Tishani Doshi treads between horror and beauty
Eight years back, at the Bocas Lit Fest 2016, on one of these hot April days of steamy pavements, with the stars burning hard at night and poets and writers sitting around drinking in an almost stupefied joy to be with one another, I met Tishani Doshi, a Forward prizewinning poet, essayist, fiction writer, journalist, and dancer. She read her poems in the Old Fire Station, (echoes of Derek Walcott drumming there, still about us) in a session titled Far From Home.
Looking at her sitting in the afternoon shadow of the theatre, her face translucent from pockets of grainy tropical light, I was transfixed. When she reads in that near-musical intercontinental voice, one feels equally lulled by her lyricism and startled by her truth-telling. I was taken aback by her slight dancer’s body and easy way of being, which conveyed lightwide freedom, the kind you see in young women who haven’t yet been bruised by life.
The men were struck by her beauty, voice, and intercontinental accent, crisscrossing as if it were the continents of a Welsh mother and Gujarati father. She was ripe for being objectified. Her poems weren’t having it. They are hugely lyrical, with heft, fiercely truth-telling, mutinous, intransigent, and dotted with occasionally savage humour.
The personal is always political. Doshi hunts down the unlit dark areas of injustice and pain, violence, sexuality, and power, and demonstrates the transformative power of truth. Doshi describes her poems as treading “between horror and beauty.” To do this, Doshi never shuts down, and every nerve is alive to life at all levels. Now Doshi tells me she writes to understand beauty and horror, craft it into an art form— poem, poem-prose-dance—and to “add her voice to the voices that were there before and the voices that will come after.”
But the original impulse remains what it has always been because she refused to “shut up.” “How to make the howl into a song? How can we sit with the beloved, horrible world and understand it by doing this? For over 15 years, Doshi, who was inducted into the Royal Society of Literature 2023, was the lead dancer at the Chandralekha company in Madras, India. She explored and interpreted, as she does in her poetry, how the female body connects to the world, to belonging, to being an outsider or insider. There appears to be no separation between her being and her art—the continents she calls home—in literature or culture.
After Doshis’s wedding in 2014 to journalist and writer Carlo Pizzati, she wrote this in a Facebook post for the India Love Project. “We met in Chennai in 2008 by chance. It took two more years for us to meet by chance again (in Rome this time), but we’ve been together ever since, living in a house on the beach in Tamil Nadu, where we got married in 2014 in an Arya Samaj Ceremony. Carlo was hoping for an elephant or a horse for his baraat, but he got a mattu vandi (bullock cart) decked out with flowers and bells. The priest told the groom to be a good boy, which was funny, considering Carlo was 48. My eyes watered the whole day— emotion, yes, but mainly bad eye makeup. I’m half- Welsh, half-Gujarati, full Madras.
Carlo is from the Italian Alps but has lived in the US, Latin America, and Spain as a foreign correspondent. He had to get used to hot weather and food; I had to be periodically dragged up to his beloved mountains in the Veneto. We spend our days writing in separate rooms. “After dinner, we like to dance around the hall while our three adopted beach dogs look at us puzzled. He made me watch all of Kieslowski’s Dekalog. I made him appreciate the finer points of Dirty Dancing. I yearn to speak fluent Italian. He yearns to speak fluent Tamil. People ask how we work as a “mixed couple. We’ve made a language of lovespeak of our own.”
This devotion to a life built around writing has given Doshi a bounty—in books. Doshi’s debut, Countries of the Body, won the Forward Prize for Best First Collection (2006) in 2016. Girls Are Coming Out of the Woods (2017) headlined the All About Women Festival at the Sydney Opera House and was shortlisted for a Ted Hughes Award. “Girls Are Coming Out of the Woods conjures back to life Indian women who have been brutalised, brutalised, and murdered,” the Guardian declared in an early review. Their ghosts and stories refuse to be forgotten: “Girls are coming/out of the woods, clearing the ground/to scatter their stories. Even those girls /found naked in ditches and wells, / those forgotten in neglected attics, /and buried in riverbeds like sediments /from a different century.”
Her novels, The Pleasure Seekers (2010) and Small Days and Nights (2019), were shortlisted for the Hindu Fiction Prize, Tata Fiction Award, and the RSL Ondaatje Prize. In Small Days and Nights, male violence, brute power, and the way women keep secrets resurface after an Indian woman returns from America to Pondicherry, Tamil Nadu, after her mother’s death.
Doshis most recent collection of poems, A God at the Door (HarperCollins India), was shortlisted for the Forward Poetry Prize 2021 and delivers her heady punch of lyricism and eviscerating truths. One reviewer in India wrote how she shares Doshi’s “seething rage and a sense of helplessness witnessing the systematic violence, communalism and the boxing in of women into their homes.”
