The immaculate women

Tishani Doshi’s Girls Are Coming Out of the Woods is an unnerving gathering of poems that seem to have clawed their way out of hard earth. In a moment that references a victim of a brutal gang rape, who has become a household name in India, Doshi asks, “And what can be said about darkness after all?/ About men who board buses with iron rods?” Girls Are Coming Out of the Woods is not so much a warning of the state of the world as it is a promise of some kind. When the curtain, frayed and mauled, is pulled back, the eyes of girls and women flash back defiantly. The following is an edited excerpt from BLink’s interview with Doshi.

The last two books of poetry have been dedicated to your dance mentor, Chandralekha. Everything Begins Elsewhere ends with a poem for her. This one begins with a dedication to your mother, Eira. What does it mean for this book to open this way?

I often begin books with titles and dedications in mind, but this one was different. I don’t think I had a sense of the poems collectively until I hit a critical mass and realised that they belonged together. In a way, they all had to do with temporality, and resisting fragility. And I suppose that made me think of my mother, so I wanted to make this offering to her.

The titular poem, ‘Girls Are Coming Out of the Woods’, written for Monika Ghurde, reads like an anthem. It is menacing, beautifully so. Could you tell us a bit more about this poem?

Some years ago, I was on a bus in Ireland listening to Bollywood songs, and there was something about the disconnect between landscape and lyrics that made me think of this group of women coming out from the woods. I was thinking as well of the many stories of violence against women in India, so much daily brutality, so that’s how the poem began. I wanted it to feel like an anthem, gathering force as the poem was gathering bodies. For it to be unrelenting in the way that violence is unrelenting. The poem was a way of saying that these stories and ghosts refuse to be buried, that a chorus of voices will echo back from all that horror. And then, in October of 2016, my friend Monika Ghurde was killed, and everything about the way it happened — her murder, the way it was reported, the way her life was dissected and commented upon, the whole thing was wrong and dishonourable, and it brought the violence from the streets of abstraction into my spleen. The poem had already been written, but I put her name to it as an act of reclamation.

The poems often allude to your life on the Tamil Nadu coast between two fishing villages. There is a slowness to these poems, but not a calmness. The dainty, peaceful vision of a beach is really stripped away in these poems.

The thing I least expected about coastal life was about how it would increase my sense of dread and decay. Everything is constantly dying by the sea. Death of hinges, death of light fixtures, death of turtles, dolphins, dogs. So much detritus and flotsam shoved on to the shore every day. All that corrosive salt air. So, it’s beautiful yes, but it also really brings up questions of mortality, and I think that’s something that pervades the entire collection. It’s an interesting conundrum. Time slows down, but you still feel closer to death.

This feels like your most personal book of poems yet. The poems about your family are particularly less-guarded. Do you want to tell us about the experience (and difficulty, if any) in writing about such personal subjects?

My brother is the only real person in my poems. The rest — father, mother, husband — are amalgams. I was happily divested of truth-telling in poems at university. My professor JD McClatchy said of the opening lines of one of my early poems, “I hold my uncle in plastic bags,” why uncle? Why not husband or father? So even though it was really my uncle who had died, and I did not have a husband at the time, I changed it to husband and it gave the poem a different truth and a different weight. Richard Hugo said, “You owe reality nothing and the truth of your feelings everything,” and I think in poetry, we’re always manipulating things to arrive at that understanding.

The collection speaks with urgency of escalating violence against women. It also makes ample room for imperfect, not “immaculate” women. How do these two narratives speak to each other for you?

The greatest excuse for why violence against women is perpetuated in this country is because it is somehow the fault of these women. Wearing the wrong clothes, staying out too late, living alone, going to nightclubs. It pits this idea of an immaculate woman (which is non-existent) against the idea of a corrupt one, and it shifts the blame to women, as if they were constantly ‘asking for trouble’. There’s a huge amount of social conditioning about gender roles, so even the most emancipated women I know struggle to accommodate their ambitions and desires against what’s expected of them. So, these two narratives go hand in hand, and, in a way, the woman in these poems, who is sometimes a version of myself, is challenging these terrors that await her in the world. She’s saying, here I am, I accept the dangers, but I absolutely refuse to give up on the beauty.

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