A Manual for Memory: The Poetry of Meena Kandasamy
Meena Kandasamy’s collection Tomorrow Someone Will Arrest You is poetry as resistance literature, where aesthetic beauty and political activism merge to challenge a nation’s conscience.
We live in a world that has invented terms, language, and entire philosophies to justify (or at least, assuage) the guilt of looking away. We look away in the name of protecting (or isolating) the personal from the political. Compartmentalization. Therapeutic detachment. Curated neutrality.
Meena Kandasamy’s Tomorrow Someone Will Arrest You (Atlantic Books, 2023) blurs—or rather, torches down—those lines between the personal and the political, with each poem akin to watching the very tragedies and absurdities she writes about unfurl. The scene is macabre, fascinating, haunting, and impossible to ignore.
Here is poetry as resistance literature, where aesthetic beauty and political activism merge into something more altogether, something dangerous. There’s a cold, precise rage that runs through Kandasamy’s lines. Her words are a mirror to the oppressive regimes, to the bystanders and enablers, and to a country that increasingly becomes unrecognisable. They mirror a world that punishes dissent, criminalises empathy, and rewards silence. Her poems remind us that silence is complicity, surrender.
In one of the final poems, “We Are Not the Citizens”, she writes: “We are not the subjects of anyone(...) nobody’s citizens and nobody’s slaves.” (85) The line is equally a warning and a refusal to belong to a nation that doesn’t recognize your personhood, your identity. Through poetry, it imagines what lies beyond protest, in the space where belonging must be reimagined all over again.
Kandasamy may move easily across genres—novels, essays, polemics—but poetry is where her voice finds its rawest edge. Here, she is most exposed, most unrelenting, most sovereign. Tomorrow spans just under a hundred pages, yet it’s sprawling in scope, touching upon vast emotional and political terrains.
The collection is divided into five parts: “The Poet”, “Her Comrade”, “Her Lovers”, “Her Friends”, and “Her Country”, but the poems themselves sidestep any stable taxonomy. Categories are only temporary markers in a book that is, at heart, gloriously uncontainable. In doing so, Kandasamy frames herself as subject and object at once. The poet is both character and chorus, writing her own role even as the world writes one for her. This reflexive gesture, i.e., naming herself before others can, sets the tone for the entire book.
The poems in the first section, “The Poet”, are as much a definition of Kandasamy, the poet, as it is a commentary on the perception of the said poet in the world she inhabits. Recalling the familiar remarks on her caste and “merit”, of the exhausting reality of having to justify one’s very presence in spaces deemed “not for you,” she writes, in the poem “A Sapphic Scar”:
She said without saying in as many words that I was there
because I was low-caste, that I came from the margins,
that I was picked out because I was different,
that I served institutional purposes of diversity. (6)
Her words are a mirror to the oppressive regimes, to the bystanders and enablers, and to a country that increasingly becomes unrecognisable. They mirror a world that punishes dissent, criminalises empathy, and rewards silence. Her poems remind us that silence is complicity, surrender.
Through the counter-testimony, she refuses to be footnoted as the diversity hire. To be seen as denominational only feeds her resolve to outlast denomination itself. What is meant to reduce her becomes the ground from which she asserts her sovereignty.
Kandasamy’s poetry plays with both form and voice, aesthetics and argument, each interlacing against the other, creating rivulets and tributaries. For instance, a poem on the seven stages of love in Arabic is interposed over inter-caste honour killings in India, creating a calligram of seven. Even as the world falls apart, repressive institutions and practices throttle your very sense of being, there’s an undercurrent of a brush-shaped hope with which she paints the world around her: not the innocent dreams of sky blue, but the faded desires of carmine.
Because the calculus of resistance under authoritarianism always brings the question: How do you weigh hope against survival? How do you keep writing when language itself is policed? When the price of reading, resisting is a jail cell? Kandasamy evokes this sentiment in “A Poem on Not Writing Poems”: “when friends who planned to read Marx had prison cells waiting for them, so why risk, why run for dear life, why rage at all” (12).
And yet a different poem, “A Sapphic Scar”, contains the answer to her very own question. The poet stakes her claim to posterity, refusing to let others write her out of the narrative:
Being seen as denominational sets me alight,
makes me write word after word in rage,
leave behind this body of work,
o that someday, in another time,
someone else will read me and say:
she deserved her place. (8)
The refusal to write is paradoxically preserved through writing, a gesture that shows how authoritarianism can police speech but not the impulse to testify.
