Description
Smita Agarwal’s new work, determined to break cycles of silence and resignation, is an emphatic indictment of an authoritarian world. — Arundhathi Subramaniam
Wry, pensive, poignant and acerbic by turns, these poems courageously articulate a deep disquiet. Smita Agarwal speaks to us from the heart of a turbulent darkness. — Ranjit Hoskote
When a brave woman speaks, the sound of her voice turns into a “bowl of luminosity”, and laughter and terror flow out of its womb. — Prof Neela Bhattacharya Saxena
Speak, Woman! is Smita Agarwal’s third collection of poems, the earlier ones being Wish-granting Words (Ravi Dayal Publisher, 2002) and Mofussil Notebook (Brown Critique/Sampark, 2016). Agarwal is also the editor of a collection of essays on nineteenth century as well as contemporary Indian poets writing in English titled Marginalized: Indian Poetry in English (Rodopi/Brill, 2014). Agarwal’s poems have received awards and residencies and have been curated in journals and anthologies published in India and abroad. She has also published critical articles and translations from English into Hindi. She is professor of English, University of Allahabad, former Director of the Centre for Women’s Studies and a professional singer who performs for All India Radio, Doordarshan and cultural events such as Triveni Mahotsav and Shilp Mela. Currently, she divides her time between Allahabad and Bombay.
Reviews
Mamta Joshi in Different Truths
Kinshuk Gupta in Jaggery Lit
Basudhara Roy in The Times of India
A collection of poems by a woman poet and entitled, Speak, Woman!, is likely to invite certain speculations, especially if the poet’s reputation as a feminist precedes the book. Urging women to break the walls of silence, fostering a female community by inspiring dialogue, and shaping assertive, speaking women through consciousness-raising sessions, have been significant agendas within the feminist movement. It is pardonable, therefore, to assume that Smita Agarwal’s book is animated by a kindred spirit, that it is likely to be a rant, a wake-up call, a weighted exclamation of rage and unrest. … To meet, however, its breezy, self-governed consciousness, its noncommittal turns of thought, its amusing postures and its disarmingly candid diction, is a startling surprise. Instead of the categorical feminist fare that one has been expecting the book to bare, the reader is overwhelmed by a kaleidoscopic celebration of life’s myriad shades and an assertion of a selfhood that is, gaily, ageing, fallible and female.
Keki N Daruwalla in Hindustan Times
The title of this volume, Speak, Woman!, is of a piece with other books by women poets. Since women have suffered the ills of patriarchy for millennia, as Robert Graves says in The White Goddess, they should have raised the banner of protest earlier and not let male prophets, kings, philosophers and knights (who prided themselves as saviours of “damsels in distress”) walk all over them. Of course, it would be unjust to think of Smita Agarwal’s volume as just an outcrop of feminist revolt. It is more than that. After the initial thrust, her poems coil themselves around what she wants to say and what is actually said, and the end is a surprise, as we see in her first poem Guru Mantra where the guru “asked me to unhook my blouse. He placed his palm on my throat “Sing” he said. I saw, National Geographic: the sparrow paralysed before the swaying hood of the Cobra, I felt nothing. Nothing moved. And I’ve been singing since. The poet is a vocalist who ‘could memorise at least/ five difficult melodies in a day.’ She zeroes in on Meera She lived in her head: in a landscape where fantasy blew in gusts of love. This is a fine poem.
Mustansir Dalvi in The Wire
In Speak, Woman!, author Smita Agarwal speaks of a woman’s condition, and exhorts others to do so too. She knows that there is little recourse to equity, even solidarity, from the state, its institutions, its cultural constructs, or from those of the opposite persuasion. … So she raises her voice in this asymmetrical world. “They are done with decency,” she says, speaking on behalf of those like herself in her poem, ‘Self Goal’. Through her courageous words, she chargesheets the patriarchy while simultaneously exploring herself. Both are undertaken with a candour that makes this book of poems so riveting.
