I S S U E 7

The Architecture of Belonging and Longing

Sana Goyal in conversation with Supriya Kaur Dhaliwal

Supriya Kaur Dhaliwal’s first full-length collection, The Yak Dilemma, is peripatetic in spirit and packed with the pit-stops she’s made along the way. Moving from the Himalayan mountains to the Mediterranean, and from India to Ireland, the poet is always asking: ‘Where have I truly come to?’ The reader follows her into cemeteries and seminar rooms, museums and no man’s land, pubs and partitioned lands—as she questions her place in the world as a flâneuse and a ‘foreigner’. I spoke to Dhaliwal about freedom, her skewed relationship with form, and being a female poet of colour releasing her debut.

How was The Yak Dilemma born? Was it with the title poem or the opening poem (‘Meet me in the morning on no man’s land’), a sentence or a sound, or something else entirely?  

The Yak Dilemma was born out of a desire to read a book by a female poet of colour who did not have to belong to a place to write about it. I was looking for a book that talked of the freedom of bodily autonomy, freedom of movement that comes from fighting against constraints—geographical or physical, freedom of thinking the thoughts that lie scattered all over our lives like weeds—without any impended harm or censorship. There were poets who excited me through my search, such as Karthika Naïr, Moniza Alvi, Meena Alexander and Mimi Khalvati. I like to think that the voices of these poets paved the way for the poets of colour of my generation. We must think, write, and talk about our liberty continually, so that it might be realised someday.

I wrote a lot of poems in the book as I was living my life, as I was taking those ‘Arabic Lessons’, visiting a kitabevi (bookstore) in Istanbul, dining alone in Dublin, always bringing back saffron from the Himalayas to wherever I was returning after visiting home. But there was a point in this journey where I realised there was a common streak connecting most of my work. The rest of my years were spent tracing this streak. ‘Meet me in the morning on no man’s land’ is an important poem for me because it laid the foundation for what The Yak Dilemma could be. I wrote the title poem much later than most of the other poems in the book. But it reassured me of what memory was capable of generating after the thick patina of time starts to wear off.

Can you say a little more about this ‘streak’?

My poems, it turns out, were all outcasts to be labelled under one genre—just like the subjects they were touching upon. I was writing about this idea of home and I wanted to write more about it without calling it home. Some poems in the book like ‘Meet me in the morning on no man’s land’ and ‘Poem in which I am an Interloper in an Art Gallery’ were first written as longer non-fiction pieces. But in the subsequent drafts they developed into the poems they are today, morphing into a different style and structure altogether. A single poem, in the end, is a product of the multiple journeys.

You’ve said somewhere that these sections can also work as standalone mini pamphlets. Can you talk about these parts of the whole—and how you see your book as a material object? Do you think that there is still sometimes a false sense of snobbery or hierarchy between pamphlets or chapbooks and collections? 

I think the boundary between what we call a pamphlet or a chapbook, and a collection, is of an invisible colour. A book of poems remains a book of poems despite its size and intentions. I really wish publication houses focused on this more. I understand we label these books of poems because of how they are marketed in the industry. As a poet, though, I do not buy into this false sense of snobbery at all. While I was studying for a Creative Writing MA in Belfast, the standard model of publication that we poets were asked to follow directed us towards publishing a pamphlet before a full-length collection. I think more than anything this has to do with the structure that pre-exists in the publishing industry. It is often presumed that it is close to impossible to be able to find a publisher for a debut book of poems until a pamphlet, a smaller body of work, already exists in the market by the same author.

 Arranging these poems in four distinct sections was one of my biggest challenges. There is definitely no concrete model for what really works and what does not. That being said, the only judges are the poets themselves, with inputs from their editors and trusted readers. After my manuscript was a 100% finished, I spent a long time mulling over how to arrange them in an order that works. So, I laid them supine on the floor on multiple occasions as if I was a doctor, and the poems my patients, eagerly waiting to get home. There is so much about cities (visible and invisible, mapped and unmapped), houses, rooms, accidental encounters, art, etherealness, and intimacy in the book. I wanted each section to give direction to the following section while touching upon similar subjects. I was mindful to not make the sections appear as if the poems in them are overcrowding each other with what they have to say.

 Each section of the The Yak Dilemma is mothered with much care and attention. All readers of poetry engage with these bodies of work in their own beautiful, distinct ways. I wanted to give my readers a standalone experience of reading each section on its own. I was also aware of the fact that the book will find its way towards readers who do not usually read poetry. That is why I did not want the structure of my book to be so complicated that it turns off anyone who wishes to spend time with it. Poetry is for everyone. This book is for everyone. The sequencing, the design, the way these four sections were going to be separated from each other—it all mattered a lot to everyone who created this book.

