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Nov 14

The (Great) Indian Poetry Collective Indiegogo Campaign

The (Great) Indian Poetry Collective is the brain child of Shikha Malaviya, Minal Hajratwala, and Ellen Kombiyil, three poets who met in Bangalore, India, in 2013, and decided to found a mentorship model collective literary press. The Collective aims to publish new & emerging Indian poets, on the basis of manuscript merit, mentor them through the publishing process from A to Z, and then train them to eventually become mentors themselves. In addition to publishing books, The Collective also gives poetry workshops, organizes readings, develops poetry curriculums rooted in Indian poetic traditions & much more. They’re all about widening the dialogue on Indian poetry and bringing it out into the open.

So far the collective has published two titles, Geography of Tongues (December 2013/January 2014) & Bountiful Instructions for Enlightenment (November 2014). They hope to publish three more books in the coming year & will be releasing  inPoetry, a poetry app which will bring Indian poems in English to readers through their mobile phones, as well as designing an online poetry workshop.

In order to realize their goals, The (Great) Indian Poetry Collective is now running an Indiegogo campaign. While India has influenced the world in music, film, fashion, philosophy, and countless other ways, her poets have not yet had the international platform they deserve. The Collective hopes to remedy this oversight and, through the power of social entrepreneurship and community, allow the verse of Indian poets to shine everywhere. Please consider being a patron of poetry & donating.

 To learn more, visit:

 

Oct 6

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Kriti Festival 2014 and “Kriti Withdrawal.”

kriti posterMany literary conferences and festivals are so large that, by the time you get your bearings, it is time to go. Not so at Desilit’s Kriti Festival: The Midwest’s South Asian Literary Festival which was large enough to offer a bounty of panels and books and yet small enough to be accessible to all attendees. From the opening readings to guest of honor Manil’s Suri’s unforgettable presentation on his most recent novel ‘The City of Devi’, to a dizzying array of panel topics, Kriti Festival 2014 was one of those magical times where everyone was having such a great time– discussing books, attending panels and readings, making new friends, connecting with old ones– that going home was so sad an event many panelists  coined a new term for it: ‘Kriti Withdrawal’.  I was on six panels including  ‘Memoir & Essay: Telling True Stories’ (with Lopa Banerjee, Fawzia Mirza, Preston Merchant), Selling Your First Book (with Dipika Mukherjee, Sonali Dev, Nayomi Munaweera), the delightful romp that was ‘Sex and the Word’ (with Mary Anne Mohanraj, Rajdeep Paulus, Mina Khan and Sonali Dev) and I moderated the much more somber panel ‘Trauma and Memory in South Asian Literature’ (with Mary Anne Mohanraj and Nayomi Munaweera) in which we discussed novels about Sri Lanka’s civil war, the Kashmir conflict, and the Sikh Golden Temple Massacre and more.  I can still remember the days many many years ago when book shelves carried, if they would at all, Bharati Mukherjee, then Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, and then Manil Suri, and so, to now be amongst so much South Asian talent be it poets, playwrights, novelists, filmmakers, short stories writers, photographers, comedians and to see so much of their work and so many books being published and readily available is to arrive at a particularly wonderful station on this journey of South Asian American Literature. I returned home with a suitcase overflowing with memories and books and the knowledge that I belong to a lovely and warmhearted community of fellow writers, and that not only is Manil Suri a terrific storyteller but that he also possesses a wicked awesome sense of humor. Thank you Mary Anne Mohanraj and Neha Kumar for organizing Kriti and to all the sponsors. May you have many more.  Kriti Withdrawal. It’s real. Because for many many many of us Kriti was coming home.

Brown Girl compiles a list of Top Ten Quotes heard at Kriti

The Aerogram write up on Kriti Festival 2014.

Saris and Stories write up on KF 2014.

 

 

Oct 2

Interview with Abdullah Hussein author of the iconic novel ‘Weary Generations’

An interview with Abdullah Hussein, author of the classic Urdu novel ‘Udaas Naslein’ (Weary Generations) which spans the British Colonial times to Partition. Hussein is now in his eighties and has some very interesting ideas and firm beliefs.

