Salma: Filming a Poet in Her Village

by Salma, Kim Longinotto

In this book the Indian poet Salma and filmmaker Kim Longinotto come together to portray Salma’s extraordinary life and the challenges of capturing it in a documentary film.

When Salma, a young Muslim girl growing up in a South Indian village, was 13 years old, her family shut her away for eight years, forbidding her to study and forcing her into marriage. After her wedding her husband insisted she stay indoors. Salma was unable to venture outside for nearly two and a half decades. During that time, words became her salvation. She began covertly composing poems on scraps of paper, and, through an intricate system, smuggled them to the outside world.

The poems, many of which are included here, describe the hardships Salma and countless women like her suffer in their secluded lives. Eventually they reached a local publisher who printed them.

Against all odds, and in a direct challenge to the stultifying traditions of her village, Salma has gone on to become a renowned Tamil poet and influential human rights activist.

Genres: Womens, India

160 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 2013

About the author

Salma is a writer of Tamil poetry and fiction. Based in the small town of Thuvarankurichi, she is recognised as a writer of growing importance in Tamil literature. Her work combines a rare outspokenness about taboo areas of the traditional Tamil women’s experience with a language of compressed intensity and startling metaphoric resonance.

With the film, she thinks that she has truly arrived. Salma the film, through a series of interviews, tries to bring to light the realities that have shaped the poet, of how she would write hiding in the toilet because she could not pick up a pen outside.

Reviews

[AS · Rating 3 out of 5]

I had watched the movie screening, on top of which the book adds to the experience the crew went through, their emotions and how alienating the experience was to people from the western world. Salma's life started as the norm and has evolved into an outlier, a position she uses to the betterment of her world. Her struggle to break the patriarchal norms while seeking comfort within her family is expanded upon wonderfully.

[N Kalyan · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is the story of the making of the iconic documentary, Salma on the origins and life of the eponymous Tamil poet. Jointly authored by the filmmaker, Kim Longinotto of the UK and Salma. I'e translated a couple of long notes by Salma on aspects of her life as well as 13 of her poems. It was published by OR Books in New York in October - November 2013. The book has beautiful photographs (and poems in translation). It's one of a kind, really, if you are interested in poetry and poets. Recommended.