Poetry Is The Only Way Megha Rao Can Talk About The Personal And Still Feel Strong

Kerala based artist, Megha Rao's poetry offers an experience. Sometimes one can hear her chuckle in between two extreme verses and sometimes sobbing on the other side of the comma. 26-year-old Rao is a poet, a painter and a performer at heart. She describes herself as a confessional performance poet and surrealist artist.  She has published four books and we are talking with her about her latest one called Teething.

Through a set of poems, the book tells the story of a young boy who decides to end his life after he was caught kissing his neighbour. His elder sister then tries to uncover the mystery and ends up opening many old wounds. The book makes mentions of homophobia, childhood trauma and complicated families. Megha Rao spoke to SheThePeople about her new book and what drives her world.

You have said that your book Teething is open to interpretation but how do you see your book?

In many ways, this book is closure for me. The overall experience of writing Teething was blissful, agonising, gentle yet powerful. But reading Teething, when it was all done, was a completely new encounter. If the first felt like entering a world, armed to the teeth, the second felt like exiting it with gifts and flowers.

I came out of it a different person, as you do when you’re reading or writing books. And while Teething is open to interpretation, because it can be anything, really – a window. A mirror. A door. A pill. A drink. A summer. A lover – for me, it’s always been a device of time travel. I hopped onto it and went back, and redid a lot of things. My childhood, my adolescence, every year, one by one. Took control of the narrative, discovered what an honour it was to be alive, despite how ridiculous the world was.

What is your relationship with the characters in your book?

I haven’t been able to love all of them. Some are flawed, but some are quintessentially problematic. There is the innocent, the monstrous, and everything in between. Some of them are me. Some of them are people I’ve known – loved, even. But I wanted to put Kochu, Achu and Molu in the centre because Teething is their story. I wanted to talk about the courage of childhood, the beauty and wonder and the freedom that come with it. I wanted to hide, for a very long time, with the parts of me that were untainted and vulnerable and sweet. I’m very protective of the children in the book, and I hope anyone who reads about them will be too.

Picture credit: Megha Rao

The poems seem to have stemmed from a very personal place, did it ever get difficult to pen them down?

I think poetry is the only way I can talk about the personal and still feel strong. Anything direct leaves me feeling exposed. I know poetry often feels as stark as a diary entry or open wound, but it also doubles as a weapon or a fortress. It’s not like an autobiography, where people read and know it’s yours. With poetry, there’s always a sort of secrecy, a mystery.

The poet’s life appears and disappears before you like a magic trick. There are so many times when I’m writing a poem and someone asks me, how much of this is true? And I shrug and I smile and I say, I can’t talk about it, it’s private, you see. It’s all true, but then again, it’s also entangled in this fascinating world of imagination. It gets dramatic, it gets enigmatic. It wasn’t difficult at all, because it just felt like going away for a while into a vault or some sort of dungeon where you hid skeletons. That was it. You don’t think too much when you’re there, you just write.

I think poetry is the only way I can talk about the personal and still feel strong.

When did you have the idea about writing the book and what was your inspiration behind this particular narrative?

Right after Spoonerism. A spoonerism is a poem about a family’s conversation during dinner, soon turning into a series of strange games, and eventually leading to a horrifying revelation. The poem had characters, it had a story, I was so confused by it. But suddenly, it felt like the last page. It felt like each character had something to say individually, so I began to explore that. And because I’ve always been fascinated by the grand narratives of books like Milton’s Paradise Lost and Ilango Adigal’s The Cilappatikaram, where a story is told through poetry, I wanted to dip my hands into the technique as well. These were, of course, epic books, but I’m also a staunch believer that if a story has ended, you just don’t disturb it by adding extra poems or chapters. My story had ended, and I wanted to let it rest.

There are different ways of narrating a story and yours seems scattered. What made you make that choice?

The world of the characters is fragmented. Trauma does that, it blurs and highlights memories. Everything is all over the place, left and right, ricocheting back and forth as if there was an explosion. The book is in the midst of it, and for me, it wouldn’t have made any sense for it to be a perfect, linear narrative. I don’t think I was capable of it either, to be honest. The book was a process of dissociating and falling back together every split second. There wasn’t another way.

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You are an artist who paints, writes and performs on stage. The scope of your art expanding on different mediums is massive. What medium do you prefer the most and why?

