Teesta Review: A Journal of Poetry, Volume 5, Number 2. November 2022. ISSN: 2581-7094
Flowing Together: facilitating po(i)etic dialogues between Indian and Australian writers
Acknowledgement:
This editorial was penned on Kaurna Yerta, the lands of the Kaurna People. As a non-Indigenous person living on stolen land, I pay my respect to Kaurna Elders, and to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, whose sovereignty was never ceded. This always was, always will be Aboriginal Land.
‘Let
us flow like the river’, I read frequently in the email signatures of my
esteemed colleague and Editor-in-Chief of Teesta Journal, Jaydeep Sarangi.
No matter how many times I see these words, I never tire of them, and never
fail to feel myself smile as I read them. They evoke thought of the mighty
Teesta River, which courses through such diverse terrains, feeding and
connecting many otherwise very different people and cultures. The river as
symbol says so much about what poetry at its best can be, and of the reasons
why it matters. In multiple senses, poetry flows, and allows us to flow. It
flows both from and towards – from experiences, emotions,
thoughts, situations, responses, and often other poems; and towards new
insights, connections, possibilities, and actions, including actions of
inspiring or creating more poems.
I
see this new special issue of Teesta as that kind of flowing from and
towards. Taking a long view, I can reflect that my own impetus towards this
kind of work flows from my 2008 travels to Kolkata, where I was fortunate to
spend many long hours sharing coffee, poems, and adda with local writers,
artists and philosophers. The astounding warmth and generosity with which I
found myself welcomed and the ongoing email-based friendships we maintain to
this day showed me how vital collaboration, conversation, and community are to
literary practice – especially if that literary practice aims to engage
socially and politically with issues of justice, health, and environmental
responsibility (which is always the key aim, so far as I am concerned). In more
immediate terms, this new special issue flows from a previous one that Jaydeep
and I co-edited for TEXT: Journal of Writing and Writing Cultures
(Sarangi & Walker 2020). The issue was an experiment in a methodology for
cross-cultural creative research combining strategies of duoethnography
(Norris, Sawyer & Lund 2012) with poetic inquiry (Prendergast, Leggo &
Sameshima 2009): we paired twelve Indian poets with twelve Australian poets,
inviting them to exchange poems, write new poems in response to one another,
and then reflect on their learning through the process. The aim was to facilitate
interliminal po(i)etic dialogues addressing global challenges of current times.
‘Interliminality’ is a concept borrowed from translation studies and here
adapted to describe the special forms of discovery collaboration through poetry
can spark. A limen is a border, threshold, or point of crossing-over, and
‘interliminality’ indicates a ‘complex dynamics that arise at points of overlap
or contact between differing liminalities of language, culture, geography, and
more (Sarangi & Walker 2020: 1). Through the term ‘po(i)etic’ we signal
poetry’s connections with the Greek notion of poiesis (making) – in this
case, poetry that makes something at the intersecting limens of culture,
geography, society, knowledge, history and more.
For
the TEXT special issue, we began pairing poets in late 2018, with most
exchanges commencing in 2019 and continuing through to mid-2020. The global
COVID-19 outbreaks of early 2020 thus became an unanticipated theme of many of
the collaborations: it was moving to read, for instance, Ranu Uniyal’s account
of ‘the role poetry can play as a mode of connection and a source of strength
through difficult times’ (Uniyal 2020, p. 2). Alongside similar statements from
other contributors to the issue, Ranu’s description of how collaborating with
Australian poet Quinn Eades became ‘a source of poetic inspiration and strength
despite anxiety and fear’ (Uniyal 2020, p. 2) convinced me of the especial
value these sorts of transnational poetic dialogues bear in the present era
especially. This enhanced the conviction I already held in transnational poetic
collaboration as a means for furthering the deeply necessary ongoing critique
and resistance of colonisation’s continuing effects – for India and Australia, though
vastly different, culturally, and geographically, share common histories of
British invasion/colonisation with its ongoing ramifications across social,
cultural, spiritual, ecological, epistemic, and economic spheres. As a
non-Indigenous and white-skinned person born and living on Kaurna Yerta, the
lands of the Kaurna people, I recognise myself as implicated in the continuing
violences of invasion, racism, and systemic injustice. In Australia, privileges
are afforded to white people that we do not deserve, and at dire cost to the
true owners of this land – not to mention the land itself. The need to
decolonise is clear. The way towards decolonisation is not. But I do know that
listening to First Nations Elders and community voices is essential. And I
believe that facilitating conversations between transnational contexts affected
in different-yet-related ways can illuminate possibilities we might not see if
remaining simply siloed in our own spaces and scenarios.