In the “Her Comrade” section, Kandasamy’s tone remains rebellious, or questioning, but the poems take a romantic turn, one that is unsure but assuring. In her hands, love is less a retreat from politics and more its sharpest expression. To insist on tenderness under surveillance is to assert that intimacy, too, belongs to the repertoire of dissent. The comrade is a lover but also a co-conspirator in the daily defiance of a world that would rather they both disappear.
The section is a conversation, or an urge, with her comrade and her partner, Cedric. “Love me now,” she writes in the poem titled “Were Time to Hold Us Prisoners”, “The torments, of being torn apart, can haunt us another day.” (26)
The section also houses the longest poem in the collection, “We Are Learning By Heart,” a meditation on the violence of language, the homogenization imposed by colonial legacies. When language is the vessel in which we carry our stories and our cultures, how much is split in the forced transfer into the foreign, English vessel? The question is raised, answered, and left open in the air. To love under authoritarianism is to stage a protest, to insist that time and desire belong to the living. The struggle to hold a partner closely mirrors the struggle to hold on to a native language: both intimate, both tormented by erasure.
Later, Kandasamy retells the story of Eurydice and Orpheus story laced with her personal experiences. In Greek mythology, Orpheus loses Eurydice forever by looking back too soon. In Kandasamy’s “Visa Gods”, this story becomes something darker, more personal, where the world she desires lies across the seas (and immigration policies): “In this story, Eurydice is dark & deadly & has lived all her life in Hades. In this story, Orpheus plays the drums (...) Here, Orpheus must leave. / Eurydice must follow.” (18).
There’s a smoky intimacy to the poems in the next section, “All Her Lovers,” which hums with desire, loss, misrecognition, and longing beyond labels. Like a familiar acquaintance, Kandasamy’s mother tongue Tamil peeks and probes, notably in “Written in Stone,” a poem shaped in the Tamil Sangam tradition that holds multiple perspectives in a single breath:
WHAT HER FATHER SAID TO HER
I love you, my difficult daughter.
I love that you love each other.
Hear me out for I’m an old man:
What will this world say?
Will you be able to face
all their stone-throwing? (39)
By representing love as something fleeting, unpromised, Kandasamy rewrites the heteronormative script. Love here goes beyond the soft-focus fantasy of permanence, wears the veil of urgency, a flame cupped against the winds of patriarchy and caste. To write it down is to let it burn.
The poem “Fire Walk With Me” feels like a continuation of Kandasamy’s last poetry collection, Ms Militancy (2010), written over a decade ago, with the poem imagining a conversation between Sita and Ravanan from the Ramayana: “Walk with me until it is time for my firewalk / Walk with me until it is time to walk away” (41). The fire walk becomes a metaphor for all the trials women endure to prove their worth. The conversation between captor and captive becomes a rumination on complicity and resistance.
And while the world prefers love stories dressed in permanence—marriage, children, stability—what about the momentary relationships, ones without the certainties of a forever ever after? “A Poet Goes in Search of a Side-Chick Song” sings to the “here and now” of love against the grain of heteronormative expectations, finding beauty in the temporary, of the “moments we gather in the palm of our hands.” (44)
If her love poems resist the straightjacket of permanence, her political poems resist the straightjacket of language itself. In “The Discreet Charm of Neoliberalism,” Kandasamy decries the appropriation of language and words, co-opted and spun until their very meaning dissolves. “How to spin about a spin master?– a question I want to ask, but do not.” (47)
The “Her Friends” section begins with the collection’s titular poem, written by Kandasamy in solidarity with her close friends, Jaison Cooper and Thushar Sarathy. In February 2015, police in Kerala raided the homes of Jaison, a state insurance department employee, and Thushar, a lawyer, booked under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA) for alleged Maoist links—charges based largely on the possession of political literature. Their arrests highlighted how easily books and dissenting speech could be treated as evidence of “terrorism.” Media trials began, initiating a witch hunt that’s been replicated all too often in the years to come. The poem is equal parts mourning and warning: “Tomorrow someone will arrest you, your partner, your children, your children’s children. Some measures are essential to keep a democracy alive.” (53)
The trajectory of the book enacts the very transformation it argues for with the private wound widening until it implicates the entire body politic. By the final section, the lyric “I” has dissolved into a collective “we,” an insistence that personal grief cannot be disentangled from social collapse.
This section presents Kandasamy at her unsparing best, anger emanating from every word. By chronicling arrests, witch hunts, and martyrs, she rejects the erasure that authoritarianism relies on. In the poem “They Are After Me”, she writes, “In the beginning, they went after you: a ban; a price on your head; shunning you from their coteries, their awards ceremonies” (57).
