BY Dr. R. Raj Rao
Review of The World That Belongs to Us: An Anthology of Queer Poetry from South Asia. Edited by Aditi Angiras and Akhil Katyal. Harper Collins, 2020. Price Rs. 599.
In his blurb to the anthology, poet Jeet Thayil says “A bold and necessary correction to the subcontinent’s poetry canon.” The way I see it, this is an honest admission on Thayil’s part to the mistake he committed in not including the work of gay, lesbian and transgender poets in his own anthology 60 Poets, with the notable exception of Vikram Seth.
Angiras’s and Katyal’s anthology is the fourth anthology of South Asian gay writing, after Hoshang Merchant’s Yaraana, Ashwini Sukthankar’s Facing the Mirror, and Minal Hajratwala’s Out: Stories from the New Queer India. It is significant that the editors opt for the term ‘Queer’ in the title, for this is a term viewed with disfavour by many queer historians. In their Introduction to the book Same Sex Love in India: Readings from Literature and History, Editors Ruth Vanita and Saleem Kidwai, for example, distance themselves from the word ‘queer’, which to them encompasses “unconventional or strange sexual behaviours.” To them, the word ‘queer’ connotes “all sort of behaviours, from fetishism to exhibitionism.”
The World That Belongs to Us includes the work of over a hundred poets and translators, from cities as diverse as Dhaka and Dublin, Benares and Boston. More than ten Indian languages are represented in the book. However, this vast inclusiveness excludes the work of a prominent gay poet, whose estate wrote to the editors to say, “For a variety of reasons, we are not approving your request for any of the poems [of the poet in question] to be included in your collection.” To register their displeasure about the refusal, the editors have symbolically left page 31 of the anthology blank; perhaps, had the estate of the poet agreed, the poet’s work might have appeared on page 31.
But who is this poet? The editors have cleverly masked the poet’s identity by using the third person plural pronoun ‘they’ to refer to the poet. (This is also a strategy they adopt in the bio-notes on some poets). After all, in the English language it is only the third person singular pronoun (he/she) that gives away one’s gender. But here the poet cannot be anyone other than Agha Shahid Ali or Suniti Namjoshi. Incidentally, the former’s work does not appear in Merchant’s Yaraana: Gay Writing from India, although Merchant includes an entire chapter on him in his critical study Forbidden Sex/Forbidden Texts: New India’s Gay Poets. Likewise, Namjoshi’s work does not appear in Facing the Mirror: Lesbian Writing from India. The unwarranted omission is thus in keeping with similar omissions in previous anthologies.
The Preface suggests that there are multiple queer identities, both indigenous and global, and it is a herculean task to give judicious representation to all of them. Apart from the well-known lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender identities, there are several other newer identities like kothi, intersex, asexual, pansexual, demisexual, pomosexual,and so on.
A more pertinent question, however, is whether a non-queer person may write a queer poem. The editors ask: “Is a queer poem written by a queer-identified person about ‘queer themes, whatever those maybe? Can a non-queer person address those themes as well, in a persuasive manner?”
Their answer seems to be yes. Thus, when contributor Ruhail Andrabi was asked by one of my students what the call for submissions said, he replied that it was simply a call for poems, not a call for queer poems. This is proved by his poem “I’m now a Butterfly”, which although it speaks of beauty and desire, is gender-neutral rather than gender-specific:
I have a thousand desires:
to be dust
on the barren south pole
of the moon
a wanderer who has chanced upon
the turnpike of your beauty.
Yet, as Eve Sedgwick explains, this is exactly why the gay community has not managed to politicize itself and acquire rights the way other constituencies like race, gender and (in India) caste have. The editors would do good to rhetorically ask themselves whether an anthology of black writing would include work by white writers; whether an anthology of women’s writing would feature work by men; and whether an anthology of Dalit writing would have upper caste writers appearing in it. If Angiras and Katyal took the trouble to ask themselves these radical questions, rather than conveniently relying on the word ‘allies’, they would find a way out of their dilemma. Sometimes, it is necessary to be reductive, even form a ghetto, if one wishes to dismantle the status-quo.
The other dilemma faced by the editors, which they describe as a “sword hanging over us,” pertains to the quality of a poem. Simply put, how does one decide if a poem is good or bad? As the editors say, “The good-ness of a poem itself is a jumpy thing. You can’t tell if it lies within the poem or in the perceptions of the people outside it.”
