Draw me a poem ‿︵‿︵

On art and friendship

In July of 2019, I remember having a conversation with Michelle about art and how that was the sole reason I ventured out of my existential crisis post graduation. Stumbling and fumbling, I drew things I heard and verses I read. I drew them in my mind and painted them on paper.

Now two years later, I am trying to coherently unwrap all those dialogues spanning two countries and three cities over a serendipitous iftaar dinner, phone calls, movies and Bombay wanderings.

The conversations meandered through various doubts and landed up at a question. How do we as two artists with a shared history of place and identity, draw out poetry? Thus followed two months of collaboration on Michelle’s poetry manuscript. The journey taught us patience and persistence. And now after two years, Michelle’s chapbook titled ‘Gulf’ is published by Yavanika Press. It’s a beautiful narrative filled with brutally honest inquiries about place, belonging, family and faith. The poems are raw and drip with languages, food and NRI existentialism.

I’m leaving Bahrain
with languages under my tongue
like pills. I’m asked to open my mouth.
Smuggling tongues is illegal. I swallow
the rest and speak in English.

An excerpt from Gulf by Michelle D’Costa

Drawing out a poem is an intimate process, we take more than we give. It’s messy and it takes time. However, at the end of it (by it, I mean the process because the art never ends, to me it is always a work in progress) there are three visuals of what the poem means -one which the poem describes, one that we draw out and one in the fluid space between the two, constantly changing form based on who’s reading it (feeling it). There is beauty in looking at the poem and being seen in its representation.

If I were to sketch these very same poems today, they would be starkly different- the foundations would essentially be the same but the journey of the last two years would be reflected in what I draw and the way I draw it, irrespective of the words trying to bloom from the images.

The hesitation and the doubts Michelle writes about in a gentle yet unwavering voice is what drove me to play around with this medium of black and white, excesses and limitations, indulgence and restraint.. The hope is that they lead you through a lane of memories of your own – joys, shame, desires, that came and went, and those that stayed.