Ill

By Ishita Suri

Artist Statement: Ill was written after a long day, full of little inconveniences which moved me to tears. Crying has always been meditative for me; it allows me to grieve both the big and little. Yet, tears are weaponized against women and feminine peoples as symptoms of “weakness,” of illness. This poem suggests the opposite — our tears tie us to our pasts, to our presents, to each other, and to ourselves — giving us power. They are an intentional slowing down, a pause from the capitalist “grind,” providing space to feel and produce the very poetry that connects us to our feminine kin, their stories, and their knowledge. This piece opens with an audio recording of my grandmother reciting a poem to me about the creation and fickleness of the universe, an example of how poetic knowledge is passed down between mothers and daughters.

     Crying is a beautiful practice of remembrance and collectivism, and thus, a radical poetics.

     I would like to thank AM Weatherford, Elora Hancock, Samantha Bachour, and Andrew Shaw for their support in this project.

Author-Provided Translation:

This universe, a bundle of paper
Blow a draft, it will fly away

This universe, a bale of hay
Light a fire, it will burn

This universe, a clod of soil
A droplet of water, it will melt

So, my dear, this life is precious. If we commit bad karma now, who knows what we will end up as in our next one? If we do good karma, God may give us a good rebirth.

If this poem is labour, then I am on strike. My hands are ill. Too ill to write.

    For hundreds of years they hadn’t a moment to rest — and so, they remember everything. How to write a poem, how to wash dishes, how to grind wheat inside the चलतीचक्की, the ever-churning mill of life.

    I know Kabir cried because of them. I know Kabir cried for them.

    But then… he cried for all of us. He cried for my grandmother, who, caked in the dirt from her fields to where her complexion was of the Earth, showed me her own bloodied, cracked hands and said, “girl, you best work your mind because your hands are too soft to be bloodied.” He cried for my mother, whose father spoiled her (his youngest)… told her she doesn’t have to work for neither man nor employer… but now she does both the dishes and the 9-to-5. And combined, they cried for me, because they knew it is bad karma to be born a woman, to be born diseased. That the labour of existing in the world is hardest when it takes the female form.

    And like them, I cry. I cry in the shower at the end of a long day because I can hear an inner voice reminding me to slow down… “pay attention to your symptoms.” But like an alarm clock ringing into perpetuity… I hit snooze, eternally. I cry because my father almost named me Simran — remembrance of God, of self — cruelly ironic in an economy where the sacred is supplanted by the mechanical, the divine by the disenchanted. I cry because Bulleh Shah, too, wanted to know himself beyond his work as a sheepherder.

    बुल्ला की जाणां मैं कौंण ?

    I cry because I’ve been born into a world of illness, but I’ve been given the poetry of mothers and grandmothers and mystics to help me survive. I cry because I’ve been ill for 19 long years… and 45 years before that… and 76 years before that… and hundreds of fucking years before that… since the creation of cartesian time. I cry because I am unprofessional. I cry because I am PMSing, because I am hormonal, because I’m crazy. I cry because those before me have cried. I cry because it’s tradition. Memory. Medicine.

    If this poem is labour, then I am on strike. My hands are ill, too ill to write.

    But you needn’t worry about me, for I can still cry. Passed down for hundreds of years, my tears have written poetry, they’ve washed dishes, they’ve survived. So next time I break down, next time I’m not fine… Next time I have fever and you see me cry… please give me grace, give me space, give me time… because the tears that I shed are never just mine.