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An Interview with Pradip Choudhuri

Interview with Pradip Choudhuri by Denis Emorine

In your poems, your write more often than not “I”. Is your poetry a roundabout way to write your autobiography?

Yes, this is so. I always do it consciously. No doubt, all representation of human nature can never be cut off from this word, my temperamental ego maybe, which has always prompted man (until death) to follow a mirage of flesh, a rainbow at the end of his own horizon called life. I am a man par excellence, it is therefore likely that there are many autobiographical elements in my writing, in my poetry. But what then is this autobiography of which I am the sole protagonist, an autobiography which was of course fashioned by myself. For a long time I have asked myself this question. Outcome: the birth of Poetry-Religion which begins by a fabulous definition of the self: “I belong to any generation or, better yet, I am a thoughtful resemblance extremely small or infinitely large in the modern world and of all its generations. Very well, practically together, enigmatically like the sphinx, veins and veinlets of the conscious and the unconscious of the maniacal spirit, the degraded, the debauched, shy ones, the destitute, fools, the dumb, thieves, the blind, the Sannyasins, comrades, expeditionaries, corrupt bodies, the beaten-down, heartless ones, the tubercular, single corpses, the personal and the impersonal and everybody alive.” In my opinion, this is equally one of the definitions of a complete man. Yes, in my poetry, I only write my autobiography which contains the whole life of mankind on this planet. Here I am!

Reading you one often has the impression that life and poetry are only one and the same even if the first of these is a source of disappointments or misfortunes on all planes. What is this precisely?

This is true. On this level, everything that comes to pass around me is only a masquerade of men and women with their disgusting banalities, bourgeois rascals with a thousand and one desires inspired by the devilish demands for consumption. In this flow, the stupid tide of human desires, are lost the cardinal virtues of life; friendship is, most often, devoured by cupidity or gluttony for power; love is, inevitably, sacrificed on the altar of sex… even before its blossoming. For a sacred soul, isn’t this bizarre order of the world a huge disappointment? Most human woes occur due to his great disappointment, of this incredible madness of “civilized” men. On the other hand, the natural world we inhabit remains unchanging in a big dream because, at bottom, men only know to dream. My poetry then is the link between the worlds of consumption and of dream. It is therefore natural that the poetry of the countryside is namely life a little melancholic. The poet with all his sacred passions is always lovesick. In our time perhaps, any poet may not be able to avoid this fate. As such a poet, I am not able to manhandle life. In my poetry, there is a complete fusion of life and dreams, of passion and humor / black humor. This is the only secret of this bold entirety of my poetry which, most often, is watered with sadness, a sort of a kiss of life.

In the 1960s, when you were a student, you were part of a protest movement “the Hungry Generation ”. I know that, considering this period past, you do not still wish to be associated with this time. Are you willing to explain why?

Certainly. If I remember well, the appearance of the Hungry Generation in the 1960s – like the other well-known literary movements in America and in Europe – was something created very spontaneously. At the time, the disorder was total in the political realm of India, and the mediocrity of literary expression in the realm of the Bengal muse created a great void in the sensibility of the youth, on the campus of the universities. Political frustration had actively developed lunacy in literary creation. In Bengal, and for the young Bengali poets, this time was a crucial period. This was a period of “lost dreams” for the young people of this land, like I have already said, in the literary realm as well as in the political one. Everywhere an impression of unbearable, sinister life reigned. The society of the eastern dream was, on all planes, torn by the hypocrisy of the middle class; it was bizarre. In a situation like this, the creation of the Hungry Generation was an urgent necessity for my friends and myself. We employed the weapons of creation, that is to say a virulent writing. We demanded a total revolution, complete anarchy, if necessaryMy active participation in the Hungry Generation was pursued until 1970, before the publication of Poetry-Religion where I began to exploit my private horizon charged with several dimensions. After a well defined time, every movement gives birth to a recruitment whatever it is (see the case of surrealism) or serves the agents of the state. I did not know too much. I knew equally that it was no more my cup of tea. After more than 35 years devoted to the Hungry Generation, having been one of the founding members of this movement, I am more than a human program, a solarspectrum fairly grand and I call my poems (love poems, not hate poems) in the four corners of the world. Always and during this long period of “trials and tribulations”, I am happy to have not lost the strength of my heart and to be right. My participation in the Hungry Generation gave me the courage to confront the essence of modern life and the creation of my art forever. The victory of the Hungry Generation has at least given birth to an alternative literature. After that, there is only to move forward… to move forward as Arthur Rimbaud said.

Besides Bengali which is your mother tongue, you speak as well English and French. The literary critic often writes that your work reconciles the East and the West. Do you also have the impression of existing at the crossroads of two cultures, of several sources of inspiration which coexist within you?

