Date:26/06/2007 URL: http://www.thehindu.com/2007/06/26/stories/2007062660760200.htm

Karnataka - Bangalore

Verses from tongues of fire

Bageshree S.

This programme of poetry reading will be off the beaten track

BANGALORE: If every book launch and reading programme these days gives you a “been there, done that” feeling, here is one that promises to go off the beaten track. For once you will get to hear voices from regional languages, although in translation. What’s more they are voices that shook the smug middle-class sensibility when first heard in Tamil.

Toto Funds the Arts is holding a reading of poetry by four Tamil feminist poets – Salma, Kutti Revathi, Malathy Maitri and Sukirtharani. The poems, translated into English by N. Kalyan Raman, will be read by two well-known theatre persons of Bangalore, Kirtana Kumar and Nalini Ratnam.

One common thread that binds the four poets is that they have braved outright hostility for daring to write on themes regarded “unbecoming of women”.

Kutti Revathi’s collection of poetry, for instance, created a huge controversy by its very name, “Breasts”, and the manner in which it spoke of a woman’s body. Ironically, the loudest protests came from film lyricists.

The other three women too have had to fight for their right to speak up and be heard.

While Salma negotiates to carve a space for herself within circumscribed space in the small town Thuvarankurichi, Sukirtharani, a schoolteacher in Lalapet, writes of desire and longing in a way that rejects male-centred discourse.

Malathy is a Dalit-Marxist activist organising a campaign against the Pondicherry Deep Sea Port Project. The poetry and lives of women has inspired a film, “SheWrites”, by Anjali Monteiro and K.P. Jayasankar.

When charged with obscenity and immodesty, Revathi said: “I use my language only to loosen the fetters that have bound and shrunk a woman’s body.

“I have experienced poetry enter the beings of women in much the same way as performing arts do.”

If you want to listen to the fiery poetic flourish of the four women, head for Crossword Bookstore, Residency Road, at 7 p.m. on Wednesday.