I’m with Toni Cade Bambara (who, to paraphrase very wildly) once said: “The role of the radical artist is to make the revolution irresistible.” I think language can be used to mask grave crimes (the language of United Nations reports, for instance), or to send across stereotypes, or even sometimes to denude us of all feeling, all outrage. This does not mean that language does not contain the potential for revolution, or to serve as a call to arms. Meena Kandasamy: I do believe that languages are biased, fucked-up structures, clearly reflecting a lot of the status quo, reflecting the inequalities and very often reinforcing them.
John Rufo: Your newest chapbook, #ThisPoemWillProvokeYou, features a bifurcation: two sections, the first titled “Love” and the second titled “War.” Could you speak a bit about the inability of language(s) to successfully communicate and/or deconstruct, to commit war and to commit love? I love the poems because you use them to speak of things that don’t exist-or don’t exist yet-and do this incredible act of pointing, accusing, undermining the status quo, flipping off the crimes and situations permeating everywhere today through gang-rape, discrimination towards Dalits, and the loss of lives. In this interview, we discuss language, protest, translation, and the role of the poet in the world. Kandasamy’s poems, as the title suggests, often rely on a direct relationship with the reader. The focus of this interview is a collection titled #ThisPoemWillProvokeYou.
Her first novel, The Gypsy Goddess, was published by Atlantic Books (UK) and HarperCollins India in 2014. She describes her own work as maintaining “a focus on caste annihilation, linguistic identity and feminism.” She has published two collections of poetry: Touch and Ms Militancy. She writes poetry and fiction, translates, and often uses social media to discuss issues of social justice. Meena Kandasamy is a writer based in India and London.
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