In January 2018, Dalit organisations gathered near Pune to commemorate the 200th anniversary of a historic battle commemorating the victory of Dalit soldiers. Violence broke out, and in the aftermath, the state arrested lawyers, poets, and activists in what is called the Bhima Koregaon case, including Sudha Bharadwaj and Anand Teltumbde, accusing them of Maoist conspiracy. Years later, many remain imprisoned without trial. Through this case, Kandasamy lays bare a system where the “Process=Punishment,” also the poem’s title, and “to silence these sloganeers, a case was slapped:
Tukde Tukde Gang x Terror
Anti-National x Urban Naxal
a staged spectacle, an eclipse shutting out all light,
myths peddled between commercial breaks,
a primetime media circus on loop. (64)
The trajectory of the book enacts the very transformation it argues for with the private wound widening until it implicates the entire body politic. By the final section, the lyric “I” has dissolved into a collective “we,” an insistence that personal grief cannot be disentangled from social collapse. In this arc, you witness how a reckoning with the self becomes inseparable from a reckoning with the state.
“Her Country”, the final section in the book, is thus the most political—and most ingenious. Her gaze is squarely outward and openly confrontational. “How to Make a Bitch Give Up Beef,” is a collection of poems made up of tweets she received on defending the organisers of the 2012 Hyderabad Beef Festival, lists the all-too-familiar, oft-hypocritical, oft-oxymoronic world of right-wing Twitter/X, where conspiracies and rape threats reside hand-in-hand and violent misogyny is dressed up as patriotic outrage: “Because the bitch is an anti-Hindu Ram-rubbishing terrorist poet and venomous serpent, ask your followers to get carbolic acid concentrate ready.” (72)
Later, in response to Penguin Books’ recalling Wendy Doniger’s The Hindus: An Alternative History (2009), Kandasamy writes a scorched-earth reply to censorship and corporate cowardice through “#ThisPoemWillProvokeYou”:
This poem does not comply to client demands.
This poem is pornographic.
This poem will not tender an unconditional apology.
This poem will not be Penguined.
This poem will not be pulped. (76)
Elsewhere, her gaze widens to the names and stories often omitted from national memory. “Resurrection” remembers four victims of the state: Dharmapuri Ilavarasan, Mudassir Kamran, Gurvinder Singh, and Badru Mandvi. Ilavarasan, a young Dalit man from Tamil Nadu, died suspiciously in 2013 after marrying a Vanniyar woman. Kamran, a Kashmiri student, was found hanging in Hyderabad in 2013 after being accused of homosexuality; his death was widely considered institutional harassment. Singh, a farmer from Punjab, was run over by a convoy linked to the Union Minister during the 2020–21 farmers’ protests against new agricultural laws. Mandvi, a tribal youth from Chhattisgarh, was killed in 2020 in an alleged fake encounter, his parents refusing to bury his body. Kandasamy writes: “This poem is for all the parents / who make mighty states tremble / by refusing to bury their sons” (77).
More poems in this section similarly react to atrocities and injustices that have plagued the nation in recent years, including “Rape Nation”, where she sees a cyclical inevitability following the gang-rape and fatal assault of 19-year-old Dalit woman from Hathras, “This has happened before, this will happen again.” (79) In “India is My Country”, she writes of the lives lost during India’s devastating second COVID-19 wave in April–May 2021, when hospitals ran out of oxygen, crematoriums overflowed, pyres burned in city parking lots, and bodies floated in the Ganga. What she builds, across these poems, is a ledger of refusals: refusal to be footnoted, refusal to separate desire from dissent, refusal to let arrests and witch hunts erase the memory of comrades, refusal to belong to a nation that denies dignity.
The arc of the Tomorrow Someone Will Arrest You enacts its argument: beginning with the poet’s wound and ending with the country’s, showing how one bleeds into the other. The lyric “I” gives way to a collective “we,” the private breaking open into the political. If the state insists that the process itself is punishment, Kandasamy insists that poetry itself is resistance.
Tomorrow Someone Will Arrest You is, in the end, less a collection of poems than a manual for memory. It insists that to write, to rage, to love, even to mourn, are all ways of staying alive in a world that rewards silence and calls it peace.
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Amritesh Mukherjee is a writer and editor. He is a content writer at a marketing agency and the long-form lead at Purple Pencil Project, a platform to promote Indian literature (and languages). You can find him on Instagram: @aroomofwords and Twitter: @aroomofwords.