“A sharif admi cannot become a real writer. Philandering is one of the virtues of great minds, not because it is a virtue in itself but in the sense that it breaks taboos and to be a good writer you need to break social taboos. To create is to negate the existing order.”

read rest here 

Sep 15

On Literary Festivals and V.S. Naipaul

As the Kriti Festival in Chigaco nears  no doubt all the artists and authors attending are thrilled to have this venue to share their work and thoughts through readings and panels. In many such Festivals panelists etc… are usually paid airfare and lodging and the Super Stars  (hierarchy, yes, there is) are also paid for their time. V.S. Naipaul recently asked the Ubud Writers and Readers Festival to pay him more than they could afford, so he was dropped from  the roster. I don’t know who wins in this scenario because everyone seems to lose: the festival, the author, and the festival goers.

“The late cancellation of Nobel laureate V.S. Naipaul from next month’s Ubud Writers and Readers Festival has exposed the fierce competition and delicate negotiations behind the flourishing international festival scene. Since Janet DeNeefe founded the festival 11 years ago as a healing response to the Bali bombings, the Australian-born restaurateur and writer has built a successful annual event that attracts almost 26,000 visitors to enjoy talks, performances and food amid Ubud’s hillside rice paddies, art galleries, temples and resorts.” read rest here

 

Aug 20

Letters from Indian Soldiers in WWI by David Omissi

In Indian Voices of the Great War, British historian David Omissi collected letters written during WWI by Indian soldiers. One soldier asks for charas, another for ladies shoes, and yet another for a flute not because he needs it but because he has ‘great longing for a flute to play’. The reader can only imagine his request for a musical intrument, for music, and what that means to him amidst trench warfare. One soldier writes about his four year abcense  and so allowing his wife to remarry according to vedic rites for the dignity of the family, another writes about the real reason he wants the ladies shoes which is not because he is having an affair, and yet another sends home a picture of an American female aviator so Indian women can see what they can aspire to.

Balwant Singh (Sikh) to Pandit Chet Ram (Amritsar, Punjab)

[Gurmukhi cipher]
FPO.39 [France?]
24th October 1915

The ladies are very nice and bestow their favours upon us freely. But contrary to the custom in our country they do not put their legs over the shoulders when they go with a man. [Deleted]

 

read letter excerpts in Caravan: A Journal of Politics and Culture 

Aug 18

Daisy Rockwell Interviews Amitava Kumar

Novelist, artist, translator Daisy Rockwell brings her many hats to her interview with the equally multi-hatted Amitava Kumar (though Rockwell does not open the ‘authenticity’ door 🙂

“In his new book A Matter of Rats: A Short Biography of Patna, author Amitava Kumar writes about his hometown, Patna, in Bihar, India. Not meant to be a comprehensive history, it’s a slim volume that attempts to capture not just the spirit of a city, but also Kumar’s ambivalent relationship to Patna, as an emigré with pangs of guilt for having left. I found the book was witty, thought-provoking, and eminently readable, but I still had many questions for the author, and so I contacted him for an interview, and he graciously accepted.

Your hometown of Patna, in India, is the kind of place that people want to leave, if they can, and have trouble feeling proud of. Is there an equivalent city or region in the United States that would help American readers get an idea of what Patna is like?

You remember what James Carville said about Pennsylvania? It has Philadelphia in the east, Pittsburgh in the west, and Alabama in the middle. When I heard that remark, I was living in State College, PA. At first I chuckled, and then I stopped. I began to wonder, if he’s saying this about State College, PA, what would he say about Patna.”

read rest here

* on an added note, I’m looking foward to reading Rockwell’s translation writer Upendranath Ashk’s short story collection “Hats and Doctors.”

