Travelers, Like Us: An Introduction to Red Silk

Like most anthology projects, the impetus behind Red Silk derived from a mix of professional and personal concerns. While anthologies of South Asian Canadian writing are not completely absent from Canadian literature, only a handful have been published over the last two decades, few dedicated to publishing poetry, and even fewer introducing women poets. However, without these pioneering anthologies, a project like ours could not have been attempted, let alone achieved. As Diane McGifford and Judith Kearns point out in Shakti’s Words: An Anthology of South Asian Canadian Poetry (tsar publications, 1990), “Until the 1960s there were no works in English by South Asians”(ix). More than four decades later, while South Asian Canadian fiction has received national and international status and acclaim, the poetry has remained in its shadow, and South Asian Canadian women writers have received much less attention than their male counterparts.

Ours is not a new complaint. When Suwanda Sugunasiri edited The Whistling Thorn: South Asian Canadian Fiction (Mosaic Press, 1994), the introduction included the following caveat: “if there are only three women writers here (Lakshmi Gill, Surjeet Kalsey, Uma Parameswaran), it is not unreflective of the larger reality of the South Asian Canadian scene”(intro); and in The Geography of Voice (tsar publications, 1992), Diane McGifford adds, “Generally South Asian Canadian women have written more poetry and the men more prose”(xv), and it is likely that the lack of critical attention and commercial success lamented by nearly all Canadian poets also adds to the perception of an absence of South Asian Canadian women poets, especially the new and emerging voices of the new millennium. The 1990s anthologies of The Geography of Voice and Shakti’s Words highlight the work of South Asian Canadian women poets Lakshmi Gill, Himani Bannerji, and Uma Parameswaran, and certainly Arun Mukherjee is correct in perceiving a publication of South Asian women’s writing in English “a pioneering event”(Her Mother’s Ashes, ix), but these names, while they have earned their due in these publications, are not exclusively representative of the range and diversity of writing by South Asian Canadian women poets today.

These critical concerns were brought to consciousness for our editors in tandem with several other academic and creative explorations. Both in her academic and creative work, Rishma Dunlop, who had the initial idea for Red Silk, had been exploring South Asian literature, immigrant and diasporic identities and their relationships to memory, history, class and gender. Delving deeper and more specifically into South Asian Canadian writing, and reading the existing anthologies, new questions of theoretical, cultural, and aesthetic interest rose to the forefront. Where were the new and emergent poetic voices? Mixed race voices? Hybrid identity? The voices of those born and raised in Canada? How were these women poets writing about their lives, tackling issues of national and cultural identity? Issues of class and gender?

With these questions in mind, and upon hearing that poet and colleague Priscila Uppal was of mixed race identity which included a South Asian background, Rishma Dunlop decided to approach Uppal with the idea of compiling an anthology that would highlight the new wave of poetry being written by South Asian Canadian women. Although Uppal had resisted identification as a “South Asian” poet or academic, her work frequently explored issues of gender, ethnicity, and nationalism. She had also read extensively in the area of South Asian Canadian literature.

Dunlop then approached Denis De Klerck, publisher of Mansfield Press, who is committed to bringing new, diverse voices to his press and to the Canadian poetry scene, and he agreed to publish the proposed anthology if both writers were willing to undertake the anthology as editors, and also as contributing poets. The proposal led the editors to consider, first and foremost, whether it was actually a fruitful exercise to group together what one hoped would be a diverse and eclectic mix of writers under the heading “South Asian Canadian women”?

Our title Red Silk provokes deeply embedded connotations for women of South Asian heritage, as historically and culturally red is the color of happiness and joyful celebration. Red silk saris, salvar kameez, and other traditional attire embroidered with gold brocade are worn by traditional brides across the Indian sub-continent and these historical and cultural traditions are maintained by many South Asians in Canada and in the world. From this fabric, symbolic and real, myriad connotations and provocations emerge for contemporary South Asian Canadian women poets. These points of departure include considerations of exoticism, eroticism, the paradoxes and contradictions between feminist concerns, women’s traditional roles, submission, oppression, hybrid and diasporic identities and the material lives of modern women. Red silk as symbolic of traditional feminine roles for South Asians, invites questions and challenges to accepted notions of South Asian identities, women’s identities, and opens the door to re-imagine, re-write or re-invent these roles and symbols.

