If We Gods Could Die For Her, We Would: An interview with Devjani Bodepudi
Devjani Bodepudi's new collection, If We Gods Could Die For Her, does something I haven't seen a poetry manuscript do before. Devjani's debut pamphlet, For the daughters carried here on the hips of their mothers (Fawn Press), won the Saboteur Award for Best Poetry Pamphlet in 2023, and this new book builds on that same instinct for testimony, on a larger scale. It runs a Hindu myth, told in the register of scripture, alongside the fractured, unpunctuated poetry of a mother raising a daughter the world has decided to fear. By the end, you realise they were never two stories. They are the same one, told twice, in two different languages of grief.
I sat down with Devjani to talk about where the book came from, the gods who fail to protect their own creations, and what it means to write toward the things you were once told to keep quiet about.
On the myth structure
What drew you to retelling a myth alongside a contemporary mother-daughter story, rather than telling one or the other?
Pāro represents the little girl I was, the woman I am becoming still, and the young woman I am raising, Devjani told me. "I have always felt something akin to battle from the moment of giving birth to my daughter to now. I was at once fiercely protective and also quietly ashamed that I must not be doing my best. My daughter always seemed to be suffering, be it from feeding, colic, lack of sleep, and then later, we found, from all the things that come from being an undiagnosed neurodiverse brown girl. I needed to represent this battle, chaos, love, anger, bond in an epic form."
The mythic register wasn't incidental, either. "Growing up, I've been surrounded by Indic mythic tradition and so the stories came naturally. The form also represents the patriarchal voice that's always whispering in our ears. There's always been a sense of fatalism when things go wrong, and we blame it on the gods. There's always been a lack of control for women, for women of colour, and now, I'm learning, as a parent navigating the complexities and bureaucracies of neurodiversity. I needed a form that brought the macrocosmic idea that we're all part of something bigger, narratives which have already been put in place, set against our own smaller battles, living our smaller lives."
Brahma creates the girl specifically to be feared and destroyed, so men will be shamed into change. Did you always intend the gods to be this morally compromised, or did that emerge as you wrote?
"I've always found it fascinating that the gods, in any mythic tradition, are flawed," she said. "Zeus, Thor, Indra, they're all driven by their egos. But they also represent all those who think they know what's best for us and really just want us to remain suppressed to fulfil their own ends. This divine moral ambiguity was always there in the back of my mind as I wrote. I wanted the gods to be seen as fumbling and bumbling, much like those who govern in real life."
Agni and Jatayu keep vowing to protect the girl but can't actually stop what's coming. What were you working out through gods who care but can't intervene?
"I wanted there to be gods who did genuinely care, like, I'm sure there are politicians who care," Devjani said. "But they represented a sense of futility against systemic inadequacies within the healthcare system and societal taboos when talking about mental health and neurodiversity, especially within Asian communities. Pāro is forced to fight, and the only way they can help her is to fight alongside her. And that's where real change can begin, when the person who is suffering is finally heard and believed and supported. The struggles will exist, but they don't have to be so hard when there is support."
The book ends with Brahma "only Lord in name." What does that line mean to you?
"It means that there are little men in the world who exist, who think they wield a lot of power, but actually, even they have bigger systems to answer to," she said. "They think they are in control, but eventually they will need to recognise their failings."
On form
The myth sections are numbered like scripture and written in an elevated, archaic register, while the poems are fragmented and often stripped of punctuation. Did you write in these two registers separately, or did they pull against each other?
They were written separately, Devjani told me. "If I remember correctly, I wrote the scripture first and the poems came after. I wanted there to be a loose story arc for Pāro with a kind of resolution, and I wanted the poems to either uphold or debunk these stories. The scripture was supposed to act as a kind of prophecy for the mother and daughter, but as in real life, prophecies rarely come true in the way we expect."
Pieces like "The Shedding" and "Response" use slashes and spacing to physically enact the content on the page. How much of that formatting came in early drafts versus revision?
"Formatting came in second, third and fourth drafts," she said. "Some poems simply wouldn't work without thinking about form more carefully. One particular poem started off as a sonnet and then had to be completely rewritten. 'Response' was the least redrafted, however, and naturally took that form. I wanted the form to represent a vessel, and I needed small words to make up a bigger meaning when read from bottom to top and then the other way."
Why the golden shovel for Malika Booker? What is it about that form specifically that suited this material?
"Malika's original poem, 'My Mother's Blues', is so beautiful in its rhythm and repetition," Devjani said. "The energy it expresses, of a snowballing disappointment a mother grows inside her when her children don't live up to her expectations, is something I grew up knowing. It's a joke in South Asian families, to be compared to cousins and other people's children in the community. We expect it and carry it. I worry I do the same for my own children. I was definitely guilty of imagining gilded futures for my daughter, and as a high achiever most of her school life, it felt justified to want more for her. It has taken a complete change in attitude to see my child for who she is and not for who I expected her to be. My poem touches on that, but also, while holding onto Malika's poem, it talks about a mother watching helplessly on as her child navigates a world that is determined to categorise her as one thing or another, under scrutiny and sometimes in pain."
On the mother-daughter material
This book doesn't look away from self-harm, hospital visits, the fear of loss. What did you need to be true to, in writing that, that fiction or distance might have let you avoid?
