Don Share: This is the Poetry magazine podcast. I’m Don Share, editor of Poetry magazine.

Lindsay Garbutt: And I’m Lindsay Garbutt, managing editor.

Don Share: We hope you’re doing as well as can be wherever you are. Lindsay and I are recording from our new makeshift recording studios.

Lindsay Garbutt: In other words, from our homes. This week we spoke with Tishani Doshi about her poem, “They Killed Cows, I Killed Them.”

Don Share: The poem began when Doshi saw an undercover video shot by a New Delhi-based news organization of a man bragging after he murdered a local meat trader.

Tishani Doshi: We’ve been, in India, going through several movements of violence, and this cow vigilantism, these incidents, were troubling to me because, I mean, one was the violence and the fact that here you have people who are turning upon men because of suspicions that they either have beef in their home or that they trade in cattle, but the other was the fact that because of technology they were recording these killings and that these things were being circulated.

Don Share: Doshi says that in this circulation, the violence becomes multiplied. She believes poetry can convert at least some of the anguish in the world into something that can be grappled with.

Tishani Doshi: I really believe in reclamation as something that poetry can do. Every poem in that sense is trying to reclaim something and here it would be thinking about the lives of Qasim Qureshi, a meat trader who was 45 years old, Tabrez Ansari who was tied to a pole and accused of being a thief and beaten to death with sticks and forced to chant "Jai Shri Ram." I mean when we’re talking about language, this chant of "Jai Shri Ram" is actually, you know, was a devout greeting that Hindus would use and it has now become a battle cry for right wing fundamentalists. There’s so many things about language that I think I’m trying to do in this poem.

Lindsay Garbutt: Here’s Tishani Doshi reading “They Killed Cows, I Killed Them.”

Tishani Doshi:

In the future we might all be vegetarian,
and this life will seem barbaric the way
a corset was or eugenics. We might look
at this man being secretly recorded, bragging,
They killed cows, I killed them, and wonder,
where was his mother? She might have spoken
of his childhood, how it was poor but decent,
how like that blue god’s mother she too gaped
into her son’s wide gob and saw the universe
once. Or she might have told the story of how
he was led astray by a band of men in uniforms.
Not brownshirts but pleated brownshorts
in which they practiced ideological calisthenics.
How she’s been standing at the crater’s edge
saying, Here, kitty kitty kitty, ever since.

Because this man, her son in the undershirt,
dear cadre, cow vigilante, he’s no gladiolus.
He sighs. Even his mustache is pusillanimous.
Maybe he was a Romeo in school. Maybe
he wields this stick to reclaim what he misses
most about his body, or maybe it’s always been
his dream to squeeze the messy limbs of this country
into a svelte operatic shriek. The camera gives us
a glimpse of his chin dumpling. He will go to jail
a thousand times without passing go, without
stopping to plant a tree or collect clean underwear.
He admits it was wrong to allow his boys to record
the killing. Jai Shri Ram. Silly to leave evidence
behind, even though they always go free,
even though the young lads enjoy it so.

And Qasim? The man they killed,
the green meadow of his life come to this,
didn’t his mother also once confuse the dirt
in his mouth for a galaxy? Didn’t he believe
a dying man had the right to ask for water?
In the future when people complain about how Gandhi
should have made a comeback, when comparisons
are drawn between YouTube and the Upanishads,
will they notice the bystanders in the frame,
their shabby shoes shuffling like lapwings
around the bloody censored blur of Qasim’s body?
Will they speak of the difficulty of watching him
thrash around for an invisible rope to steady
him home, the difficulty of us watching them
watching him being killed?

Or is that an illusion too? The way a magician
might swirl his cape to reveal his assistant
is really a robot. No damage done here, folks!
The way we enter the rooms of our past
like gunshots to say, Surprise, I’m still here.
No point carrying blossoms in your pocket
instead of a meat sandwich. Because even if
you did not walk the earth exultantly, even if
you avoided disposable plates and mourned
every glacier and strung a lattice of pearls
to the giant monument of love, there might still
come a day when you are hauling refrigerators
on a truck, or taking the children to a fair,
and when death arrives you must let him
strap you to a telephone pole, you must look
into his ten-headed face, and say,  Flay, brother, flay.

Don Share: There’s a really eerie link here between technology and a kind of ecology, an ecology in which religious beliefs and practices are so vitally important. And I was trying to think about what that link was. And what the link is for me in this poem is the language of the poem. It’s a gorgeous poem and it’s talking about very hard things and it’s, of course, it’s not American English, it’s a kind of English that bridges all these subjects and kind of brings them together with a kind of dignity, but also energy and panache, that it’s just endlessly striking. It seems to me also that her use of sentences as units, just sort of the gorgeous rhythms of these, as anguished as the poem is, you know, “the camera gives us / a glimpse of his chin dumpling. He will go to jail / a thousand times without passing go,” and so on. This kind of sinuousness of the poem and the sounds in it are a sign of its great strength and dignity and seriousness of purpose. So, it is a striking poem, but to my mind it’s also an, an unusual poem. The way that it sort of forces you to think through things in the unit of a line or phrase in a poem. It’s something that Yeats I think was the greatest master of, and, and this poem reminds me of some of Yeats’s poems, both in that way that its constructed, but also its intense political and cultural purposes and its humanity.

