POET PROFILE: RADHA GOMATY

Biography:

Born in 1968 in Kochi, Kerala, India, Radha Gomaty attended the Foundation Program at NID, Ahmedabad, and then went on to do her BA in Fine Arts – (Painting ) from Faculty of Fine Arts at MS University, Baroda, while involving herself with the Indian Radical Sculptors & Painters Association in her final year there. Taking periodic breaks from academia to work on various pursuits and diverse occupations, Radha completed a postgraduate course in History of Art from Viswabharathi University, Santhiniketan, and later briefly did research in Aesthetics in preparation for a Ph.D. which she later abandoned. Radha was a voluntary coordinator of Anmpe Media Trust during which time she scripted and was involved in the post-production work of the internationally acclaimed documentary "The 18th Elephant-3 Monologues" besides intensive outreach educational work with children & youth on ecological issues. Radha, also a poet, works in a range of media, including video, painting, and sculpture. In a mix of natural and other material, most of her art is layered and conceptual – mythic in nature and classical in approach. Her poetry has been published in two collections and she has exhibited in solo and group shows throughout India. Two of her works are in the permanent collection of the Museum of Sacred Art in Brussels, Belgium. Today Radha heads 'SlingIt!’ in collaboration with a small rural women's unit that upcycles lovely bags from tailoring waste. She works on Art & Creative Thinking Outreach Sessions as curator & coordinator of EkaRasa in collaboration with Sparcs Studio & writes for Lumiere Organic Home Store. 

Radha Gomaty

Poems:

Untitled by Anindita Chakraborty

Chiding the Poet

 

Beloved

It is absurd

This attempt to love me

With only words

Letting the Birds of sorrow

Circling your head

Weave their thorny yearnings

Into my nest

In which they lay and hatch and grow

Their dismal flightless fledgling woes

Darkening my skies

With their plaintive cries

The deepening trail of sad echoes…

 

These skies are filled with your hungry Birds

that strip to shreds this flushing skin

…Listen,

I want to know the warm scent of your hands

Not these words that smell

of printing ink…

Untitled  by Anindita Chakraborty

Sign -A Disenchanted Narrative.

 

“An angel passed by

 

Gently stirring

 

the sad air with her wings...

 

A long- fingered brush of benediction

 

upon his sleeping head

 

A moist impress of lips upon his dreaming eyes

 

shyly blooming forth

 

from the hidden crevices of her white angel’s heart

 

these dark lilies

 

of longing...” *

 

 

…He opened his eyes.

 

He was drunk.

 

  

Through the befuddled mists of the brain, he perceived a graceful, slender, unmistakably feminine form stooping gently by his bedside...  He opened his mouth to speak...

 

Entranced as if by a dark call the angel began to lose her wings...

 

 

“Come ...”

 

He seized her… “Come ...”

  

Upon her shoulders, unknown to him, her angel- wings began to shrink...    Atrophied at last to a barely discernible throbbing upon each shoulder, what remained of her wings lay upon the floor in a lifeless clump of iridescent dust mixed with the crushed, bruised, discoloured remnants of her staff of lilies... Benumbed till next morning, she sat by that little heap....

 

 As the wan light seeped into that sordid little room, she stirred enough to close her trembling slender angel-fingers around the handle of an old, worn, housewife’s broom...

 

From the vantage point of the bed, he watched, pleased, cupping the weight of his head upon a palm, the rhythmic movement of her shapely haunches as she swept feeling Desire slowly unfold, spreading its heady scent in his flesh...

 

“Come here.”

 

The broom dropped.

 

“Come here.”

 

Without looking at his face she was near the bed….

 

No one noticed the sob that broke its neck at the back of her throat...

 

…Or a shimmering insubstantial pile of dust disintegrating in a hot, arid desert wind that relentlessly breathed its irresistible decadence into every crevice of her now all -too- human wingless body....

 

“You know..?”

 

He stretched …. smiling …sated.

 

Sitting up now, lighting a cigarette:

 

“You know, last night I dreamt that you had wings?!”

He could not see her face.

 

Getting up, shaking his head, he laughed loudly.

 

Reaching for his towel, he struck her bottom lightly….

 

Not without a certain tenderness mingled with a touch of derision, he softly called out to her…

 

“Angel!”

