Michelle Cahill is a Goan Anglo-Indian writer who lives in Sydney, Australia. She writes poetry, fiction and essays. Her second collection Vishvarūpa was shortlisted for the Victorian Premier's Literary Awards. She received the Val Vallis Award and was highly commended in the Blake Poetry Prize.

Her poems are anthologised in 30 Australian Poets, Ed. Felicity Plunkett (UQP) the HarperCollins Anthology of Modern English Poetry Ed. Sudeep Sen, Contemporary Australian Poets (Turnrow) Ed. John Kinsella and The Yellow Nib Anthology of Modern English Poetry by Indians (QUP, Belfast) Ed. Sudeep Sen and Ciaran Carson. She was a fellow at Hawthornden Castle and Sanskriti Kendra International Retreat. Michelle Cahill is editor of the Mascara Literary Review. She is considered as one of the leading poets in Australia. She engages her readers and make them read her poems again and again.

Jaydeep Sarangi: What do you consider your important works?

Michelle Cahill: I don't think in terms of my work being important but I do think that establishing Mascara has been a significant project which has far exceeded my expectations. It has enabled me to realise my belief that language has power, influence, that language is plural and specific and that my task as a writer is to enrich and deepen the language I use for what needs to be spoken in order to disrupt the silences of various hegemonies.

When did you discover your talent for writing?

As a child I grew up in London. I would leave the smallness of our flat in Russell Square and later Chalk Farm to make my way to the bustling, grand streets of Holborn which captivated my imagination. I remember walking to and from school and just feeling inspired by a voice, a story and knowing that I would become a writer. Studying medicine was a complete digression and an escape from this, but also a confronting experience that deepened my interest in healing. Eventually, I realised that I couldn't afford to ignore my inner voice.

What are the preconditions for a good poem?

Clarity, fidelity to the experience/image that inspires it and which language embodies.

How do you structure thoughts into a poem?

Some things I have learned are to work backwards from traces of illumination to the material context, to argue against an argument, providing obstacles, to vary the tone, to distance myself from the confessional, to enable the abstract to become embedded in the language of my senses. I have also learned to be patient with ideas. To let them fertilise in my mind sometimes for months before I will allow myself to write the poem. Sometimes poetry is best served by this postponement, at other times it demands urgency. Becoming familiar with the unpredictable and variable flows of thought and inspiration is a subtle and ongoing process.

Is there any specific significance of the title, Vishvarūpa?

For me the significance is that it is not an English word. That's my little triumph: as an Anglo-Indian-Goan hybrid who can barely manage a few phrases of Hindi, let alone make any kind of claim to Sanskrit. But with this book I've made Vishvarūpa my word.

You have written fine poems on Hindu Gods and Goddesses. Do you have a spiritual mind or does it reflect a new development within you?

Well firstly, not all the poems are spiritual. Many of them are ironic, playful, erotic or ficto-critical. The poem "Two Souls" reflects on Vedanta philosophy, embodying notions of dream, sleep, wakefulness and transcendence.

I do try to trust what I think you're describing as a 'spiritual' mind. To accept who I am and to respect those non-material needs, by which I mean a personal spiritual practice is something that I value despite neglecting it for prolonged periods. But the underlying inconsistency in Hinduism's polytheistic monotheism (non-duality) meant that I could be inventive with the Hindu pantheon as a political lens with which to interpret questions of identity, gender, power, nationality, language. This makes Vishvarūpa metaphorically powerful.

A large part of our identity is rooted in nationality. How has migration from one nation to another affected your identity?

I'm not sure. Maybe I have a more global, transcultural perspective than some writers. I guess I became more independent as a result of cultural transitions and travel.

How did you come to Sydney?

It was a bit like finding a publisher for the next book: a long story.

Are you a monolingual?

Pas toujours…

Do you feel to identify yourself more with any one particular nation you have stayed in so far?