Jul 19

Naipaul on Writing A House for Mr. Biswas

Love him or hate him, this is a poignant piece by V. S. Naipaul about what writing A House for Mr. Biswas meant to him.  (Published in 1983, but I think the sentiments are timeless…)

Of all my books A House for Mr. Biswas is the one closest to me. It is the most personal, created out of what I saw and felt as a child. It also contains, I believe, some of my funniest writing. I began as a comic writer and still consider myself one. In middle age now, I have no higher literary ambition than to write a piece of comedy that might complement or match this early book.

The book took three years to write. It felt like a career; and there was a short period, toward the end of the writing, when I do believe I knew all or much of the book by heart. The labor ended; the book began to recede. And I found that I was unwilling to reenter the world I had created, unwilling to expose myself again to the emotions that lay below the comedy. I became nervous of the book. I haven’t read it since I passed the proofs in May 1961.

My first direct contact with the book since the proofreading came two years ago, in 1981. I was in Cyprus, in the house of a friend. Late one evening the radio was turned on, to the BBC World Service. I was expecting a news bulletin. Instead, an installment of my book was announced. The previous year the book had been serialized on the BBC in England as “A Book at Bedtime.” The serialization was now being repeated on the World Service. I listened. And in no time, though the installment was comic, though the book had inevitably been much abridged, and the linking words were not always mine, I was in tears, swamped by the emotions I had tried to shield myself from for twenty years.

Lacrimae rerum, “the tears of things,” the tears in things: to the feeling for the things written about—the passions and nerves of my early life—there was added a feeling for the time of the writing—the ambition, the tenacity, the innocence, My literary ambition had grown out of my early life; the two were intertwined; the tears were for a double innocence.

read rest here in the New York Review of Book.

Jun 29

Anita Desai on Being An Outsider

Celebrated writer Anita Desai spoke with Joshua Barnes of Sampsonia Way about how she became a writer, her writing process, and what it’s meant to be an “exile” from her homeland while writing about it. Indeed, writing as a daily practice is inundated with multiple requests to engage and interact with fellow writers and readers in a way not known before, mainly because of the fluidity of communications available through the Internet. She also explains that in spite of our increased connectivity, we are nonetheless drawn to the mode of exile because of its impact upon both our ancestors and our present:

I’m interested in people who live in a kind of exile; it may not be political exile, but in some sense it’s exile from the rest of society. It may have something to do with my upbringing and my parents. My mother, having been German, lived most of her life in India and never felt able to return to Germany . . . But on a superficial level, by uprooting yourself, you experience the world from many different angles. On another level, it leaves you as an outsider for good. You’re always an observer rather than the participant, and that’s a big difference.

To read more of this interview, click here.

Jun 23

Amitava Kumar on Writing in English

Amitava Kumar discusses the politics of writing in English as well as the desire, or need, to get published in the West rather than be content with getting published in India.

“I read the message from my friend and wondered whether Paul Auster had ever heard of Patna.

Although I hadn’t till then read anything by Auster, I now felt a connection. A couple summers ago, I saw a young woman on the beach reading The Invention of Solitude, and bought a copy the next day. When Auster’s memoir Report from the Interior came out last year, I again picked up a copy. Early in the book, there is mention of “the starving children in India.” Auster is describing a scene from his childhood. American mothers in the 1950s talked of half-naked, emaciated Indian children begging for food so that they could shame their own kids into finishing what was on their dinner-plates. This pleased me, but the memory was so general that it took on the character of a myth, which is what, in the end, it was. read rest here”

 

Jun 5

Arisa White writes ‘Post Pardon’ based on poet Reetika Vazirani’s life and death.

I was living in California the first time I heard about  poet Reetika Vazirani. I mention where I was living because this woman I did not know is one of my strongest memories of living in a State/place I grew to love despite the few months I was able to call California home. The reason which  I first heard about Vazirani was less than stellar. She had committed suicide and, what seemed, impossibly, even worse,  she had also killed her two year old son. My elder son was, at the time,  two and a half years old, and, don’t we all suffer dark nights, and yet, we fall asleep and wake up ready to give a new day a fresh chance. I could not get her son out of my mind. That night I wrote a story about such an incident but I did not try to get it published for some  words you need to bare your heart of just for yourself. But, since that day over a daceade ago,  I do think back to that woman and her son and wonder what happened? What happened?