Were we convinced, as editor Nurjehan Aziz was, in collecting together short stories by South Asian Canadian and American women in Her Mother’s Ashes (tsar 1994), and then again in Her Mother’s Ashes: II (tsar 1998), that “South Asian women despite all their differences possess enough in common to make the enterprise of collecting their works in a single volume a meaningful one”(vii)? We realized quickly as submissions came in, that there could be no homogenizing tendencies as has been the custom of Western scholarship; the category of “South Asian woman” is a reductive, constrictive and false categorization and is used here in full knowledge of the inadequacy of any such label. As Arun Mukherjee points out, the term “South Asian” is inadequate to express our diversities. The terms South Asian and East Indian include vast linguistic, ethnic and religious differences as well as the historical legacies of markers of class and caste identities. South Asians with origins in the Indian sub-continent include those who are Punjabi, Bengali, Marathi, Tamil, Telegu, Malayali, Parsi, Sikh, Hindu, Muslim, Christian, to name only a few possibilities (Mukherjee, p.x).

Our own backgrounds reflect the vast differences between those who might be categorized as South Asian Canadian women. Rishma Dunlop was born in India, the daughter of Sikh parents, a biochemist and a teacher, and immigrated to Canada in 1958 when Dunlop was a small child. She grew up in Beaconsfield, Quebec. Priscila Uppal was born in 1974 in Ottawa and grew up with an absent Brazilian mother and a quadriplegic father of South Asian origin. Neither Dunlop nor Uppal were specifically instructed in the religion, language, or traditions of South Asian culture, although these traditions would have been present in peripheral ways. Uppal had written a novel about Catholic nuns, a collection of poetry responding to the post-September 11th reality through the lens of Greek mythology, among others. Dunlop had written essays, a radio play and a PhD dissertation which explored ancestral roots in India, and had published collections of poetry deeply connected to women’s bodies and desire. We realized that our own work and background were vastly different. We felt that given a larger body of work by South Asian Canadian women poets, we would have a much better idea of what poetry was actually being written, and then we would have a better basis for significant comparison. In fact we wanted the anthology to reflect a range of difference to bear out our conviction that there is no monolithic South Asian culture.

We were keenly interested in reading what other women were writing about, not to the exclusion of South Asian Canadian male poetry, but because we were aware, as earlier editors were, of more poetry by South Asian Canadian women than by South Asian Canadian men, and our own creative and academic work was also heavily invested in Barbara Godard’s formulation, that “the impact of feminist scholarship has been to show that gender is a fundamental organizing category of human experience and the creation of knowledge”(1). And yet, we knew too, by our own research and creative work, that it would be diªcult to even attempt to predict in what ways these women would respond to the roles of women in their work.

In deciding what “South Asian Canadian Woman Poet” actually meant, we sought guidance from the predecessors to Red Silk. Shakti’s Words: An Anthology of South-Asian Canadian Women’s Poetry edited by Diane McGifford and Judith Kearns (tsar publications, 1990) provided us with a workable definition of writers rooted in the Indian sub-continent: “the writing of South Asian Canadian women who traced their origins from one of the following South-Asian countries: India, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, and Bangladesh . . . directly to Canada from one of the South Asian countries or indirectly by way of Britain, or British Colonies, such as those from Eastern and Southern Africa, the Caribbean, and the Pacific Islands”(ix). We specified in our call for submissions that we were looking for ten to fifteen pages of poetry as yet unpublished in book form, and while this was a South Asian Canadian women’s poetry anthology, we welcomed poetry on any theme. In fact, our request was: “we want to see the work you are actually writing,” in the hope of receiving a more accurate sample of the poetic concerns and vastness of experience of our poets rather than only poetry about being South Asian.