I cherish the memories of my childhood and I love the landscape and other (historic-cultural) aspects of England. I feel I am Australian and yet there is a disconnect which I think is about realising that Australia does not culturally embrace difference at a deep level. I am not aware of my colour in Australia but there are definitely gatekeepers. The long standing and highly entrenched White Australia Policy and various other socio-institutionalised concealed forms of racism have perpetuated homogenised white Anglo-Australian cultural facades. Australia is preoccupied with post identity but it hasn't resolved its issues of race. Writers and academics are often uncomfortable speaking about race. I might be judged for being a self-appointed activist but I'd like to ask who is judging me? When someone is threatening the status quo of course it is strategic to undermine them. That is what is happening inadvertently. I don't want to seem ungrateful since I've received a lot of support from some amazing people. There are so many gifted and forward-thinking intellectuals but unless we have these conversations in Australia, silence will prevail and change cannot take place. I know that for some people that might be happening too quickly but for many of us change is long overdue. Everything is relative. We may be born with different skin colours but speech is a shared medium, a form of equivalence so let's talk about these things. Even if nobody is talking to me but I am making them feel uncomfortable change is inevitable.

I want to mention that racism happens everywhere. In 1994 on a visit to London a woman spat in my face and told me to go 'home.' She called me a "Bengali bitch". As you can imagine that was extremely traumatic. But at the same time coming from a Christian minority, I have often felt more than a minor estrangement when I am in India or among certain Indian communities. There's nothing unusual about any of these ambivalences and provocations. Identity is complex and maybe it's impossible to define in a globalised world, and even more so for the writer, the artist who is always an exile. Besides, is it necessary for any of us to belong to one nation?

If we cherish the past I don't think too many of us can.

You also voyage into dreamscapes as a kind of meta language of suggested meanings. Do you find this observation justified?

Dreaming suggests what lies outside and beyond it. That is what makes it so powerful as a poetic trope. In order for us to dream there must be a parallel in the real world. So dreaming is an argument if you like. It can enable political and social meanings to be suggested by the ordinary; it can persuade the reader with the intimate address of the somnambulist. It can transcend trauma, one of the pervading conditions of the colonised. And I consider the present time to be colonised in different ways to the past.

The state of dreaming is incantatory, a condition of observation more than desire, of presence as much as oblivion. It allows me to enter experience directly, knowing that the boundaries and borders are blurred, elusive and porous.

Is writing an act of resistance and emancipation for you?

Sometimes, mostly, always…Writing is exhausting, difficult, and although it is 'the imagination pressing back against the pressure of reality' to quote Wallace Stevens, the imagination is being channelled through the writer. The writer is nothing but the vehicle so how can it be that the writer benefits? Yet, I agree with you: it is liberating to enable that process as deeply as possible. Word by word, thought by thought I try, often inadvertently, to resist the indifference of bureaucracy, the hypnosis of capitalism, the economic suppression of many kinds of colonialisms, the silencing of voiced narratives: this is the task of my writing. It might sound ambitious but why not? Why should I be co-opted into other narratives?

The most important thing for a writer to develop is a sense of their own journey. With this comes maturity. Louise Glück, a writer I deeply admire speaks of poetry being her education. We have to learn to listen to what language is teaching us: and by language I'm not talking about English or Marathi or Bengali. I'm talking about our very own words, the language we make specifically for our purpose and without which we cannot live. Only then do we begin to fulfil our potential as writers. I want to know what that feels like. I think the curse of good writing is complacency.

When creativity is unbroken a writer experiences the event happening in a very intuitive way, beyond the order of the real. This is beautiful, demanding, complex, also extremely draining and isolating. It's rare. It's like living on air. Sometimes you know it's happening because synchronicities and coincidences are happening around you. I can't always live like this but I've tasted it more than once.

Could you comment on the poetry scene in Australia?