Poet Arisa White  is trying to answer exactly that in Post Pardon, a series of poems loosely based on Vazirani’s death. White had met Vazirini and her son, Jehan, and she was also a student of Jehan’s father, Pultizer Prize winning poet Yusef Komunyakaa.  White says:

“Post Pardon is an investigation of that why; it is an effort to occupy the mindset of a person who would commit an act of murder-suicide, in such a way where reason is not given, judgment is not passed, or excuses are formulated. The series of poems is a chorus of voices speaking from the interiority of a woman who contemplates life: the taking of her own and that of her only child.”

To peer into what may have lain in Vazirani’s heart, Arisa White uses the strategies of  Irish poets  Medbh McGuckian and Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill. White was drawn to  McGuckian’s ablity to imagine and create worlds of her own and Dhomhnaill gaze into the  spaces between sanity and insanity. White is also writing an opera based on Post Pardon.

thanks to Minal Hajratwala for the tip on Post Pardon: the Opera. You can see the kickstarter Post Pardon trailer here.

May 27

Kriti Festival 2014 Call for Submissions

Deadline June 30

Kriti Festival of Arts and Literature Call for Submissions
September 25 – 28, 2014
University of Illinois at Chicago

DesiLit is pleased to welcome submissions to its upcoming festival of arts and literature, to be held in Chicago, Sepember 25 – 28, 2014.

Submissions are welcome in the following areas:

  • literature (fiction, poetry, creative nonfiction, drama)
  • film
  • music
  • dance
  • visual arts

If your work is selected, you’ll be invited to serve on panels and/or give a reading/screen a film/give a performance/etc. Panelists will receive free festival registration, and if there are funds remaining after expenses, a share of the proceeds towards reimbursing their travel expenses. We’ll also do our best to match you with local volunteer hosts if desired.

To have your work considered please send an electronic sample to submissions@kritifestival.org with the subject line: KRITI SUB [title of work / your name], following these guidelines:

  • a brief bio, PLUS one of the following
  • literature sample (up to 20 pages)
  • film sample (up to 20 minutes; if you want to send a longer film, be aware that we may only view the first 20 minutes)
  • music sample (up to 20 minutes)
  • dance sample (up to 20 minutes)
  • image sample (up to 5 images)

For large sound/graphic files, we STRONGLY prefer that you host the work on your own site and send us a pointer to the URL, or submit via Google Drive or Dropbox. If you wish to submit in multiple genres, please submit each sample separately.

For a sample of our 2005, 2007, and 2009 panelists, please visit http://desilit.org/kriti.php. If you have any questions, please contact info@kritifestival.org.

DEADLINE: June 30, 2014

May 22

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Akhil Sharma Mulls on “A Mistake”

Writer Akhil Sharma has an excerpt from his forthcoming novel Family Life entitled “A Mistake” featured in the latest edition of The New Yorker. It is filled with the kind of engrossing details that first-generation immigrants from any nation will recognize, from the wonderment at all the conveniences to confusion at all the seeming sameness. Endless adjustments, to school, to work, to home, and to the comforts of a post-industrial nation both delight and frustrate the narrator as he details his first few years as an Indian in America. An ordinary red shag carpet in a one-bedroom apartment in Queens, NY becomes a thing of luxury, conjuring feelings of “stepping onto a painting.” The stories in Family Life are based in part on Sharma’s real-life experiences and loved ones, and here he reflects upon his deliberate choice to dwell in fiction instead of memoir:

I think one can be more honest in fiction than in a memoir. For me, memoir, because it claims to be factually true, restricts my ability to use dialogue, since I remember only a few things that were said. It also hampers my ability to collapse time, because collapsing time takes events out of context. And I wanted to focus on only certain aspects of the experience; in a memoir, I would have felt obligated to include things, such as boredom, that don’t interest me artistically but were an important part of the experience.

To read more of Sharma’s story, click here. For more about Sharma’s experiences while writing his novel, click here.

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