Pooja Nansi

There comes a time in every artist’s life, when we are asked how we define our role, our work, our pursuits, in relation to everybody else’s. It’s easy to say what a teacher does, or what an engineer does, but what does an artist really do? And what do you tell your friends and family?

To be fair, art in itself is hard to define, much less a career as an artist. I used to find it frustrating to be asked time and again what I do as an artist, and it almost feels as if I have chosen a life of crime. I think we need to normalise the arts. And it begins with not trying to compartmentalise what we do. We need to demystify what being an artist means.

I started writing when I was a child. At that age, it was just stories and poems for myself. When I got older, I started writing emotional poems in notebooks for myself and the boys I had crushes on. Growing up with parents who are artists in their own right — my mother is a trained classical dancer and my father wrote community plays — art has always been a part of my life.

The first time I found a community was when I went to a poetry slam, and I realised that writing wasn’t necessarily stagnant and solitary. Poetry isn’t just a passive expression of one’s self, and the echoes of my expression can be palpable and real.

And when someone I don’t know comes up to me after a reading and tells me I expressed something they were feeling which they didn’t know how to articulate, it is an accolade in itself. Or when someone else is inspired to tell their own stories after having felt, seen or heard mine, my work is done.

It takes resourcefulness to make a living as a full-time artist, and we need to learn how our skills can be applied. The worst thing anyone can do is to think of art as utilitarian, and that is enough to break any artist’s spirit.