The
factors I have so far described are among those that compelled me to pursue a
follow-up to the TEXT special issue – namely, this new issue of Teesta,
co-edited with Aden Burg, a recent Honours graduate and aspiring creative
writer whose first co-authored scholarly publication (with Doris Pushpam) is
among the six new poetic exchange articles this issue presents. The other five
are by Adelle Sefton-Rowston writing with Sunil Sharma, Bishnupada Ray writing
with Dominic Symes, Cameron Hindrum writing with DC Chambial, Sunil Sharma
writing with Robert Maddox-Harle and Jaydeep Sarangi, and Arnis Silvia writing
with Susheel Sharma. Additionally, there is a single-authored article by esteemed
Professor and Former Head of the Calcutta University Dept of English Sanjukta
Dasgupta – a reflective essay developed from the speech Sanjukta offered at the
online launch of the TEXT special issue, in which she discusses her
creative and scholarly engagements with Australian literature, her experiences
of travelling to Australia, and the special personal as well as professional
connections she has forged with Australian writers and cultural critics,
spanning almost two decades, from 2004 to present times.
The
articles form the first of two sections within this issue. The second section
presents poetry by a rich mix of established and emerging Indian and Australian
writers including Dominic Guerra, Jessika Spencer, Subhra Kanti Kar, Samantha
Faulkner, Jeet Thayil, John Kinsella, Mags Webster, Ravi Shankar, Sagar Mal
Gupta, Dan Disney, Sabyasachi Bhattacharya, Aidan Coleman, Emily Sun, Prabal
Kumar Basu (with translator Armaan Singh), Barrina South, Grant Caldwell,
Simon-Peter Telford, Animikh Patra (with translator Souradeep Roy), Judy
Anderson, Gemma Parker, and Susheel Sharma. The Indian contributors represent
diverse regions including Kolkata, New Delhi, Uttar-Pradesh, Himachal Pradesh,
and diasporic communities in Malaysia, the US, the UK, Europe, and beyond. The
Australian writers speak from First Nations Kaurna, Ngarrindjeri, Wiradjuri,
Barkindji, and Torres Strait Islander as well as non-Indigenous perspectives
including but not limited to Chinese-Australian, Muslim-Australian,
Irish-Australian, Italian-Australian, and British-Australian poets grappling
with the complexities of being on stolen land – or in some cases, leaving to
travel and live elsewhere.
Altogether,
the issue thereby articulates thirty-two distinct voices and sets of
experiences. Recalling the metaphor of poetry as a river flowing from
and towards, each one of these voices expands the range of sources
further still – as with streams and tributaries that meet to flow together as a
larger body of water, eddying with cross-currents, ripples, and surprise
swells. Most exciting for me are the possibilities of where this can all next
flow towards – in other words, of the new collaborations and dialogues that
this bringing-together of voices might allow to emerge. It
is my hope that this issue may prompt some of the writers published in section
two to connect with one another and form new dialogic articles along the lines
of those in section one, thus continuing the river of exchange and furthering
the objective Sanjukta raises towards the end of her article – namely,
actualising the potential value to be gained via increased awareness of Indian
literatures in Australia, and vice versa, or in other words, increased
‘cultural two-way traffic’.
I
dedicate this issue to my late friend Achinta Gupta – journalist, activist,
editor, and publisher. An esteemed figure in the literary community that
welcomed me so warmly in Kolkata in 2008, Achinta passed away in December 2020
from COVID-19. Founder of the literary organisation Shatak Ekush and the
literary magazine of the same name (Shatak Ekush 2010), Achinta worked
tirelessly to create and sustain platforms for writers and artists to raise
their voices and be heard – especially those speaking from marginalised
backgrounds and/or about issues of political struggle. Achinta showed me how
powerfully poetry and related art forms can assist people in overcoming false
divides and establishing connections across borders of multiform kinds. While
respecting differences, we can recognise commonalities and work together
towards shared hopes.
Let us flow, and flow forth, indeed.
(Guest Editor)
Teesta Review: A Journal of Poetry
Works
Cited
Norris, J, Sawyer, R & Lund, D 2012, Duoethnography: Dialogic
Methods for Social, Health, and Educational Research, Routledge, London.
Prendergast, M,
Leggo, C & Sameshima, P 2009, Poetic Inquiry: Vibrant Voices in the Social
Sciences, Sense Publishers, Rotterdam.
Sarangi, J &
Walker, A 2020, ‘Indian-Australian exchanges through collaborative poetic
enquiry’, TEXT: Journal of Writing and Writing Courses, vol. 24, special
issue no. 60, at: https://textjournal.scholasticahq.com/article/23513-introduction
Shatak Ekush
2010, Shatak Ekush on Blogspot, https://shatakekush.blogspot.com/
Uniyal, R 2020,
‘Beyond the Bend’, TEXT: Journal of Writing and Writing Courses, vol.
24, special issue no. 60, at: https://textjournal.scholasticahq.com/article/23527-beyond-the-bend