Twenty-nine-year old Aditi Rao refuses to define herself in neat boxes. The ‘About Me’ section of her blog lists ‘25 random facts’ that give you sentence-sized sneak-peeks into her life. One of them tells you that she lost a childhood home to the river Beas when it shifted course. “The land on which I have the fondest memories is now a riverbed,” she writes. Aditi’s poetry brims with a sense of quiet searching for place and belonging, and with the exploration of her personhood as a woman, engages closely with the world around her. “Poetry,” she says, “is a way of working out my personal neurosis.” Winner of the 2011 Srinivas Rayaprol Poetry Prize and the 2013 Toto Funds the Arts Creative Writing in English Award, at the Poetry with Prakriti festival, Aditi will read from her first volume of poetry The Fingers Remember (Yoda Press) released this November.
What binds the 60 poems of The Fingers Remember together thematically?
The idea of memory — both personal and political, individual and community, and as a form of resistance. Personal grief, loss, mourning and recovery run through as one thread, while parallelly there is a broader, political remembering and forgetting. The ‘Fingers’ part of the collection invokes the body, both physical, as it deals with illness and mutilation, as well as the gendered body, which ties in with the body politic and the political body of the nation itself.
You’ve spent the last decade travelling through Latin America, the U.S., and India, before finally settling in Delhi. How do these journeys seep into your poetry?
There is certainly a physicality of place in all my writing. For instance, the title poem of this collection was written in a summer volunteering in Mexico, sharing a room with four other people, without a computer. I suddenly had no access to private space, was writing longhand in buses, outside churches, in parks...and all those people, sounds, sights and smells casually made their way into my work, in a way that would never have happened if it was written at a desk. Right now, I’m writing a series of poems set in different historical places in Delhi. They aren’t historical poems, but are about how in the intersections of life, people are interacting with 18th Century or 16th Century Delhi, in a blurring of the private and public. If I’m looking at the sickness of a close friend, for instance, but writing it next to a 15th Century tombstone, that just shifts the way I’m looking at mortality in that poem.
How does being an educator with Non-Governmental Organisations and a teacher of creative writing make the poet in you?
I would think of it as how those experiences have shaped me as a person, more than my poetry itself. Some of the more political poetry is directly linked to the peace education work I do, and a lot of my poems have been written at my creative writing workshops, where I complete all that I require the participants to do as well. I cannot imagine myself as just being a poet. In fact, the reverse question is more true: how does my being a poet make me a certain kind of educator? In that sense, the seemingly parallel lives flow together in my head.
Aditi will read at Kalakshetra at 2 p.m. on December 3, at 10 a.m. in WCC and 12.30 p.m. in Ethiraj College on December 4. For details about the Poetry with Prakriti Festival, visit http://www.prakritifoundation.com
