your bridge home
Saints and Poets
She signed every poem with somebody else's name, and wrote some of the most self-possessed verse in Marathi.
She signed her poems Nami's Jani, Nama's Jani, and sometimes Dasi Jani, the servant Jani.
That is how she named herself: by whose house she worked in, and by her occupation. Not by a father, a husband, a lineage or a place. A poet has to name herself as somebody's servant, in order to be identifiable at all.
And that tells you her exact position in the world. In two words. At the end of every verse.
And then you read the verses, and they are not the verses of a person in that position.
Janabai does not petition Vithoba. She claims him.
She says he is hers. She talks about him as a possession and a companion and occasionally a nuisance. She tells him what to do. In one well-known abhang she threatens to eat him. Or to beat him with a stick.
In the register of a woman at the end of her patience with a family member.
The rest of this story, read aloud, and a new one every day.