Iranian Literary Festival

Featured Poet: SASHA PARMASAD

Sasha Kamini Parmasad was born and raised in Trinidad and Tobago, began writing poetry as a child, and was actively involved in the performing arts on a national scale from the age of six. She lived with her family in New Delhi, India, between 1988-1992. She received her B.A. in English Literature and Studio Art at Williams College, Massachusetts, in 2002, and her M.F.A. in Creative Writing at Columbia University, New York, in 2008. Her first novel, Ink and Sugar, which is a work in progress, won third place in the long fiction category in the First Words Literary Contest for South Asian Writers in Washington D. C. in 2003. In April 2008 her paintings were exhibited at the second annual Indo-Caribbean Women’s Empowerment Summit in Queens, New York, co-sponsored by Sakhi for South Asian Women and Jahajee Sisters: Empowering Indo-Caribbean Women. One of her poems was the winner of the 2008 Poetry International competition, and will be published in the next issue of Poetry International. At present she lives in New York City where she teaches a Creative Writing Workshop to undergraduates at Columbia University. (Photo credit: Priyanka Das Gupta )


Q: Name one collection of poetry that you wish you had written and why.

Somewhere in Caroni, Central Trinidad: an overgrown hunk of land on which, at one time, stood a wooden shed that concealed a crude underground room. Secreted in this room, the story goes, a manual printing press used to publish clandestine papers distributed among workers and farmers engaged in struggle throughout Trinidad. The world as text, and action as writing, this is the book I would have liked to have written.
But the boundaries of this plot of land are no longer clear; the underground room has, perhaps, long filled with water and caved in.

Q: Describe the place/physical location where you write most regularly.

A room in our apartment. My husband, Mandip, moved in when I was in Trinidad, set up my desk here because I like to write in spaces that crow with direct morning light. Paradoxically, I keep the curtains and shades mostly drawn so that grey days don’t dampen, or bright days blot out the world at my fingertips. I face my desk away from the windows for the same reason. But I like to know, especially in winter, that there is light at my back; to watch it brush my computer screen, smear the wall in front me.

On that wall, a picture of my parents, sister, myself taken in 1988, as we prepared to leave Trinidad for India—my father was on his way to study cultural history at Jawaharlal Nehru University and we would live on that campus for four years. It was a staggering journey—back to the land from which our ancestors had been taken one hundred and forty-three years before, which generations before us had never seen. Beside this picture, a copy of The 23rd Psalm gifted me by my maternal grandmother, Soobratan, who in part raised me; observing her I learnt, to my especial delight as a child, Spanish, patois and Bhojpuri swear words, how to kill and clean a chicken, eat rice and dal with my fingers. Descending from a long Muslim line, she declares herself a Khan, is a member of the choir of the Presbyterian Church she has belonged to for more than three decades, and prays to Shiva alongside her Hindu grandchildren. Beside this, the fragment of an Indian-Trinidadian Bhojpuri song written and performed by my paternal grandfather, Ramsaran, in the 1930s, in honor of Uriah Butler, a labour leader of that time: Uriah Butler garibo ke khaatir, apne praan ko khelgayaa.

Beneath these images, binders that contain, like the file cabinets lining the adjacent wall, material relevant to my teaching and ongoing writing projects: my notes on literary texts; writing exercises; historical material accessed through archives, libraries, museums, cultural organizations; clippings from Trinidadian and American newspapers; academic essays; information relating to the Indian diaspora, particularly the old plantation diaspora; interviews with elders in the village of sugarcane workers and farmers in which I grew up; drafts of pieces of writing; video footage from a rapidly changing Trinidad that I hope, at some point, to edit, compose – in the vein of my earlier video-work – into sequences of visual poems.

I have not yet been able to unlearn the idiosyncratic method of typing I developed at college (I didn’t know how to type when I left Trinidad), so we’ve had a wooden stand constructed for my laptop which has saved me from many a neck crick. Tucked beneath this, books I’ve been jumping between: Sidney Mintz’s Sweetness and Power, Hugh Tinker’s A New System of Slavery: The Export of Indian Labour Overseas 1830-1920, Flannery O’Connor’s Mystery and Manners, Michael Ondaatje, Grace Paley, Nikolai Leskov, Charles Simic, an anthology of Caribbean short stories. More books and material of current interest on either side of the stand, piled atop the file cabinets, beside a corner shelf reserved for Caribbean literature, texts about Trinidad and Tobago.

