Kanika Ahuja - Self Reflective Essay, Ways of Reading

“So no matter that I have inhibitions to fill all my pockets, I keep trying, hoping that one day I’ll write a poem I can be proud to let sit in a museum exhibit as the only proof I existed.”
- Sarah Kay, “Hiroshima”

I walked into this course a poet, a jack of one trade, master of none, with a rather grave realisation of the possession of a skill having already been taken for granted without being honed and harnessed. My motives for opting for a course like “Ways of Reading” were twofold – to become a better poet on one hand and a better and more appreciative audience for fiction, nonfiction and graphic narratives on the other, all the while understanding, or attempting to, the tricks and techniques behind identifying the “way” each artist works towards finding and employing the best possible literary styles and devices to compliment their content. “Ways of Reading” as a course has been holistic and intensive, making me channel my observations and analyses of poems and writings in class into my own work, and, as a result thereof, watching these very observations impact my style of writing.

The greatest learning that I will take back from “Ways of Reading” is how the course has taught me to belong in my own poems, to find ways to go beyond myself and also trace my lineage and ancestry in between verses, and to let the poem rest on the very foundations that I call home. The strength in the words of poets like Agha Shahid Ali, Alice Yusouf, and Mahmoud Darwish, among others, is what I intend to hold on to the most from this course as I work towards discovering a voice that both embodies and empowers my understanding and acceptance of the self rather than focussing on an avoidance of a possibility of co-opting, or taking up perspectives that do not belong to me. This celebration of the self has to an extent transformed my way of writing poetry, something which I found in the poems that were inspired by my niece and my grandmother.

This course, with its equal amount of value bestowed upon each of the four types of narratives it explored, carried within itself a large amount of respect for each of the varied styles of writing, something that only increased exponentially as the intricacies of each writing style were unfolded. It is this respect for narratives that I have come to understand better and actually love, from a place of complete ignorance as in the case of graphic novels, is something that I value deeply and it is this respect and value that has made me equally capable of enjoying more varieties of writing styles as a reader and also finally given me the courage to finally experiment with a genre like creative nonfiction.

A highlight for me was the focus on the process rather than the end product. By analysing the literary devices, stylistic techniques and methods that went behind creating different works of art, this course helped create a much needed yet often overlooked respect for the writer through the process of the writing rather than through an analysis of the final piece. This was something that came out especially during Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things, a novel I had a chance to analyse through two very different approaches in two different papers within the same semester. Roy’s brilliance of keeping the readers involved and hooked long after that plot has unfolded demands a respect for her sheer brilliance in engaging the readers in stylistics that go beyond the plot, something I had never quite considered.

All in all, “Ways of Reading” as a course broadened my horizons vastly, to say the least. It made me focus on how works of art come to life, emphasising on their creation rather than on their reception. It also made me question my areas of too much comfort within the realm of poetry, and recognise y need to push the boundaries, especially through Aditi Rao’s workshop, wherein I realised that most of my favourite metaphors were long dead and waiting to be reworked and revived. To say the course has made me a better reader would be far more apt than to say that it has made me a better poet, but it has most definitely made me more aware of what I write and how I write it, equipping me also with the tools to push beyond my current ways of writing, something I very keenly look forward to practicing.