Kali, in Conversation

Description

This poetry collection reimagines Kali not as a distant deity, but as a living metaphor for women’s rage, courage, and clarity in the face of violence and erasure. Drawing on decades of work alongside survivors of war, forced displacement, and conflict-related sexual violence, the poems position Kali as both witness and weapon; a language through which unspeakable experiences find form.
Kali’s many arms, tongue, and eyes become symbolic extensions of women’s fractured and multiplied selves: bodies marked by survival, memory, and resistance. Across the collection,
Kali’s political journey unfolds alongside the lived realities of women navigating occupation,
exile, poverty, and systemic injustice. She is invoked not as myth alone, but as archive: carrying the histories that states suppress and conflicts attempt to erase.
The poems move between intimate bodily landscapes and collective histories, foregrounding rage not as destruction, but as a necessary ethical response to injustice. In this work, anger becomes a source of discernment; grief becomes testimony; courage becomes an act of reclamation. Kali’s fearlessness mirrors the resilience of survivors who refuse silence, transforming trauma into presence and memory into power.
Situated at the intersection of art and activism, the collection challenges dominant narratives that sanitise suffering or demand forgiveness without justice. Instead, it insists on accountability, dignity, and the right of women to name violence on their own terms. Kali’s mythology is reworked through contemporary political realities, offering a feminist re-reading that centres survivors’ voices and agency.
Ultimately, this book is an invocation of truth, of remembrance, and of justice. Through Kali’s imagery, the poems bear witness to pain while affirming the possibility of transformation. They ask what it means to survive with integrity, to remember without submission, and to imagine a world shaped not by fear, but by fierce, unapologetic life.

About the Author
Mahi Ramakrishnan is a poet/writer, documentary filmmaker, and forced-migration consultant/researcher whose work lives at the sharp edges of women’s power, political resistance, and the untidy truths of survival. A former journalist, she has worked with international outlets including Time magazine, the BBC, the Associated Press, and Agence France-Presse, grounding her creative practice in years of rigorous reporting from the field.
She is also the current president of PEN Malaysia. Her storytelling is shaped by long-term work alongside displaced communities, survivors of conflict-related sexual violence, and grassroots refugee women’s groups that anchor her life and politics. Moving between documentation and imagination, her work refuses the distance of neutrality, choosing instead to bear witness from within.
Mahi’s poetry moves like a blade; cutting through silence, memory, and the polite violence of the world. She writes from the crossroads of activism and ritual, where myth bleeds into lived experience and the feminine divine refuses to stay tame. In these poems, Mahi reimagines Kali as political, feral, tender, and unbound: an echo of Gowrie, the woman who birthed and raised her and the countless others still fighting to be seen. This is her debut poetry collection.