 

Untitled  by Anindita Chakraborty

  

Mother [For Kali]

…So eschewing all my lesser loves

I married Her…

The fact that we are both Women

does not make me blush

For I know

that my betrothal to my mother

to her mother to her mother, all put together

is older than all of us…

…So I married Her

of powerful multitasking arms 

that reaches out to severe

a dominant mustachioed head

while the other unfailingly remembers to knead

the dinner’s simple dough

My Mother…

Her intelligent eyes smile with Love

even as they flash forth a restraining bolt

warning a beloved errant son about to burn

his hand  in a flaming stove

Mother

With Her swirling skirt of severed arms Her

Drunken laughing eyes Her

Sweetly lolling bloodied tongue Her

strange necklace of skulls

striking hollow sounds

like from the pair of bamboo rods

that the herdsman ties

round the necks of his favorite cows…

Nestling against the warm dark of Her body

Like a small bird sits resting

Rain-ruffled upon a bough

I hold on to My Mother

Soaking in Her

waters of Elemental Love…

The Lucent III by Anindita Chakraborty

A Beautiful Lie (Featured poem)

 

“Can you help me find the zipper to this dress I’m wearing, please?

If I could find it I would just unzip, take it off, leave it behind crumpled on the floor and simply vanish without a trace from this Earth…

You see…there is nothing here to hold me anymore.

I need at least one beautiful lie that I can live by…

That I can touch with my hands, taste with my tongue, smell with my nose, gaze at with my eyes to see me through this.

I’m also a beautiful lie.

Useful for the same purpose.

If anyone has a need for it for reasons that match, leave a note under the front door.

The mat that said “Welcome.” disappeared a while ago

And No.

I’m not being a drama queen.”

(Last Journal Entry)

……………………………

So she let herself into the office with her own set of keys and put up a notice on his board pinned up with florescent tacks.

It said:

“Urgent Vacancy!

A reasonably healthy female of variable physical and mental age urgently requires one beautiful lie to live by that can be touched, tasted, held, smelt and seen.

The advertiser is similarly a beautiful lie useful for the same purpose.
Looking for incumbents with more or less matching needs.

The job will require some physical traveling and plenty of nonphysical journeying alone and together.

Backpacker mentality with camping skills and capability to set up and take down pop-up homes, highly desirable.

Additionally, keeping& sharing a journal is part of the task list.

Attitude to turn water to wine and feed five hundred with one loaf of bread and a single fish combined with a very high pain threshold are highly appreciated traits.

No worries. Ample scope for developing and fine-tuning these traits will be made available on the job once selected.

For further queries and clarifications contact theblankpage@gmail.com
OR
serveyoursentence@gmail.com”

Carefully locking the door she felt the cold hard shape of the keys once more in the palm of her hand before leaving it quietly on top of the electric meter outside the door.

There was no one at the beach when she reached.

Her gaze flew to the point of the channel at the end of the stone pier where she once saw a young boy who had come to have a good time at the beach with his friends disappear into the grey swirling waters.

It had seemed so effortless. Even innocuous to say the least. She had stood watching then, stock-still.

Transfixed at the sight of this young boy suddenly go down below the surface come up again once only to disappear again.

Then all she saw was his outstretched hand, palm open once, fingers splayed. And then he disappeared … without a trace as people looked on in disbelief.
The minutes ticked past .Nothing happened at all.

The water just bobbed, its cold greyness aswirl where his hand once was raised like a flag, a last outpost …

For a moment, something disturbed her attention and she turned around in the direction of the tug of some invisible line.

A fairly well dressed man with a fleshy face and thick lips was hanging around slinking behind the remnants of a wall. He stared fixedly at her with expressionless eyes and without pausing once unhurriedly, he unzipped his fly.

Then he began to masturbate; slowly at first and then with a steadily increasing pace without once taking his eyes off her.

She looked back at him fixedly jaw clenched without batting an eyelid feeling a rush of blood briefly go to her head as she did .The brilliant noonday sun briefly was covered with dancing silver spots that slowly subsided.

She refused to withdraw her gaze and began to slowly walk backward on the stone pathway that led a 100 odd feet to the turbulent water at the point of the channel where it met the sea.

She walked backwards in slow deliberate steps down the rock pier without once taking her eyes off as he continued his increasingly frenetic movements

The sea rocking like a cradle threw splinters of blinding light into the brittle salt air glinting like mirror shards.

Now the man was just a form about a foot or so tall in her field of vision. A foot high dwarf making some sort of indistinct rabidly unreadably absurd rhythmic movement

The spot on the grey water where the water wrinkled, where the hand splayed outwards and sank, swirled just behind her.
But now she had eyes in the back of her head. The sun was so bright that all was nearly white.

At that moment, she turned …

The grey was cool.
So shockingly deliciously cool. The salt stung her lashes and she smiled .Or did she?
The blob at the distant had stopped bobbing up and down.
That was the last thing she saw as she rolled her eyes upwards at the sky, at the noonday sun that spun like a mirrored plate, an oscillating disc…

The waters dimpled once where a hand was once raised.
The grey lid closed shut the wake her body left.

 

Untitled by Anindita Chakraborty

The Ant’s Soliloquy on what possibly sustains Antkind

I am an Ant in the unfolding Apocalypse.

Just an Ant

that is sensitive to the gusts of the heat from the towering pyramids of flame;

That understands that by itself an Ant isn’t anything much to write home about.

