excerpt from essay in progress

For the committed writer, multilingual doesn’t just mean knowing, in addition to one’s native tongue, the languages of at least one or two other nations. It also means knowing the different languages within one’s own mother tongue. The slang or dialect that is the antithesis of that tongue, i.e., that supposedly degrades it by not adhering to proper grammar and pronunciation, may in some ways be the better language, containing precisely the vocabulary necessary for communicating truths obscured by the dominant/official language.

from What the Bird Tattoo Hides: The Vijaynagar Notebooks

Something

Pursued by it,
I brood for years.

At night, it sits
in the tamarind tree
then climbs
acrobatically down, crouches
near my window and looks in.

Screeching and moaning,
sensuous beyond belief,
it is the animal
of language, bellowing incoherently.

A poem from What the Bird Tattoo Hides: The Vijaynagar Notebooks, a book manuscript

Hill Camp

How can
she do it, she’s
so small? Like
a stem pulled down
by a black chili, Nilima seems
tugged groundward by too much
raven hair hanging
heavily to her waist as she stands
in the cave’s mouth, spreading
with delicate fingers
the lips of a man’s neck wound
in a daylight almost too bright
to allow survival, but it does, even letting
Nilima retain her balance no matter
how often, saying
she’s so small, I refuse to see
the scene’s intrinsic stability: the poise
of those in her keep
and the rifle always within her reach.

Meena Kandasamy

Visit Meena Kandasamy's website. A young (in her 20s) Dalit writer from Tamil Nadu, she is a very talented poet, translator and social critic.

Stirring: A Literary Collection
Volume 11, Edition 2 : February 2009

Six of my poems have been published in the February issue of Stirring.

Check them out.

Another morning
adaption from the ancient Latvian

Slowly, God rode the horse-pulled sledge
downhill into the snowy meadow.
The stallions trotted tranquilly forward
while behind them the sledge crossed the snow
as silently as a cloud’s shadow.