Right from the beginning the editors and publisher had agreed upon a portfolio-style anthology so that poets could be introduced not by one or two pieces but by a body of work which would more adequately convey their poetic interests and sensibilities. Our selection process was based first on our own discernment of literary merit. In addition, we also selected with variety of form and range of voice in mind. Luckily, these two notions are certainly not mutually exclusive and we feel that every contributor to Red Silk demonstrates high literary merit as well as originality in terms of poetic approach or formal experimentation. While we did receive a lot of poetry which can be identified as exploring the South Asian experience in particular, we also received love poems, sound poetry, poems about sexual awakening, poetry without any reference to South Asian origins. We asked for a “Poet’s Statement” from each contributor, a paragraph introducing each writer’s poetic concerns, philosophical frameworks, or any other information about her artistic practice which she cared to highlight for the reader to introduce her poems.

What did we find? Our poets are formally diverse. Herein are prose poems, sonnets, ghazals, sound poetry, lyric fragments, sequences, and long poems. The proliferation of long poems and sequences was, at first, surprising; however, the complexity of experience and expression evident in the poets’ explorations seems to necessitate the longer verse forms. In addition, over the last few decades, the long poem form has frequently been cited as a dominant Canadian form, with several critics concurring with D.M.R. Bentley that the form “may have begun on the margins but now holds the center”(18), and with Frank M. Tierney and Angela Robbeson distinguishing further that it might be “distinctively Canadian in its documentary aspects, often serving a topographical and memorial function”(1). The long poem and poetic sequence offerings in Red Silk ought to be fruitfully considered as belonging to that tradition.

While the traditional red silk wedding sari is mentioned in several poems, red silk, for its editors and its writers, can also be interpreted as a locus for the exploration of notions of tradition, transplantation, stereotype, oppression, submission, womanhood, motherhood, that all of our poets in some way explore. As editors, we were both pleased and surprised to find a number of common threads among our writers, while each writer has also retained individual aesthetic and theoretical strategies for examining these themes. Many of the poems deal with the tensions between how history is taught and how it is remembered, but also how it is invented and reinvented. Memory plays a crucial structuring role for the transmission of family histories between generations, but also between forms.

Mothers appear everywhere in these pages. Perhaps this is a reflection of writing by women as a whole, the need to both identify with and rebel against one’s first and most significant image of woman and mother. However, we’d like to suggest further that the proliferation of mothers might also be understood as concurrent with the investigation of history and memory evident in the poems. How the women remember their mothers says a great deal about how they envision the world and their own place in it.

Travel has ended up being the dominant theme of the collection. Each of these poets isolate travel to and from places. Whether real or imagined, historical or memory-based, the prime energy of the poetic lines is movement, and place is as fluid in the work as language itself. The convergence and blurring of linguistic identities is also evident; herein are Punjabi words, French, Latin, cultural slang. The hybridized tongues reflect the multiple languages and linguistic traditions from which these poets draw their subject matter and semiotic language bases.

We did not find an essentialized South Asian Canadian national or cultural identity, nor did we find one unifying experience of gender among these poets. What is most common between all of us might be what is most common between all writers: the imagination is more crucial to notions of selfhood and family and home than categories of gender, actual national boundaries, homelands, and ancestral roots, because through the imagination we can travel the greatest distances and claim so much as our own.

While previous anthologies of South Asian Canadian writing have sought to expose a “distinctiveness of the ‘in-Canada’ South Asian immigrant experience, a distinctiveness that leaves most of us wincing and ashamed. . . . [an] icy, hostile social environment where they feel themselves doubly marginalized: first because they are immigrants and second because they belong to racial, often linguistic, and usually religious minorities”(Geography of Voice, viii), our anthology proves that this experience need not be the only one. Many of our writers were born in Canada, or were brought to Canada at very young ages. Many of our writers are mixed race. In fact, our three youngest contributors belong to both categories. In the end, these eleven writers are firmly Canadian writers. Hybridity is not something to be grieved, but something to be celebrated. They are not struggling with the same anger or racial oppression of their predecessors, but are claiming their experiences without guilt and without apology. Who we are is not something to be discovered in our genetics or in the history books; it is to be discovered in the many forms of the imagination.

