Dipika Mukherjee
Writing in pursuit of a polyglottal world
In this edition of #SAIatHome, we speak with author–educator Dipika Mukherjee and curatorial advisor for South Asia Institute’s current exhibition Testimonies on Paper: Art and Poetry of South Asian women
Dipika Mukherjee is the author of the novels Shambala Junction and Ode to Broken Things, and the story collection, Rules of Desire. She holds a PhD in English (Sociolinguistics) from Texas A&M University and her work is included in The Best Small Fictions 2019 and appears in World Literature Today, Asia Literary Review, Del Sol Review, and Chicago Quarterly Review, Newsweek, Los Angeles Review of Books, Hemispheres, Orion, Scroll, The Edge and more. Her third poetry collection, Dialect of Distant Harbors, is forthcoming from CavanKerry Press in October 2022
A collection of her travel essays will be published by Penguin Random House (SEA) in 2023. She is currently working on a third novel, as well as a hybrid memoir. When she is not writing, or travelling, she teaches at StoryStudio Chicago and the Graham School of University of Chicago
The multiplicity of your own lived experience has been at the center of your work across prose and poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. Walk us through the roots, muses and insights of your writing career that spans decades and geographies. You refer to Bengali as your ‘magic chalice’ in the poem ‘Dialect of Distant Harbors’– is that where your story as a writer begins?
…
Bengali is the seventh most spoken language of our world.
It will not disappear by my neglect, nor Bengali poets writing in English.
It is impervious to our mad dashes and enjambments, our stutters in severed
tongues. Yet I fear the absences from the vocabulary of my children;
Seventh most spoken language of the world, but its majesty unfelt
in this foreign tongue I continue to write in, to reach you…
…to reach you.
My childhood was spent in many different countries as my father was a diplomat; I was largely educated in Switzerland, Indonesia, New Zealand and Malaysia. As an adult the wanderlust bug continued to take me abroad, and I have worked in Singapore, Netherlands and China. Home for me now is three cities (Chicago, Delhi and Kuala Lumpur), and I continue to regularly teach and mentor writers in all three places.
I grew up with a father who loved poetry and often quoted poems in three languages; the classical Sanskrit and English literature he studied, and the Bengali literature that was his mother tongue. I grew to appreciate Bengali literature and poetry as an adult, (as a child I chafed at Bengali and appreciated only the English which allowed me to communicate no matter which part of the world I was in). Dialect of Distant Harbors is really about a journey from realizing the heft of my mother tongue, and understanding myself and my own creative energies that come through an ancestral language.
Your bio states that you can often be found in the Harold Washington Library when you are in Chicago. Talk to us about your love of libraries and how it shapes the way you write, teach and interact with literature.
As a child subject to frequent moves and expatriation, I was often distanced from friends and had to find a new network, often in countries where the primary language was not something I understood. Libraries, whether in International Schools or public libraries always had English books, and I felt that no matter what was happening in my life, libraries always spoke my language, and I could find my beloved books embracing me even in cities that felt foreign. I love how the Harold Washington Library is a refuge for everyone: a haven for bibliophiles; a source of knowledge for those seeking everything from citizenship to employment; a refuge for those who have nowhere else to sit for a while. Libraries welcome anyone without discrimination, and I love that. They are these beautiful cathedrals to knowledge, and I love the Winter Garden in the Harold Washington Public Library!
“...Libraries always spoke my language, and I could find my beloved books embracing me even in cities that felt foreign.”
“Migration, Exile … These Are Men’s Words” reflects a profoundly spiritual idea of home as being fluid, non-geographical, borderless, infinite and assertively undefined. Talk to us about the interconnected themes that are central to practice as a writer.
I am no woman-poet-migrant-in-exile.
Keep your labels, please…
(…) I am a nomad.
(...) In the feminine infinite
we make our home.
Although I grew up with the idea of homes as non-geographical and borderless (most of my childhood friends were as nomadic as I was), as I grew up, I started to think about how women have always moved through marriage, and made a home wherever they were. It is an amazing act of courage to uproot oneself from natal ties and move with a spouse, but women have been doing this for generations, but unlike explorers “discovering” new lands, the intrepidity and adroitness of women everywhere, making lives in inhospitable places has never been acknowledged.
“unlike explorers “discovering” new lands, the intrepidity and adroitness of women everywhere, making lives in inhospitable places has never been acknowledged. ”
Your latest poetry publication Dialects of Distant Harbors serves to complicate the immigrant narrative. The poetry provides vivid yet nuanced descriptions of histories both shared and personal. Language plays a pivotal role in sharing and honoring these lived experiences- how do you as a writer navigate the multiple languages that come with them?
Living in America makes you think that operating in different languages is somehow magical or a skill, but it is not, most of the world operates in multiple languages. I grew up in India where everyone speaks at least two languages fluently and understand another; in Malaysia, most people can converse in at least three languages, and mix up the languages in daily conversations. I hope Dialect of Distant Harbors has captured a polyglottal world. Although DDH is essentially in English, it uses Bengali terms like Awsukh, and uses the ethos of Malay poetic forms like the pantun.
In your most recent collaboration with SAI, you served as Curatorial Advisor for our current exhibition Testimonies on Paper: Art and Poetry of South Asian Women. It brings together an array of works on paper by South Asian women artists with responses in poetry by South Asian women poets. Part of the curation is On an Ohioan Autumn, Remembering Reetika– your response to Ayesha Sultana’s Untitled Graphite Scratched Paper series. Share with us your thought process behind this pairing.
I "met" Reetika Vazirani serendipitously; I was offered a residency at Centrum in Washington State in 2003, to work on my first novel, and I found books of Reetika's poems in my room. This was February, cold and snowy outside, and I curled up with this voice that sounded like home, with much of the anomie I was struggling with after giving up a well-paying academic job in Singapore to move to Ohio. Reetika sounded like she could be me, but by July 2003, she was dead in a murder-suicide that was absolutely brutal.
I obsessed over her. I read everything I could, trying to make sense of the sudden death of a poet so promising, someone I had thought about reaching out to, to say "thanks for SEEING me". I wrote a short story that found an avatar as a chapter in my novel, then I wrote this poem, finally naming her. This was written in 2003, but Reetika's memory still haunts me, and when South Asia Institute asked me to respond to art with poetry, I chose a dark canvas with flecks of white, jagged and jarring. I don't want to forget Reetika, and there are many ways to remember her; this is my memorial.
“ I hope Dialect of Distant Harbors has captured a polyglottal world. ”
Congratulations again on the successful publication of your third collection of poetry Dialect of Distant Harbors. We would love to know what you’re working on next.
I have a book of travel essays, titled Writers Postcards, which will be published by Penguin Random House (Singapore) in November 2023. I am also working on my third novel.
