Sex and memory

Sex, memory, death and poetry are inextricably entangled in the poems of San Francisco-based Preeti Vangani’s debut collection, which won the R L Poetry Award 2017 (National Category). The book is dedicated to the poet’s mother, who, we learn, died of cancer in 2008. Many of the poems are meditations on loss, infected with a desire to archive recollections. “I am trying to backpack through the geography of a future / without you, my compass, and no one has written a Lonely / Planet Guide titled 100 Getaways Without Mother, or / let’s produce a reality TV show for constants to adventure / through losses on a shoestring budget.”

The title of the poem, “Unremember” — it is the first one in the book — alerts the reader about its double anxiety. There is a desire to forget loss, to not remember the dead parent, and yet the prefix “un” makes sense only with “remember”. To forget is also to remember, in this case. The mood is elegiac, but also therapeutic. The poet evokes the dead mother through her picture frame, the garland of flowers. But she is equally aware of the futility of such an evocation: “You can’t hold faith as a torch light over reality’s head / You will be disqualified if you reenter the symmetry / of this world with longing as your wild card.” There is no wild card after death.

Other pieces in the book are erotic, where sex is often less a source of pleasure and more of reflections, some philosophical, others political and yet others downright humorous. In an early poem, “ABCs of Hotel Sex”, the narrator describes losing her virginity, not out of desire for her boyfriend but to earn respect. “Consider the respect if you did ‘it’? So I did ‘it’ and later / danced into the verandah, announced my / excitement buttoned up in the boy’s shirt. / F word an F word, I whispered the F word but not as a curse / (girl’s got game, my roommate said, and she’s got / hickeys the size of acid bug bites).” The respect sexual experience earns is also dubious when the boy proudly recollects his experiences.

Mother Tongue Apologize; Author: Preeti Vangani; Publisher: TRLFPA Editions; Pages: 73; Price: Rs 300

Throughout the book, various sexual experiences are described in painstaking detail, shot through with an acute, self-deprecating self-awareness. “Sex is a barometer for standard size cool,” writes Vangani in “What Spilled Itself Outside the Margin”. But there is also humour: “Must take mom’s photo off the wall I face when I masturbate / This is not what mother would have wanted / To be this self-aware / to be this foolish.” Self-awareness to this extent can in fact be a form of stupidity, making it impossible to surrender to instinct or the ecstasy of pleasure. 

In these poems, Eros and Thanatos are like two strings entangled, so entangled in fact that Freud would have found it hard to disentangle them with his theories. In “Relationship Status”, Vangani writes: “Humour has a thing for dark spaces / else how can you explain me kissing / my boyfriend hard as the flight blackened / for takeoff, the flight I was taking to go / see my sick mother. I’d find out on landing / that she passed away when my tongue / was busy sampling lust.” There is, of course, a deliberate attempt to shock the reader. When have we read elegies so infused with erotic power? When have death and sex been juxtaposed like this? To pull this off the writer is required to be honest, vulnerable, and to experience this poetry, the reader also needs to abandon her safe spaces and venture forth. 

Vangani also invites the reader to take risks by subverting the standard left-aligned format for her poems. These are some shaped like an erection, others like a clock and yet others are words scattered across the page, with no obvious plan. Experimental poetry exploring space on the page or shapes in which words are arranged is finding purchase in Indian poetry. Vangani has a strong and sure voice and the book currently under review is a stunning debut. 

The writer’s novel, Ritual, is forthcoming this year