is semi-autobiographical. How about your poetry? I loved your poem ‘My Grandmother Never Ate a Potato in Her Life’\u00a0<\/em>from your upcoming collection. It made me wonder about your paternal grandmother as your father is Gujarati (Jain).<\/strong><\/p>\n

TD:<\/strong> The question of biography is endlessly fascinating for readers and endlessly irritating for writers, mostly because I think it implies a lack of imagination. If you admit that you draw from life then it\u2019s thought of as kind of lazy\u2014What? You didn\u2019t make anything up? As if it\u2019s some kind of cut and paste job. Whereas anyone who\u2019s ever written knows that writers are constantly taking from life, theirs or other people\u2019s, and there\u2019s a process during the writing when that gets transformed into something else, and that transformation is the most interesting part of writing. My paternal grandmother died when I was quite young, and as far as I know she never ate a potato in her life. I\u2019m not sure if it\u2019s true, but does it really matter? The poem is its own truth. It goes beyond my grandmother and lands in an entirely different place.<\/p>\n

\n

In my poems, it\u2019s all very personal, but I\u2019m also asking the reader to look into this experience of mine, because most people have a version of this\u2014some person that they are fiercely protective of, some love that always needs more.<\/strong><\/h4>\n
\n

MDC: In March, you spoke to India Today<\/a> about growing up with a brother with Down Syndrome. In your poem \u2018Summer in Madras\u2019<\/em> from your upcoming book you describe family members reacting to the heat and of all, ‘the brother? <\/em>Brother is most lackadaisical of all’. <\/em>Does the reader get to meet your brother briefly here?<\/strong><\/p>\n

TD:<\/strong> My brother has always been a presence in my poems, hovering on the sidelines, and in this collection he moves closer to the centre. This is not disconnected to the fact of both of us growing older, my sense of responsibility increasing, and with it a sense of fear and dread and all the rest of it. When I was growing up there was a real invisibility around disability. People would stare at my brother because they just hadn’t seen someone with Down Syndrome. That staring was so disconcerting. Even now, when my parents travel with him, some people are amazed that they bring him along this way. So, it\u2019s about visibility, and questioning how a society treats people with disabilities, how much space they give to them, how they can be trained to look differently. In my poems, it\u2019s all very personal, but I\u2019m also asking the reader to look into this experience of mine, because most people have a version of this\u2014some person that they are fiercely protective of, some love that always needs more.<\/p>\n

MDC: The title poem feels like a feminist anthem. It is beautiful and disturbing at the same time. How did you conceive it?<\/strong><\/p>\n

TD:<\/strong> I had been reading a lot of stories about violence against women in India, and it was unrelenting. I had this picture of what might happen if all these women and girls suddenly marched out of the woods and it took on a kind of incantatory rhythm, so it\u2019s interesting how you have an idea for something, but when you find the form, that\u2019s when the poem really begins to take shape. Here, the repetition of girls are coming, girls are coming, started to gather force, and I just let it run through.<\/p>\n

MDC: Why free verse?<\/strong><\/p>\n

TD:<\/strong> Why not?<\/p>\n

MDC: The poems in your new book shift from left alignment to central alignment. How do you decide on it and do visual effects affect the way a reader consumes your poems?<\/strong><\/p>\n

TD:<\/strong> Again, this has to do with play. Most of them are left-aligned, which is pretty standard, but the grandmother poem looks potatoish if it\u2019s put in the centre of the page, which I thought was a nice visual effect.<\/p>\n

MDC: If you hadn\u2019t met Chandralekha, do you think you would have been a dancer anyway?<\/strong><\/p>\n

TD:<\/strong> I was a dancer before Chandralekha. My girlfriends and I put on legwarmers way back in the late 80s when you did that kind of thing even in Madras, and danced to \u201cEye of the Tiger.\u201d I\u2019m never shy of initiating a dance floor, and from the age of three I had also been taking part in dance dramas where I\u2019d be a flower, peacock, prince\u2014that kind of thing. But dance in the way Chandra made me dance, where the body is the most central energy to life? Impossible. It would never have happened.<\/p>\n

MDC: If not dancing or writing or interviewing, what would it be?<\/strong><\/p>\n

TD:<\/strong> In college I was studying business and communications, so perhaps I would have had a nice bank job or something. I like to think of myself as a painter. It might not be too late.<\/p>\n

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I had this picture of what might happen if all these women and girls suddenly marched out of the woods and it took on a kind of incantatory rhythm….<\/strong><\/h4>\n
\n

MDC: Your poems cover a wide variety of themes. Do you believe in Plath\u2019s words:\u00a0\u2018<\/em>Everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise.\u2019<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

TD:<\/strong> I think as a writer everything that you experience is game for subject matter. This is the terrifying thing. Nothing is out of bounds. This is why writers are considered such dangerous people. I believe some stories need their time to be told, and it\u2019s all right to wait on those things. Faulkner said a writer\u2019s only responsibility is to his art. \u201cIf a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate; the \u2018Ode on a Grecian Urn\u2019 is worth any number of old ladies.” He\u2019s right.<\/p>\n

MDC: You are not only\u00a0a poet who believes in reaching readers with the written word but also the spoken word as you feel poetry is suffering. You say so in your interview with PORT. Do you think initiatives such as\u00a0The Alipore Post that has carried your poems help keep poetry alive today?<\/strong><\/p>\n

TD:<\/strong> For some time I called myself a poetry evangelist, but now everyone is a poetry evangelist, so I don\u2019t know. I still believe in ushering poetry into whichever space I find because I do believe poetry deserves a larger audience. I think poetry lends itself to collaborations with film, photography, music\u2014so in theory, it should be everywhere. But I also believe that a poem exists first on the page. That can never be displaced. The page is where you can return to again and again. And for all the obituaries that are being written for poetry, it\u2019s been around for a long time, I don\u2019t think it\u2019s going anywhere just yet.<\/p>\n

\"Girls

Girls are Coming out of the Woods book cover. Courtesy HarperCollins India.<\/p><\/div>\n

MDC: It is tough for writers (literary) living in India to earn a living from their writing alone. How do you and Carlo manage?<\/strong><\/p>\n

TD:<\/strong> It’s not easy to make money from poetry and even literary fiction is tough. However we both work as journalists pretty full on. Carlo also teaches a post-grad course, and for many years ,I worked with a professional dance group. There are always projects here and there that come up which pay decently but these are unreliable, in any case uncertainty is something you come to terms with.<\/p>\n

MDC: Would you like to give any advice to\u00a0aspiring writers or recommend any book.<\/strong><\/p>\n

TD:<\/strong> My advice is to read. Read something you know you\u2019ll enjoy. Read something you know you\u2019ll struggle with. Read my book of poems.<\/p>\n

MDC:<\/strong> Thank you Tishani for speaking to me and thank you Harper Collins India for providing me with a copy of Girls are Coming out of the Woods.<\/em><\/p>\n

\n

Michelle D’costa\u00a0<\/i>edits fiction for\u00a0<\/em>Jaggery Literary Magazine<\/i>. Her poetry\/fiction has been published in\u00a0<\/em>The Madras Mag, The Bombay Literary Magazine, Open Road Review, Eunoia Review<\/i>\u00a0among others. She blogs at\u00a0michellewendydcosta.wordpress.com<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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