Interview | Tishani Doshi’s poems of disbelief in her new book, ‘Egrets, While War’

Interview Tishani Doshi's poems of disbelief in her new book, 'Egrets, While War' The poems explore grief and conflict via the imagery of birds, notes the writer and dancer.

Key points

• The Chennai-based poet is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
• Grief, in its different forms, whether solastalgia, Weltschmerz or anticipatory loss, lies at the core of this anthology.
• While additionally picking through the ordinary day, the human present, essentially, that is the feeling of it.
• The ageing body, in fact, is a recurrent theme in this anthology.
• While the tech bros are trying to live forever, we know from all the myths the hubris of this kind of quest for immortality.

For context, the Chennai-based poet is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Photo Credit: Carlo Pizzati.

Birds flit in and out of Tishani Doshi's fifth poetry collection, Egrets, While War: "emerald-bodied" parakeets; "soft and earthbound" dodos; "limitless feathery blue" peacocks; Martha, the particularly last passenger pigeon in the world who died in 1914 at the Cincinnati Zoo, aged 29; egrets, those "feathered dinosaurs", even an archaeopteryx, believed to be a transitional species between reptiles and birds, fossilised in a shallow lagoon.

While these winged creatures have been in her poems for a long time, in this collection (published by HarperCollins), they are present in a different way, notes the award-winning poet, writer and dancer over a Zoom call from Paramankeni, the coastal village near Chennai where she lives. As anybody who reads regarding birds will know, there are millions of things that are just amazing concerning them, believes Doshi, "It's not just that birds happen to fly into the poem, but they're actually quite active in the making of the poem." And. "Just seeing its flash of colour is a joyous thing, and when you are faced with images of such horror, having this image of lightness or colour, even if for a brief moment, is uplifting." Edited extracts from the conversation.

Grief, in its different forms, whether solastalgia, Weltschmerz or anticipatory loss, lies at the core of this anthology. It draws deeply from what is happening in the world right now. Could you tell us more?

In practice, the last three years have been one thing after the other. Since we were so close to annihilation, you would imagine that after a pandemic, there might be this move towards renewal of things, like wonder, awe and what it means to be alive. But we've gone in the other direction, and I feel, like plenty of residents, a sense of helplessness, anger and confusion regarding how we secured here.

It feels hyperbolic to talk in this way, but we have been witnessing remarkably exaggerated things – conflicts, genocide, climate change, politics of real horror. So, I think the poems come simply from a sort of disbelief that, of all the directions we could have taken, this is where we are.

While additionally picking through the ordinary day, the human present, essentially, that is the feeling of it. Particularly much a sense of how to hold this enormous grief and threat of endtimes.

Something that really struck me was how time works in this anthology: the prehistoric past intertwined with the present, the cyclicity of death and destruction, the body being an archive of lived experiences as well as ancestry.

It has to do with being at a particular stage in my own life, this feeling of having arrived at a kind of mid-path where you are neither young nor old, but looking, with your face, to both directions. The past is childhood and ancestry and the beginnings of where you came from, and the future is unknowable, but you are trying to move towards it with a particular intention.

I discovered that in these poems, I have a real longing to know concerning individuals who preceded me in my family: the residents I've come from. There is additionally the planet's time, the sizeable, universe time that makes human life completely inconsequential. We are so small, but nevertheless, within that sizeable planetary time, thinking concerning one's own ancestry and how one might find place in it, or this question of belonging, is something that I have addressed in all my writing, whether it be poetry or fiction.

But yes, in this book, there is a lot of turning back, saying that while I might be moving into this next stage of life, I want to bring that childhood and those ancestors with me. I don't want to leave that behind since I need them to travel with me and take this journey, a strange dependence. It I don't think has been there in my previous work.

Notably, the ageing body, in fact, is a recurrent theme in this anthology. It I discovered especially interesting, given how central the physical body has been to both your writing and performance.

While the tech bros are trying to live forever, we know from all the myths the hubris of this kind of quest for immortality. So, it is both wanting to embrace ageing, but additionally acknowledging that it is challenging to see the ageing body, whether it is the things happening to your own body or in the bodies of the individuals you love. It is a question of trying to think regarding where we can source strength, power and joy in the body; desire is highly grounded there.

And then there are the bodies that I've seen on my screen, mutilated bodies, bodies of children and the horrors enacted on those bodies, so it is particularly dissonant. We are living through a time when there is not even a possibility to go through full mourning since the horrors are ongoing and there's no sense of them ever being over. In a way, the poems are just really trying to navigate, without being able to answer or offer any clear answers, what it means to be alive now.

There is a film featuring three masked women, created as a companion piece to the book. What prompted you to create it?

I've done short video poems previously, but this was something different. I was really interested in building an alternative world of images to go alongside the images in the poems. Not in a narrative way, but just trying to create resonances. When we were all masking up, this feels to be the age of unmasking, I've been interested in the idea of the mask for a long time, and after COVID-19. So, it was really an exploration of the themes of the collection through image, interchangeability, transformation, play.

I've created some choreographic work as solo pieces, but this was the first time I obtained to work with other bodies. Three is such a magical number in plenty of ways: the trinity of gods in numerous religions, the past, present and future. Additionally, I am the middle of three children. It was really an experiment to combine poetry, movement, film, and how the image works between these three mediums so differently. Poetry has this elasticity throughout forms. It interests me more and more. A post shared by Tishani (@tishanidoshi).

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