Defining home

When people ask Rochelle D'Silva where she is from, her usual response is, "in the places I believe I belong to".
Having been born and raised in Mumbai, Rochelle has since lived in many different places including Melbourne and Himachal Pradesh, apart from Goa, the place where her parents hail from. Thus defining what or where home is for, has been a complex process. And it is this theme that she has explored in her first solo collection of poetry, ‘When Home is An Idea'.
" I have travelled a lot and lived in different places and hence I don't really feel like I belong to any one geographical location," she says, adding that the book is divided into three parts. " The first part centres around what is home anyway? It deals with my questions of identity and belonging and figuring out whether home to me is a place or a person or something else or maybe even in the places I haven't gone to as yet," she explains. The second part titled ‘Limbo' tackles her struggles with not feeling very connected to the city of her birth and falling in love with other places instead. The third part focuses on her rereturn to Mumbai after being away for 18 years. "It looks at what it feels like to be back from travelling in the local trains to dealing with people's prejudices and stereotypes etc," says Rochelle, adding that there are some harsh descriptions used too.
Interestingly, the book of poems fell into place within a month. "The whole book was set into motion quite by accident. I had heard that the publishing house was looking for submissions and so I sent them a general query asking them whether they would be interested in poetry," she recalls. When she went down to the office however she took a completely different manuscript with her. "They told me that they were looking at putting out books that were someway related to Mumbai. So while not all the poetry is new, I had to rewrite the poetry accordingly and align it to fit the theme,"she states.
After launching the book first in Mumbai, Rochelle recently had her book launched in Bangalore recently and based on her observations of the response to her book, she believes that a lot of people can associate with the book. "A lot of people in my generation are going through the same thing and have all these questions of identity as they are travelling and living in different places. So they see themselves in it," she says.
Rochelle will next be heading to Goa to launch her book here on November 3 and also hold a poetry workshop. She admits that this is the first time that she will be doing a gig in Goa. "I come down to Goa often and to me Goa is my place of relaxation. In fact I would say that Goa is one of the places where I believe I belong to as is Himachal Pradesh as I feel thoroughly myself. There are some places that just bring out the calm version of yourself. In Goa, I got to sleep early, I wake up early and I want to be out! In the mountains I used to stop and talk to everyone passing by. In Mumbai though, I just want people to stay away from me, don't touch me and don't even look at me," she explains.
Talking about how she got into the poetry field to being with, Rochelle states that it was less with fascination and more to do with being a coping mechanism. Being someone who didn't socialise much, poetry became her way of relief and her way of making sense of the world. A friend's unexpected death also shocked her and led her to pour out her feelings with pen and paper which she read in class while doing her masters. "It was then that they asked me whether I knew anything about spoken word poetry afterwhich I looked it up," she recalls. A month later, she moved to Melbourne and fell in the company of poets who opened up the poetry world to her and she believes she discovered the true version of herself.
Upon returning to Mumbai, she discoved that there weren't too many poetry gigs happening around and this prompted her to start Words Tell Stories about three years ago to popularise the concept of spoken word and also provide a space for aspiring poets to practice their art. Apart from bringing down international names for her spoken word gigs, D'silva also mentors new poets. And in fact, post her book launch in Goa, she will be having a workshop titled ‘From page to stage how to write for performance'. "When you are performing you should know how to stand, what to do with your body, how to connect with the audience and hold their attention. Why the audience should care for your story is most important," she advices. And while, of course there are chances that you may miss out a line or word while performing, as long as you know the story and keep it conversational, you should be able to improvise, she says.
And with spoken word poetry events only growing, Rochelle believes that this has a lot to do with it being more accessible today. "Also, it is a language that everyone can understand. You don't have to study literature to get this. You just have to have a great imagination," she says. " Poetry has also given young people a voice to express themselves and talk about anything as people are more willing to have a conversation in this space. You can be vulnerable or angry. It's a good way to offload a little."