Antiserious — Bra, 2017
All about our Issue 2
Soon after we announced a special issue on the ‘Body’, I broke my arm. Surgery, perhaps the ultimate metaphor for invasiveness, followed. My family, never one to let go of the Bengali tic for puns and ‘current affairs’, made jokes about ‘surgical strikes’ while I lay on the hospital bed. I was glad they hadn’t lost their sense of humour even as I grew painfully aware, more than ever before, of the political and aesthetic equivalence between body and land. Territoriality. Doctor. Army. The Body Politic. The readymade tropes from my essay-writing school life began returning to me.
Manjiri and Debojit, my co-editors, had their bodies make demands on them in different ways. We laughed, even as we discussed delays in our publication schedule. The Curse of the Body — we made it sound like a half-made film that had run out of funds. It was a bad joke, as bad, or perhaps worse than the title of the film, The Mummy Returns. We hadn’t set out to look for the ideological body, claimed by various isms. Being naturally antiserious, we were curious to see how submissions would look at the ordinariness of the body, one that had retained its humour in spite of the visa marks of experience. What we hadn’t expected was the unwanted humour in our personal inboxes — the advert for writing and artwork about the bra seemed to have worked like a stimulant: there were bizarre messages about the bra, accompanied by committed online research about it, its various sizes and genres. Not unexpectedly, these were from men.
‘Don’t they realise that this issue on the bra isn’t for them?’ A text message from Manjiri.
‘The section on the bra is for them,’ I replied, while looking at my Facebook newsfeed cheering the students of Kamla Nehru College for hanging bras on the walls of Delhi’s Shri Ram Centre while protesting against their disqualification in a theatre fest for having used the words ‘bra’ and ‘panty’ in their play, Shahira Ke Naam.
As we read through poems, essays and artwork, we were cheered by the fact that our contributors had seen the bra as we’d hoped they would — without its baggage of expectations, historical and cultural, and the titillation that brings middle-spreads in glossies alive in the sweaty dark. The Bra as Ordinary Object. Or, This is Not a Bra. They might as well have turned their attention to a pair of slippers. And so we bring to you poems by Maryam Ala Amjadi and Arjun Rajendran, a poem in translation by Rira Abbasi, a photo essay by Meherin Roshanara, and artwork by Maryam Izadifard.
This, of course, is part of our special issue on the ‘body’. This, too, was play. When we were discussing the title and decided on, simply, the ‘Body’, I couldn’t help being self-conscious — ‘The Body’ had been a phrase used to describe a female model, it was dressed to be a compliment. It made us slightly self-conscious, that we were using the word for a category that we wanted to demystify. We were also embarrassed that the ‘Body’ excluded the non-human (we didn’t receive a single submission that would’ve challenged this lazy acceptance of the category). At Antiserious our aim has always been to reverse the readymade gaze, neither the head-on nor even the sideways glance but perhaps the upside-down. In this issue — delayed by the bodies of its editors — we bring to you poems by Annie Zaidi and Gaurav Deka, fiction by Himanjali Sankar, Salil Chaturvedi, Tomas Sanchez Hidalgo, and Madhubanti Mukherjee, and a visual poetry series by Devashish Makhija, a way of looking at the body as if we were walking on our heads, literally and figuratively.
Sumana Roy
co-founder and editor,
Antiserious
Contents
Fiction
Poetry
Poem in Translation
Graphic Poems
Photo Essay
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