I love making comics. I haven’t made one in years, so I don’t even know anymore if I’m allowed to say I love it. Do people who love each other stay apart? Yes, yes they do. There’s no logic to it, but it happens. If I’m lucky enough, I’ll create a graphic novel one day.

Picture Credit: Megha Rao

I know that Taylor Swift inspires you. Would you say it is the way she merges personal and political? If not then what about her art seems relatable to you?

I like honest music, I think a real artist knows how to listen to the vulnerabilities of the heart. I also think beautiful lyrics sound so much like poetry. Songs that have metaphors, how lovely are they? Handsome, you’re a mansion with a view – I’ll never truly get over that line. And so many others. But I also thought her taking a stand, after so many years, and making use of her platform to educate and empower, was an amazing personal growth spurt. There are a lot of people who have a huge audience, I hope they can use their privilege to talk about important things instead of choosing to be apolitical.

I also think beautiful lyrics sound so much like poetry.

Do you have a ritual of your own when it comes to writing?

I write backwards. Poems, novels, anything. As a child I used to write numbers and words backwards, it worried my mother. I also remember, very recently, calling up a friend and telling him I have a story, and I know it from end to beginning. He thought that was incredibly hilarious. I wasn’t joking, though.

As a woman who writes, how much does your gender influence your narratives? Do you feel you have a responsibility to paint them well or just real?

I don’t think you can strip something as crucial as the gender of any text. Anything that’s part of your identity is going to bleed onto your body of work. Especially when you’re from a country where there’s so much gender inequality – socially, politically, health and education-wise – when female infanticide and child marriage continue to exist, it’s impossible to grow up indifferent to gender identity.

Sometimes I think I write because I’m a woman. For myself. For my women ancestors who had miscarriages at fifteen and were never allowed to go to libraries and were married off early because they couldn’t afford them. For my mother, who dreamed of foreign pens other kids brought to class and was never allowed to bring boys home. So I believe my only responsibility is, to be honest about the many truths of experience.

SheThePeople announced the Women Writer's Prize in 2021. Do you agree that we need an exclusive platform to honour the women writers and their contributions?

Yes! Awards bring visibility. There’s a lot of institutionalised discrimination that hinders women’s success. Maybe women don’t have to turn to pseudonyms to be read anymore, but global research has proved that women writers are less likely to win awards, be included in syllabuses or review pages, regardless of merit. I also find it strange that if a book has a largely female audience, it’s so easily dismissed and looked down upon. When women write romance, they’re never taken seriously, but then Nicholas Sparks, how is he so different?

These are just global examples, but really, we need exclusive awards for women. Not just women, we need exclusive awards for Dalit writers. For Transgender and gender-nonconforming writers. Writers with disabilities. Because awards make people feel valued. Awards recognize celebrate and validate someone’s hard work and good work. And exclusive, inclusive awards are necessary because they can amplify marginalized voices. They can make important stories heard.

Picture credit: Megha Rao

What is your most personal work of art and how?

My Mother’s English. It’s a poem I wrote for my mother, about her tragedy, and it’s not a poem I visit often. It’s not even a poem I intend to perform.

Who do you call your role models in the literary world?

Rimbaud, Anna Akhmatova, Mahmoud Darwish, Nazim Hikmet and Sylvia Plath are some of my favourite poets. I’m a fool for Joan Didion’s essays. But I also grew up reading Basheer’s stories as a teen, and my favourite poem is Mambazham by Vyloppilli. And because Tamil was my second language during my childhood, and my grandmother studied in Tamil medium, I was exposed to a lot of Tamil stories. They were told to me, of course, and I only read them later in life – out of what I’ve read, I like The Cilappatikaram by Ilango Adigal and Kalki’s Ponniyin Selvan.

Awards bring visibility. There’s a lot of institutionalised discrimination that hinders women’s success.

Which women writers' work have you enjoyed the most recently?

K.R. Meera’s Hangwoman and Jhumpa Lahiri’s Unaccustomed Earth are my latest finds. I loved Meera’s novel because of its fierce female protagonist and its sharp yet sensitive treatment of themes like capital punishment. Lahiri, of course, has this impeccable ability to be so precise with her words and observation of human relationships. And currently, I’m reading Chernobyl Prayer by Svetlana Alexievich, the Belarusian journalist and winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature. It’s a shocking, heartbreaking, vital book.