Book Review by Basudhara Roy
Title: My Body Didn’t Come Before Me
Author: Kuhu Joshi
Publisher: Speaking Tiger Books
The body is a text, writing and written on. As much of this text is ‘given’ as it is ‘fashioned’, its meaning continually negotiated at the intersections of self, society, and culture. Thoroughly personal, the body cannot, at the same time, escape from being spectacularly public because in its corporeality, it constantly responds to the material and metaphysical dimensions of the world around it. A body is being, becoming, possession, as also performance. It is, at the same time, uncertainty, liability, incarceration, and an alibi against everything that we might wish it to be.
In Kuhu Joshi’s slim collection of thirty-five poems titled My Body Didn’t Come Before Me (Speaking Tiger, 2023), the problematic of the body is placed at the centre of poetic inquiry. The crisp and categorical title catches the readers’ attention first and in many ways, the cover offers a brilliant paratext to the ideas in this book as it evocatively underlines a conversation between girlhood, body, nature, and form.
We are never merely inhabitants of our bodies but also bear responsibility for our embodiment. The question of identity is, to a great extent, framed by questions of embodiment, and the conformity of the body to established cultural codes. Such conformity, however, is a sheer travesty of nature. Kuhu Joshi’s poems chart the development and growth of selfhood through severe scoliosis or spinal deformity and the experience of alienation that gathers around it led by societal conventions of normalcy.
Central to these poems is a conflict between embodiment and selfhood, and the numerous ways in which socio-cultural codes of accomplishment, lifestyle, and beauty dictate the need for possessing the ‘perfect’ body. Often, ideas of romance and scripts of love and longing also reiterate the same narrative, rendering desire and its fulfilment both difficult and transgressive. This book is an ardent statement of such experiences of otherness and an activist desire to dismiss them into the idea of individuality or selfhood.
Joshi’s poems delineate subtle contradictions between the body-as-construct and the body-as-experience with insight, freshness, and candour. There is little sentimentality in these pages, almost no lamentations of victimhood, and hardly any regret for life as it has been or is. But in their abrupt matter-of-factness and remarkable economy of expression, these poems manage to communicate a startling range of emotions – pain, fear, shame, depression, self-loathing, forbearance, and self-confidence.
The collection, interestingly, begins with ‘I tell myself I am beautiful’, a poem that on the page curves itself like a scoliotic spine: “…And I tell myself/ I am beautiful/ so I do not feel the need/ to be normal. I tell myself/ I am beautiful/ so I do not feel the need/ to be something I am not.” The poem offers a convergence of several themes that will underlie the book – embodiment, normalcy, beauty, de/form/ity, narrativisation, and selfhood.
Despite the grand diversity of bodies that inhabit this world and the numerous modes of embodiment, stereotypes of normalcy rule our everyday lives to such an extent that even the slightest deviation from the norm sparks reactions that inject within us feelings of otherness. Such narratives of otherness can only be combated through self-fashioned narratives of beauty, experience, identification and identity.
The body at the centre of these poems is a body consistently othered by medical discourse. But it is also, and with equal tenacity, a female body that through its girlhood, adolescence, pubescence and growth, must bear the implications of this otherness in more ways than one with the result that everyday narratives of friendship, safety, love, and desire are complicated in their enunciation. In ‘The girl with a rod’, one of the most tender poems in the collection, the subtle yet dramatic inter-gender confrontation between two adolescents raises several questions on normalcy, vulnerability, and comfort in social spaces – here, the seemingly innocuous space of a school bus.
And yet, the speaker in these poems acknowledges that when it comes to another scoliotic body, her own gaze is marked by the same curiosity that borders on the invasion of privacy and the transgression of personal space. In ‘A girl. Scoliotic’, she begins with the confession “I don’t remember her name./ I remember her Instagram handle. sco.lio/-something. I remember clicking on her/ to compare her/ curves to mine. ” In this virtual encounter, the social media profile representing the individual becomes the object of the speaker’s scrutiny and realisation that ‘my curve/ was never that curvy’, she offers a mirror-reaction to socio-cultural perceptions of her own identity.
The cold professionalism of medical procedures and the seeming detachment or unconcern of medical practitioners that work together to objectify the dis-eased body, establish themselves strongly in these poems – “I think a lot about the cold, wet plaster./ And the hands of the doctor/ moulding it around my waist.” (‘In this one you win’) In ‘The day of the fitting’, the doctor at the Spinal Injuries Hospital who ‘does not look at me. He says namaste to Mom’ is, paradoxically, also the one whose hands ‘messing’ with plaster across her torso intimately gather “the skeleton of my body. In his hands/ the silence of my spine, white and hollow. ”
In the two poems ‘What your doctor will not tell you:’ and ‘What your doctor will tell you:’, Joshi compresses with remarkable skill and deftness the two sides of the experience of embodiment – the private and the public, the subjective and the objective, the circular and the linear, and most importantly, the marginal and the mainstream. The doctor’s “Kuch nahin hota hai” and “Lacheeli” (with regard to the spine), find their alternative truths in the speaker’s “Hard-back chairs will hurt no matter what. ” and “Do not listen to ‘Sexy Back’”.
A hint of the Father as Patriarch lurks decisively in this collection in the speaker’s equivocal relationship to male figures of reverence and in her repeated seeking for comfort among women. There is the father who, because he is absent in ‘Nani’s house[1]’, the children are “free to dream”. In ‘The protector of life’, Joshi writes:
…The protector of life
is a man, and I
am not surprised. Neither are you.
I assure you. God
was a man too. This is what we
were given, you and I, Eves weeded out
of the garden of life.
In ‘Enter a garden in new delhi’, she contrasts the injunctions placed on the female body with the careless freedom of male bodies that manage to remain beyond cultural surveillance– “all around you there are/men/spread/men spread out/spread all around/legsflopping backssprawling/handscratching bodiesrelaxing” In ‘Five stages’, the speaker asks “Is it odd to extend responsibility/ for my body?” and the unarticulated answer is ‘no’ since our bodies are continually being transformed and redefined both physically and psychologically by our personal and social encounters.
With its articulate language, assertive voice, and sharp images, Kuhu Joshi’s My Body Didn’t Come Before Me makes a potent debut, emphasising subjective embodiment as a form of resistance, and offering an alternate cultural site to reimagine normativity.
*Note: Kuhu Joshi has recovered from scoliosis or spinal deformity and is currently based in New York City where she is a professor of creative writing and English composition. She has been the recipient of the Jane Cooper Poetry Fellowship and was awarded an honourable mention for the Academy of American Poets’ University Prize in 2021. She is the co-author of the chapbook Private Maps (Human/Kind Press, 2020) and founder of the poetry workshop ‘The Terrible Joy of Poetry’.
[1] Maternal grandmother’s house
Basudhara Roy teaches English at Karim City College affiliated to Kolhan University, Chaibasa. Author of three collections of poems, her latest work has been featured in EPW, The Pine Cone Review, Live Wire, Lucy Writers Platform, Setu and The Aleph Review among others.
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