Tishani Doshi and I have only ever been in the same room a handful of times. But as a reader, I have followed her work closely since her 2006 Forward Prize winning début Countries of the

Body. We met first at an Indian Poetry event over a decade ago at the National Portrait Gallery in London. I recall her mesmeric delivery, the lyrical gravity of each word and the silence of the audience – and how the next reader regrettably broke the stillness with his jolly tomfoolery. Years later, when Doshi was invited to read from her second book Everything Begins Elsewhere at Liverpool University where I teach, I appreciated the embodiedness of her voice differently: as a way to speak about rootlessness, which relates to both of our itinerant experiences.

Once, many years ago, we stumbled over one another on the London Underground – briefly and unexpectedly – grateful for a familiar face amid the city’s strangeness. I don’t remember what we said during that quasi-epic-underworld encounter, but I do remember feeling that our displacements in that moment overlapped suddenly.

A sense of longing, and belonging, inhabit all three of Doshi’s poetry collections, as do multiple geographical sites – South India, Wales, England, Italy, places both imaginary and real. So it seems

The award-winning writer and dancer talks to Sandeep Parmar about fear, freedom and embodying female energy in her work

INTERVIEW TISHANI DOSHI

only fitting that my interview with her for Mslexia should take place in a virtual space between New York University’s campus in Abu Dhabi, where she is teaching, and Los Angeles, where I’ve retreated for the Easter break.

It is 7pm in Abu Dhabi where she is; 8am in Santa Monica where I am. Skype thrums extraterrestrially. On my laptop on my sister’s kitchen table, where the Californian sun is offsetting my long-haul bleariness, Doshi’s face appears, framed by the soft furnishings of her faculty-housing living room at sunset. She rotates her laptop camera and a flash of high-rise towers comes into view. Even though she’s just done a three-day whip-fast trip to India to launch her new novel (more on that later), she looks remarkably awake.

Doshi tells me that she hasn’t taught creative writing this intensely for a while, but this assignment has come at a good time, because – blissfully, and unusually for her – she has nothing else to do. During the past year she’s published a third poetry collection, Girls Are Coming Out of the Woods, as well as a second novel, Small Days and Nights.

Girls… has received much critical attention and acclaim, as well as a shortlisting for the Ted Hughes Award – in part because Doshi toured an

Doshi stands on stage, legs apart and bent at the hips, slowly drawing energy up from the ground

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electrifying dance performance she developed, based on the collection’s stark title poem, which is an incantatory and haunting exploration of gender-based violence.

Inspired both by the murder of Doshi’s friend Monika Ghurde and the rape of Jyoti Singh on a bus in Delhi in 2012, the title poem was written before the rise of the #MeToo movement. ‘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.’ These silenced women speak in Doshi’s voice in a chilling recitation that both depersonalises – by making plural this ubiquitous violence – but also feels intensely intimate and vulnerable.

This is partly the result of repetition, a chanting of the promise that retribution is coming. ‘I wanted to have this accretion and gathering of force, gathering of bodies, and to have that sonic effect – but also to create the visual effect again on the page,’ she tells me. The shape of the poem is a column, a channel of force that links itself to the earth, both on the page and in performance. In the dance, Doshi stands on stage, legs apart and bent at the hips, slowly drawing energy up from the ground and through her body as her recorded voice moves deliberately through each image and sound.

Having witnessed her performance, I suggest that she reads this poem differently compared with other poems in the collection. ‘Something does happen in the reading of that poem, and it’s not the same every time; but there is this sense of it starting slow and then gathering pace and then slowing again at the end to “they’re coming”. In a way the whole poem is about that: about reclamation, about the fact that I think of these women who are dumped in the earth, dumped everywhere. It is about this image of them somehow being resuscitated and coming up from that place.’

Born in Chennai to a Welsh mother and Gujarati father, Doshi has lived mostly in India since 2001 – currently on an isolated beach in Tamil Nadu that provides rich source material for her latest two projects. Having studied at Johns Hopkins for a Masters in Creative Writing, Doshi credits US poets as formative influences, including Elizabeth Bishop, that poet famously known for artful losing and her use of form.

