Born and raised in Bombay (Mumbai), Pramila Venkateshwaran is a prominent voice in Asian American poetry. In her works, she blends her vision, life experiences, memories, and cultural influences, like an artist, mixes colors to paint a picture on canvas. In her writings, she gently and subtly approaches her readers and exits impactfully, leaving one longing to hear more from her. At times her voice is fierce, like ocean waves crashing on the shore to leave behind all that she brings from her depth for one to contemplate before retracting.
Pramila Venkateswaran, poet laureate of Suffolk County, Long Island (2013-15) and co-director of Matwaala: South Asian Diaspora Poetry Festival, is the author of Thirtha (Yuganta Press, 2002) Behind Dark Waters (Plain View Press, 2008), Draw Me Inmost (Stockport Flats, 2009), Trace (Finishing Line Press, 2011), Thirteen Days to Let Go (Aldrich Press, 2015), Slow Ripening (Local Gems, 2016), and The Singer of Alleppey (Shanti Arts, 2018). She has performed the poetry internationally, including at the Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival and the Festival Internacional De Poesia De Granada. An award winning poet, she teaches English and Women’s Studies at Nassau Community College, New York. Author of numerous essays on poetics as well as creative non-fiction, she is also the 2011 Walt Whitman Birthplace Association Long Island Poet of the Year. She leads writing workshops for breast cancer patients in their healing journey. She is a founding member of Women Included, a transnational feminist association and the current Vice President of NOW Mid-Suffolk, Long Island
In this conversation, we shall walk with the poet to discover more.
KSC: Take us on your creative journey. How did you become a writer?
PV: As a teenager, I was drawn to the British poets we were reading in school. I wrote poems and short stories, enjoying the process of creating them. At Sophia College, in Mumbai, I had the opportunity to take a course in creative writing and participate in poetry contests on campus. My professors and peers at Bombay University introduced me to poetry readings happening in town. These readings were both in English and in Hindi. I enjoyed them and was inspired to send some of my poems to an anthology that was being put together by Calcutta Writers’ Workshop, published by P. Lal, a household name among Indian poets. It was thrilling to have my poems published in this venue. When I initially came to the U.S. I was so busy with my Ph.D. that I took a hiatus from writing poems. But once I finished my Ph.D., I went back to writing poems. I started sending out poems only in my 30s and was surprised to have some pretty good journals accept them. These were Calyx, Prairie Schooner, Paterson Literary Review, and so on. Once I had my first book, Thirtha, published, I was well on my way to writing voraciously, giving poetry workshops and attending them.
KSC: Why did you choose poetry as the medium of your literary expressions?
PV: As a young girl, sound in poetry captivated me. Ever since my first poems, I have always had the beat of a line in my head, and I experience great pleasure in working on sound patterns in a poem. Of course, much of it on first writing a poem is unconscious. But in the editing process, I continue to work on the sound of the poem in order to create the musicality of the whole experience of listening to the poem.
KSC: Tell us about your cultural background and experiences of growing up in India.
PV: I grew up in Mumbai in a Tamil speaking family. Since we were in a cosmopolitan city, we were exposed to many languages and cultures. At home, I absorbed Carnatic music that constantly played on the radio and tape recorder, Tamil folk songs my mom sang, Bollywood songs blaring from every corner, devotional chants, Sanskrit poems and bhajans that I learned in the weekly balavihar (religious school) I attended. In college, I studied British poetry, from Chaucer to the modern European poets. So my cultural experience in India was a medley of sensibilities.
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KSC: How easy or difficult was it for you to adjust to a new culture and find a breakthrough in your profession of writing and teaching in America?
PV: In my initial meeting with poets in the US, I was very self-conscious that I was writing poems that were not sophisticated as the poems I was hearing around me. My exposure to American poetry was nil. So, I embarked on reading the major American poets of the 20th century to educate myself, thus further strengthening the sensibilities that were already in me. Adjusting to the publishing challenges was onerous. I learned quickly not to give up but persist. This happened after I took a workshop with Sharon Olds, who convinced me to believe in what I was writing and keep at it.
