Legacy Of Violence And Sensuous Fantasies: Rochelle Potkar

Sensuous fantasies realigning with lust and passionate yearning for physical retention revolve around breasts. In the backdrop of the Me Too movement, how the breast, the most discernible symbol of womanhood, exposes the legacy of violence and shapes impulsive and compulsive spaces of females is subtly and sensitively articulated by an acclaimed poet, Rochelle Potkar, whose collection of poems, Coins in Rivers, is shortlisted for Beverly poetry award, UK and Gaudy Boy poetry book prize, NewYork. Hachette India recently released it, and on the eve of the launch of Coins In Rivers, she candidly talks about her poetic meditations on the linguistic reclamation of the female body by producing what she described as "an ode and autobiography of the breast" in a conversation.

Q- Your poems, The Girl from Lal Bazar, Me Too Movement in India, gravity, and a short story, The Arithmetic of Breast, betray an intriguing inventiveness in marking out the object of sexual fantasies. However, Mahshweta Devi's Breast Stories describe it as a weird tool of gendered violence. Gayatri Spivak is of the view that the breast of a woman in these stories becomes the instrument of a vicious denunciation of patriarchy. Do you think it is the motif for violence as well?

A - The inscrutability of the human body always leaves me in a spell. It triggers desire and violence simultaneously, and almost all human activities revolve around it. Aesthetic sense, food, clothing, cultural practices and religious rituals draw their sustenance from it. The body is the abode of lust, shame, guilt, fear and violence, and it is also the epicentre of the male and female gaze that intrigues me. I tried to fashion an evocative ode and autobiography of the breast. The ode surfaces in society repeatedly: seductive advertisements on tightening, lifting, downsizing and resizing bear testimony to it. It is also my tribute to all those sniggering men who are obsessed with this part of the female anatomy. Here, comedic and sarcastic idioms verbalise female rage over street harassment. I composed two visual poems, Me Too Movement in India Size Card and Gravity, and in the first poem, the size is the double entendre that zeroes in on the risk and opportunity conundrum. The second poem poignantly portrays disparities between the genders. Male acquires transcendence, but the woman still grapples with primitive apes lower on the totem pole.

Q- Cross-genre writing has become our time's pristine creative and aesthetic endeavour. Now, literature looks situated at the intersection of poetry, prose, and a Japanese genre; Haibun, appending laconic evocative postscripts in verse to the prose, has gained currency. Your third collection Paper Asylum, is replete with haibuns. Do you think rigid genre specifications are no longer valid in the post-poetry era?

A- Rigid genre specifications hardly go with creativity. I comprehend the mysteries of the transient world through the prism of the inventive genre Haibun, comprising a written prose passage and a 17-syllable poem. It brings forth a wondrous mix of longing, anguish, tension, personal remembrances and wistful, nostalgic anecdotes in an unpretentious narrative. I resist plaintive metaphors and poeticised idioms and imagine a world where nature is in us. We are not in the lap of nature. In my poems, one can notice that the sparse and shortened verse does not explain or amplify the prose; instead, it exposes the inherent contradictions of observation.

Q- Celebrated poet Jayant Mahapatra applauds concrete imagery and cosmopolitan vocabulary impeccably used in your new collection of poems, Coins In Rivers. How do you view your changing poetic persona?

A -The book is a landscape of poetic thematic deliberations from the personal to the political. The poems reflect existence and life itself, in all its splendour, from love to sensuality, humour to grief to world politics. New Collection is a refracted spectrum of what it means to live in this world as witnessed and experienced by one woman-poet from a corner of Mumbai, looking at herself, the city, her country's citizenry, and the world around her, but never without a poetic lyrical coalescing of wisdom and philosophy, sometimes rhetoric, sometimes prophetic never bereft of the zeitgeist of living.

Q- Your oeuvre subtly betrays how verse, prose, screenplay and storytelling dovetail into an organic whole. Do you find this to be the cardinal point in understanding your poetry?

A- Partially yes, many poems such as Seed, Tattoos, Spice Garden Reflux, Asylum Quiet Chaos, and Retake Two discuss life's vicissitude through a comic lens mixed with searing anguish and angst. My gaze has moved from personal to social issues, world affairs and politics, and even to the galaxy and philosophy. Sometimes, I have been a woman-in-the-city, sometimes citizen-in-the-world, and sometimes just an atom, sans religion, creed, caste, class, race.

My creative outpourings follow the story of my life as a social observer and thinker and mirror my life motifs as a storyteller. Even as a teller, I am immersed in various what-if situations across realism and science fiction genres, from personal to galactic. Renowned Australian poet and winner of the 2021 Partick Whie Award, Adam Aitken, observes that my poems spark and spin with feminine energy, surreal thoughts, critical reflections, and restlessness.

Q- You talked about female sensibility, but do you think human sensibility in the final reckoning is gender-specific?

A- Life per se is non-gendered. Primarily, men and women with almost equal vehemence feel human emotions such as anger, lust, happiness, desire, and fear. The division of time into existential chores and gender roles allows each to experience these differently. Men tend to externalise their emotions, and women internalise more, I have heard. Nevertheless, even if it is so, it is individual-specific. My poems stand for the redemption of women's bodies in a hassle-free manner.

Rochelle Potkar's new collection Coins in Rivers creatively asserts that the destiny of nature (rivers) runs through those who live by embracing its greenery and fertility, but rampant degradation hardly affects them. Her poems are replete with anecdotes that conjure awe and despair simultaneously.

(Shafey kidwai, a bilingual critic, is a professor of Mass Communication at AMU, Aligarh)