However, while these writers can be legitimately perceived as engaged in several common practices and theoretical explorations, they are also individual poets in their own right, and we would like to take the time and opportunity here to say a few words about each poet, to offer up our thoughts and reactions as editors to the poetry we have chosen to highlight in Red Silk.
Hiro Boga’s selection of connected lyric fragments reads as a series of contradictions, of conflicting and opposing emotions and drives. The domestic world and the mythical world combine as Hindu mythology rubs up against the Sears catalogue for the poet’s attention. “Every no bears in its belly the sibilant/yes,” Boga writes, and the poem moves less like a spiritual conversion than a mix of protest and celebration, stops and starts, as the mythic and the mundane compete for the same space.

Rishma Dunlop’s individual lyrics also explore competing and sometimes conflicting spaces of identity as the apprenticeship of the student, the artist, the lover, and the poet are carried out in memory, in the world of books, in the post-colonial experience of her childhood, and the urban cityscape of her adulthood. Travel in her poems appears as a vehicle for memory and as a form of creation. “There is tenderness in every geography,” she writes, while the geography of language is explored as another form of tenderness which ought not to be ignored.

From Kuldip Gill’s selection we take the title of our introduction. In the poem “Four O’Clock Tea at Harrison Hot Springs Hotel” Gill juxtaposes the colonial experience in India with post-colonial life in British Columbia, elegantly remaking Delhi on the west coast. Her ability to combine cultures and experiences into a cohesive whole is also evident in her formal concerns. Persian forms such as the ghazal exist alongside the sonnet and the glosa.

Sonnet L’Abbé’s selection is, arguably, the most edgy, even in-your-face. L’Abbé is not afraid to take risks, experiment, and diverge from previous work as she tackles post-colonial issues head-on in “Theory, My Natural Brown Ass,” and international relations in “My Osama Bin Laden T-Shirt.” Most intriguing about her work is the sense of play which permeates each poem as she invents herself, her language, and her ancestry: “Killarnoe, I decide, is the land/of our ancient people.”

Danielle Lagah’s selection is another long poem sequence which is as much detective work as it is poetry. The family history is told by various players (the poems are formatted like a play), and both writer and reader simultaneously piece together the story fragments about a girl poisoned to death under mysterious circumstances. Lagah’s language is highly evocative and provocative, where the brutal reality of immigrant wives is set against other images of mundane domesticity. The exoticization and romanticization of India, the lush imagery and sensuality, continually shocks alongside grit, poverty, and disease.

Soraya Peerbaye’s poetry is primarily sensory. Reading her work is like confronting both sides of a negative at once: “as I try to photograph/the light, the light photographs me.” The rabbit image as one of girlhood adolescence bordering on womanhood expresses all the trappings of domesticity and femininity while intimating the power of sexuality and the larger public world. The vulnerability of the voice here is its strength and the poet risks the safe places for those with untapped potential.

Sharanpal Ruprai displays the most overt use of religious symbology in her poetic sequence. The reader enters a conflicted household, and one which you rarely see represented in Canadian poetry. The poems raise important questions about the roles of men and women, boys and girls, and how these roles get played out in the many rituals associated with one’s faith and culture, and transplanted into another country. “I wonder how it must feel to carry/this weight,” Ruprai writes. Her poetry is courageous, spanning the emotional gauntlet from shame to determination to humour.
Sandeep Sanghera’s selection is populated by women. Family history, village history, colonial history, international history; all intersect in her poetry as the roles her female figures assume in diverse landscapes are examined. The poet is witness to all the comings and goings, the secrets and betrayals: “The women in this village/are the running off kind.” The individual lyrics accumulate into a pledge of loyalty, not necessarily to a specific people or place, but to the transmission of stories in a community: “still a village will bear the weight of my tale/and the weight of your disbelief.”