Once again, the editors wouldn’t have been beheaded by the sword if they looked at other marginal literatures, such as Dalit writing. Dalit writing has been dismissed by upper-caste suvarna critics as writing that is mere propaganda, and which, in the words of T. S. Eliot, amounts to a turning loose of emotion rather than escaping from emotion. To which, Dalit writers like my friend Sharankumar Limbale have pointed out that Dalit writing has its own aesthetics, knowledge of which is a must in order to appreciate it. In the same vein, an anthologist of gay writing must attempt to define and speak about a queer aesthetics. But Angiras and Katyal do nothing of the sort.
Of the poems included in the anthology, a few stand out. In “Resistance Rap” Gee Semmalar, a transman activist from Kerala, explores the intersections that unite disempowered people all over the world, whether they are Iraqis victimised by the US military, Colombian drug lords, children doomed to child labour, displaced Nepali cooks, airline stewardesses molested by affluent business class passengers, Syrians killed by American weapons, the bombed residents of Gaza, gay Russian men, jailed subversives in Montevideo, militant black women and transwomen, slum dwellers in Chennai and the South Bronx, Harlem Latino queens, black panthers and Dalit panthers, Pakistani hijras, native American warriors, or those brutalized by the excesses of the army in Manipur.
In “Queer As In” Riddhi Dastidar describes the fickleness that members of the LGBTQIA+ community must habitually suffer:
Queer as in fuck you,
queer as in secret.
Queer as in just a phase, as in the very best of friends
arms interlinked with yours, smilingly saying
you just think it makes you interesting.
Queer as in only at parties, as in only when drunk,
as in only that one time at that party when drunk–
she has a boyfriend in real life, you know.
You know, queer as in not in real life.
Queer as in fuck you, queer as in secret. Queer as in just a phase, as in the very best of friends arms interlinked with yours, smilingly saying you just think it makes you interesting.
Queer as in only at parties, as in only when drunk, as in only that one time at that party when drunk–
she has a boyfriend in real life, you know. You know, queer as in not in real life.
Dibyajyoti Sarma’s “There Was Nothing Common Between Us” is a sentimental poem about a failed relationship with an older man. However, Sarma told me that he had submitted a longer poem to the editors, which they snipped, making it look somewhat patchy:
I was young, he old
I was rustic, he sophisticated; I poor, he rich
I restless, he rooted.
We spoke different languages.
The only thing that worked was mysterious, was absurd. Sometimes
we called it ‘love’.
I was happiest in his company—
when his old fingers caressed my restless hands
when my thumb recognised his hungry lips when we got drunk and ambled on the empty streets at midnight
with my arm around his shoulder
When he drove and I craned my head to his bosom
when he said ‘I love you’ to me in Tamil
when I fell asleep to his heartbeat.
Fifteen years later, I still miss the heartbeat.
I close my eyes and I can hear it.
I cannot endure
There was nothing common between us.
We knew the night will end soon.
It is to the credit of the editors that they include a poem by the late Srinivas Ramchandra Siras at the end of the book, translated from the Marathi by Anish Gawande. Siras was a professor at Aligarh Muslim University who was suspended from service and humiliated when he was caught sleeping with a cycle rickshaw driver in his campus flat ten years ago. The incident led to his death, although the Allahabad High Court ruled in his favour and ordered the university to revoke his suspension. Ironically, his poem “Rooms to Sleep In” evokes the sort of claustrophobic conditions in which the poet lived, and in which he was found dead:
He’s already bathed in sweat,
it’s very hot after all.
He shows me—work of his dreams
completed just today—beyond
are rooms to sleep in.
When this house lay unbuilt,
no money and no constraints
of diktats of the previous owner’s
incomplete dreams, I told him
Don’t block the mountains with windows
or walls, even—let them come right in
into the house, not like guests
but family.
But his obstinate, mad love for solitude
wants not flowers on the steps below
wants not tunes in middle octaves
here, only those rooms to sleep in,
only those [that] were built
for a purpose.
Although The World That Belongs to Us isn’t perfect, it was long overdue. The last anthology of gay writing came out in 2012, and the ones before it in 1999. It is hoped that another decade will not pass before the next such anthology sees the light of day.
(Dr. R. Raj Rao is the author of the iconic gay novel The Boyfriend, as well as of other gay-themed novels, short story and poetry collections, plays, and nonfiction. He was Professor and Head of the English Department at the University of Pune, and has been a Visiting Professor at Dresden University and Tubingen University, Germany, and Concordia University, Canada. Rao has postdoctoral qualifications from the University of Warwick, UK, and was a Writer-in-Residence at the International Writing Program, University of Iowa, USA).
