Vogue Dialogues: Pooja Nansi on poetry, the art of creating inclusive spaces and the power of literary education
13 May 2024
After five years spent transforming the Singapore Writers Festival from its helm, poet, educator and former festival director Pooja Nansi is embarking on her next chapter. The title? Whatever her soul craves
It is 8am on the last morning of the Singapore Writers Festival (SWF) in 2023 and Pooja Nansi is standing on the front lawn outside Arts House. No festivalgoers have arrived yet, so Nansi enjoys a rare moment of quiet, watching the coffee and bookstore vendors set up.
Beside her is Alex Lee, an events director Nansi worked alongside for the festival—whom she describes as “always having gone above and beyond”. Lee eventually breaks the silence: “I’m going to miss working with you so much, Pooja.”
According to Nansi, this is the first time she has cried on festival grounds. This is hard for me to believe. Nansi is someone who operates on feelings. Big feelings, in fact, which seem to be her medium of choice even more so than words.
“I recall, at three or four years old, experiencing intense grief because my mother was getting rid of the dining table we’d had for a few years. I thought, ‘Oh my god, this is the table that I did everything on. What am I going to do with all my feelings’?”
At the end of Nansi’s fifth and final year helming SWF as festival director, she received rave reviews from major local publications on the festival’s success during her tenure. One article noted that Nansi had had slightly longer than other festival directors to ‘make her mark’. The typical term of an SWF director is said to be four years, by which time Nansi had grown festival attendance by over 70 percent from the previous record.
What the same story had perhaps left out was that, in Nansi’s hands, the festival had transformed.
It went from being a formal affair tailored largely to visitors who already considered themselves a part of the literary world (a meeting of intellects, if you will) to a no-holds-barred invitation to explore cleverly designed programmes on fashion, hip-hop, feminist horror and more.
A Youth Fringe introduced by Nansi in her first year as festival director allowed young writers to become an integral part of programming, empowering them to platform the topics they cared about as opposed to watered down distillations of what ‘experienced’ programmers thought young people were interested in.
“We all need to be able to tell our stories. It gives us a sense of who we are and it allows us to speak to one another”
I like to think of Nansi’s SWF as the Coachella of literary festivals. You might come for the headliners—each year, she brought in powerhouses from Claudia Rankine to Viet Thanh Nguyen—but you’ll likely leave with a new favourite artist you never knew existed.
In 2022, the fourth iteration of a Nansi-led SWF drew over 46,000 festivalgoers. A different review attested that she brought ‘diversity’ to the festival with her ‘unusual’ programming.
Loaded with assumptions and unintended meaning, the term ‘diversity’ had seemed to become a major subject of focus of many articles and social media rants about Nansi’s tenure.
I ask how she feels about this.
“I’m curious whenever someone uses the word ‘diverse’ to describe something,” she ponders. “My question is: what do you mean by that? What does diversity look like to you?
“If you watch a panel and you see three Chinese men and one brown woman on the speaker list, is that going to be diverse for you? Because it could be if that’s a disruption to the world that you’re living in.”
For Nansi, a diverse and representative festival wasn’t something to aspire to. Rather, it was the basic tenet that any communal space should be built upon. “All I did was set out to make the festival look more like the city I grew up in. When you talk about literature, what you’re talking about is stories. We all need to be able to tell our stories. It gives us a sense of who we are and it allows us to speak to one another. It’s a necessity.
“Literary spaces get a bad rap for being elitist or cold or overly academic. There seem to be strict boundaries around what sort of literary media is considered of value and what is not. But are you going to tell someone that if a particular manga title has altered them, that is not profound?”
It was imperative to Nansi that SWF would be a welcoming space for more people, particularly individuals who would not dare see themselves as literary purveyors. More importantly, she wanted to ensure that they would feel comfortable there.
“One of the first things I told my team was, ‘Remember, it’s the Singapore Writers Festival, not the Singapore Writers Conference. It needs to be joyful. You should feel comfortable enough to sit on the floor. You should be able to get a gin and tonic between events. If you don’t want that, you could get a teh halia. It’s all good.”