Published in the UK, US and India, her work

encompasses poetry, fiction and essays, as well as literary journalism, including a recent run as a columnist for The Hindu. This range of genres reflects her international engagement: in addition to her three poetry collections and two novels, she’s written a version of the Welsh Mabinogion myth Fountainville and a book of essays, The Adulterous Citizen.

It is rare for a poet to traverse so many communities and readerships. Does she feel she belongs to any one literary community? Undoubtedly Doshi is an Indian poet, but she also feels strongly connected to the UK. ‘I’ve been going to England for so long and I’ve lived there, and I have a British passport. So I am a British writer but nobody calls me that because I don’t live there.’

Many poems from Girls... are either written in traditional European poetic forms – the sestina, canzone, sonnet, golden shovel – or maintain a constructedness that shows a careful attention to the poem’s visual elements. But form itself is not one of Doshi’s primary considerations; one senses that her use of form emerges from a concrete and sonic synthesis, rather than a primary linguistic impulse. Memory, repetition and time coalesce around the lyric utterance, making use of rhythm. Like a dancer, her poems are responsive to space and timing.

Poems on ageing and the female body, on both motherhood and its refusal, give Girls… an edge that feels refreshingly honest in our age of the sacred mother, the woman who can have it all, who never ages. Violence from within and from other women, the violence of judgement and censure, ruptures at various points across these poems and points to a culture of surveillance and cruelty.

Doshi worries that the feminist movement has lost some of its radicalism. ‘I question the marketing of feminism as a lifestyle, with tee-shirts and slogans like “the future is female”. It’s only by dismantling systems of patriarchy and capitalism that there can be change in a really important way. Everything is shifting. And we have language to describe it, and forums like #MeToo, which is hugely important for giving people a voice, especially in India. I don’t diminish those movements at all, but I think that simply saying “I’m a feminist” doesn’t meaningfully tell us where we stand or where we might go.’

Her readership is largely female, though she’s had some favourable responses from men who’ve read Girls…. ‘It’s great that women are reading me. But I would like to conquer gender. I would like to have a huge male readership.’ Certainly, if women are to be humanised by the great universalist project of art they need to be heard by all readers.

Doshi has written, in Girls... and elsewhere, about her choice to ‘decline the invitation to breed’ (‘Your body language is not Indian!’). At a cultural moment when motherhood is being resacralised by women writers, Doshi is conscious that any opposition might offend. But ‘there are many ways to be a woman,’ she says. Women’s experience must be plural, it must make space for alternative existences.

Her fascination with the female body stems

First writing‘I wrote a poem when I was about eight that was in the school magazine. It was about my childhood home, which is interesting because it is the house I would later write about in my novel The Pleasure Seekers. I still dream about that house.’

Early influence‘When I took my first creative writing class in the US I read four American poets and they were very important to me: Mark Doty, James Tate, Mary Oliver and Elizabeth Bishop. Those were early poets that I read and was very impressed by.’

First book that influenced me‘Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier. I love the way she creates tension with the character of Mrs Danvers and the novel’s first line. But if you ask me the same question tomorrow, I’ll name a different book.’

Advice to my younger self‘Develop a thick skin and laugh more. But the best advice stolen from a literary figure would be Shirley Jackson’s letter to a disgruntled reader: “Dear Mrs White, if you don’t like my peaches, don’t shake my tree”.’

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TISHANI DOSHI has published six books of poetry and fiction. Her essays, poems and short stories have been widely anthologised. She received an Eric Gregory Award for Poetry and her collection Countries of the Body won the Forward Prize for Best First Collection in 2006. Her début novel The Pleasure Seekers was shortlisted for The Hindu Literary Prize and longlisted for the Orange Prize and the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. From 2001-16 she was also the lead dancer in the Chandralekha Troupe, performing across the world including in Tokyo, Taiwan, Bombay, Munich, Calcutta and Toronto.

her fascination with the female body stems from a female-centred dance tradition in India

sea for generations, they belong there and must think ‘what the hell are you doing here?’.

