In our workshop we will be watching Anand Patwardhan’s film We Are Not Your Monkeys (1997) and reading poetry by Feminist Dalit writers and poets to generate a discussion and poetics/poetry on myth, caste, race, supremacy, and emancipatory practices. Dali feminist poetry is embodied writing—Dalit poets write about their experience of violence in their lives and how their bodies respond to events around them and register emotions of sadness, rage, disgust and joy. Theorists like Pramod Nayar call this “traumatic materialism.” Contrary to expectations of Dalit women to be silent and invisible in casteist and patriarchal societies, Dalit poets display their poetic tools of realism, imagery, irony, metaphor and a subversion of conventional poetics to subvert these expectations.

In this workshop, using examples of Dalit poets such as Sukitharani, Meena Kandasamy, Umesh Solanki, Arangamallika, Hira Bansode, Daya Pawar and Umadevi, you will be guided to write pieces exploring and expressing moments of pain/trauma in your life or your witnessing of violence (broadly ranging from words to physical action) as well as other emotions of joy or serenity; how can emotional affect be a form of resistance to conventional narratives about the gender and expression? You will be prompted to shift any traditional ideas you may have inherited about expressing emotion; in patriarchal scenarios, all genders deal with the stereotyping of silencing of individual emotional expression or suffer from being blamed as being excessive or dramatic. In your writing give yourself permission to disrupt any voice of blame and claim your voice whatever that may be (soft, loud, melodramatic, epigrammatic; fragmented bursts). You will be encouraged to bring in voices from your community, family, or literary figures to help you build your piece.

Dalit feminist poets display their cognizance of writing as part of a community of writers resisting casteism, patriarchy and all kinds of domination. In your writing, feel free to think of yourself as part of a larger universe than your singular self. Parallels to this can be found in the poetry practices by June Jordan, Audre Lorde, Adrienne Rich and many marginalized poets in the US that you may be familiar with.