On the desk, apart from books: cups of pens, a lamp—unspecial, but familiar. Up into the cubby-holes: journals I jot ideas in, literary magazines, junky things I resist discarding. The post-it notes stuck to the edge of the desk guide my writing like that broken line down the centre of the road. Higher up, a printer, speakers for music, folders, books: a collection of postwar Polish poetry edited by Milosz, poetry by Muriel Rukeyser, Jeremy Cronin, Dennis Brutus, Lorna Goodison, Martin Carter, Mahadai Das, Wislawa Szymborska, my father—Kenneth Parmasad, fiction by Tagore, Harold Sonny Ladoo; a dictionary, thesaurus, a brass murti of Saraswati I acquired on what I remember to be my first visit to an Indian-Caribbean temple in Queens, old bangles, photographs. It’s been over a year since I assessed the items on these upper shelves; they are footprints in dried mud.

I didn’t develop the practice of writing at a desk, in a closed room, facing a wall, until I left Trinidad to attend college. When I visit Trinidad I still like to write outside, by hand, or drag my small desk, if it’s not raining, into the upstairs porch with its view of the Northern mountain range, this Tanty watering her plants, that one sweeping the gap in front ofher house, the boys playing cricket in the road. I am not sensitive to shifts in light there.

Q: What South Asian themes are you interested in exploring in your work?

Cities of the Dead, according to its author, Joseph Roach, “shows how the memories of some particular times and places have become embodied in the through performances.” Roach further states: “…the voices of the dead may speak freely now only through the bodies of the living.”

In the Caribbean, Indian indentureship ended decades ago.

Sugarcane plantations are no more.

The government of Trinidad and Tobago announced last January that 2007 would mark the end of the sugarcane industry in the island—a watershed period in Trinidad’s history and, particularly, the history of the Indian community in Trinidad for, since 1845, when Indian indentured labourers were brought to the island to toil in conditions of bondage on plantations, the lives of masses of Indians, sugarcane workers and farmers, have been intimately tied to and dependent on the fortunes of sugar.

So much has changed, and yet, so much remains the same.

Though Indian-Trinidadians constitute half the population of Trinidad and have shaped and given their lives to that place for almost two hundred years, they are still called “East Indian” in that context—the same term used to describe them in colonial documents; it appears beside that other acceptable colonial designation, “coolie” (a derogatory term comparable to “nigger”). Many Indian-Trinidadians have also come to refer to themselves as “East Indian”. In Trinidad, I might be called an East Indian, West Indian. Here, in the United States, filling out official forms in different contexts, I have often had to choose between the categories: South Asian, Black/Caribbean. When, in one instance, I chose Black/Caribbean, the officer behind the desk took one look at me and said that I had to identify myself as South Asian. When I told her that I was both Indian and Caribbean – that my ancestors had lived in Trinidad for almost two hundred years – she shrugged. “You’re not black,” she said. Interestingly, the Black/Caribbean or Black/West Indian equation is also present in much American social scientific writing.

When I write, I think of these things—of the indelible marks left on us by history—how the voices of the dead continue to speak through the bodies of the living. I think of the contestation that exists between humankind and history: how we strive to be makers of history as history simultaneously makes us. I think of a Trinidadian sugarcane farmer – I will call her, Radha – who, in the political struggle waged by small sugarcane farmers in the 1970s to repeal an oppressive piece of Trinidadian legislation, pushed a policeman’s gun out of her face and asked: “Why you pointing a gun at me for? This is a peaceful struggle we having here.” I think of the Guyanese sugarcane worker and political organizer, Kowsilla (aka Alice), who became a martyr in 1964 when an estate scab drove a tractor through her, severing her body in two. I think of an Indian-Jamaican friend of mine, the descendant of indentured laborers, who walks into a room at a Massachusetts college where her friends (whose parents hark from South Asia) are sharing “Indian-Indian” food, hears the word, “aloo”, and bursts into an excited torrent of questions. What does the word mean, she asks urgently, what does it mean; for her grandmother in Jamaica used to use it, but the old woman is now dead and that word, dead with her, so what does it mean? Her friends, laughing incredulously, tell her: potato. She, clutching the word, fills with tears. Around the word, aloo, lit on a stage, I picture a space so dark with eroded sound, image, that the absence seems to shriek.

