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A Few Notes By Nabina Das



Nabina Das


Nabina Das is a 2017 Sahapedia-UNESCO fellow, a 2012 Charles Wallace creative writing alumna (Stirling University), and a 2016 Commonwealth Writers Organisation feature correspondent. Born and brought up in Guwahati, Nabina's poetry collections are Sanskarnama (2017), Into the Migrant City  (2013), and Blue Vessel (2012). Her first novel is Footprints in the Bajra (2010) , and her short fiction volume is titled The House of Twining Roses (2014). A 2012 Sangam House, a 2011 NYS Summer Writers Institute, and a 2007 Wesleyan Writers Conference alumna, Nabina writes and translates occasionally in English, Assamese and Bengali while her poetry has been translated into the Croatian, French, Bengali, Malayalam, and Urdu. A guest faculty at University of Hyderabad for Creative Writing, Nabina has worked in journalism and media for over a decade, and is the co-editor of 40 under 40, an anthology of post-globalisation poetry (2016).




A Few Notes By Nabina Das

All literature is experimental if you look at the approaches each writer has. Even within traditional frameworks of fiction and poetry, experiments are always ongoing on the level of words and sentences, and ideas and themes. Just to call something experimental for the heck of it baffles me. As a writer, it's not a label I'd adopt.

By the same logic, it's futile in my view, to discuss what the West-East angle is in 'experimental' literature. As much as we wonder at what James Joyce did for "Ulysses" -- experimental for his times -- we must wonder at the quirky grace of Vikram Seth's "The Golden Gate", written in a later time and age, for being "experimental" in storytelling. Experimentally speaking, Jules Verne took us on a whirlwind trip as Western colonial projects were taking hold, while our own folklore and tales have liberated us through their magical renderings from time immemorial.

From Beckett to Bolaño to Apollinaire to Adichie, for all genres, the text has always found representation in variegated ways. In South Asia, oral literatures from Dalit and Tribal communities, as well as the essence of the Urdu Dastangoi, are all experiments that test new and old mores, sans the modernist baggage of 'experiments'.

One can of course argue that there's genre-bending work. And hence, experimental. Maggie Nelson's "Bluets" -- I admit having read only excerpts, and am picking it up now as I write -- offers the grain's eye view of the insides of a mother-of-pearl shell where the very term 'experimental' would fail to be a tribute to the fluid writing which sweeps effortlessly between poetry and prose. Very recently, Joanna Walsh's novel "Break.Up" created some stir and has been said to be challenging genre boundaries. If this is experiment in the age of digital realities -- the latter expression itself a hyperbole -- then Walsh and others are indeed aiming for a different re-telling. Poetry can adopt or adapt to prose, SFF can (and should, why not) come with social commentary, and romance be told in graphic and other hybrid forms. This way, experiments take place in form, craft, and themes. What is experimental in spirit can become popular. The popular can aspire to be experimental. As a poet, especially, I don't see the need for any compartmentalization.


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