CARVED VOICES THE LOVE AND DESIRE ISSUE
INTERNATIONAL MAGAZINE CELEBRATING CREATIVE RESISTANCE
CARVED VOICES Issue 3 Pre Launch February 2019 Founder/creative director Sonali Mohapatra about.me/sonalimohapatra Co-Founder/curator Shantashree Mohanty about.me/shantashreemohanty EDITORS: Sonali Mohapatra Shantashree Mohanty Jess Quinn Guest Editor for this Issue: ANCHITA ADDHYA GUEST CURATOR: GUNJAN WADHWA CREATIVE INTERN: KALPSHREE GOGTE Featured Cover Art By Resident Artist: Jess Quinn Instagram: Instagram.com/jessquinnart © Copyright 2015 under CC BY-NC-ND license Website: www.carvedvoices.com facebook: https://www.facebook.com/carvedvoices/ twitter: @CarvedV
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The Love & Desire issue
CARVED VOICES
The Love and Desire Issue Welcome to the pre-launch for issue 3 of Carved Voices! Carved Voices is an international annual queer and feminist digital magazine celebrating creative resistance. We aim to showcase the voices of artists/activists around the world and build a feminist/queer safe space. Curated, designed, edited and hosted by an unlikely twosome- a physicist-feminist-poet and a judge-writer with a criminal law background- Carved Voices hosts avant-garde and new age wordsmiths, poets, artists, doodlers, music makers, letter writers, authors and creative writers from all walks of life. We believe in art without boundaries and undaunted expression which can be carved into the memories of the masses. In our first issue, ‘Challenging Sensibilities and Deeply Emotional Shit’, we introduced our readers to the notions of feminist, queer and creative resistance. With our second issue, ‘Contours of Identity’, we agonised over our multiple, fluid, ever-changing and contingent identities.
Today we introduce to you extracts from our third issue, ‘Love and Desire’, which seeks to undo the heteronormative understanding of love and desire whilst incorporating the multiplicities, fluidities, tensions, absences and silences which we believe to be associated with these concepts. The full issue includes personal stories of love from outside the ‘norm’, seeking to raise, rather than answer, the question of what love truly is, and whether there are inherent politics imbedded in love which make loving and desiring acts of resistance in itself? In this pre-launch magazine, you will read extracts of both poetry and prose which seek to explore the many facets of love and desire, highlighting the resistance entangled in the emotions, and the differences and similarities found across a world’s worth of experiences. You’ll read poetry from our cocurators themselves, Sonali Mohapatra and Shantashree Mohanty, our guest editor, Anchita Addhya alongside other extracts from some of our many contributors. In this pre-launch, we have the pleasure of featuring extracts from work by Page Turner, an award winning author, relationship expert and editor of the website Poly.Land and Sadia Khatri, writer, activist and co-founder of the feminist collective, "Girls at Dhabas". There are also illustrations from our resident artist, Jess Quinn, along with a fascinating extract from a powerful interview about love from award-winning author Sharanya Manivannan curated by our guest curator, Gunjan Wadhwa. The Carved Voices team has taken on new family members this year and we are very excited to welcome our creative intern Kalpshree Gogte, artist Harsukh Deol, our Book Whisperer, Ebru Demir, along with our media team, Lei Gioia Yang, Anna Mulira and Veronika Márová. Join us in the celebration of this age-old resistance called love. Team Carved Voices
In Conversation with Sharanya Mannivanan Interview by Gunjan Wadhwa
Do you think love is political? What do youthink are the politics of love, who you love and how you love? “Love is political. Anything that is concerned with power is political, and we need to look at all the ways in which things have been misnamed as love in order to manipulate. Nationalism, or love for the nation. Marriage, or love for property, caste and misogyny. Those are broad examples. They play out in subjective ways, but in discernable patterns. The ways in which the family unit is held sacrosanct, even when it commits and feeds abuse. Similarly for romantic bonds, in which abuse is deemed negligible when compared to the social legitimacy, sexual satisfaction and other benefits provided. Make no mistake: these are power structures, and deeply linked to the patriarchal status quo. When I speak of love I do not mean bonds which are assumed to be love (between siblings, between married couples, between peers who socialise together), because this automatic assumption is at the roots of what creates and maintains these power structures. When I speak of love, I speak of the thing that both goes beyond these structures and its expectations, that is esoteric and powerful (though not necessarily power-full). That is difficult to describe. That is impossible not to have felt, even if not having been its recipient. You can’t choose who you love, for the heart wants what it wants, but you can choose how you love. Do you love in ways that excavate your deepest wounds and hold them to the light, transformed? Do you love in ways that reject the ways that your family normalised abuse? Do you love in ways that are based on trust and respect, and not control and façade? Do you love in ways that flip the script? Do you love honestly? Do you dare to love deeply?"
Our Shared Poly Tomorrow! Sonali Mohapatra
Tomorrow, my stories of you will be woven with daydreams, perhaps, what-ifs, and kaash!, wo aisa kehta tha! I can see our, this thing, stretching stretching, till it has wrapped around both of us continents across. You are going to love her I can imagine you falling for her slowly at first, hesitantly, and then Boom! her eyelashes hold meanings of a whole world.. or maybe a him, or them
standing under umbrellas together, you guys, books stuck into jeans talking through shared sips of coffees
shy, unassumingly perfect hope electrifying touches over wallets or keys or liking the same girl, again.
Oh! And when we meet, years later, you will taste of many new worlds Like I will.
