Author Ashwani Kumar says that you are not a writer if you don't suffer the horrors of writer's block
Writing poetry is a very mysterious operation – I lisp and stammer because I don't have my original language (various dialects of Hindi) with me. I'm not a trained poet and don't belong to the tradition of crafted poetry. Rather it's a very spontaneous political experience and to retain autonomy in poetry, I estrange myself fully from it.
But what causes a writer's block is quite an uncanny experience. It's not about being lazy, the lack of talent or solitude. It could be personal, social or psychotic, and even esoteric. In my case, it's caused by the presence and absence of a certain craft.
Robber-turned saint and poet Valmiki, our most revered Adi Kavi (harbinger-poet), was redeemed of it quite accidentally. One day when he witnessed a bird killed by a hunter and heard the heart-rending cry of the bird's mate, he felt the pain and anguish of untimely slaying of love. This resulted in the inspiration of his composition of the first rhythmic verse in Indic culture, and eventually led him to write the Ramayana.
Most of the times what comes to my rescue is "the voice of God that I hear". But my god is humanity, a creature with an ethical project. Until the project is complete, I feel like a refugee. A feeling I have, also because, I'm at exile. I live in Mumbai, I have a home here, but I'm not a Mumbaikar.
When writing Anatomy of Banarassey for my recently published anthology of poems, Banaras and the Other, I suffered a writer's block even though it was my second book after My Grandfather's Imaginary Typewriter. There was excessive self-doubt. I felt a lack of identity; a sense of humiliation too. I asked myself, 'Who I am?' I even detested my slow-lidding eyes and thorny hair-locks. Angry and anguished, I felt as if I am a lie, fiction and living the truth of another sky. My poem nearly collapsed and disintegrated. I struggled against my past, fading memories of being wounded with grammatical errors and provincial vocabulary.
Moreover, writing Banaras was also like inviting trouble. I was very scared. I wrote everyday but also erased the words almost every day. This was insanity. Then I stopped writing. I was able to restart one day after spending time in Kolkata with my elder son Shantanu. He'd left me wandering at the National Library at Alipore. I chanced upon the writings of Major James Rennell. His travel memories through lattices of colonial cartography sailed me to a new imagined geography of Banaras. Strangely, I literally dreamed passage after passage in the poem after this reversal to writing again. I showed my draft to my wife Shinjini. She said, 'you pray to the rains in Mumbai and praise to a memory ghost'.
While the writer's block can be alienating, self-destructive or simply nihilistic, it can also be liberating. I prefer to wait without calendar or seasons, for days, months or years, for poems to germinate, sprout and then become cruciform wings of the sacred wind. If you don't suffer this horror, you are not a writer; you are simply a troll or a bot.Not surprised, the new generation of writers of instant Lit are more like robots. Ah, they don't know the joys of writer's block!
—As told to Pooja Bhula
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