Aleena in Conversation with Navya V K
 

Her poems hold stories woven from the casual conversations of women/people which sound familiar to the reader. The literary discourse she advances is framed in the web of the everyday even when they deeply engage with the discriminations and invisibilities thrust upon the marginalised community. Like many writers of our time, she started her writing life through social media platforms. She is known by her Facebook name Aleena Akasamittayi, a self-chosen Basheerian reference. Her writings on Facebook and Instagram have a particular fan following. Her first published collection of poems, Silk Route (2022) has won Kerala Sahitya Akademi’s Kanakasree Award.

Aleena speaks with Navya V K about her creative journey where personal is always political.

Navya V K (NVK): Your poems sound very personal at one level, yet they are deeply rooted in the conflicts and experiences of your community. How do you place your poetry - as a personal expression or as a political act?
Aleena(A): Personal is political, right? However diligently I frame my personal experience, my politics will reflect in my poetry. My beliefs cannot be hidden from my writings. That is the politics I believe in and these are the problems I identify with. Politics cannot be done away with.

NVK: Your works embody two layers of politics of caste and gender. These politics seem to be inseparable from your work. What are your thoughts on this?
A: Even though they seem to be two brands of politics, they are one and the same. Patriarchy affects upper-caste women and dalit women differently. For the marginalized dalit or adivasi women, their caste experiences are inseparable from their gender experiences. In my observation, upper-caste women often universalise their gender issues. I mean, they can separate their gender issues from caste discourses. They can even use their caste privilege to highlight their gender problems. For the women of my community, the gender experience is very caste-specific. That is to say, if we are discussing the reproductive health issues of dalit women, we can see that it emerges from the basic lack of capital/infrastructure in the community.

NVK: Reading through your poems, a reader often comes across the narratorial voice of an older village woman who is casually conversing with the reader. She seems to be an ordinary and familiar persona whom we may come across in our day-to-day lives. So, what goes into the making of this narratorial persona?
A: As a child growing up in my community, I remember how women used to engage in a lot of collective work, such as preparing tapioca, weaving baskets, weaving coconut fronds etc. My mother was part of such groups and I used to accompany her as a child. From their workplace, I absorbed the lively conversations of those women, which I always thought of as the best medium for communication. Much information can be shared through such conversations. As a writer, I adopted these conversations and the narrators in my writings. The reader, much like the child version of myself, is listening to this conversation as the third person.

NVK: Most of your works like “Oil” (Enna) and “The Past” (Boothakalam), are story poems; they have a story to tell us. How do you pick up these unique but relatable stories for your poems?
A: Poetry originated as a medium for telling stories. I pick up many stories from my surroundings. Actually, I eavesdrop when I travel by bus and all, I pick up dialogues spoken by other co-passengers and then I try to weave a story around them in my head. Until my college days, I thought that I was the centre of my story and other characters were just minor entries. One day, this realization flashed in my mind that all of them are the main characters in their own stories and we may not know their stories. Everyone we meet is a walking load of stories and we only need to imagine it.

NVK: Your literary language carries regional ethos and we can place the language in a specific community and geographical locale. As a medium of self-representation, do you see language as a political medium? In which language are you writing your poems?
A: Language is a thing of power and that is why the language of the ruling class/people is accepted as the standard language. For me, writing in my regional dialect itself is an act of rebellion. My language is the language of the Kottayam-Pathanamthitta-Idukki belt and in some sense, it is closer to the standard language. I try to introduce new regional diction in my writing to mark a deviation from the standard language. On the one hand, there is an ease in writing in one’s own language and on the other hand using a lesser-known dialect adds an element of novelty that can attract the reader.

NVK: You have started writing your poems in your mother tongue and you are also writing in English. How do you experience writing as a bilingual writer?
A: Writing in English and Malayalam is are diverse creative experience. The style of writing in English is entirely distinct from writing in my mother tongue. If I follow my Malayalam writing style for English poems, that will be a failure. That’s how I feel. I have published a few English poems on Facebook and in some online magazines. Some of my poems are translated into English too. I like slam poetry for its performative aspects. It took time for me to develop my style of writing English poetry and that style is influenced by slam poetry.

NVK: You have opted for Facebook and Instagram as a medium for your writing. These social media platforms offer more freedom than the traditional avenues of writing and publication. As an emerging writer, how do you use these digital media as an avenue of creative expression and what role does this medium have in the formation of Aleena as a poet?
A: For a budding writer, the help or influence of social media is rather large. It is the social media that has created a regular readership for my works. Even when I publish my poems in traditional media, I think a majority of my readers are from social media. Social media gives us a platform for self-publishing our works. On the other hand, traditional media has so many restrictions, for example in a specific monthly issue they can only select a few poems for publication, which means only a few writers will get published in a month. In social media, we can publish and read many poems in a day. Platforms like Facebook helped me reach out to traditional publications. My works were rejected by traditional media until I created my digital readership. Once I established myself as a poet on Facebook, some of the mainstream publications requested my works for publishing. The presence of a supportive reader community is a factor that encourages my writing.

NVK: In some of your works such as “The Haunted Guavas”, there is the presence of supernatural as ghosts and demons. What is interesting about the representation of horror in your work is that it is presented as a part of everyday life. Rather than evoking fear or panic, this untypical representation seems to talk of a very different purpose. Is there a politics in the representation of horror in your work?
A: Personally, for a very long time I have seen ghosts and demons as a part of my life. I have taken the presence of supernatural elements as natural before the cultivation of my scientific temper. That is to say, a haunted house or tree was very real for me and I found no reason to categorize them as supernatural. I have not benefited from not believing in ghosts and now I think that was a better way of living. What is the purpose of life if there is no afterlife? This question has made my life miserable. I mean, all those supernatural stories and beliefs added flavour to our lives and it’s a part of our imagination.

