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A trained sociolinguist, and the author of two novels, a short story collection, and three collections of poetry, Dipika Mukherjee has been exploring languages, cultures, and places since she was a young girl, as the child of an Indian diplomat. In her most recent poetry collection, Dialect of Distant Harbors, Mukherjee paints scenic pictures of her childhood in India, and then ventures out to her later years in Chicago, with stops in Bhutan, Bangkok, and other places, alongside poems exploring womanhood, family, language, and nationality. The result is a collection of poems that are candid yet lyrical, transporting the reader not only to places around the globe, but to the interior landscapes that accompany those places, exploring how those landscapes—both inward and outward—change over time; poems that give one deep insights not only into the self, but also into the relationships and spiritual and cultural muses that serve as the roots from which the self blossoms. I recently spoke to Mukherjee over Zoom about her newest collection, as she joined virtually from Delhi while I sat in Hyde Park in Chicago. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Farooq Chaudhry
Your collection has a lot of beautiful imagery in it, of different places and from different moments in your life. But one thing I noticed is that the imagery from India, and especially from your childhood India, was always the most vivid and the most detailed. And so I wanted to ask, even though you’re somewhat nomadic, and a lot of different places have shaped you, what role does India play in your literary and creative imagination?
Dipika Mukherjee
India has always been the bedrock of my writing, really. And in some poems, I think you’ll see my referring to the Muse as Saraswati, the goddess of learning. This imagery of just doing a multiplicity of things, writing prose, and poetry, and nonfiction, I’ve never sort of felt that as being unusual because I grew up [reading] Rabindranath Tagore. And he basically did it all, right? And even when he turned seventy, he started painting, and then got really good at that, and there was even an exhibition in the Art Institute of just gorgeous paintings [of his]. So, you know, I think India has sort of shaped my idea of what someone in the arts can do and be, and has, in a way, freed me from this whole idea of genre, and sticking to your lane and just doing a specific speciality. In America, it’s kind of almost frowned upon if you do too many things at the same time. It’s like you’re not serious about anything, right? But when you grow up in India, you have like all these people who did do many things, especially somebody like Rabindranath Tagore. So I think I was shaped by these kinds of philosopher-writers almost where there really are no boundaries, you know. You do what comes to you at that moment in time. I am also shaped by the idea of women as essentially having this Shakti, you know, this goddess thing in them. I grew up with this notion that there is a basic strength in womanhood, which other cultures don’t have in exactly the same way. So that’s the kind of upbringing I had that kind of, I think, opened my mind to just those multitudes of being and doing and becoming.
Farooq Chaudhry
That’s really beautiful. One thing that I’ve always appreciated about the Indian subcontinent is you often have this idea of artists and philosophers who are polymaths, but that doesn’t feature as commonly in America. You’re almost pressured to pick your lane and stick to it. When you started working a little bit more in America, did you feel pressure to pick a lane?
Dipika Mukherjee
Oh, absolutely. I think even now, people are like, well you’re mainly a fiction writer, but you’re coming out with this book of poetry? So that is a question I get asked, like, how do you do cross genres? Whereas I think in India, or even in Malaysia, people don’t ask me that type of question about sticking to my lane. And also, just because in America publishing is so commercialized, in a way people sometimes feel [they] need to do fiction because that’s what’s going to sustain your writing. Whereas if you do something like poetry, it’s very often not really taken as seriously. I mean, you don’t get like the six-months-before-publication book reviews, you don’t get multiple people just wanting to get your ARCs. Poetry is definitely more of a hard sell. So yeah, I did get that kind of pushback. I mean, I started feeling at one point that fiction just seems to be the more sensible thing to do as a writer. So I think that in America, I feel that a lot more.
Whereas even now, you know, in Bengal, one thing that happened very recently was our Durga Puja, which is an annual event, and UNESCO recognized it this year as being one of these heritage things of the world. But what happens every year is that all these little, little groups around Calcutta spend an enormous amount of time and artistic talent building these huge edifices that host the idol. And it’s not so important to think about [the edifices] as being something that lasts. What they do is they create these things just for the sheer artistry, and compete with each other for street cred. They don’t win anything. So they do these things, and after about six days, the idle is immersed and everything is brought down. And I think every year you are reminded that art for art’s sake is valuable. It’s not meant to last. You’re not supposed to do something for the sake of creating a name, or fame, or something. You just do it because it gives you joy, you know? That shapes my thought process. Just the immense joy that I get out of it [makes it] worth doing.
