Interview with Vivek Narayanan (Part II)

Alan: In “Four Ground-breaking Things In Five Issues of Civil Lines or, Ways to Get Your Head Out of the Postcolonial Sand,” you make equations between particular historical moments in India and its literature. Here in the United States, writers and artists have worked for eight years under the cloud of the Bush administration, and, to a certain extent, the lingering effects of September 11. While some might argue that this has led to a renewed politicization among writers and artists, in fact it’s also been accompanied by an increased interest in the fantastical, the grotesque, and the nihilistic. Are there political conditions in India informing current poetic and artistic practice?

Vivek: For a while, India was ruled by the Hindu right, and this period reached its nadir in the dark tragedy of the Gujarat pogroms in 2002, even darker for having been written about and studied so extensively without the murderers, to this day, once being brought to justice. I think Gujarat did politicize even the most apolitical of artists, and many average folk, for that matter. There was a lot of energy gathered during this time. I can’t exactly draw out chains of causality, but I suspect that, after the electoral defeat of the Hindu right, on the national level at least, this energy found expression in a new openness and vibrancy, including a new openness about sexuality, including queer sexuality, at least in the metros, and all of this in turn informed art practice.
However, as you say, everything cuts two ways. The new liberal coalition government shared, more or less, one thing with its predecessor: an obsession with India’s rise as a superpower, with India’s supposed “arrival.” This is a nationalistic, futuristic fantasy that’s played out in the papers and on TV every day, and writers and artists are affected by it regardless of their political affiliation. On one hand, it means a welcome new confidence and adventurousness among writers and artists; on the other side, it signals shades of jingoism, insularity, careerism, smugness. To compound the matter, the traditional left/communist parties, through their bizarre, inconsistent, and even right-wingish politics have now lost any last shred of credibility they ever had, so it would be correct to say that many of us are now feeling, politically, rather confused and disheartened. In the back rooms, all the talk is about the Hindu right seizing the opportunity and maybe coming back to power soon, on the “anti-terror” ticket/racket.
Alan: In a post a few months ago to the Equivocaliser blog, you wrote that, “For some time I’ve wanted to find formal structures and procedures that would address the question of ownership and authorship in poetry and find ways to admit writers of poetry into this discussion.” Have you discovered any?
Vivek: The performance documented in the post you mention was a first attempt to do that, and I’ve discussed it in detail. In part, it was meant to be provocative, since all each writer had to part with was one or two lines of their own poetry, written to a very simple, shared constraint. In any case, I was thrilled to find out how many people contributed, how many were willing, as one respondent put it, to “disappear into the occasion.” Of course, none of the writers knew what was going to happen to their line(s) in the final performance, and neither did I, really, until a couple of hours before.
I’m titillated by the possibility that over time we might learn to do this thing better, give mass coordinated performances, devising our lines carefully with a growing understanding of how our contributions might be deployed, learn to take control and give our own variations on the process. Of course, with regards to the larger question of copyright and ownership, it’s really remarkable how conservative poets—not to mention the estates of poets—are on this issue, especially given poetry’s completely marginal place on the far edge of capitalism, and the fact that a wider dissemination of poetry (or anything else) only helps to expand the market for it.
Alan: You’ve recently begun to incorporate a performance component into your poetry readings. For instance, you’ve started readings sitting in the back of the audience; you began a poetry reading on a cell phone outside the venue (reminiscent of what was perhaps Vito Acconci’s last “official” poetry reading, which he literally phoned in from different pay phones around New York City); you’ve experimented with different forms of audience participation. Can you talk about the importance of performance to your work?
Vivek: I grew up in Africa, so fairly early on, rappers and then people like Linton Kwesi Johnson and the great Mutabaruka were heroes. I’m just speculating, I don’t want to essentialize, but I wonder if a great many poets who see themselves, say, as “people of color” are simply less likely to see “performance” as somehow “tainted.” They consider it as an integral part of their idea of poetry, regardless of how their relationship to modernism and the formal literary sphere might have evolved over time. What’s more, there’s a level on which performance is a part of writing; gradually, you grasp that if you hear and inflect the language in a slightly non-standard way, then performance can serve as a kind of proof, of your prosody.