Rain at Three – Rain at three splits the bed in half, cracks at windows like horsemen blistering through a century of hibernation. The washing’s on the line. There are pillows in the grass. All the weeds we pulled up yesterday lie in clotted heaps, dying slowly. We sleep with pumiced, wooden bodies—mud-caked, mud-brown, listening to the fan-whir sea-heave of our muscled Tamil Nadu nights.
We turn inwards, announce how patiently we’ve waited for this uprooting. Now that damaged petals of hibiscus drown the terrace stones, we must kneel together and gather. This is how desire works: splintering first, then joining.
Girls are Coming Out of the Woods Girls are coming out of the woods, wrapped in cloaks and hoods, carrying iron bars and candles and a multitude of scars, collected on acres of premature grass and city buses, in temples and bars. Girls are coming out of the woods with panties tied around their lips, making such a noise, it’s impossible to hear. Is the world speaking too? Is it really asking, What does it mean to give someone a proper resting? Girls are coming out of the woods, lifting their broken legs high, leaking secrets from unfastened thighs, all the lies whispered by strangers and swimming coaches, and uncles, especially uncles, who said spreading would be light and easy, who put bullets in their chests and fed their pretty faces to fire, who sucked the mud clean off their ribs, and decorated their coffins with brier. Girls are coming out of the woods, clearing the ground to scatter their stories. Even those girls found naked in ditches and wells, those forgotten in neglected attics, and buried in river beds like sediments from a different century. They’ve crawled their way out from behind curtains of childhood, the silver-pink weight of their bodies pushing against water, against the sad, feathered tarnish of remembrance. Girls are coming out of the woods the way birds arrive at morning windows—pecking and humming, until all you can hear is the smash of their minuscule hearts against glass, the bright desperation of sound—bashing, disappearing. Girls are coming out of the woods.
They’re coming. They’re coming. Kill Them in the Morning I’m trying to find where it says, If your enemy comes to slay you at night, kill them in the morning. What happens in the hours of waiting? Do you sing to one another across the trenches, stargaze from casements, then set off to duel at first light? What is it about the sun rising that’s so self-righteous? The firstness, the lightness? There’s an allegory somewhere about a girl holding scissors encircled by soldiers with guns. Don’t we know that the dragging from trains takes place after dark, that wars always happen offstage until they’re not? Summer is almost upon us, romantic and lonely. I know, I know, no tightrope-walking allowed between our house and the neighbour’s. Haven’t you dreamed of disappearing for a day, then returning to life, triumphant? Wouldn’t you want to know who missed you, who rejoiced? The idea that there are no innocent people.
What colour would you call this hair under the rubble? My enemy’s enemy is an Ottoman couch. But we’re here now, those of us alive, standing on the beach, facing the rosy dawn—how it slip slaps us into forgiveness, how we turn the other cheek. Seeing a tube of Vicco Vajradanti toothpaste in my friend’s granny’s bathroom in Trinidad I could weep for how the past keeps showing up— whooshy threshold. Here we are, all us cousins standing outside the kitchen one summer, chewing on neem twigs like our grandparents do— sceptics of the toothbrush. We are mere saplings. The world—gigantic, treacherous.
We long to understand whether the ghosts that glide past the gates with their feet turned backwards are real, or whether they have been invented to terrify us. The shadows on our bedroom walls grow claws. All this fear is meant to keep us vigilant. At night I scrape the woody taste out of my mouth. For a long time I believed I could swallow the world like a baby god if only I kept my teeth agleam. Even after the lurches, the many loamy cravings that sleep brings, I sought completeness, a daily reparation of losses. Childhood now, so far, and suddenly, close. See how carelessly I grip the tube around the middle, how I almost never replace the cap. This does not mean I no longer believe in terror. See how clean I keep it— pink hymn of my throat. I Carry My Uterus in a Small Suitcase I carry my uterus in a small suitcase for the day I need to leave it at the railway station. Till then I hold on to my hysteria and take my nettle tea with gin.
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Tishani Doshi earned her bachelor’s degree from Queens University of Charlotte and a master’s in creative writing from Johns Hopkins University. She is currently an Associate Professor of Literature and Creative Writing at New York University in Abu Dhabi. “Doshi hunts down the unlit dark areas of injustice and pain, violence, sexuality, and power, and demonstrates the transformative power of truth. Doshi describes her poems as treading “between horror and beauty.” To do this, Doshi never shuts down, and every nerve is alive to life at all levels.