Farooq Chaudhry
I want to ask you about your poem “The Shawl.” You write more than once about violence against women and sexual assault, and in this poem you wove together the image of the shawl and ageing as a protective cloth against the world. What are the origins of the shawl as a symbol in your poetry, and how did you come to draw upon that as a source of protection and inspiration?
Dipika Mukherjee
That’s a really good question. I think in pretty much all of South Asia, women do have some sort of covering, especially for their breasts, when they’re growing up. You’re supposed to wear a dupatta, or you wear something so that, like, this burgeoning sexuality is not on display in the same way as it would be like, let’s say, wearing a t-shirt. And of course, things are changing. But even now, I see, for instance, young girls in India, if there’s an elderly person who’s visiting or something, they’re a lot more conscious about covering up more, and just kind of not, in a way, parading their womanhood. And I think growing up as a woman out there, I was always very conscious about this thing that, you know, you needed to have the dupatta or a shawl or, or something, just so that the male gaze wasn’t your fault, because it was always a woman’s fault, right? I think that is lessening a bit in the next generation because women are speaking up more about men behaving badly. But when I wrote this poem, I was very conscious of the fact that as a woman who has traveled alone for much of my life—initially it was for conferences, and then I started to write travel articles, then I would just travel alone just for the mindfulness of it, how aware I am of my surroundings—I became aware as I grew older that in a way I was treated as less of a sexual object. And I don’t think that the threat of violence ever goes away for a woman. It really never does. But I think that in a way, just being referred to as like a bhabhi, like an older married woman, made a difference in how I was able to walk in public spaces. And so I wrote “The Shawl” because I feel that there is just so much that shapes your decision on how to even walk in these public spaces if you’re a woman. And I wanted to speak up about this.
Farooq Chaudhry
I wanted to also ask you about the poem “Migration, Exile . . . These Are Men’s Words.” You find power in breaking down these words and rejecting them. But oftentimes words help explain what we’ve been through. And throughout the rest of the collection, you use them so beautifully, to paint such vivid pictures of the places where you come from, and the people who shaped you. And so I wanted to ask, what power do you get from the words that you reject compared to the words that you claim?
Dipika Mukherjee
One of the things that has shaped my entire life view is that I was born into immense privilege. Not that my father had a lot of money, but I was born to a diplomatic family. So I was born into privilege in the sense that expatriation rather than migration shaped my worldview. And even as an adult, when I started working, my first academic job was in Singapore. And interestingly enough, in Singapore, they call their expatriates “foreign talents,” you know, that’s how we are designated. And they treat you very differently from the laborers that are coming from, say, Sri Lanka or Bangladesh to work on the roads or something in Singapore. And when I moved to America, and we started processing green cards and stuff, I was a “resident alien.” I mean, even the term “resident alien” just makes you feel like you don’t really belong. You’re an alien, you know what I mean? What does that even mean, in human terms? So, I think that having grown up with all this about exile, migration, and it’s made me think a lot about the privilege of just the geography of your birth, which is entirely a thing of chance, right?
But this whole thing of migration being something people are distressed by, and people being forced into exile. And women, honestly, when I think back to even my foremothers or my mother— She just picked up and moved around the world, you know, and she did it with great grace, without talking about, oh, you know, this is so hard, I’m having to start again. But women have always been expected to do that. And they do it spectacularly well; otherwise, the human race really would not survive. And even when my father passed away, and we were reciting the names of our forefathers, everybody knows the forefathers, you know, we have, like, seven forefathers written into scripts by our temple priests, and things like that. But what about the foremothers? They’re completely erased, nobody knows. So I feel that this whole conversation around how hard exile can be, how hard migration can be, it’s a moot point when it comes to women, women just do it. And so that’s why I think I end with the lions and the feminine infinite. We make our own—because I really feel that women, not only because they’re expected to, but maybe also because they are more sort of nurturing or more, you know, curious—they make a home wherever they find themselves and it’s wonderful. We just don’t celebrate that enough.