Australian poetry is vibrant and engaged with quite a lot of emerging discussions and provocations. Of particular relevance is the eco-poetic and regional discourses, non-fiction poetry as a counter proposition to more traditional lyrical schools, the burgeoning of translations and travel poetry. The New York language schools and French symbolists have been influential in the past, as have other socio-philosophical poetic discourses. Now I think Pacific Island, South Asian and Asian Australian writing is becoming influential as we deepen our appreciation of neighbouring cultures and languages.

How vibrant is the Asian diaspora in Australia?

There has been a recent burgeoning of Asian diasporic literatures in Australia, which journals like Peril and Mascara have supported. The South Asian Diaspora in particular was celebrated in a recent symposium held in Melbourne. As well there have been many exchanges and collaborations between genres, discourses, languages within the Asian Australian diaspora. Contemporary Asian Australian Poets, which I coedited with Kim Cheng Boey and Adam Aitken was published earlier this year by Puncher and Wattmann.

You edit Mascara Literary Review which has garnered respect by the academia and writers across the world. How is it going?

I'm proud of our achievement in human rights and cultural diversity. For these reasons Mascara supports a global community of writers and activists.

The problem we face is an enormous amount of administration involved, which becomes a voluntary undertaking. The future of the journal remains in crisis unless we receive core funding to pay editors and administration personnel for their time. It is a full-time job to run a literary journal and although we've received a great deal of support for which I'm immensely grateful we need to strengthen our position, be forward thinking, be strategic, be mentally composed and open to travel in new directions if the journal is going to survive.

I spent five weeks in London recently on fellowship which felt like a health retreat. I was able to renew enthusiasm because I had time for my own writing and could edit at a comfortable pace.

Do you have any special focus in the Mascara Literary Review?

Human rights, minority and diaspora writers, Asian Australian and Indigenous writing but overall excellent, challenged writing is a prerequisite for selection.

Publishers often consider publishing collections is a commercial suicide. How do you view this?

I have to agree

Who are some contemporary Indian poets you have published in your magazine?

They include Keki Daruwalla, Sampurrna Chatarjee, Sudeep Sen, Meena Kandasamy, Dilip Chitre, Nabina Das, Anuradha Vijayakrishnan, Sukrita Paul Kumar, Rizio Rohannan Raj, Priyadarshi Patnaik, Usha Kishore, Sridala Swami, Ranu Uniyal, Srilata Krishnan as well as poets from the diaspora: the very promising Nandini Dhar, Ansley Moon, Aseem Kaul and Arjun Rajendra, Anushka Anastasia Solomon along with more established poets like Ravi Shankar, Anis Shivani, Mani Rao, Usha Akella, Lalita Noronha, Sudesh Mishra.

We have published an essay by Meena Alexander, an essay on Sujatta Bhatt by Paul Sharrad, a review by Jaydeep Sarangi of Meena Kandasamy's Touch at an earlier stage of her career, reviews by myself of Language for a New Century co-edited by Ravi Shankar and Tabish Khair's The Gothic Post colonialism and Otherness: Ghosts From Elsewhere. Mridula Nath Chakraborty also reviewed To Silence by Tabish Khair

We've published fiction by Ankur Agarwal, and by diasporic Indian writers: Maya Khosla, Rumjhum Biswas, A.K. Kulshreshth, and translations by the Ausralian poet Susan Hawthrone of Kālidāsa's Meghadūta.

But our interest has extended to South Asian poets more generally. For instance we published poems by the Pakistani activist, Fatima Bhutto, which are quite beautiful, deceptively simple. We also published the Pakistani-born, Californian-raised Mehnaz Turner. We've published the Sri Lankan-born Desh Balasubramaniam and from the Sri Lankan diaspora Indran Amirthanayagam has been a contributor. We have also featured an interview and poems by the Tibetan Indian writer-in-exile Tenzin Tsundue and essays and fiction by the award winning Nepalese writer Sushma Joshi.

