I have always been a writer that draws on my personal life in my writing. The two—my creative practice and my life—often travel often side by side, one after the other, each taking turns leading. So when I am asked a question during an interview about how daughterhood fits into my understanding of myself as a poet, I don’t know how to answer.
Is it because daughterhood is too deeply entwined with my sense of self? Or because it is so disparate, so singular? I am writing a story that revolves around a daughter coming to terms with a fraught, fragile relationship with her family.
An absent father—mourning a mother—a startling lack of siblings but a plethora of cousins—exile from her community. This is barely a description of what actually happens, but more of an understanding of what lies beneath the surface of the plot, the emotional core of the adventure at hand, maybe even what critics sometimes call the driving force of a novel. While a label like ‘woman’ has always felt stifling and strange, ‘daughter’ doesn’t carry that heaviness.
To be a daughter is to know a particular kind of duty. It is a labor of love, a practice of attention, a relation of care. What I say to the interviewer, eventually, is that maybe what happened with the book we’re discussing—Lantern—is that I was spending a lot of time as I wrote untangling what it means to be a daughter.
There was the daughter I had been and the daughter that I was becoming. Both went hand in hand with poetry I was writing and the life I was building: the schism between them, the echo. My dad always says, Betiyaan wafadar hoti haan.
Meaning: Daughters are loyal. Or maybe “tend to be” or “often are”—I’m not sure how to capture the tone in which he says it: slightly wistful, sure, tender. Translation’s fallacy, I guess.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
