Leena ManimekalaiI have been writing a book on censorship I have experienced as a female body, queer spirit, poet, film maker and an artivist.
Abstract
I asked what would happen if I created with my body? If in creating I could return to my womb, to my mother’s placenta, to my grandmother’s umbilical cord. Kaathadi(Kite) was born out of this self-interrogation. My body became a celestial distance, an inscrutable stranger, an unstoppable pulse, a hidden burial ground.
In the book I explore, through a series of interior monologues, the concept of home, doubly vexed by the longing to remain and to fly free: the contradiction of be’longing.’ I translate my body into text. I break the walls of gender – caste – class – color – race, walls that separate me from myself. I refuse all stasis. Like my own pulse, I will never stop. I have no beginning or end. Only the eternal moment. No story. Only poetry .Only torrid amniotic fluid. I kill myself so I can finally breathe.
Culture writes me. If I must write myself, I must become uncultured, savage, mad. I must turn my skin inside out and dance in graveyards. I am a mad woman but I want what any sane woman wants. What any good, political woman demands: dignity, self-esteem, freedom, sexuality, desire, choice and agency. I embrace contradictions, seek an impossible language where mind, body and heart are no longer separate. I let my anguish go, I let it scream and fly and it is the ecstacy of every woman before me.
Kaathadi(Kite) is an account of art exploding gender, a complex negotiation of embodied memory, a juxtaposition of a form bound between beginning and end with a trauma that extends endlessly. The book uses time as pressed leaves in the notebook of life. The events in the book are fossilized. It is a book of natural history. Memories, irreconcilable trauma, voices oozing from the past, present and future silences encrypted in the genes, censorship, deep sighs of the repressed body and existence are quilted into the language to make it a more body centered experience, to make it an act of reclamation, of resuscitation, to give back the breath of life to my body. The book embodies my attempt to break free from all fixed forms, social and aesthetic.
The original poem and the translation that gave birth to this book.
காத்தாடி
கைவிடப்பட்ட மூச்சுகளைப்
பிடித்து பிடித்து
உடலுக்குள் ஏற்றுகிறேன்
ஆனாலும் எட்டு வைப்பதற்குள்
தட்டையாகிவிடுகிறது
காற்றுப் போன உடலை மூங்கிலில் கட்டி காத்தாடியாக்குகிறேன்
கயிறு என் நஞ்சுக் கொடி
மாஞ்சாவில் கலந்திருப்பது
என் எலும்புத் துகள்
பசை என் ரத்தம்
பறத்தலின் இடையில்
வரும் தலைகள் ஏன் அறுந்து விழுகின்றன
என்று என்னிடம் கேட்டுக் கொண்டு வராதீர்கள்
Kite
I grasp at
every breath escaped
from my clutches
yank them back into my body
but once I have eight
they become flat
I mount
my punctured body to
a bamboo frame
and make
a kite
the string
my umbilical cord;
the manja coated with
my powdered bones;
the gum
my blood;
please don’t ask me
why severed heads
are falling
midflight