The Yak Dilemma features both ‘accidental’ sonnets and ghazals. You play with formatting and the page-space: a couple of poems are printed in landscape mode and the blank spaces between line breaks speak volumes. Yet, your collection is highly accessible and readable. People still tend to think of poetry as highbrow—and as not for everybody. Can you talk about these formalistic choices? Were you trying to demystify this air around poetry?

I see the blank space between line breaks as a playground of kinship—a space where the poet and the reader bond with each other. The different ways in which a poem can sit on the page is an important concern for me. A poem’s journey is not only vertical but also horizontal. A blank page, whatever size it may be, is a poet’s canvas. The page size of the publication or the final draft, and the page size of the multiple running drafts are not usually the same. This transfer of poem from one page size to another a is crucial step for the poem in making. Some lines run as far as our eyes can see. It is hard to contain this sensation in a poem that sits without experimentation on the page.

My relationship to form is skewed. For instance, the poem ‘The quickest way to accidentally kill a succulent is to shower it with love and attention’ was first written as a Shakespearean sonnet. I was reluctant to leave it at just that because the lines felt extremely loaded with not just information but also with sound. In the subsequent drafts, I ended up chopping each line into two halves, so that we had those two pillars standing next to each other in the end. It still is a Shakespearean sonnet but there was so much that could be done with its diction and fragmentation. I love the rules of this game but my relationship to them is toxic. So much of The Yak Dilemma is about breaking free and attaining this freedom that we have been after for so long. That is why, breaking free from the form, from the rules of this game, was important for me.

Earlier on, you mentioned the ‘freedom of bodily autonomy, freedom that comes from fighting against constraints—geographical or physical, freedom of the thoughts that lie scattered all over our lives like weeds.’ What does freedom mean to you, as a poet, both on and off the page?  

Freedom, for me is a precedent for a sense of equilibrium and an intention to continue on, both on and off the page. As someone who became a poet growing up in a postcolonial country, it has always been important for me to learn about the personal and political freedoms that we must fight for and once they are attained, it has been as important for me to understand how to cherish them. Often, we are enslaved by what we desire the most, rendering most of us unfree. We are constantly rewriting our definitions of freedom because it is organic. Even to (be able to) think a little freely is truly an asset.

How do you approach your practice? I imagine the process varies each time, with each poem, but what keeps you anchored—and coming back to the page? 

My practice is very fragmented. I am never able to finish a poem in one go. It includes a lot of list-making, a lot of obscure research, a lot of sleeping, a lot of rewriting of what might appear to be the final draft. What keeps me bringing back to the page is not the finished poem but all that will lead to the birth of it—the journey, the exceptionally long walk.

What do you find most challenging – and most rewarding – about writing poetry?  

The most challenging thing for me while I am writing my poems is the way in which I place ‘time’ in it. It cannot be all in the past, present, or the future tense. It is not as simple as that. A perfect poem, I think, plays around with a number of timelines very seamlessly. I do not know how writers like W. G. Sebald, Annie Ernaux, Iris Murdoch, Maria Stepanova do it so well.

 And the most rewarding thing about writing poetry is that it is a truly valid justification for my high caffeine consumption.

So, would you say it’s not just poets who influence your work?

 Definitely not. I do not know how I would be writing if I had not been inspired by Dayanita Singh, Natalia Ginzburg, Samuel Beckett, Louise Bourgeois, and others.

‘Four walls don’t make a home or a house—it takes some doing,’ you write in ‘Ghazal on Living in a Hotel in Downtown Cairo’. The soul of the collection is nomadic and peripatetic. You’re enamoured by artists’ and writers’ houses across continents. Can you talk about the architecture of belonging—about what it means for you and your work?  

For me, this architecture of belonging is synonymous with the architecture of longing. I think, this is where most of my work stems from. All the years that I spent writing this book, I was negotiating this sense of belonging with all those houses that I travelled to, all the houses that I myself lived in. I still am.

How long does one have to live in a house to be able to call it a home? I do not know. But I do know that we spend our lives redefining what a home could mean to us. In 2021, can we really belong to a place? I do not know. Then this architecture of belonging directed me towards all the spaces that we physically occupy—hotel rooms, bedrooms, graveyards, forests, and so on. What space can we really occupy as a generation of post-memory? Do we really belong where we feel at home? Do we really belong where all the socio-political norms put us? Our concerns are worth more than a mere footnote. 