Under a rock? Looking for 2nd Generation Desi Fiction

A non-Desi co-worker raved about two South Asian themed books she had recently read. The next week, I find in my mailbox a copy of Anjali Banerjee’s Imaginary Men. It’s obvious from the cover that the book is light romance reading—the stuff of airport bookstores—and not in line for any major literary prizes. I am reminded of the hundred plus Sweet Valley High books I had read as a pre-teen, which both lured and repelled me. I enjoyed the endless daydreams of relationships I might once have (but didn’t) in high school and, when older, would have happily reincarnated into an avid consumer of Harlequin romance novels.

But the writing bug bit me, and I look back with embarrassment on the SVH era (the Ayn Rand, too). My bedside table is now a mess of avant-garde poetry, two Junot Diaz books, and past issues of The New Yorker, Gastronomica, and Fence. My writing group just finished Djuna Barnes’ Nightwood, and we’re reading The Sound and the Fury next. Though the feeling of trudging backward into an awkward history of teenage romance novels intimidates me, I convince myself that it’s something to blog about and dig in.

I read Imaginary Men in a day on my commute (the 38 Geary Limited) to and from work. No doubt my instincts about the book are true; it’s not literary fiction. But two things surprise me. I am relieved not to follow a protagonist who is “blonde” and a “perfect size 6” like the Wakefield twins. It would’ve done wonders for my self-esteem to have been reading about Indian women like me who fall in love with their dream guys. The other thing that strikes me is that with Jhumpa Lahiri being one of the only literary fiction voices in the United States, it might just be that books like Imaginary Men (and I’m told that The Hindi Bindi Club is great fun by this same co-worker) fill in the holes of the second generation Desi experience, albeit in a simplified way. And while I’m not rearranging my reading list or my bedside table books anytime soon, this foray was a good reminder that I, as an Indian American writer, need to know what others are consuming about my culture, as well as what’s missing from the big picture.

January News

NEW BOOKS:
Pramila Venkateswaran's new collection of poetry "Behind Dark Waters" (Plain View Press) comes out this month. The enclosed poems explore women's lives and issues from around the globe. Reviews of the book include those by poet Karen Swenson, who calls the poems "fierce" and "daring," and poet Saleem Peeradina who describes the book as a "a thoughtful, witty, dramatic, and provocative collection." Available from Amazon and Plain View Press.

READINGS:
A Unique Evening with Four South Asian Writers
Thursday 29 January: 7:00 p.m. - 9:00 p.m.
Redwood City Public Library will be hosting a reading including short-story writer and translator Moazzam Sheikh and three of our anthology's poets (Tanuja Mehrotra, Neela Banerjee and Pireeni Sundaralingam).
Redwood City Public Library
1044 Middlefield Rd.
Redwood City, CA 94063
(650) 780-7058

Delhi International Literary Festival
Many congratulations to our poet Sudeep Sen for masterminding the first festival of its kind in Delhi a few weeks ago. International luminaries included: Tomaz Salamun, Arthur Sze, Mimi Khalvati, Jane Draycott and Fred D'Aguiar.

TOURS:
Poet and editor Ravi Shankar is on tour with the poetry anthology "Language for a New Century: poetry from the Middle East, Asia and Beyond" (Norton, 2008) which includes several of our poets, including Meena Alexandar, Khazim Ali, Sudeep Sen, Vijay Seshadri and Pireeni Sundaralingam. Readings for the book include a book launch and party, sponsored by PEN, at Theosophy Hall in Bombay, as well as readings in Chennai (14 January), Singapore (16 January) and in the Philippines at the University of Manila (19 January).