Currently in the midst of a PHD interrogating her own creative practice methodology (which is about as meta as it gets in academia), it has never been more evident that Nansi is comfortable wearing many hats. We laugh about our shared distaste for the term multi-hyphenate although that is precisely what she is.
Before her tenure as festival director, Nansi had been an English language and literature teacher at Temasek Junior College (TJC) for close to a decade. Today, she continues to teach creative writing at Nanyang Technological University (NTU). From the way her face lights up when she talks about teaching, it is apparent that it is her one true calling.
I bump into one of her students from NTU at a workshop on reading and writing the female body that Nansi is hosting at the Asian Civilisations Museum. “The environment and space she creates in her classroom is unlike anything I have experienced before,” her student breathes excitedly, when I ask what Nansi is like as teacher. “She builds upon students’ ideas with no judgment. It gives me the freedom to explore what I truly want to write about.”
“I come from a long line of teachers and I believe that teaching is the thing I was meant to do. To be honest, the most impactful work I have ever done is probably running the drama club at TJC,” Nansi reminisces fondly. “It was a space of true belonging. We would never audition kids to join the club; everyone was welcome. I would give so many things up if I could just do that for 10 more years.”
There are easy-to-spot commonalities between her work as a teacher and a festival-maker. A desire to empower others and build communities, for one, spreads warmly across her approach to teaching and building a festival. “I’m less graceful in poems,” she offers, when I point this out. “I think I use poems as ways to figure out difficult things for myself. I feel more comfortable being selfish in my poetry than in real life.”
Experiencing Nansi’s poetry—equally pleasurable whether you read or watch—allows her audience a glimpse into her rich inner world filled with nostalgia, emotion and the sound of music. “I used to think of music and poetry as separate things. Poetry had to be in English. It had to be what you studied in school. Then there was Bollywood music. There were my father’s ghazals, which I grew up listening to. There was Gujarati folk music, which filled my house every weekend as aunties and uncles would gather around food, song and dance. It took me a long time to realise that all of that was, in fact, poetry.”
To call her work anything less than visceral would be an understatement. In her last collection of poetry (We Make Spaces Divine, 2021), Nansi writes about Mustafa Centre, Amitabh Bachchan and the dingy nightclubs she first tasted the freedom of youth in.
“I use poems as ways to figure out difficult things for myself. I feel more comfortable being selfish in my poetry than in real life”
Last year, she performed the collection in a small theatre at The Projector, set against a hauntingly melodic backdrop from Isuru Wijesoma’s double-necked guitar. With each poem, her words burned hotter, until hoots went up around the room and tears flowed uncontrollably. ‘We Make Spaces Divine’ ends with the line—“What can we build with our real and righteous rage?” Nansi’s rage, palpable in her writing, sets her listeners free.
“Rage can be constructive. In fact, rage can look like building a festival,” she says. “This country can be infuriating sometimes. Especially if you’re a minority of any kind; let’s not pretend that it is not infuriating. But I also love this country with everything I have. I love it so much that I want to do what I can to fix it.”
“But to fix something doesn’t always mean to heal it. Sometimes, fixing something can just mean putting it out in the sun, open for everyone to see.”
Nansi’s inherent sense of justice makes it a little bit difficult for her to pause. Even after five consecutive years of building a festival from start to finish—twice through a pandemic—a complete respite does not interest her. Between spending hours at her desk working on her PhD, parenting her opinionated daughter (a proud three-and-a-half years of age) and working hard to perfect her grandmother’s Gujarati daal recipe, she is carving out time to carefully plot out future projects.
“I mainly have two criteria for what I do next,’ she says with a glint in her eye. “It should challenge notions of what a literary space can look and feel like, and it should feed my soul.”
Welcome to Vogue Dialogues, a new series by Vogue Singapore in which we spotlight key writers, poets and literary voices driving change for good through groundbreaking work.
Vogue Dialogues is presented in partnership with Chanel. A long-standing patron of arts and culture around the globe, Chanel has deep roots in the literary world, led by key initiatives like The Literary Rendezvous at Rue Cambon which brings together writers to discuss important themes like female empowerment. With their support of Vogue Dialogues, Chanel joins Vogue Singapore in celebrating our local and regional literary scene, as well as amplifying the voices of Asian and female writers all around the world.
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