I Speak up Bluntly

Sukirtharani
• Sukirtharani is a prominent Dalit poet in Tamil, an active feminist and social
activist. She hails from Dalit community. Her past life taught her the
discrimination prevailing in the society.

• Her upbringing was in the caste whose occupation was to take away the dead
animals belonging to the upper caste people, bury and burn them for payment
in rice, this is explored in a few poems, including I speak up bluntly.

• Through her poems, she has taken up the cause of the caste system and the
plight of women who are oppressed by it.
• She picturises her personal experience and the treatment meted out to
Dalits. She is afraid to reveal her father profession to school mates. She
states in the same poem,

When I saw my father in the street

the leather drum slung from his neck,
I turned my face away
and passed him by.
Writing in twenty first century about the subaltern experience, Sukirtharani makes the reader
think of the humanity in this much-informed-world. In “A faint smell of meat”, she writes:

In their minds
I, who smell faintly of meat,
My house where bones hang
Stripped entirely of flesh,
And my street
Where young men wander without restraint
Making loud music
From coconut shells strung with skin
Are all ‘at the furthest point of our town’.
But I, I keep assuring them
We stand at the forefront.”
 The Poem
• The poem deals with issues of caste discrimination and subalternity. It is
evident that subalterns in distant rural places do not have access to many
privileges and therefore they are subjugated by upper caste and by the
elite of their own caste.

• The poem depicts the humiliation and shame that she experiences as dalit.
The oppression and suppression of has not lose her spirit from writing
against society evils, and at the end of the poem, she emphatically says
that “I speak up bluntly: I am a Paraichi.”

• In ‘I speak up bluntly’, speaker reveals her trouble in identifying with her

community and caste. The shame the speaker felt in association with caste
turns into a radical acceptance of it in the end.
 The Poem
• Like many other Dalit poetry, this poem is an embodied aesthetic of suffering, and
is firmly close to the material realities of caste oppression, of humiliation. The
poem can also be read as social document that map suffering, victims’ lives and
pain .
• Though written as an individual’s account, the poem forces us to move beyond a
simple referencing of historical events in the life of a Dalit to ‘bearing witness’ to
deeper social conditions.

• The poem also demonstrates, how the poetry moves from being a mere chronicle
of bodily trauma to a careful subtext of symbolic, unspeakable or barely visible
conditions beneath.
• Sukirtharani opens the poem with the description of the job and the other
humiliations associated with being a dalit: “Stood for hours, waiting to eat the
town’s leavings.”
 The Poem
• The poem also conveys the material and corporal harshness of everyday
Dalit lives, and captures the deep psychological suffering inherent in it:
“The teacher hit me. Friendless, I sat alone on the back bench, weeping,
though no one knew.” She reveals her despair in the form of the mute
language of tears, something, she says, remains invisible. The grief is
produced due to the beating which itself may be traced to caste-based
discrimination faced by the girl: “I sat alone on the back bench, weeping”.
 The Poem
• In another poem, ‘Untitled Poem—II’ , which shares similar
thematic concerns, the lower-caste girl recounts how she guarded a
carcass and brags about what she ate—leftover rice ‘gathered as
alms... turned piping hot’—but she could not escape the ‘teacher’s
cane’ (Sukirtharani, 2011). She says, “I broke down and cried My
grief invisible to the world’s gaze.” The humiliation that is not (only)
about corporeal pain but also the transcendental condition of
constant humiliation.

• But, the poem “I Speak up Bluntly” does not end with the despair,
rather it’s a journey from humiliation to assertion of pride, a poem
of self-discovery and the expression of it. After recounting several
instances of humiliation, Sukirtharani ends her poem ‘I speak up
bluntly’ with an emphatic declaration: But now/If anyone asks me/I
speak up bluntly:/I am a Paraichi.
I, Too BY LANGSTON HUGHES
I, too, sing America. Besides,
They’ll see how beautiful I am
I am the darker brother. And be ashamed—
They send me to eat in the kitchen
When company comes, I, too, am America.
But I laugh,
And eat well,
And grow strong.

Tomorrow,
I’ll be at the table
When company comes.
Nobody’ll dare
Say to me,
“Eat in the kitchen,”
Then.