WORKSHOPS:
P3: The Postcard Poetry Project with Debbie Yee and Bushra Rehman
Working with writers and artists in San Francisco and New York City, our very own Bushra Rehman will be teaching students to create original works of postcard art and poetry with a view to exchanging them with fellow artists on the opposite coast. The workshop will culminate in a public reading on both coasts and a publication consisting of the poet-artists' portfolio of work. The workshop is co-sponsored by two Asian American artists organizations: Kearny Street Workshop (SF) and Asian American Writers' Workshop (NYC).
Meetings: Mondays, Feb 2 through Mar 23, 7:00 - 9:00pm
Website: http://www.kearnystreet.org/programs/calendar/2009_1.html

MISSING: Best Poetry of 2008 Lists

Happy New Year! We hope that 2009 will be filled with perfect line breaks, abundant and truthful metaphors and rollicking onomatopoeia.

But before we forget about 2008 entirely: I recently spent a full day going over 'Best Books of 2008' lists from major publications and websites (the NY Review of Books, Publishers Weekly, Library Journal, NPR, Amazon, etc) to uncover the Best Asian American Books for 2008 for Hyphen magazine, where I am Books Editor and blogger. 

I discovered that South Asians did quite well, especially when it came to fiction -- where Jhumpa Lahiri reigned supreme with her second short story collection Unaccustomed Earth. In terms of Asian American poetry, I found most of the books I listed from the Kundiman site, though Asian American poets also did well in the American Book Awards. Our own Ravi Shankar was one of the co-editors of a poetry anthology, Language for a New Century, that had a more international focus, but also featured Asian and South Asian American poets. But I did have a hard time finding mention of any South Asian poets on the lists, but maybe it wasn't because of the lack of South Asian poets. 

But what I realized more than anything else, was that POETRY itself was missing from this strange year-end calculation. Sure there were a few (try two) mentions of poetry in the SF Gate's 50 Best Fiction, Poetry Books of 2008, a handful of interesting anthologies in this Guardian story, and here's a random-ish list on the Library Journal site, but I think it is safe to say that poetry published in 2008 safely slipped under the radar of the year-end, gift-guide media frenzy -- as poetry is known to do.  

Is it because of the subjective nature of poetry that makes it hard to review or recommend? Either way, I think it speaks to the way poetry is marginalized in America, or at least seen as un-sellable in a time of year when it's all about the money. But it did inspire me to pay more attention to the way poetry is talked about in the media, for which this blog is a wonderful outlet. 

So, I'll end this post with a little bit of mainstream poet coverage. By this time, I'm sure you've all heard about poet Elizabeth Alexander scoring the biggest poet gig of all time: Barack Obama's Jan. 20th inauguration. Going back to my previous point, this Chicago Tribune article mentions how difficult it is to find Alexander's 2006 Pulitzer Prize finalist collection American Sublime in Chicago bookstores. Either way, it is exciting to see poetry being published in major mainstream American dailies, like the Washington Post, and for indie Graywolf Press to get major attention. 

What poetry books of 2008 do you think were the best? And what were the best poems published by South Asian Americans in 2008? And does it really matter?

Featured Poet: DILRUBA AHMED

BIO:
Dilruba Ahmed’s poems have appeared in, or are forthcoming from, Blackbird, Born Magazine, Catamaran: South Asian American Writing, Crab Orchard Review, The Cream City Review, Drunken Boat, and New Orleans Review. Her work received first place for The Florida Review’s 2006 Editors’ Award. She holds B.Phil and M.A.T. degrees from the University of Pittsburgh and is currently enrolled in Warren Wilson College's M.F.A. program.



Q1: Name one collection of poetry that you wish you had written.

I just finished reading Rooms Are Never Finished by Agha Shahid Ali, an intense and beautiful collection of poems. Here are a few lines from one of my favorite poems, “By the Waters of the Sind”: “Sharpened against/ rocks, the stream, rapid-cutting the night,/ find its steel a little stained/ with the beginning light,// and the moon must rise now from behind// that one pine-topped mountain to find/ us without you.” For me, Ali’s book has been particularly instructive as a model for weaving personal events with public and historical events.

Q: Describe the place/physical location
where you write most regularly .

A: My husband and I found the desk at a garage sale shortly after finishing college and moving to the San Francisco Bay Area. The former owner sold us the first pieces of furniture that would furnish our new, empty apartment: two large leather chairs, a green folding card table, and a slim dark brown desk—all for $20!