NVK: The discourse of caste in your works is multilayered and multidimensional. Poems like “The Invisible” (Aroopikal) present the invisibility of dalit students in educational institutions, “Oil” (Enna) gives a picture of poverty and “Gossip” (Paradooshanam) focuses on gossip about the sexuality of a dalit woman, which again points to the lack of infrastructure in her community. Instead of directly focusing on the tragic aspects of marginalization and victimization, they present a story that is subtly aesthetic. Is it a very conscious technique of representation?
A: When I write poems, I have a particular kind of reader in my mind. As for the subtle poems, that imagined reader is a dalit woman like me. She can understand my caste identity without any assertion of the same from my side. In that context, I have to use the least markers of caste identity. Whereas a poem like “The Invisible” is more direct and it uses the pronoun they, as it is addressing the upper-class people. So, the choice of narrative voice depends on the intended reader.

NVK: As an activist and writer, you deal with the politics of gender and caste. How do these two areas of interest complement or not complement each other?
A: As an activist or as a writer, I want to communicate the same ideas to society. Writing offers certain freedoms and places certain limitations on me. Activism is a more direct intervention and I think some issues are conveyed best when communicated through art. We can add imagination to exaggerate or embellish the theme. I think a good artwork is the right combination of politics and imagination.

NVK: Your writings have a specific intersectional feministic positioning. They do place the stories in a lower class along with Dalit Christian context. Would you like to brand your works as belonging to Dalit Christian feminism? Also, have you observed any other contemporary writers working in the same intersectional space?
A: In the contemporary Malayalam literary world, there are not many writers emerging from the same space. Dalit Feminist writers and a few short story writers as well as historians are there. Some of the writers writing about the Dalit Christian lives hail from non-Dalit Christian backgrounds. In the past, 50-60 years back, we had Women Dalit Christian writers in Kerala such as Mariyamma Chettathi and Maggi. Mariyamma John was a prominent writer and a collected volume of her works was published posthumously.

NVK: BDSM, one of your recent poems, is a very interesting read on many levels. There is a metaphysical superimposition of the concept of BDSM with the crucified image of Jesus Christ. This metaphysical juxtaposition of the religious and sexual imagery is remarkable. Can you comment on the composition of the poem?
A: Religions in general have an affinity to the acts of suffering. They glorify suffering and even promise rewards for the same in the afterlife. In Christianity, we can see how crucifixion—a method of torturing—becomes a central tenet. So, the believers of Christ were supposed to submit themselves to similar everyday tortures such as fasting and kneeling down. In other words, they identify with the idea of torture. BDSM, though in a very different context, believes in the same idea of torture and pleasure. Even though the two realms of religion and sexuality are poles apart, I was focusing on the idea of suffering and pleasure.

NVK: Some of your poems like “Glitch” can be described as technological poems. Interestingly, these poems abstain from the moral conflicts or prejudice that accompanies any discussion of the blending of technology in human life. Can you comment on your approach to the theme of technology?
A: Technology is inevitable and we cannot resist it. I am someone who is fascinated by the potential of technology. I always try my level best to understand and imagine the future of technology. I do not moralize the use or role of technology but there is a fear about the possible loss of human autonomy. It induces fear to think that the technology we depend on can even trace our day-to-day conversations. “Glitch” talks about such a possibility.

NVK: We can see many aspiring women writers in the contemporary Malayalam literary scene but many of them are pursuing it along with their careers. As an upcoming writer who has published your first collection of poetry, what are your reflections on writing as a profession for women?
A: I want to become a full-time writer. To be frank, we do not have such an ideal situation now. If you check, you can see that writers are one of the least-paid creative workers. Any writer has to do research and make a huge effort to create a work but writing as a career is less rewarding in this society. Maybe privileged writers such as Madhavikutty, who had a supportive background, could have chosen writing as a profession. I dream of choosing writing as a profession but then I have to support my family too. I think the writers should be rewarded in proportion to their effort.
 

TO THE FOREIGN GOD WHO DOES NOT SPEAK MY LANGUAGE

--Aleena

The church I step on is built on
The graves of my ancestors,
So I don’t mind if the incense smells
Slightly of bones burning,
Or the wine tastes a bit like their blood.
And the altar curtains drip their sweat.
I know it wasn’t holy spirit
Who touched me.
It was my late sister.

I am a native of the island of faith,
But treated like a Caliban,
Cause the God I serve is not mine.
He isn’t theirs either.
They just claimed Him first,
But you spoke to me,
Through mediaeval Middle Eastern literature,
I see you, I feel you in my stomach
Like a cup of tea not made for me.
You are love, you claim.
I loved my neighbour but did not love myself.
To be the master, I became a servant
And I died being a servant.
I felt the god in you, in the burning bush,
I saw the man in you, on the cross.
Trusting you
Was the only thing my grandfather passed on,
Cause he faced the same horrors
Jesus endured,
And hoped to rise on the third day.
Heavy crosses morning to night,
Until the day he died.
I too, unknowingly,
Was called to bear the same cross.
I underline your words,
Cry over your poetic verse.
Rage on to keep you.
But I sinned of knowledge,
The same old fruit.
I choose informed misery
Over blissful ignorance.