Salma (a) Rokkaiah malik

Distinguished Tamil poet, writer and social activist, Salma dropped out of school at the age of thirteen in keeping with the rigid conventions of her cloistered community. Through her deep interest in literature and voracious reading, she has struggled hard to win fame as a writer and activist.

Salma’s first collection of poems, with its bold expression of female subjectivity and the foregrounding of female desire, came as a shock to the male-dominated Tamil literary world. The astonishing success of the book proved to be an enabling moment for women poets in Tamil Nadu. Salma’s novel, ambitious in breadth and scope, provides a searing and insightful portrayal of Muslim society in hinterland Tamil Nadu.

The National Book Trust of India nominated Salma to the Frankfurt Book Fair (2006). She was the featured author at the first Norman J. Cutler Conference on South Asian Literatures at the University of Chicago (May 2007).

Midnight Tales (Irandaam Jamangalin Kathai), a novel, I scheduled to be published in English , Hindi and Malayalam in 2009. Many of Salma’s poems have been translated in English.

HIS WORLD BEYOND ME

In recent times,
There has been
No intimacy between us
I can’t get close
To the boy
Even if I try

When I pull him close
And fondly nuzzle his hair,
He flinches from the touch
Of my breasts and moves away
Forgetting that they had once
Processed my blood to feed his hunger

When I reach with my hand
To run my fingers through his hair —
Tendrils upright like reeds on a riverbank —
He pushes it away, and moves on

He, eager to go beyond
Childhood’s threshold,
And I, wanting to reclaim it —
In this struggle between us,
Our affinity wanes

He, who had asked me,
On a night of the moon’s full retreat,
If the sun too would be gone someday,
Has no more answers to seek from me

Today,
When the gloom that has found
Shelter in my room
Asked me to be let in again,
I was sending away
A dream that came to me
When I had first conceived:

That a radiance would now wash over the gloom
And then gather here, in this room

© 2003, Salma
From: Pachchai Devathai
Publisher: Kalachuvadu Pathippagam, Nagercoil, 2003

© Translation: 2006, N Kalyan Raman