While the other purchases have disappeared from our current home, the desk remains. It’s mainly a temporary storage space for materials related to my current projects: stacks of poetry books, books on the craft of writing and, of course, piles of paper. I love the desk itself but usually I take over the dining table for writing purposes. From the dining room, I face a view of the brightly lit living room and trees framed by windows. I spread my writing materials across the table surface into a river of books, papers, pens, highlighters, and notepads. I’m a big fan of sticky notes, so narrow strips of yellow or blue paper poke out from all of these materials.

I shelve books on craft behind me, and collections of poetry to my left. Poetry collections are the only books I alphabetize. Typically the wall to my left bears a few sticky notes with favorite lines of poetry or quotes on writing. Currently, I’ve posted a fortune from a fortune cookie declaring, You are a lover of words, someday you should write a book.

For years, I only wrote first drafts in spiral notebooks with pens. Periodically, I would review my scribblings, sometimes attempting to index them with more sticky notes—this time bearing enigmatic titles such as “dwelling-helped-harmed” or “serious children.” Eventually some of this raw material would appear in later, typed drafts. I now type many of my first drafts directly into my laptop.


Q3: What South Asian themes are you interested in exploring in your work?

I’m often obsessed with themes of cultural hybridity and forging new cultural identities. When I first began writing in earnest in college, the few South Asian titles on bookshelves at that time tended to focus on false dichotomies: West versus East, freedom versus limitation, good versus bad. So my early writing efforts attempted to respond to and defy such overly-simplified categories. Thankfully, times have changed! Now dozens of South Asian and South Asian American writers have brought new voices and more complex representations of cultural experiences into literary conversations.

NEWS: Upcoming Poetry Workshop

SHIFTING FOCUS: Changing Your Brain, Changing Your Poetic Practice –

COURSE DESCRIPTION:

Kearney Street Workshop, (the nation’s oldest Asian American arts organization) is organizing a poetry workshop to tie in with its current visual arts exhibition “Shifting Focus”.

Taught by poet/scientist Pireeni Sundaralingam, this workshop is split over 2 consecutive Saturday mornings (11a.m. – 1p.m.) and is dedicated to helping you develop a sustainable and effective practice as a poet. Incorporating ideas from neuroscience (including research on enhancing perception and attentional mechanisms), the workshops aim to challenge the way that we, as writers, engage with the world around us. In particular, the 2 day workshop will explore how innovative metaphors can be used to shift our focus, both as readers and writers of poetry.

If you’re interested in registering for the course, please contact : info@kearnystreet.org
giving details of your full name and contact info.

INSTRUCTOR BIO: A former PEN USA Rosenthal Fellow, Pireeni's poetry has appeared in literary and political journals such as Ploughshares, World Literature Today, The Progressive, and The Guardian newspaper (UK), university texts such as Three Genres (Prentice-Hall, 8th Edition, 2006; 9th edition, 2009), and anthologies such as Masala (Macmillan, 2005), and Language for a New Century (Norton, 2008). Her poetry has aired on national radio in Ireland, Sweden, and the US, and been featured at the United Nations headquarters, and the International Museum of Women. She is co-editor of Writing the Lines of Our Hands: the first anthology of South Asian American poetry (forthcoming). Pireeni was educated at Oxford University, and has held cognitive science research posts at MIT and UCLA. Dedicated to examining the confluence of art and science, in the past year alone, she has given lectures on “Poetry and The Brain” at MOMA (New York), the Exploratorium (SF), and the Life in Space symposium at Studio Olafur Eliasson (Berlin). Pireeni was born in Sri Lanka and currently lives in San Francisco. http://www.wordandviolin.com

DATE: Saturday 6 December & Saturday 13 December, 2008

TIME: 11a.m. – 1p.m

LOCATION: “Space180”
180 Capp Street (at 17th Street), San Francisco, California, 94110.

REGISTRATION:
Contact Kearny Street Workshop : Tel: 415.503.0520 Email: info@kearnystreet.org
To register by check, please send check or money order to: Kearny Street Workshop, 180 Capp Street #5, San Francisco, CA 94110. Please include your full name and contact info.