True.

Smallness helps.

For eg: I can escape into a tiny floor crack when a heavy hobnailed boot approaches.

If provoked, I can annoy and escape, possibly, undetected.

Yet alone, I have my limitations.

So every Ant like me waves their antenna in the air to catch matching pheromones.

We resist, even if with difficulty, the terror attacks of pheromone jammers and find our kind…

We bond with one another with a brief antenna lock.

And then, without wasting a moment, we get to work immediately.

With conjoined bodies and communal goals, we form incessant supply chains.

We build formidable bridges across chasms so that other Ant people can cross over safely.

Together we can even survive drowning by our special cluster formations turning any floating scrap into a boat.

We know that the secrets to Sustainability in Ant Life are dedicated teamwork and on-the-feet, never-say-die innovation.

We catch the big picture by synthesizing the various views caught by the multiple lenses in our compound eyes. And more the eyes, more accurate the picture.

Antness, in its Smallness, thrives on Big wisdom

I, the ‘ANT, know that I exist because I am plural in my essence.

In that knowing lies how we could possibly survive the unfolding apocalypse.

Radha Gomaty is paired with Anindita Chakraborty, visit Anindita Chakraborty to read about her.

Poet Statement:

IGNITE's Curator, Deepa Gopal has put my writing on a blind date with visual artist Anindita Chakraborty's images. Neither of us have ever met …Just two universes meeting ...not by choice... not by chance...A white ghost- like flickering in virtual space. 

There is all the nervousness and trepidation of meeting the blind date for the first time. You are eager to respond. You sometimes talk nineteen to a dozen with voices overlapping. You are anxious, looking for that Breakthrough point in the conversation that suddenly opens out for both of you to an intersection zone of common concerns. Like the overlapping Venn Diagrams in Middle School Math, that no one told us resembles the ancient vesica piscis fertility symbol. I struggle to match five poems I've at hand with five of her drawings - the delicately etched intensity of presence of a single female Protagonist… 

Chiding the Poet that speaks in the voice of Female Desire- passionate, playful & powerful, to an unseen anemic male poet who can write on Love but cannot act on its ardor, connected swiftly to Anindita’s woman with the snake coiled tightly into her hair. In me, it reopened the universes of 'Nagamandala' and a Hindi film 'Pardesi' where Preity Zinta consummately plays the role of an expat working class wife sent to Canada in a loveless arranged marriage whose mind slowly slips from the callousness of her daily life inwards into a mythopoeic. 

Ants Soliloquy spoke earnestly and with affirmation addressing the aloneness reflected in Anindita's protagonist's fine boned sombre face enframed by loose strands of hair upon which the ants are quietly climbing... 

A female face lying with eyes closed called out to that final moment in A Beautiful Lie where the protagonist struggling with loneliness, her own vulnerability and brittleness ends her life by disappearing into her favorite element, Water. 

Anindita's protagonist has wings upon her feet. Mercurial. Her dream of winged feet is still full of hope, even if of a grounded woman. Unlike the protagonist of Signs - A Disenchanted Narrative, who caught in a brief trap, loses her wings forever. 

Kali (to my Mother) was a surprise connect that, though frankly came out of desperation, made sense later where "She of the powerful multitasking arms" easily morphed into the form of Anindita's centipede-spined protagonist whose straight back faces the viewer. 

Kali: Saturated Ecstasy /Fearsome Energy /Fearlessness of Extremes. 

What better qualities to survive the peculiar perils of these times?

You can reach Radha Gomaty at:

Blog: Radha Gomaty

Facebook: Sparcsstudio

Art & Poem

Vision & Concept by Deepa Gopal

Video by Anoushka Sunil

Intro clip and thumbnail- Vibhin P C

Introduction video

Video edit by Anoushka Sunil

Intro clip and thumbnail- Vibhin P C

CURATOR'S TIDBITS:

Anindita Chakraborty and Radha Gomaty are intense souls. I have scarcely met them in person except perhaps twice, briefly but their works have left an indelible after thought on me. Their works deal with the self, layered with what is happening around them. I met Anindita during 2016 Kochi Muziris Biennale, silent and observant, she has a charming aura about her and it certainly reflects in her works particularly her self-portraits. Her works were entirely different to what it is now. She has moved on to a different practice from where I first saw her, she’s ever evolving. I have been following Radha Gomaty’s works for quite some time too. I am enchanted by her paintings, performances and her poetry and the person she is. They take you to a different realm of experience. I keep going back to her “The Drift” floating on the Ganges with the lapping water as the background, it was/is intensely surreal! For Ignite, I requested her to be one of the poets as I wanted my audience to feel the ebb and flow of her words, she is also a renowned artist. Both their works are autobiographical and do overlap quite well and it’s interesting to see how it gels.