Yes, that is possible or well, in my case; there is only a “half-truth” in such a critique / interpretation.Thanks to a unique attitude toward literature, I have never clearly compartmentalized this realm of the muse. After reading the majority of Bengali literature of my heart before sixteen years of age, I began, as a novice, to read the works of the most celebrated authors of the world, without prejudice. About 1962, upon my entry into college, the first book that I read was Une saison en enfer by Arthur Rimbaud, the first great Western work. I was absolutely shaken up by the themes and the style of Rimbaud. The same year, I read [his] Les Illuminations with the same fervor, then the biography of Rimbaud by Enid Starkie and Wallace Fowley. I hardly asked if Une saison en enfer was a product of the East or the West. The freshness of the language, the richness of the experiences of Rimbaud, that was enough for me at that time; well with the passage of time I discovered things orientalized by Rimbaud. In 1996, at Bergerac, in an interview broadcast by Radio-Bergerac, I even compared the genius of Rimbaud to that of Ramakrishna! “The geographic limits are no longer restricted by any latitude or longitude…”, I wrote in the poem L’Automne [“Autumn”] in the collection Ratri. The Frenchman Arthur Rimbaud spent the majority of his life outside his own country. Between the ages of 17 and 21, besides Bengali, I read the works of Dostoyevsky, Camus, Kafka, Baudelaire, D.H. Lawrence, Henry Miller, Whitman, Artaud, Cendrars, Giono, Céline, Genet, as well as other friend-poets of East and West who are very well-known in our times. As much as student of English and American literature at the university, I had to read a thousand and one English and American authors… good and bad. I never asked if they were oriental or occidental. The only book which helped me a lot to resolve the problems revolvingaround this question of East versus West, was the essay by André Gide on Dostoyevsky. For me, besides The Brothers Karamazov, the book by Gide is the book of my life. It is the one which helped me to comprehend the French psyche, which actually gave me the courage to go to Europe, especially to France, like a poet of the world. At this time, I have more than 500 friend-poets in France, Spain, England, America, Ireland, Japan, Canada, and Africa as well. Have I merely orientalized my friend-poets of the West? Yes, perhaps. Thus, I am on the stalk at the crossroads of the whole world. This is why we understand ourselves so well. It is the total victory of poetry. Yes!

For you, is the writing of poetry a subversive act?

That depends upon several conditions: for example by the “good’ or “bad” state of the society in which the poet lives, by the place where he works to maintain his physical sustenance, and by the spiritual sustenance which allows him to write. The poet of my heart is neither a “versificator” nor a “searcher” of poetic words. On the contrary, a true poet follows passionately the indisputable verities of his own life, the verities of the society in which he lives and writes… Poetic truth has to free itself from all hypocrisy… like love which supports the values of life. My dear Denis, you are not unaware, nowadays, that the society of mankind – and its attitude towards things – has changed much. It lets itself go to consumption with its own Mephistopheles: the media. Almost everywhere, in Europe as in India, especially in the underground, politicians, their agents gave birth to “sycophancy”. Most people, who are only sycophants, form the major body of the readers of poetry. My poems are certainly “subversive” for a society and with readers like those. I do not write on some particular mission. My poetry, itself, could be used for the emancipation of new men, for the creation of new poetical tastes; and you well know for myself, my dear Denis, novelty is a kind of subversion. So, in this world, my poems are absolutely subversive, that is to say humane.

One has talked, in Europe and in the United States, of your sources of inspiration: the Beat Generation, Rimbaud, or Lautréamont… what do you think?

Rimbaud… yes, like the native Jibanananda Das and Manik Bondopadhaya. In Lautréamont, it is his long impassioned cry on the sea that I retain. Moreover, always, I ask myself why Lautréamont had been so brutally assassinated. Always, I would like to have information on this murder. Besides, perhaps you could help me in this research?Outside of a few personal friends: Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Allen Ginsberg, John Montgomery, Harold Norse, Kaviraj George Dowden and Claude Pélieu, I hardly like the rootless writings of the Beat Generation. The only author of this movement who inspired me very much was Jack Kerouac who, on his own part, was inspired by Rimbaud, Céline and by his nostalgia for France and Québec. It is often said that Jack was “the king of the Beats”. In my opinion, Jack was obsessed by search for his own identity -- as much philosophical as religious. Despite some similarities between the Beat Generation and the Hungry Generation, no one from the Hungry was completely influenced by the Beats, unfortunately. At the present time, because of the American media which have always presented the Beat Generation as an absolute apocalypse, the spiritual heritage of this movement is about to disappear.

In our time when the image seems to reign, when many books are often published for reasons which exclude literature, I pose the question bluntly, “Of what use is poetry?”

