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Political correctness devitalizes language, says Adil Jussawalla

Adil Jussawalla, in conversation with Sohini Das Gupta at the Tata Literature Live! 2016 festival, rues that society now expects a certain correctness of behaviour from artists

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For a literary leviathan distinguished by relatively sparse works in his authorial repository—and the seminal influence of those works on post-independence Indian poetry, Adil Jussawalla is appropriately complex. The 76-year-old lives in a high-rise and dwells on images of storms and seas. He writes poetry but doesn't valourise the idea. Sohini Das Gupta discovers the man within the artist.

What is poetry to you?

Poetry is the only way I can express something that can't be said in any other way. What I want to say can't be said in an interview or be put down in a musical composition... it can't make me pick up a camera and shoot. The pressure is to say something in words, but not the way we use words when we talk to each other. It comes from pressure of listening to how words sound in your ears, on the page, how certain rhythms occur. It is language demanding to be spoken through you in a form of poetry–one of the more formal forms, or a free-er form—I'd know when I write my first line. Ideas may come my way rhymed a certain way, and I'd say, 'Well, this is asking to be a sonnet!' I generally have to make many drafts of the poem... the first is almost unbearably unsatisfactory.

How does a poet hold on to or let go of that first draft, the sole evidence of the original idea?

We can use the potter's analogy. Throw a lump of clay and you shape it till you get the right form, the right content or a certain kind of beauty. Each draft seems to spring from the other and take another shape. It grows organically. In my case, it is continued transformation, a shape-shifting of sorts. Not just in the shape of the poem, but the shape of the words and sounds.

If our thoughts are, to certain extent, the product of our roots, what allows an Indian poet to adequately express himself through the medium of a foreign language?

Things that we know have roots, never really lose them, or go back to them, do they? Trees don't. A historian once said about Jews, “Where trees have roots, men have legs”. It is because of our legs that we migrate, and sometimes, become refugees. I don't feel I have lost my roots because I dont know what ground they were supposed to be on in the first place. They grow in the ground that I inhabit.
About English as a foreign language, I wrestle with the language, but not because I see it as a foreign language. My writing in English does something to me and my mother tongue of Parsi Gujarati does something else, which a foreign language does not do. They are like inseparable twins. One of the twins, my Parsi Gujarati, have almost perished, but not quite. It still erupts in my thoughts and my feelings in very surprising and unexpected ways. There is certainly something which keeps erupting and disrupting an easy flow in my English... whether that is the Gujarati trying to assert itself is difficult to say.

Your A Poem on Bombay touches upon the anguish of those compelled to look for a new home. You say 'communities tear and reform'... Are you haunted by the global crisis we are facing right now?

I can't get away from the images of large amounts of people suffering and moving across the world...even if I didn't have television—which I do—I wouldn't be able to. It has led to one of my recent poems, to be published soon, called Anatomical Chart. I talk about our bodies, that are full of internal migration...cells fighting each other or the bacteria. It's like an inner anatomical chart of refugees being blocked, slaughtered and lost. Yes, I am haunted by these images. But I don't think expressing them in a poem makes any difference to the political situation.

Then what does it do?

If the poem is any good, it will have changed the perception of the reader for a while. But this isn't durable in the face of the horrors that some people have to live through. Poets are helpless, but not much more than so many other people in the face of what's happening. Like so many other people, the helplessness doesn't prevent us from fighting back...from protesting. Poet Ronald Duncan said it very well, "Poetry is not meant to fight evil, but to show evil".
 
You've been known to say 'I'm a city poet'...

I regret that.

Okay. But...did your city, the city of Bombay, transition easily into Mumbai in your head?

The name change hasn't bothered me as much as it has bothered some people. But the way Bombay has developed as a city, has. When the first high rises began to sprout in Bombay, my friends and I were rather proud. Now I find it absolutely horrifying. I live in a high rise, but I don't live happily in it. The transport, the pollution, its out of control. I didn't foresee this and I don't see the situation improving. It is unfortunate that the whole name thing has become politicised, because in Gujarati and other Indian languages, we would always call it Mumbai. I regret how it has led to Bombay/Mumbai being a divisive city.

Why do you regret having identified as a city poet?

I didn't myself see how much nature has been important to me, right from the start. It was Arvind Krishna Merhotra who pointed out in his anthology Twelve Modern Indian Poets, that nature is there in a number of poems in my first book. Its what one sees or experiences as nature in the city, stray leaves or flowers, these have become absolutely necessary for my life and my work.

Do you identify with TS Eliot?

I do. But not necessarily with the city images. I think The Wasteland is a great poem, but I always go back to his Four Quartets. In time I have had to to admit to myself that I can't run away from being meditative. I can't whip up a frenzy as I did part of the time earlier. The meditative mode makes me consider natural images like the sea, storms and gardens.

On a typical day, what are the writing rituals that you follow?

I have not been able to find myself a special place to write or a room to lock myself in. Sometimes certain lines come to me at night, and I try and write them down in a notebook. After waking up in the morning, it comes in the form of a poem. I quickly write them down and try to read them out in two day's time. Then I say no, I can do better. I know that if I can discipline myself and go through the tedium and the joy of writing drafts after drafts, then what I wrote this morning will become a poem.

Do you think an author's gender flavours their work? Should it?

It does. I can't say if it should. I'm very wary of telling someone how they should write. Ever since the idea of the anonymous artist stopped, you can tell by the person's name their gender and unfortunately, their caste and you immediately say, "Ah, this is typical!" As a teacher, one of my exercises was to throw poems at my students anonymously, or under false names. They would say this is a working class writer, or this is the feminist, and then to their horror find that the feminist poem has been written by a man. It is an interesting critical exercise for oneself to blot out the name of the poet and guess their identity. You'll be surprised how often we can be wrong.

You've been a poet, as you've been in a poem (Chasing A Poet: Epilogue) by Amit Chaudhari. What is it like for a poet to see his own identity filtered through his own medium, via someone else's perspective?

If Amit sees me that way, with my cock-eye, that's fine. It's amusing. But I have difficulty seeing myself primarily as a poet.

That, coming from someone who is, well, a poet...

I’d rather see myself as a craftsman, an artisan. I realise I am writing poetry, but unlike many others, I don’t see my primary identity as that of a poet. If we are knocking back drink after drink in a bar, its not because the poet is suffering any more than the carpenter next to him. Other people might be going through much more than the poet, I don’t like to valourise the poet above anybody else.

So their artistic persona is a separate identity in itself?

Not their artistic persona, but their work. Now with the language of political correctness, we tend to say, how can you like that adulterer's film, how can we appreciate that man's novels? I don't mean they should escape the law. But I think you still have to let their work work on you. The work has its autonomy.

You are rejecting the language of political correctness...

Now more than ever, we tend to expect very correct behaviour from artists, a correct way of writing from writers, which is unfortunate. It means you will remove the fire and vitality from a lot of literature. If a novelist or a poet uses swear words, it doesn't mean that that's what they do themselves, but that it's the language people use sometimes, and you're trying to get that in your work. Political correctness threatens to devitalize language.

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