"There are many mothers and daughters out there going through, or who have gone through, the same sorts of things," Devjani said. "Girls who are learning to live with neurodiversity, or diagnosed as neurodiverse, are statistically less likely to receive the help they need. Healthcare providers often talk about mental health issues such as depression when it's probably exhaustion due to masking and ADHD. Of course, I'm generalising as well, but there is research to suggest that girls, brown girls especially, remain underdiagnosed when it comes to autism or ADHD because they are so good at masking. There are certain expectations South Asian families place on their girls that it can be really baffling when the girl in question starts experiencing difficulties in regulating her emotions."
She didn't spare herself in this, either. "As a mother, the guilt for missing the signs, for holding my daughter up to the standards I was held up to, is also something I wanted to be open about. The more people who talk about it, the better. It's never good to keep these things to yourself. The fiction gives the feelings, the incidents, a kind of surreality in a way, a new way of talking about these things. But I feel I still need to feel them, acknowledge them. Creating distance wasn't necessarily my intention."
"My daughter is not my daughter / my daughter is" closes the book. What are you asking the reader to sit with in that repetition?
"The feeling that my daughter is and always will be my daughter, and yet she is her own self, an identity independent of me," Devjani said. "As a parent, I find it incredibly hard to see my children as their own entities, and yet that's when I feel the most proud, when I see them succeeding as their own people, not just as extensions of my own self."
There's a recurring idea of the mother as both refuge and trap, "we lie a trap." Was that a hard line to let stand?
"It's a truth I come back to again and again," she said. "My own mother, and her mother before her, hold these strings that we're tied to. Memories, trauma, expectations, responsibilities, obligations, guilt and love all act as these strings to form a net that keeps us caught, I think. In my case, it's not a net I need to escape, but perhaps for my daughter it's one that may need to be broken. Who knows."
On being seen as monstrous
The girl in the myth is made fearsome so men will see their own cruelty reflected back. How does that mirror what you wanted to say about how a suffering child, or a suffering family, gets looked at by the world?
"There's always stigma attached to suffering, isn't there?" Devjani said. "People don't want to acknowledge it. We can click away, scroll past, blame the victims. It becomes monstrous. At the same time, the monsters are us. I think in all of human history, the monsters have all been man-made. Once we start looking at the monsters of story and myth, such as Medusa, Circe or Surpanaka, we see they were all wronged by men, and who is portrayed as a monster is all in the telling. The narrators decide on these monsters, and for a long time it's been powerful men from certain geographical locations."
Bullying, isolation, the language of demons and abnormality run through both threads. Was there a specific moment that made you want to write toward that theme directly?
"I think, looking in the mirror, I've never liked what I saw, to the point of having grappled with a mild eating disorder when I was younger," she told me. "Growing up in the 90s, it was a thing, we could never be skinny enough, and for a South Asian, I was relatively dark skinned, another taboo in my household. It took right up until my adulthood to accept, and even be happy with, the way I looked. I felt wrong in my body, so it was easy to portray abnormality."
She sees the same pattern playing out now, differently. "Neurodiversity is only just being talked about openly, and even now the West almost fetishises it, with programmes such as Love on the Spectrum. We still see it as 'abnormal'. Bullying was also something I experienced growing up, the subtle, less violent kind, it was so subtle I sometimes think I must have imagined it, that left me miserable and lonely. I felt I was easily able to portray those feelings and frustration from my personal perspective, but also the fear as a mother that my child might also experience those feelings. Thankfully both my children have navigated the social aspects of their childhood much better than I ever did, but her teachers, her school, the education system in general let her down. She was demonised, set apart and felt ostracised. The language of myth and poetry seemed a natural way to work through those themes."
On craft and process
You move between English and Hindi, myth and domestic detail, prose and verse. How did you decide what belonged in which register?
"The scripture needed to be archaic," Devjani said. "It fitted with everything I had read, from Bible verse to English translations of Sanskrit texts. It feels almost inconceivable to let the word of gods be anything other than archaic. The poems had to be rooted in the mundane everyday, sometimes informal register, because those were our lived experiences. The world of gods is too far removed from the world of ordinary people, the language needed to reflect that. The Hindi snippet in one of the poems was to bring in the second or third language we hear on a daily basis through music or film."
Is there a poem in here you almost cut, and what made you keep it?
"I nearly cut the angel poem," she said. "In my mind it was too confrontational. I've always been outspoken about racism, and that sometimes shocks people. I wondered if this poem was too harsh. I kept it because it's real. Bias and convention creeps into casting angels, amongst other things. Although, a few years ago, I had the privilege of working with one colleague who intentionally cast the most unlikely people as the school Nativity angels and other characters. I thought that was beautiful."
What do you want a reader to do with this book after they close it? Is it a book about surviving something, or witnessing it, or both?
"I hope the reader, whoever they are, reads the book with compassion and grace," Devjani said. "I don't think this is a book looking for critical acclaim. I want the reader to feel something like empathy. If there's anyone who can relate to this book, and it brings them comfort to know that they're not alone, that would be amazing too. As for whether this book is about surviving, witnessing, or both, I think it's definitely both. It's also a testimony. I think 'witness' implies distance sometimes, but this is a first-hand account of unconditional love and endless fight."
Join the YouTube launch for If We Gods Could Die For Her on the 25th of September at 7pm Amsterdam time. Hear Devjani read from the collection, and be part of the first night this book gets to exist in the world.
The book can be found on Amazon, and will shortly be available through Bookshop.org as well.