Forgetting Feet Sadia Khatri "It’s a game every morning: to keep my desires in check & decide what I will wear contingent upon the spaces my feet will touch. The city, its skies, the trees, all unfurl before m e, but the trouble is walking by unnoticed, unfazed. I want to move unhindered, to slip into the beat of the city. But m y assumed woman’s body is inconvenient: it stands out, de claring itself as an outsider. Loving streets is hard when th ey do not contain you so easily, when stepping into them means stepping out of proscribed boundaries. " * "If I am crossing lines, I might as well go a bit further. A bit of cleavage, a bit of legs. Loud, glittering, femme. Jhumkas paired with a sleeveless, maybe a tighter top to define my curves." * "It is a strange luxury, this invisibility earned through attir e, so simple yet so astounding in its power. For with each desire I claim, another feels possible."
I Promise (You) Jess Quinn
Unsaid Anchita Addhya ... "But I didn’t cry the day you came to me And said you liked a boy, who lives next door; He gives you hickeys now and then, just between your breasts And makes love to you when he wants. Sometimes, he hits you too and as you laugh it off, saying “love hurts”, Tears well up in my eyes; and I swear I want to bash his head. But your mom approves of him, for he is a boy. And gives him extra eggs for he can take good care of her daughter; ... And all I get is a disgusted glance, at my cursed breasts, I hate them too, trust me I do, for I was born with them, But I was also born to love you. "
Polyamory Page Turner
"I myself set out into polyamorous relationships with modest expectations. I thought it might be a total disaster but perhaps one that would leave me with an interesting story or two. And I was mostly trying it out because I thought polyamory was a terrible idea in theory, but when I was truly honest with myself I had to admit that I didn’t really know. This bothered me. Being so dead-set against something I had no direct experience with. The last thing I expected to gain from polyamory was a sense of belonging, of acceptance. A large, mostly queer chosen family. So naturally, that’s exactly what I ended up with."
Wild Women Srividya Srinivasan "The men sing the lullabies of the bold women of yore, The men keep the hearth warm, The gentleness of their love for the homes they keep softening the fire of their wild women, as they find their way home into their arms."
Love Plateaue Kalpshree Gogte
"But somewhere in between those tiring days and sleepy end of the day talks, love and desire took their toll and changed them both so subtly that they didn’t even get a chance to notice it."
The Second Eternity Tibra Ali "Modern literature has a strange logic and sometimes it appears to be counter-intuitive. This is because literature explores the subterranean world of human existence, the existence that lies far from the view of man immersed in his sentimental world of received wisdom and borrowed gestures. Many human beings but few gestures, Milan Kundera notes. It is we who belong to gestures, and not the other way around. Like the gesture of a man kneeling down and promising an eternity to a woman. Not that such gestures are not to be trusted, but at least they should be recognised for what they really are: the dissolution of the individual in the stock and generic form."
The McAllister’s Bride Shantashree Mohanty
"I know all your friends; I know you like your flowers on trees not plucked. I know you’d like a monochromatic iteration with the seating and the whispers; all doled to a point where strangeness makes sense. .... What about me? I’d just like Bill Hader to be my sister’s date!"
5 1/2 Tits Srividya Srinivasan
"15 years was a long enough time to test love of any kind. But the question of what to do with her missing right breast had remained. They had discussed at length if she should have a false one put up, or stuff kerchiefs so they looked balanced. Jeanne had come up with the most outrageous suggestions and ideas, almost making losing a breast sound like fun. Finally, Rita had defiantly left it unresolved, preferring to wear her scar until she knew how to heal. Every time, someone glanced at her chest, they averted their eyes. She knew the day that it did not matter, or failed to catch it in their eyes, she would have healed. But right now, it itched, reminding her of what was gone. Her anger and the scars remained."
In Conversation with Sadia Khatri Interview by Gunjan Wadhwa
First off, we would love for you to explain your idea of love to us and our readers. "Thanks to Mary Oliver and Shabnam Virmani, recently I’ve begun to think of love as worship. Where worship = surrender, not submission. To surrender to is yield, which is a powerful act of devotion, attention, prayer. I don’t mean these as religious acts, but rather as intimate rituals that force us to be present, to notice. Love is attention at its source, attention without judgement. Love is to cultivate awareness, to give (care + kindness + one’s senses!) without expecting anything in return. It changes us, transforms us fundamentally, and always for the better. For me, love has to be the intention I place at the heart of anything I do, if I am to do it well. In a capitalist world where everything is increasingly isolated, segmented and distanced, love can be fiercely freeing and affirming. It pulls us back to the present moment, it connects us to people, nature, cities, creative pursuits, whatever it is we long to connect with, and of course, love helps us survive."
Editors' Recommendations! Life is hard you guys...for which we must all delude ourselves with the right kind of artistic consolation. Here are some of our favourite recommendations based on the themes of love, loss and tenderness: Books/Graphic Novels: Written on the Body by Jeanette Winterson On a Sunbeam by Tillie Walden This Young Monster by Charlie Fox The Argonauts  by Maggie Nelson Immortality by Milan Kundera I love Dick by Chris Kraus Train to Pakistan by Khushwant Singh Movies & Series: Amour by Micheal Haneke Scenes from a marriage by Ingmar Bergman In the mood for love by Wong Kar-Wai Only Lovers Left Alive Call Me By Your Name Her You Me Her (American Canadian Comedy Series) Sense Eight Music: (Spotify: @Carved Voices: The Love and Desire Issue) Something by George Harrison Jolene by Ray Lamontagne Famous BLue Raincoat by Leonard Cohen Wicked Games by Chris Isaak (We recommend the version by Acidwash) Apocalypse by Cigarettes after Sex (And everything else by this band) Kotobaaro Bhebechinu (Rabindra Sangeet) Nida Bhara Raati (From the Odia Chalachitra Anutap)
"We hope your appetites have been whetted with the extracts in this pre-launch, please look out for the full issue coming in May" Yours in Love, Carved Voices