“Performance” in that wider sense was something I believed in, and worked on, more or less from the time I began to go public with poetry, maybe 15, 20 years ago. What did happen, however, was a disenchantment a) with the slam/spoken word style, and b) with poetry recited to a musical backdrop. Both modes I think are dead ends by now, or cul-de-sacs at best—the first because it has settled too easily into a set of mannerisms (the best poets from the movement, such as Lemn Sissay, are still great because their performances are in many ways an attack on, refusal or negation of everything the audience has come to see), the second, because hip hop with its offshoots has taken the whole word-music equation to such unbelievable heights of skill that “spoken word” just seems unable to compete.
So in thinking about what to do differently with performance in the aftermath of these disenchantments, I found myself going back to fundamentals beyond language—the context of the performance above all, which might include the temporality of a poem, the interplay between ephemeral and lasting effects in a poem, the presence or absence of the body, the role of the audience, the possibility of collaboration, the possibility of “remote” performances, how to channel and recover the long, varied history of poetry performance styles available to us on record, and so on. It made sense to look to the history of avant-garde performance and to the kinds of things that have been happening in the art world, a visionary like Acconci leaping across that border. A lot of what I end up doing depends just on visiting the site where I have to perform, ideally with a collaborator, and seeing what it is that can and needs to be done. There are people in Delhi like the mesmerising performance artist Inder Salim who are doing far more extreme stuff, using their bodies, poetry, language, performance. I don’t personally want to get too far away from representational and composed poetry, just to learn to hold it in tension with its context. For me, the key question, the only one that really matters, is still, “How and why do we make poems public?”
Alan: In your manuscript “Mr. Subramanian” you utilize a lyrical, disjunctive prose to ask: What and where is a “native place”? How are we to think about origin, history, and tradition in a new century that already feels broken? The poems in your somewhat ironically titled “Lectures in Indian History” manuscript are also lyric in mode, but shorter, more personal. At the same time, they seem to be very much about movement—though in this instance more literally, less transculturally. How does the relationship between form and location/dislocation play out in your poetry?
Vivek: Yes, it’s strange, one is full of contradictions, and poetry is the place where one can get at and investigate those contradictions most nakedly; the poems, sometimes veering off unpredictably, always seem just a little bit ahead of where one’s theoretical self-understanding is at. My first book, Universal Beach, which came out two years ago, was really meant to be a big “tata-byebye” to the very possibility of roots or place or single location, to defend my own, inescapable, rootlessness. I should mention that a few years before it came out, I had left South Africa, the place where I envisioned spending my whole life, unable, for a variety of reasons, to return. “The Subramanians” and the “Lectures in Indian History,” on the other hand, suddenly seemed to open a kind of “Indian chapter” in my poems, albeit with all kinds of dislocations and interruptions—sometimes I think, well, I’m not really an Indian, but I’m forced to play one on TV—which leads me to think of it as a kind of retro book, retro also because it sometimes shows nostalgia for aspects of ’80s India that are being obliterated or changed beyond recognition in the current, epic transformation.
So, yes, I guess there’s some attempt there to make a new, tentative relationship to the past given, as you say, the “already broken,” to try and see what would happen if one thought (so-called) “tradition” and “experimentation” together, as if they were the same thing. This seems to sometimes lead me to go back to historical forms but maul or rework them in some way that can get to their more fundamental properties. I seem to have gone, for instance, from writing ghazals to writing various kinds of choric forms that people say are “ghazal-like,” using refrains, repetitions, disjunctions, mixing it up with some of the repetitive “bhajan” forms I sang in my childhood. There are attempts—ultimately absurd, inaccurate, quixotic attempts—to imitate Tamil metres in English, and to get at, say, the percussive sound of Tamil in English, to run a prose line that could suddenly get lyrical without warning. There seem to be attempts by a lot of poets today to try and gradually alter the sound and movement and syntax of the English language for once and for all, to gradually make it more and more malleable and porous—I like that. Mostly, like any struggler, I’m just trying to bring all the different aspects of me together on the page, to pay that price.