Rochelle Potkar on “Coins in Rivers”, in conversation with Kabir Deb

Kabir Deb: Hey Rochelle! How are you doing? Let me kick this interview off by congratulating you on your new collection of poems Coins in Rivers. What made you write these poems?

Rochelle Potkar: So many reasons besides the compulsiveness to write.

To give shape to the chaos, restlessness, and turbulence that seeps into me from the world we live in today. Writing is catharizing. The need to empty oneself only to fill up again has always been the process.

In Four Degrees of Separation – my first book, I was raw while talking about the self, society, family, and relationships. In Paper Asylum my gaze was wider, sometimes cockeyed over the horizon. By the time I reached Coins in Rivers, I think I evolved much as a storyteller and screenwriter. 

I believe through every piece of work, every art form, every story, every poem, we become a new person. But writing poetry for me still comes from impulsive and compulsive spaces. Unlike fiction or screenplays that are well-thought-out theses, outlines, and structures.

KD: In the poem The Girl from Lal Bazaar you shed light on the sufferings of women. Similarly in your short story The Arithmetic of Breasts grief becomes a physical entity. Tell us more about it. 

RP: I have been curious about the human body, especially the female form that informs politics and society, sometimes as fodder, sometimes as prescriptive slates of do’s and don’ts. Food, clothing, strictures all oscillating around it. Human desire, the male and female gazes have intrigued me. We have always been torn between desire and violence. Shame, guilt, and fear realigning with lust and passionate yearning. And then the religiosities of dogma and decorum that shape our behaviours within confined and unconfined spaces.

In The Girl from Lal Bazaar I wanted to explore the grit and ambition that can spring up from anywhere. Even by the edge of the road. It’s always transformational and inspiring to witness the life of an invisiblized and marginalized woman subverting the trajectory of her destiny and dominant hierarchies. Even in our day-to-day unguarded life, we crave such rag-to-riches true tales.

Whereas my first short story The Arithmetic of Breasts’ in Bombay Hangovers, was
so many things: 

1. an ode and autobiography of the breast 
2. my linguistic reclamation of a woman’s (our own) bodies, 
3. channelizing the rage felt over street harassment but in comedic/sarcastic ways, 
4. also to pay tribute to all those sniggering young male friends of my childhood who were obsessed with this part of female anatomy. 

But to this day, the ode continues, even outside the threshold of that story in society: ads on tightening, lifting, downsizing, resizing, and whatnots done to the décolletage. Sometimes we evolve oh-so-slowly as a species that some short stories never end.
I would like to bring attention two visual poems in this book: 

1. #MeToo Movement in India, size card,and 
2. Gravity.

In the first, I capture the risk versus opportunity conundrum. Here size is the double entendre. In the second visual poem, I talk of disparities between the genders. While the male species acquires transcendence (in mostly every career and life field) atop Maslow’s tilted pyramid, the women are mostly still grappling with primitive apes lower on the totem pole. Their climb through the pyramid is tougher. [Not to say the evolved Man is not dealing with primitive apes, but more the women have this ordeal. :)]

KD The collection moves from personal to universal. What was your objective in putting this collection together? 

RP: My collage in Poetry is very disorganized, unlike my fiction, novels, and screenplays that are more planned and structured. Poetry gives me a lot of freedom to be wild.

In poetry, I write randomly and then piece together the mosaic into a semblance of section breaks. I believe in the Japanese poetic philosophy when they juxtapose images of a haiku, that no matter what you write, it will all come together as a mosaic of your life. Patchwork quilt-akin.

What I have noticed rather in my poetry books is a Pattern of Thought: all of my poems move concentrically expanding from the navel-gazing to the stargazing. From expanding personal orbits of query to social life, familial and, world affairs. Now it has even reached the galaxy and two or three stars.

KD: Quite a few poems here use fantastical elements. How do you balance between creativity, sensuality and reality? 

RP: Humans need control. We brew fantasies so we can control what doesn’t exist. Want starts in a dream-state.

I don’t think sexuality, desire, and sensuality are far from how we experience the existential states of boredom, loneliness, sorrow, and grief. On a spectrum, all of this encompasses human living.

But sometimes we are caught more in one aspect of life than the other. For instance, if you are fighting a grave injustice or discrimination, you may not write a lot about sexual pleasure. That doesn’t mean you have not experienced it or desired it. But life and time is so limited, we pick our battles and stay the course. That’s why so many genres, tones, and themes exist. Pre-occupational hazards.

I think sensuous fantasies face a dichotomy in ever-changing societies. Then each word is a revolution, pushing the way forward, making space for what didn’t exist by materializing it on paper first, then in reality. Like a manifestation manifesto.

KD: What role does gender play in relationships and how do we change it? 

RP: A lot of life is non-gendered, according to me, in the way it renders itself. For e.g. grief, happiness, lust, and desire hit both men and women in the same intensity. But the divisions of time into existential chores and gender roles allow each to experience these differently. Now with the laundry and cooking modernized, ridding women of chores, it has somewhat equalized the experience.

Men tend to externalize their emotions and women internalize more, I have heard. But even if that is true, it’s person-to-person specific.

Where gendered violence or gendered discrimination is concerned, this doesn’t hold true.

 In one of your poems, you write that the destiny of nature (rivers) runs through those who live by embracing its greenery and fertility. How do we as writers and poets feel responsibility towards environment and its rampant degradation as the capitalist world teeters heavily on  consumerism. 

By not being climate deniers? But adapters. I think earth-awareness is important whether via the school syllabus or a self-learning one. And then making choices accordingly.

Even capitalism will need to think of the Environment, if it has to sustain itself over the bottom-line-P&L-ROI-driven long run.

I think consumption and consumerism have more to do with mind-set. When does one feel content? When does one stop wanting things? This has a philosophical connection to the self-knowledge of death. Every day we are dying a bit or going toward death, so in that sense should we be living it up by consuming more, or begin the slow process of pruning? Should we be sharing our resources more freely because we are all walking the same road, same journey? It’s a matter of individual choice.