Shauna Singh Baldwin blends humor with seriousness as she makes use of bakeries, personal ads, holidays, and Hallmark cards in her poetry. This world is at once her world, where she has a stake in the political events of the present and the past, but one which also does not seem to take into account the needs and wants of its citizens. Questions of faith mix with moments of wonder as the poet seeks guidance in a time marked by violence and hypocritical gurus.

Proma Tagore’s poetry also bears witness to the violence and marginalization of voice around her, at the same time that it celebrates difference and the sensuality of experience. From an elegy for Reena Virk in Victoria B.C., “November 14th,” to lesbian love poems, to poems that respond to other writers, Tagore’s poems are as diverse as they are dense. “I can hear the etchings of new maps,” she writes, siding with the possible rather than the restrictive.

Priscila Uppal’s long poem sequence does not so much describe the loss of a particular mother (no description of the woman is given at all) as it explores the nature of invention as a consolation for grief. Another detective story, the daughter refuses to be “tricked” by memory, and invents her own physical evidence, her mother’s character, and her own familial identity, even to the point of imagining siblings. Everything must be created because so much has been destroyed. Her travels to hunt down her runaway mother occur not by the aid of memory, but through the imagination, “the last place she knows you will look.”

No anthology can claim complete representation with equal balance served to all geographic regions, poetic traditions and aªliations, as well as to the diversity of cultural and religious traditions and sexual orientations a modern multicultural nation offers. We know there are multiple religious, cultural, and linguistic backgrounds within South Asian communities which are not represented here. We have a high Sikh Punjabi religious, linguistic, and cultural content. Many of our contributors live in Ontario and on the West Coast; however, this is most likely related to history and immigration patterns as these two regions have the highest populations of Canadians of South Asian descent. In addition, in response to our call for submissions for the anthology, we discovered some burgeoning movements, evidence of work-in-progress, though still at a developmental stage, of accomplishment in areas not traditionally associated with immigrant poetry, such as concrete poetry, and we think that if another anthology were undertaken in ten year’s time, we would very likely find this work may have more representation from South Asian women writers.

Since we are all travelers, poetry is a source that can and does speak powerfully across differences; poetry is a language of many tongues, many geographies. There is a plethora of South Asian Canadian women’s writing, and specifically women’s poetry, being written. The works included here are not exercises in nostalgia; rather, they are imaginings and re-imaginings of history, memory, the material reality of lives, testifying to the fact that boundaries of nation, culture and gender are slippery inventions requiring continuous interrogation.

Rishma Dunlop and Priscila Uppal
Toronto 2004

Works Cited

Aziz, Nurjehan, ed. Her Mother’s Ashes. Toronto: tsar publications, 1994.
Aziz, Nurjehan, ed. Her Mother’s Ashes: II. Toronto: tsar publications, 1998.
Bentley, D.M.R. “Colonizing Canada: An Introductory Survey of the Canadian Long
            Poem.” Bolder Flights: Essays on the Canadian Long Poem. Eds. Frank M. Tierney and Angela Robbeson. Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 1998. 151-
            159.
Godard, Barbara. Gynocritics/gynocritics: Feminist Approaches to Canadian and Quebec
            Women Writers. Toronto: ecw Press, 1987.
McGifford, Diane, ed. The Geography of Voice. Toronto: tsar publications, 1992.
McGifford, Diane & Judith Kearns, eds. Shakti’s Words: An Anthology of South Asian
            Canadian Women’s Poetry. Toronto: tsar publications, 1990.
Mukherjee, Arun. “Introduction.” Her Mother’s Ashes. Toronto: tsar publications, 1994.
Rafiq, Fauzia, ed. Aurat Durbar: The Court of Women, Writings By Women of South
            Asian Origin. Toronto: Second Story Press, 1995.
Sugunasiri, Suwanda, ed. The Whistling Thorn: South Asian Canadian Fiction. Oakville:             Mosaic Press, 1994.
Tierney, Frank M. & Angela Robbeson, eds. Bolder Flights: Essays on the Canadian     Long Poem. Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 1998.