Feminist poet Usha Akella’s book ‘I Will Not Bear You Sons’ is a scathing indictment of patriarchy

I will abort every male fetus I bear,

I will live to ensure there are no more sons,

I will live to see your bloodline cross over

with you to the other side,

now the blessing from your lips is your execution.

Usha Akella, I Will Not Bear You Sons (Spinifex Press, 2021) – an excerpt

Her new poems aim to strike at the root of ancient patriarchal systems that see the girl child as a burden on families. The title poem, which runs into many pages (excerpted above), describes a typical family scene in India where the daughter-in-law is constantly under pressure to bear sons, until her rage erupts. The sex ratio in India fell from 940 females for 1,000 males in 2011 to 900 females to 1,000 males in 2015, mostly due to illegal sex-selective abortions.

“Female foeticide is undoubtedly, a terrible evil born from a mix of different factors dehumanising the female sex and wrongly assuming that the female sex is non-contributive. Women among the less economic advantaged classes are many times the primary earners. So, the mindset is social,” says Akella, who earned her master of studies (MSt) in creative writing from the University of Cambridge, UK. She is currently based in Austin, Texas, and is the mother of a 19-year-old daughter.

Reading Keats in grade four sparked Usha’s love for poetry. “It was that defining moment when I heard language as – magic! I went back home and tried my hand at my first poem. Many years of bad poems followed till I had my first formal guidance with Kendra Kopelke at the University of Baltimore in 1994,” she says of the beginnings of her journey as a poet.

The draw towards feminist issues was a kind of inner calling for Akella. She explains: “I realised that poetry was a powerful tool to use to express issues that bothered me deeply – feminist and other social issues. I believe a poet cannot lie to the blank page; she has to write about what she knows, what resonates, and what is heartfelt. Women’s issues move me deeply and I understood early I had to tell my story and others’ stories to begin a process of empowerment and healing. Articulation is imperative as a step for freeing oneself.”

Akella’s last poetry book, The Waiting, published by Sahitya Akademi in 2019, was translated in Spanish by Elsa Cross. She was twice selected as a creative ambassador for the City of Austin, and her work has been included in The Harper Collins Book of English Poetry.

She is also the founder of the Poetry Caravan in New York and Austin, which takes poetry readings to the disadvantaged in women’s shelters, senior homes and hospitals. The City of Austin has notified January 7 as Poetry Caravan Day.

Akella believes feminist poetry is a much-needed category. “It articulates many issues that need to be heard, which in turn influence poetics like establishing the validity of feminist themes as subject matter for poetry. Women’s themes are not less important than war and politics – a commonly held perception,” she says.

Ukella refers to a poem in the new book, titled 'Harmony', in which a wife goes to great extremes to create meals for her husband who assumes her servility is his right. “The poem emphasises the domestic space as the political space – there really is no division,” she says.

It opens with these lines:

Her cooking is the honeycomb

that keeps him succulent.

He is seated, King Kong, at the head of the table,

she is unseen, in the kitchen,

sanctified by self-sacrificing labor

Usha Akella, ‘Harmony’, I Will Not Bear You Sons (Spinifex Press, 2021) – an excerpt

In fact, the relationship described as the poem progresses appears more akin to slavery than marriage. But Akella clarifies, “No work is slavery when it is a choice, including homemaking. The point is choice. A woman has every right to choose to be a homemaker alone if that is her calling and fulfills her identity.”

She further gives a context: “Living in the US forces us to do a large amount of housework unlike in India where domestic help is affordable. So having lived here, I don’t find housework dehumanising. Tiring and tedious, perhaps, but not dehumanising. It becomes so if it wielded as a tool to subjugate and demoralise. In the poem, we see an example of role-playing internalised, played out and perpetrated.”

An admirer of feminist poets Kamala Das, Meena Kandasamy, Pramila Venkateswaran, Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath and Sharon Olds, Akella has been published in numerous literary journals and has been invited to prestigious international poetry festivals around the world.

She finds the paradox of gender inequality in India “bewildering”. While we have a plethora of goddesses, women are treated terribly in real life, subject to blatant misogyny, gender violence, religious extremism and rapes.

“I think the solution is very complex as the issue is complex and has to be addressed by the media, cinema, advertising, in the classroom and family – in society, overall,” she says, adding, “Men and boys need educating; too often the already converted are the recipients of social-change directives. How can we reach those who need converting? How do women undo brainwashing?”

There is also the question of religion-sanctioned sexism and misogyny. “Many feminist scholars such as Eleanor Gadon and Neela Saxena have worked intensively on the relationship of underlying religious structures to their social manifestations and expression. The absence of a she-God in the Abrahamic religions has resulted in certain distortions of the feminine. Likewise, we have deep-rooted myths and ideologies driving Hindu ideals of womanhood,” says Akella, who read with a group of eminent South Asian Diaspora poets at the House of Lords in June 2016.

Her initiative Matwaala, co-directed with Pramila Venkateswaran, was born in 2015 from the perceived need to increase the visibility of South Asian diaspora poets in the mainstream.

“This year and next,” she says, “our festival is a series of readings with poets of colour: African American, Native American, South/Central, Mexican, Dalit and Asian American. We recognise the need to express solidarity with these groups of poets due to the commonality of issues faced, and we hope to influence the canon and try to have more South Asians recognised. At least, that is the direction of the work we do.”

First published in eShe magazine