Poetry is the informal engine of unquantifiable entities, developed outside the schemes used for power. Poetry serves the subversion more than is believed even if it seems to have been recruitedinto some institutional ledgers; it serves to take form amidst chaos and to render all this chaos into credible fact -- even if some defend fear of having real screen presence; of perceiving the light, which should enlighten our lives. There would be important work to achieve in collaboration with the scientists if they should abandon all megalomania and have a little idea of heir poetic dimension, in particular the astrophysicists who have surrendered their reason to the stars and who, in the same way, meet the poets on the same ranks with perhaps other certainties. But poetry only serves to reinforce our certainty, that of the impossibility of NOTHINGNESS which, if it exists, is charged then with an extraordinary manna of possibilities.

Why the title The Black Hole for your [poetry] collection?

Bravo for your feeling of a poet! To tell the truth, I used The Black Hole, this astronomical expression, as a metaphor for life, you are correct! Symbolically, when upon each instant millions of black holes are born from our innumerable sensual desires: blind, deep and menacing among the gravitational field is like any radiation (of creative imagination and brilliant creation) only able to go outward, the human desire – which is the source of all our activities – is ironically the black hole itself. In this civilization dominated by money, power, and sex, we often feel locked up inside a big hole with no exit. Only physical love relieves us sometimes, then new bitterness, the distaste. The historical Indian allusion of the black hole – which was appended [to my collection] by my friend Paul Georgelin – a true connection with this title. Then, I am in complete agreement with Paul. My dear Denis, it is my friend Paul who presented me to French readers with a phenomenal ardor. I embrace him and I thank him.

In your essay entitled “Poetry-Religion”, you write in particular, “Poetry is the only way to obliterate all of the questions and dialectics of “primitive man as well as modern man, as much as all the conflicts between consciousness and unconsciousness of the uneducated people and the ignorant”. Could you develop this idea makes sacred the poetic act?

For me, the poetic act makes sacred humanity in a whirlwind of kindness which brews and takes away everything its path. There are no more barriers, the enclosure is open and the immense herd of wild horses is liberated, only we no longer call it herd, that’s the difference. Each entity develops alone but together. The great paradox which governs our interior and exterior lives is this: the universality of poetry will not justly govern our lives; we have become masters of our own destinies, alone and together. You mention the meaning of the sacred in poetry, yes, a thousand times yes and we could associate God to it or anyone else, why not? Now everything is permitted. Whether they are in the West or in the East, the sources of poetry are cosmic. Civilization has rapidly expanded which only implies this directly even if it is the main actor.

Have you already been tempted by forms of writing other than poetry?

Yes, certainly. In my own way, I have already covered all the forms of writing. For example, tales (symbolic), short stories, essay (literature), literary criticism and defense of poetry, drama pieces too. Everything but crime novels which I do not particularly like. I have been equally seduced by poetry and its meaning. This is a great obsession of mine. Perhaps I am paranoid, I wonder. I only feel normal when I am in the rich and euphoric land of my obsessions. I love to write, in a natural language, a vast pornographic fresco devoted to the funereal rites of the Muse or my loved-one. It is France, which always remains my spiritual homeland, where I would love to work.

In 1997-98, you created Pphoo a trilingual review, in Bengali, English, and French. Do you wish to offer a brief presentation?

At this time, I created this review in collaboration with my friends Claude Pélieu, Carl Weissner, William S. Burroughs, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Kaviraj George Dowden, Gérard Belart, and my dear J.J. Herman. For the Bengali literary scene, Pphoo explores all that is avant-garde, underground. In its pages, I have published all the poets famous and blasted of the four corners of the world… Bengalis, English (Americans) and French. I translated Rimbaud, Artaud, Cendrars, Nord de L.F. Céline along with his last interview. It was a great moment in my life when I also translated Fernando Arrabal and The Brooklyn Bridge of Henry Miller. Since the 1990s, thanks to my different connections in France and to my knowledge of the French language, I have published sixty or so French and Francophone poets: Canadians, Algerians among others. In 1996, Pphoo won the prestigious prize for the best review of French-speaking communities in Bergerac, during a poetry festival. All in all, I am very happy: Pphoo has placed me at the center of world literary activities. In my opinion, this review is one of the sources of new creations at the end of this

century, that is already a lot!

At present, what are your projects?

Outside my own country, I am involved in several projects linked to France. I would like to write a memoir about my two stays in France – analyzing the different trends in contemporary French poetry. I would like to write a short history of French bridges and an essay on the town of Guyancourt, where the mayor is my friend, the surrealist poet Roland Nadaus. And finally, I would go to pass a white night (the Arabian nights) with my friends and I would write an homage to each of them. This is a tremendous project, isn’t it?