KSC: Do you believe that female writers have unique challenges? If yes, what are those, and how did you overcome them?
PV: The challenges I faced as a woman poet was something most women face. I had to figure out how to balance my writing with the time-consuming work of being a mother of two children, teaching full-time, and keeping house. I was also involved with organizing events for the local South Asian cultural association so my children could have a strong foundation in their identity as Indian-Americans. I made time between all these commitments to work on my passion for writing poetry. I did go to writing residencies whenever I could, leaving my children under the care of my husband. These residencies saved my writing life—they kept the rest of me sane.
KSC: How do you find your work different from what is being written in mainstream English literature today?
PV: I bring to my poetry a wealth of history, Tamil and Sanskrit literary traditions, a mix of languages, a variety of cultures, Indian philosophical thought, and American and European traditions. Just stringing these words together can make anyone’s head spin. But the fact is all of these are part of me. Much of what we see in mainstream American poetry is a focus on craft with no soul—these are mainly products of MFA programs. But when we look at African American, Latino and Native American poetry, one finds the real pulse of American poetry.
KSC: You come from a diverse background, which brings a unique sensibility to you as a writer. Do you blend that sensibility when you write in English in your adopted country?
PV: Although I have always written primarily in English, I blend different languages reflecting my location, which is intersectional. While Tamil, Hindi, Malayalam and Sanksrit interweave in my lines, upon immigrating and settling in New York, local turns of phrase and idioms, which range from the African American to Brooklynese, to the Long Island brogue enter my poems. I would say there is no monolithic sensibility in my poems. Even in India, where I was influenced heavily by the Bombay school of poets (Nissim Ezekiel, Eunice De Souza, Arun Kolatkar etc.) and was educated in the British literary curriculum, I could only claim my Sanskrit devotional training, Carnatic music and my exposure to Bollywood as my Indian sensibility. I was a postcolonial child who was not “post” anything and entered the American environment and took to contemporary American poetry like a duck to water. It was only in the U.S. that I began reading Tamil poetry, teaching myself my mother tongue, and it is only recently I have begun translating contemporary Tamil poetry.
KSC: Do you believe the diaspora writing is on the margin and not a part of the comprehensive picture of English literature?
PV: The challenge to Eurocentrism took place in the U.S. as recently as in the late 1980s! The question of including African American writing in a literature curriculum itself was thought of as radical. So imagine what kind of battle Asian American and South Asian American poets had to fight to be included in journals and magazines, let alone the curricula in English and Humanities departments across the country. A recent article published in the New York Times, “Just How White is the Book Industry” states that only 5% of the works of fiction published in the U.S. between 1950s to today are by writers of color. I bet that South Asian poets published in the U.S. during the same time span make less than 1%. So it is a marathon task to challenge the gatekeepers. And how many diaspora poets who do get past the gates push the gates open wider for other diaspora poets?
Very few creative writing and English departments are now beginning to include writers of color and specifically South Asian writers in their curriculum. If the next generation of our students need to be exposed to writers of color, the demographics of this country need to be reflected everywhere—in journals, in universities, in leadership positions, in conferences and so on.
KSC: What helped you break the barriers and establish your identity as an English writer in the United States? Please share any information about the groups and resources that can be useful to new writers of diaspora.
PV: I keep writing and publishing, despite challenges, ignoring rejections. My co-director, Usha Akella and I run Matwaala: South Asian Diaspora Poetry Festival, where we not only bring together South Asian poets into the limelight, but we open up all kinds of opportunities for younger poets to publish, read, and attend workshops. Please visit www.matwaala.com to get a full view of our amazing poets and their poems and articles. You can also use our anthology, MAPS (Matwaala Anthology of Poetry by South Asians), which can be downloaded from our website. I use it as one of the texts in my poetry classes. You can share this with your students in your classes. You can also share the articles on the website with your students, especially since some of them offer a sound history of late 20th century Indian English poetry as well as South Asian American poetry.
KSC: What do you want to focus on in your writing to make your contributions unique.