Lindsay Garbutt: I really was thinking about the same things you were Don, about the beauty of the sentences and lines here. But also, I love the use of stanzas in this poem too, because they’re so complete, each one, and yet they build on each other in such a beautiful way. And so, the fact that this first stanza is very future oriented, it’s about how these sort of scenes might be viewed in the future if we are all indeed vegetarian, and the way this life might look barbaric. But it also looks backward to think about how the mother might have raised this man and about how she might’ve seen him and so this both forward- and backward-looking glance sort of swirls throughout this poem. In the third stanza, it takes the form of all these different questions, but what I really kept being drawn to was this repetition of the “you must” at the end of the poem and having a” you must” to tie up the end of course reminds me of Rilke and “you must change your life,” only here the must refers to how someone accepts their death or has to face their death. And to think about this poem in comparison to Rilke’s is to see, you know, that poet was looking at a sculpture and this poet is looking at a video on YouTube. It’s as you were saying Don, a sort of updated medium or an updated technology that is providing for this experience in this poem.

Don Share: I love thinking about Rilke here, too because of the questions in the poem; Yeats was a good question poet, too. Those are poets who put questions into their poems as well as kind of demands on readers. But the questions here, you know, “the man, they killed, / the green meadow of his life come to this, / didn’t his mother also once confuse the dirt / in his mouth for a galaxy? Didn’t he believe / a dying man had the right to ask for water?” The questions that are raised and are many in this poem are kind of unanswerable except by the idea that you’ve described that Rilke had that, you know, have to change your life. That what you see and what can be thought has to lead to action. It can’t just be that you are a spectator, like you would be on YouTube. You know, you have to think something. And that the models we have for coping with so much that we’re subjected to and so much violence is to make the future possible. If that can be by looking at something not in the way that you look at sort of a viral video, but looking at it with all the sort of senses and faculties and capabilities of thinking that you, that you can have that beginning of the poem, you know, wondering where this man’s mother was. These are all both questions that poetry raises, but they’re also ethical questions and they’re the kinds of things that people don’t slow down long enough to think about. And if you don’t slow down long enough to think about what’s happening in the present, the future isn’t going to be possible except as a shambolic violent wasteland.

Lindsay Garbutt: Yeah. I love how in that stanza with the questions that you were talking about, Don, she writes, “when comparisons / are drawn between YouTube and Upanishads, / will they notice the bystanders in the frame,” and it goes on to think more about this watching that we do, both the watching that is visible within the video itself, and then the watching that we do as watchers of the video of the bystanders within the video. It’s sort of this endless consideration of what role we play just by being observers and how, as you were saying, can we take action and think more deeply about what it means to view something and what it means to be living in the world at this moment with knowledge of these things that are happening? What, what more must you do?

Don Share: Yeah. Being confronted with these questions of who is watching the watchers and having to remind yourself that you have to ask what is an illusion and what we see and what we think we see can, are…these are all questions that can only be resolved in the heart and in the mind.

Tishani Doshi:

No damage done here, folks!
The way we enter the rooms of our past
like gunshots to say, Surprise, I’m still here.

[Music]

Don Share: Tishani Doshi is a poet, novelist, and dancer. Her most recent books are the novel Small Days and Nights from W.W. Norton and the poetry collection Girls Are Coming Out of the Woods from Copper Canyon Press.

Lindsay Garbutt: You can read “They Killed Cows. I Killed Them.” in the April 2020 issue of Poetry magazine or online at poetrymagazine.org.

Don Share: If you’re not yet a subscriber to the magazine, and you really should be one, for a limited time we’re offering podcast listeners a special rate of 20 dollars. That’s 20 dollars for a full year of the freshest voices in contemporary poetry featured in 11 book-length issues as well as free digital access on our mobile app. Visit poetrymagazine.org/podcastoffer to subscribe. That’s poetrymagazine.org/podcastoffer.

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Don Share: We’ll have another episode for you next week. Or you can get all April episodes all at once in the full length podcast on SoundCloud. The podcast is also now available on Spotify.

Lindsay Garbutt: The Poetry magazine podcast is produced by Rachel James. The theme music comes from the Claudia Quintet. I’m Lindsay Garbutt.

Don Share: And I’m Don Share, thanks for listening