So in answer to your question I think we have published a unique range of South Asian writers in English across a range of genres, and from several countries and cultures. What this represents I hope is an exciting hybridity. Many of these writers are multi-lingual and are connecting with more than one culture.

You are a distinguished poet and editor. Do you consider there would be any difference between a native English poet and a bilingual/trilingual poet from Asia?

Yes of course, because they would bring to their craft different vocabularies, semantics.

You include a lot of Indian phrases and terms which are loaded with cultural nuances. Do they create thematic and linguistic distance for the native English speakers in Australia?

Without close analysis of my poems I can see why cultural nuances might be assumed. However, for several reasons I disagree with your proposition. Firstly I am using cultural terms in new contexts. The poem 'Deva Loka' creates a whole new narrative embedded in myth which is being recast from my own, minority, diasporic perspective. So this becomes a contribution not an appropriation. In many poems I am speaking in the voice of a split persona, oscillating between India and Australia, between Hindu mythology and my own personal beliefs.

Also, I don't think you really need to understand every word because the process of poetry is as important as semantics and structure. I am concerned with allowing my poems to be aberrant, to take risks, to experiment with language and its possibilities. Association and implication, a resonance of multiple meanings and elusiveness are essential to my poetics so the meanings don't have to be explicit. When I read Milton I don't always understand the language and this distance is even more apparent when I read Chaucer. Moreover, many acclaimed contemporary poets write in quite a dense style, so that comprehension is clearly not the sole purpose of reading or appreciating poetry.

But also there are processes of transculturation being enacted in my poems. They are syncretic and ambulatory to a degree which is intentionally metonymic of difference and complex in its multiplicity. These are rhetorical devices; the aesthetic element is also a political manoeuvre for the kind of representation which is being staged.

And besides, I am reminded that Anglophone Australian readers are not the first Australians and that English is a lingua franca and not the native language.

Who are important reviewers/critics on you?

The best reviews, by which I mean critics who understood my craft, are by Judith Beveridge in Westerly, Mark Tredinnick in Australian Book Review, Tina Giannoukos in TEXT, Charles Manis in Transnational Literature, Tara Safran off in KIN and Margaret Bradstock in Sotto. But I've been very fortunate with all the reviewers of my poetry. Although I respect Paul Sharrad as a critic and I published his review of Vishvarūpa I don't think he fully appreciated aspects of the poetics and I think there were several assumptions in his appraisal. He assumed that I work long hours as a doctor, and that therefore a lot of the poems were set at night. He also assumed that my daughter was a toddler, perhaps suggesting that I was at a different emotional stage as a mother. This had the effect of detracting from my work. It can be dangerous to bring a poet's personality or personal life into an appraisal of their craft. I think this happens more so when one is unconventional, at times provocative in one's path as a writer, as I have been.

Is there an anxiety to portray Indianness in your writings?

I don't think so. My poem "Mumbai By Night" breaks many non-secular taboos (drugs, sexuality), that would otherwise be considered to characterise a traditional kind of identity. But it goes further. The poem anarchically revels in the wreckage and clefts of a postcolonial identity. I don't think that could be a striving to portray Indian-ess and I am aware that many Indian readers would disapprove. Rather, I want to assert my identity, inscribe it unashamedly as something unique in this poem.

So it's a poem that speaks of un-heimlich, of not belonging to a city, even a family yet somehow being familiar, in-between. I have tried to be as ruthless as I can about the truth if you like of my story. But sometimes I cannot. I think "Shaping the Linga' is the most elusive poem in that collection but I think this is signalled to the reader as an intentional strategy that the speaker employs. That is a sensible thing to do, sometimes.

What do you suggest for budding young poets from Australia and India?

Write. Keep writing and don't stop. Language, I would say, is quite possibly the answer to its own problems.

What's your immediate wish?

To accept the utterly uncompromising truth of being a writer.

**