Breasts - Kutti Revathi
Breasts are bubbles rising
in wet swamps
I wondrously watched and guarded,
Their gradual swell and blooming
At the edges of my youth’s season
Saying nothing to anyone else
They sing along
With me alone always;
Of heartbreak
Love
Rapture
To the nurseries of my turning seasons
They never once failed or forgot
To bring arousal
During my penance, they seem to want to break free
And in the fierce pull of lust, they rise
Engorged with memories of musical trance
Like two teardrops of an unfulfilled love
That cannot ever be wiped away
They brim, as in a still puddle
20th March, 2010. The winter chills are far away in Bhopal and the Cultural Bonanza is on. People are coming out of their homes every day, attending one or the other event happening around Bhopal. Bharat Bhavan, the Cultural capital, a la India Habitat Centre in Delhi, hosted a three day Kavi Sammelan, where Kutti Revathi stormed the auditorium with her bold poems.
Kutti Revathi has been often misunderstood as one who is trying to draw attention to herself by using shock value. When Mulaigal (Breasts) was first published in 2002, needless to say it drew a huge amount of flak from the conservative Tamil society. But Kutti Revathi, which is the pen name of Dr S Revathi, is unapologetic. “As we poke into a word and turn it over,” she writes in her essay, “the history buried in its innards rises up, along with images, memories . . . and poetry too.”
Breasts are central to a woman’s body. They are her obsession too. Needless to say, most men spend a lot of time thinking about them.
Every woman is in one way or the other involved with her body. It is her personal domain. What is problematic is that on their own, men have set “rights” over woman’s body by snatching away even a woman’s right to speak, share thoughts about her body or parts of it, with herself or with others. Men, have made both the woman’s body, especially her breasts, objects of desire by making it a taboo subject and grabbing a woman’s claim over her own body. By trying to “hide”, place shame and guilt over a woman’s body, they have tried for centuries to make women disown her own body and hand over the “power” to men.
Therefore, the more women speak about their bodies, the more she reclaims what is hers.
The demons that affect us – Kutti Revathi
Sister…. Like potters, lets fashion
Many more breasts now
When breasts brought life by stoning
And at knifepoint are being consumed.
There is no fences to protect these
Nor the world’s newest foodgrains.
Why do vultures indulge
In the plunder of grains?
The old woman’s breasts, alive through
Eating the sun and enjoying open spaces
Hang down, pushing against her heart
like demons that afflict her.
Those demons too, are but boundary maps
of dried up history. So sister
We shall not turn breasts that once were
Water ponds to quench our thirst
Into vessels of unending agony.
We’ll turn them into stone someday
And fling them away using slings,
We’ll wander, even with a lone breast
Bearing the weight of the sun.
(English translation by N Kalyan Raman)
Sister…. Like potters, lets fashion
Many more breasts now
When breasts brought life by stoning
And at knifepoint are being consumed.
There is no fences to protect these
Nor the world’s newest foodgrains.
Why do vultures indulge
In the plunder of grains?
The old woman’s breasts, alive through
Eating the sun and enjoying open spaces
Hang down, pushing against her heart
like demons that afflict her.
Those demons too, are but boundary maps
of dried up history. So sister
We shall not turn breasts that once were
Water ponds to quench our thirst
Into vessels of unending agony.
We’ll turn them into stone someday
And fling them away using slings,
We’ll wander, even with a lone breast
Bearing the weight of the sun.
(English translation by N Kalyan Raman)
Kutti Revathi is the pen name of Dr S. Revathi. A Chennai-based Tamil poet, her poetry seeks to evolve a subversive language to explore and reclaim a long-colonised realm of experience – “the map of a Tamil woman’s body”.
More on Kutti Revathi:
http://india.poetryinternationalweb.org/piw_cms/cms/cms_module/index.php?obj_id=6288
N Kalyan Raman took up translation in the mid 1990s. His translations of Tamil short stories have been included in several collections of Indian language fiction in translation. He has translated three volumes of Ashokamitran’s fiction into English: The Colours of Evil, Sand and other stories and Mole!, besides a novel by Vaasanthi, published as At the Cusp of Ages.
More on N Kalyan Raman
http://www.museindia.com/showauthor.asp?id=789