PV: Right now, I am focusing on political poetry. I am writing about trauma and loss of creating borders within and between countries. In my political poetry, I strive to bring together the aesthetics of writing and political issues.
KSC: What is the reason Indian writers seem to draw more influence from the writers in the West and seldom recognize writers and literature from their own country written in their rich native languages?
PV: Colonialism. Universities began including Indian writers in the English curriculum only after the 1980s. Today, with the burgeoning publication of literature by Indian writers, many of their writings as well as earlier Indian and other South Asian writers are now taught in colleges.
KSC: What are your recommendations for bringing exposure to Indian literature, written in the various Indian languages, to readers in the West?
PV: I think we need to teach South Asian writers writing in English and in translation in literature and creative writing courses. We also need to hold more poetry festivals showcasing South Asian poets and novelists, as Matwaala and Tasveer are currently doing. And we need to support one another to bring more South Asian writing into journals and performances.
KSC: Have you done any translation from your native language into English? What are they?
PV: I have been translating Dalit poetry from Tamil into English. So far, I have translated a few of Sukirtarani’s and Malathi Maitri’s poems. In addition, I have translated a few of the Sri Lankan poet, Sharmila Seyyid’s poems.
KSC: What are the challenges of translations?
PV: Translation is a very slow, painstaking process. It is hard to find the right words, images, word order, and melody to match the original, without losing the meaning and the aesthetic.
KSC: Why in India are people inclined to accept the dominance of English over their own languages? Is it a healthy sign?
PV: Colonialism has left much of the middle and upper classes with the currency of English as the doorway to survival and success. While it is tragic that some of us had to teach ourselves to read and write in our mother tongues, English is favored by Dalits as the way to overcome the kinds of subjugation that has kept them from good education. Scholars, such as Kancha Ilaiah, advocate for English education rather than Sanskritization (referring to the feverish move recently of many Hindus toward reclaiming Sanskrit) as a way to challenge centuries-old casteism. It is important to understand the peculiar complexity of language dominance in postcolonial India.
KSC: Do you think politics negatively influence the literature? Has politics impacted your writing and worldview?
PV: I think all writing is political. My poems are definitely political; many of them are deeply feminist, and engage with transnational politics. As I came into feminist consciousness in my late teens, I brought in my experiences as a woman into my poems. As an immigrant woman, I became conscious of racism’s impact on me and the brown and black people around me. Navigating racism and sexism as I nurtured my daughters, I brought these themes into my poems. I also started reflecting back on the casteism and the ravages of patriarchy in India and I continue to write about these topics.
KSC: Tell us about your recent books. If you would like to recommend reading one of your books, which one would, that be.
PV: My most recent book is The Singer of Alleppey (Shanti Arts, 2018). It is a poetic narrative of my grandmother’s life in Kerala. She was a singer whose songs live in the minds of all the family members. The poems depict her music, while I examine her challenges of patriarchy and colonialism. For this book, I tried to capture in English meter the melodies of kummi, boat songs, and Carnatic ragas. Another book that is being published in 2022 is “We are not a Museum” (Finishing Line Press). It traces the history of the Jewish people in Cochin. I think this is a unique book since there is no poetic rendition to date about this topic.
KSC: What are you writing now?
PV: I have a manuscript that is making its rounds with publishers. It is on the psychological effect of borders on people. I take examples of all kinds of political borders and bring in personal and other stories, with the quest for finding balance. I am also writing a novel, which is proving a bit of a challenge.
KSC: You have published several collections of poetry. Please share one of your favorite poems from each of them.
PV: From Thirtha, my favorite poem is “Lighter Than.” From Behind Dark Waters, my favorite poem is “Art by the Way,” and from The Singer of Alleppey, “The Long Shadow of Evil.”
KSC: What advice would you have for new writers and poets?
PV: Read everything you can lay your hands on. Write every day. Keep a notebook and write by hand as soon as you wake up, for at least 10 minutes.
For poems, of Pramila Venkateswaran CLICK HERE.
Kalpna Singh-Chitnis is an Indian-American Poet, Filmmaker and Editor-in-Chief of Life and Legends.
Official Website: www.kalpnasinghchitnis.com
