Artist Profile: Namitha Rathinappillai
The latest in a series of interviews with artists who have a significant body of work that responds to social justice issues.
Namitha Rathinappillai (she/they) is a queer, disabled, Tamil-Canadian published spoken word poet, organizer, and workshop facilitator. They have been creating, performing, commissioning, and competing as a poet, locally and nationally, since 2018. She is currently based in Toronto, and was the first female and youngest director of Ottawa’s Urban Legends Poetry Collective (ULPC).
CL: Carissa Law, JAYU’s Manager of Advancement
NR: Namitha Rathinappillai
CL: How/when did you begin writing poetry?
NR: While I had casually been writing here and there in my Notes app throughout my childhood and adolescence, I first got properly involved in writing after taking an AP Writer’s Craft class in my senior year of high school. The final assignment of the class was to choose a style of writing, do a presentation on the style and ultimately, create a piece of writing in this style. I decided to pick spoken word as Button Poetry was quite popular at the time, and I found myself moved by the ways that a writer could move you with their words, but also how they chose to share them when reading them aloud instead of them existing solely on the page. I tried writing a piece for this assignment, and ultimately really enjoyed this style of writing. It felt urgent and important, and it made me feel important. After that, I decided to throw myself into the poetry community in Ottawa: performing at spaces such as Tell Em Girl and Spice. I ended up finding Urban Legends and attending every open mic and slam I could attend. Two years later, I became the youngest and first female Director in the collective’s history!
CL: You hold a Masters in Sociology from York University and a Bachelor of Arts in Criminology & Criminal Justice, and a minor in English Language and Literature from Carleton University. I wonder, was the imbrication between poetry and the social/political apparatus—beauty and justice—made plain to you through your scholastic experience?
NR: To be honest, I think it was quite the opposite. When I entered the spoken word community, and especially when I had the privilege of attending national gatherings such as the Canadian Festival of Spoken Word, I began to meet poets who were “poets and”: individuals who did poetry in addition to a full-time career. Many of these individuals, like myself, were studying social sciences or humanities, and I could see how deeply intertwined their art and scholastic experiences were, and how symbiotic the relationship was. One would enhance the other, and both practices became stronger because of it. I wish that in my scholastic experience that the power of poetry, or even art as a practice more generally, and its ability to incite deep societal and systemic change was highlighted. Unfortunately, my experience of academia often left me feeling as though I had to choose it or art: and while I am grateful for both experiences, poetry has never made me feel like I have to choose.
“I believe that poetry has the capacity to incite change, to comfort, to challenge.”
CL: There are many spokes in your research interests: race and racism; white womanhood and its capacity for violence by way of self-victimizing weaponization; queerness as it intersects with racialization, prison and police abolition, and transformative justice and futures. Will you expound on them and how they figure into your work as a spoken word poet?
NR: My research interests have often been about my hopes for the future, and a desire to see myself in it. Thus, as an artist whose work speaks about myself, my lived experience, and how I navigate the world, I believe that many of these spokes become visible even when I do not intentionally try to highlight them. Outside of my art and my research, these issues are ones that are ever present in the way I walk through public and private space, and because they are issues I face as a person, I do not believe they can be separated from my art or my research.
CL: You currently work as a Youth Network Project Coordinator for the Intersectionality and Diversity Education Program at Canadian Centre for Gender & Sexual Diversity (CCGSD). How does your vocation influence your art practice and vice versa?
NR: My work with CCGSD is primarily focused on working with QTBIPOC youth. As someone who came out in adulthood, it is important to me that young people of colour have representation that is as diverse and expansive as they are, including seeing positive, successful, and living people of colour who are also queer/trans in adulthood. I have been lucky enough to bring my knowledge and experience in the arts into my work as I recently co-led a project at CCGSD called “Queering ARTivism”, which was a series of national forums for youth QTBIPOC who were interested in the possibility that exists at the intersection of art and activism. This was easily one of the most profound and inspiring things I have done in my time at the organization thus far, and am grateful to have been able to be a part of it. I hope to integrate my arts knowledge and passion for supporting and empowering QTBIPOC in more ways like this in the future.
CL: Taking your own lived experience as a queer, disabled, Tamil-Canadian, how do you reconcile these intersecting identities? Broadly speaking as well as in relation to the process of writing, is there one that bubbles up at a more frequent rate or weighs heavier?
NR: I believe that in holding multiple marginalized identities, there are times in which one identity holds more weight or is more accepted than others. However, I believe this is everchanging and highly dependent on the context. I believe this conversation itself could be, and has been, written about extensively, and I could not truly do justice to it in an answer like this. I will say that it has taken me a very long time to not hold anger towards my oppressing identities, but rather rightfully direct that rage at the people, institutions, and systems that hate me for it.
“Poetry has never made me feel like I have to choose.”
CL: When all of us were in the throes of the pandemic two years prior, you performed your poem "Unprecedented Times," on CBC. If I may, I would characterize it as a very uplifting cri de coeur - would you say that is a calling card of yours? Poetry as a means to enliven, to cast light upon that which is dim, leaden, or clouded?
NR: I believe that poetry has the capacity to incite change, to comfort, to challenge. When CBC reached out to me to write a poem for them, the topic was undecided. Given the social context and time period we were in, I believed that writing and performing an uplifting poem was the most appropriate choice. I am grateful for the ways that art has kept us alive and how it has held us when we have relied on it for support during difficult times. I hoped that my poem could contribute to that foundation that many of us sought out during the heights of the pandemic.
CL: Your debut chapbook collection, “Dirty Laundry,” is meant to be an ode to the women of Sri Lanka - what are the prominent themes and recurring motifs that speak to their strength, moments that you most strongly want to convey?
NR: I’d encourage folks to give it a read, or a listen and see for yourself! ;-)
CL: Your lodestar, inspiration, patron saint?
NR: Nisha Patel, Khaleefa Hamdan, and Olivia Gatwood, Also, my mother and any mother that has fed me, the moon, weathered hands, milk tea with condensed milk, any body of water I can wade in, the warmth of the sun on my skin, and a really good wax seal stamp.
Beyond the interest in poetry, Namitha also enjoys crafting, writing letters to friends, and looking at the moon.
namitharathinappillai.com