Farooq Chaudhry
There’s a lot of imagery about visiting places, but there’s also really deep imagery about visiting people, and relationships, and other defining moments, like with your brother and your mom. What is the relationship between people and places in this collection?
Dipika Mukherjee
In terms of the people, it was really driven by my brother’s accident. He was such a sort of leading brain in India. He was a computer science professor at IIT Kanpur, which is like being the leading professor in MIT in America. And then to have this [accident] happen to him, and he became sort of a drooling infant. So that was something that hit me really hard. And when I did write the poems about my brother and my family going through it, it was catharsis. There was just no sense to any of it. And I was trying to make sense of it. And I don’t think that those poems are particularly lyrical or beautiful, you know, I think they were just a lot of just trying to just make sense of things. So there you wouldn’t find, let’s say, the musicality of “Wanderlust Ghazal,” where there’s just places that are pieced together and places that I love and that speak to me. “Mountain Echos,” which was written in Bhutan, and Bhutan spoke to me in a way that was very different in terms of just being so magical, and being so open to human beings and their conversations, even though I didn’t have a language in common with these girls. And so I’m always very conscious about the fact that places open up to you because of the people in it. And the way that the people relate to you is really a function of how open you are willing to be, and also how uncomfortable you are willing to be. So I think my relationships with people and places are very much connected. I love the places because I get to love the people, if that makes sense.
Farooq Chaudhry
You’re often working across languages and places where certain concepts may not exist in the other language, but the places may resonate with each other. And so how does access to a different language in a place where that language is not widely spoken help you understand it differently?
Dipika Mukherjee
The best example to use out here may be Malay. My Malay is kind of functional. Like, it’s kind of like a bazaar Malay, I can kind of go and ask for things I want to buy and stuff, but I can’t like give a lecture in Malay. And so I think that what it does for me, though, is that I’m very aware of when I do go into Malaysia and I speak Malay, and I speak it kind of badly, I do see everywhere that people appreciate that you are trying, you know, and that you’re really making the effort to at least meet them halfway. In a place like Amsterdam, they speak English so well that it’s almost impossible to get to speak Dutch very often. And I actually had one of my regular storekeepers tell me, hey, you’ve got to tell me when you try to speak Dutch so that I can know, that’s what you’re trying to do [because it was] so bad. So I think that I’ve had a lot of fun with languages. Again, you know, I’m a trained sociolinguist. So I think that I also am going into these languages with a little more play. And it was such a marvel that people in such far-flung places of the globe could communicate not completely, but at least partially. And so these kinds of things are just so fascinating to me. And of course, you know, Hindi and Urdu are just another language that’s just been sort of divided by Partition and by history. But so much of it is so familiar that even now when I speak to somebody from Pakistan, we do speak in a mixture of Hindi and Urdu, and you have two languages that have given me immense joy.
Farooq Chaudhry
What role have bookstores played for you in terms of feeling at home in the world, especially as you travel to so many different places?
Dipika Mukherjee
More than bookstores, I’d say libraries. When I went to Myanmar, for instance, and tried to get some books, because of what the publishing industry out there thought would sell, they were basically just self-help books and books on military tactics, and very little in English, or fiction, or poetry. So bookstores have not always been the greatest place to find things that speak to me. But libraries usually always had an English section, or a Bengali section, you know. I love the Harold Washington Library [in Chicago] because they have a lovely Bengali section. I remember when we moved to Wellington, New Zealand, and I was about ten or eleven years old, and I felt like I didn’t belong anywhere. But I just had to walk into a library and it just spoke my language without saying anything. I could just go to various nooks and corners and find Enid Blyton, which is what I had gotten familiar with in India, or other books I wanted to read at that particular time. I think I had already started on some of Alistair MacLean’s things at that time. So yeah, books are, in a way, universal. The kinds of books that are being talked about at Harold Washington Library will also be available in my neighborhood library in Delhi. So it’s like finding old friends.
POETRY
Dialect of Distant Harbors
By Dipika Mukherjee
CavanKerry Press
Published October 31, 2022
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