Spoken Wor(l)ds: Anglophony, Poetry, Translation

Abstract

This essay grows out of the sense that the diatribes against purportedly bad poetry on the Internet have become less interesting. It examines the flourishing Internet-enabled poetry culture in India today through a few works of dissent poetry birthed and circulating online. As digital artefacts, these poems live, in a manner of speaking, very public lives unlike born-digital novels or longer prose forms. They can be accessed and manipulated by anyone with an Internet connection or a cheap data plan on their phone. Most of these poems are also almost simultaneously translated by members of that poetic, political, or intellectual community. They are read out loud, listened to, seen, and yelled out and yelled at as they move across intermedial environments as Instagram posts, YouTube and TikTok videos, protest performances, and WhatsApp forwards. How do these self-consciously political poems perform their politics through their mediated and linguistic environments? Analysing three poems – Aamir Aziz’s ‘Ballad of Pehlu Khan’, Ajmal Khan’s ‘Write Me Down, I Am an Indian’, and Tishani Doshi’s ‘Girls Are Coming Out of the Woods’ – the essay argues that Indian dissent poetry on the Internet leverages the viral logics of social media to defy state surveillance and censorship, toward new political affiliations. In doing so, this poetry reprises a long tradition of folk and resistance poetics as part of a digital protest culture.