CHENNAI: “We have seen so much violence that our eyes are graveyards,” says poet, novelist and essayist Tishani Doshi, reflecting on the way repeated images of war and suffering have altered our relationship with violence.
In a poetry reading session titled Egrets, While War, Tishani Doshi will read from her latest poetry collection of the same name. Written in the aftermath of the pandemic, the collection grew organically out of Tishani’s observations of a world grappling with war, economic uncertainty, climate grief and ecological loss.
Rather than approaching these themes with a predetermined agenda, she says the poems emerged from an attempt to connect the personal with the larger collective experience.
“What I was trying to navigate in this collection were my experiences and observations, but trying to tie the personal to larger collective notions of where we are in the world and trying to imagine perhaps where we could be,” she says.
Birds became a recurring presence in that process. For Tishani, they occupy a space between the earth and sky, offering a sense of lightness and hope in an increasingly difficult world. The poems eventually took her beyond the birds she encountered around her, towards extinct species, literary birds and the many ways birds have captured the human imagination.
At the heart of the collection is the idea of disappearance. She connects the disappearance of species with genocide, war, civilian deaths, ageing and the loss of people who were once part of our lives. Survival, then, becomes more than simply continuing to exist.
“If I'm thinking about renewal, I'm thinking about how do we prevent or not allow something to vanish entirely? How do we keep that trace? And then what can we build on that trace?” she asks.
For the poet, poetry offers a particularly elastic way of responding to the contemporary world. Unlike a sustained narrative, which can require time to develop, a poem can intervene quickly while still allowing ideas to deepen through distillation, imagery and language.
And in an age when violence arrives continuously through social media and news, she believes art has a role in resisting the numbness that follows.
“It is a way of witnessing, it is a way of commenting, it is a way of trying to, through the poem, through language, even suggest a different imagination, a different way of seeing, a different way of being. We need to have hopeful things; we can't fall into despair, that's the end game,” she tells us.
A Chennai native, many of her poems feature the city, or Madras as she still calls it. One poem in particular returns to an encounter in Trinidad with a woman whose ancestors had travelled there as bonded labourers.
When she heard that Tishani was from Madras, the woman repeatedly invoked the city, even asking her, “Do you speak Madras?” Hosted by Prakriti Foundation, Egrets, While War will be held on August 21 at The Lab @ Shanta, T Nagar.