It is clear that itinerancy and longing, what some critics have noted as ‘melancholy’ – a term Doshi doesn’t recognise in her own work – has found a new rootedness and boldness in her recent writing. There’s a distinct vibe of playfulness throughout Girls…, an irony amid its seriousness. I wonder what might have brought about this change, or is there a constant thread still being worked out? The body is central, she explains; how it is excluded, how it claims space, and where it does and does not belong: ‘You use your body to stake a claim,’ she says.

I like this idea of marking a boundary by hurling the self into the earth. And poems like ‘Understanding my fate in a Mexican museum’, which take the past and future body for an artefact of oblivion, really do claim their moment. Doshi’s latest poems are markedly more visceral and less spiritual: ‘leaner, more to the ground,’ she says. She hopes there is anger, irreverence and lightness too, and that she has learned to stand outside her work – and make possible a space for personal as well as political transformation. ❐

from a female-centred dance tradition in India, and its associations with female energy: the all-powerful life force, the deity Shakti. However, female power in the abstract, the mythical, the spiritual – is often at odds with lived reality. ‘You can never get away from your body in India. You can never walk down the street and forget you’re a woman. You want to believe in female energy, and sometimes you feel this power from your anatomy; but at other times you feel terrified. I’m interested in that dichotomy and that space.’

Doshi’s new novel, like Girls…, explores that fear and the navigation of public space in India. Living on an isolated beach for the past eight years has given her time and space, and furnished a beautiful landscape for the plot’s backdrop, which involves a young woman who has inherited a stretch of land on India’s coast – along with a previously unacknowledged sister.

The novel revolves around duty and freedom, the ways in which family relations and obligations are defined and tested. ‘Beautiful landscapes can very quickly become dangerous. I enjoyed working that tension into the novel.’ The novel was inspired by the story of Arthur Miller and Inge Morath’s son Daniel, who was institutionalised with Down’s Syndrome in the 1960s and effectively forgotten. Doshi’s personal experience with a differently-abled sibling informs the book, as does grappling with being an outsider.

‘This novel came out of a really deep wound of not belonging. For a long time I loved being the outsider and thought that it was important to my work as a writer. Now I think that being an outsider wherever you go comes at a cost, because you never feel truly that you belong to something.’ The fragmented and peripatetic nature of modern life makes this unavoidable. But the local fishermen who’ve lived and worked the land and

► It may take you a long time to circle into a project, but obsessions twirl around in your mind and body. You may not realise that an idea is forming until you collect your poems together after a few years. ► You never begin by thinking of themes. The way you write is organic, even messy. ► You always write in the morning. After lunch everything stops. ► With poetry it’s important to have an alignment that comes from being physical. Your dance practice grounds you in physicality. If you don’t dance and read widely you find it difficult to write.► You identify as a reader as much as a writer. You want to be amazed by what language can do. ► You’re not one of those writers that worries about being influenced by other people’s work. ► You take your writing seriously, as if it were a job. That’s your life. Unless you do that, it’s never going to happen. You must create the necessary space and time for it; you have to be very disciplined. People around you also need to respect and understand

100 WAYS TO WRITE A BOOK

what you’re doing. ► You’re a little superstitious. You have to create the right atmosphere, the right conditions. A sense of ritual is essential. Whether you write only in the morning or take long walks, you do whatever it takes to bring yourself into the space where you can create. ► You like writing with fountain pens, and collect ink bottles. So paper and pen is very much the way you like to create, rather than going straight to the computer.► You love the process of editing. It’s much less stressful than writing on the blank page, because when you are creating something from scratch you have nothing. ► You have some trusted people who read your work in draft, but not many. You always take advice on board and are genuinely not too attached to what you’ve written. You love working with editors. In fact, you’re an editor’s dream because you rarely disagree with an editor’s suggestions.

THE DOSHI METHOD

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SANDEEP PARMAR has a PhD in English Literature and an MA in Creative Writing from UEA. She is a Professor at the University of Liverpool, and co-directs their Centre for New and International Writing. Her many publications include editing the collected poems of Hope Mirrlees and Nancy Cunard and Reading Mina Loy’s Autobiographies (Bloomsbury). Her poetry collections include The Marble Orchard and Eidolon (both from Shearsman).