etc - Navayana

Give Us This Day A Feast of Flesh
N.D. Rajkumar
Poems from Tamil translated by
Anushiya Ramaswamy
Where the word becomes flesh, where
reason is dazzled and magic reigns
supreme: in that world delves Rajkumar.
Sensuous and ferocious, the poetry of
Rajkumar cracks open a world that offers
the modern reader stunning glimpses into
a magic-drenched, living dalit history. Born
into a traditional shaman community in
a border town between Kerala and Tamil
Nadu, Rajkumar revels in his ability to
claim disparate discourses as his poetic
subjects. His angry goddesses of unreason
and excessive emotion embody unfettered
power, independence and freedom—
elements excised from the daily life of the
dalit.
Anushiya Ramaswamy, through her
inspired translations, and in an essay that
locates Rajkumar’s insurrections in a global
literary context, shows how the poet is not
writing for inclusion into a centre: he has
re-drawn the lines in such a way that the
centre itself is meaningless. The centre has
the right of it to fear the Other, the Mohini,
the darkness, the Isakki, the mother with
her breasts full of the poisonous essence,
for
We who cannot experience
The Brahmam
Link hands and walk
With our Jungle Gods.
‘Powerful
liminalities,
threshold moments
of transit and
transformation, are
at play in the poems
of N.D. Rajkumar’
Biblio: A Review of Books
‘As a member of the kaniyar caste among
the dalits in Tamil Nadu, Rajkumar uses the
shamanistic, magical and supernatural,
with which the kaniyars are associated,
to fashion an aesthetic that can seem
anarchic and is certainly destabilising in its
effects on the reader’—DNA, Mumbai
36
N.D. Rajkumar has published four volumes
of poetry in Tamil. He works as a daily wage
labourer in the Railway Mail Service in
Nagercoil. Anushiya Ramaswamy teaches
at the Department of English, Southern
Illinois University, Edwardsville, US.
2011
ISBN 9788189059330
110 pages Paperback 6.5 x 8.5” Rs 180
All rights available