From ULR Issue 12 – Gender & its Discontents

LET’S SEE NOW, FN SOUZA

Flawed genius, treasured art. The speaker grapples with darkness, embracing aesthetic pleasure despite moral judgment.

LET’S SEE NOW, FN SOUZA Read Single →

Fecking Nickle Souza, what a fecking loser,
never met a woman he didn’t try to abuse-a.
But there’s a lot of him in this room, isn’t there?
What’s that say about us? We revere good art
by bad men and women? Oh dear!
Eric Gill, Rimbaud, E.A. Poe, Anne Sexton, etcetera,
ad infinitum, anon and a-none. Why cancel my own pleasure
and half my bookshelf for good measure
when all I’m doing in truth is shooting myself in the foot?
Add Dom Moraes, Nissim Ezekiel, Eunice De Souza,
me and youse, uh. As for FN Souza,
he may be a loser and a boozer but he’s my loser.
Who are you to judge? Pass the fudge.

Jeet Thayil

Jeet Thayil is an Indian poet, novelist, librettist and musician. He is the author of several poetry collections, including These Errors Are Correct (2008), which won the Sahitya Akademi Award. His first novel, Narcopolis, (2012), won the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature, and was shortlisted for the 2012 Man Booker Prize and The Hindu Literary Prize.

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