You write about different kinds of partitioned lands and no man’s land across time and history: from India-Pakistan – where ‘the distance between Jhelum and Satluj is a wound’s width’ – to Ireland and Brexit. Your poems are timely and politically charged but also tinged with nostalgia and personal circumstances of the past and present such as homesickness and heartache. How do you approach the big and small, the consequential and the trivial? 

I think that the poems decide for themselves what is consequential and what is trivial. I can think of an ant carrying a grain of rice on her back for hours in one go. For how long must I think of an exodus that rendered millions displaced? Perhaps an entire lifetime falls short for that.

As a polyglot poet, you write about your ‘half-baked Arabic / & over-ripened Hindi’, you lament lost vocabularies and dictionaries, and your poems have been translated into various languages. Can you talk about writing and living between languages—and what language means to you as a postcolonial poet, if that is indeed how you identify? 

These words by Yoko Tawada resonate with me a lot: ‘Often it sickened me to hear people speak their native tongues fluently. It was as if they were unable to think and feel anything but what their language so readily served up to them.’ Since I am not yet fluent in any language of this world and I do not know if I will ever be, I am left with a lot of thinking to do. Every language to me is a foreign language.

How does it feel to be published – and to stay still and unmoving – in the midst of a pandemic?

It is really lonely to be bringing a book out during the pandemic. I am grateful for all the support that has poured in. It is the little things that I miss the most. I have not seen The Yak Dilemma in bookshops yet. Nor have I been able to raise a toast in person with any of the people who played an instrumental role in bringing it out in this world. I keep telling myself that this is not about me. If people are reading The Yak Dilemma and finding different ways to connect with it, then we have been successful enough. The book had just come out when bookshops were reopening in the UK for the first time this year, and when the second wave of the pandemic had just hit us in India. It was a weird time to be celebrating something at such a sensitive time. Hopefully, this will change as the world heals.

 We spent a fair amount of time during the worst of this pandemic feeling uncomfortable—not just because of our personal losses but also because of everything we lost as a community. According to a new report released by the National Crime Records Bureau in India, their data claims that India lost more people to suicide than the Coronavirus in 2020. Much will be researched and written about this pandemic in the years to come, but I doubt if anything can be a testimony to some theory that draws a line between ‘collective’ suffering and the suffering that takes place on a very individual level—the kind that is doomed to be irrelevant, even in literature.

Why did you choose to publish with Makina Books? What was the process like? 

I have been a keen follower of how books are made. I am very invested in how small presses end up making a wealth of difference in literary communities. Making a book is an intricate process and The Yak Dilemma could not have found a better home than Makina Books. After we had the manuscript ready with us, my editor Robin Christian along with The Yak Dilemma’s designer Patrick Fisher at Frontwards Design came up with the idea of creating a map of our own for the book’s cover. The final cover is an amalgamation of the maps of India and Ireland. It is hard to decipher that on the first look and Patrick is simply a genius to have come up with that and such brilliant, striking colours and font. The entire team really wanted to make a very beautiful object in the end. Such care is very rarely given to books that are mass-produced by publishing giants. Robin and I were on board with a lot of similar interests when it came to making a book. I had so much fun creating The Yak Dilemma with the entire Makina team.

As a debut female poet of colour, are you able to offer some thoughts – words of wisdom, words of woe – on the poetry landscape in the UK?

Things are improving but we really have a long way to go. I have been fortunate to meet the people who paved the right path for me. But I have had some harrowing experiences too when I was constantly reminded that my accent was not the right one to succeed, to be a real poet; when I was told there was no way forward for my poems to get published until I italicise all the non-English words in my work or take them out entirely. I have been told, at every step, that it will never be the same for me because English is not my first language, or because my poems are good enough for a non-native speaker of English, but nothing like what white poets write.

There is a reason we do not see many books by female poets of colour on the shelves of even the best bookshops in the UK. As someone who is just starting out, such experiences can crush you. At a time when so many exciting things are happening in the UK’s poetry scene, it is the most crucial duty of all of us to make the much-required amends without delaying them for the future. As a poet of colour myself who has studied, and published extensively, in the UK over the last few years, I do not want the poets of the future to have to face the same challenges that poets like me have had to face. If progress doesn’t continue to be made then all of us, as poets, curators and editors, would have failed terribly.

You have an MA from Trinity College, Dublin and an MFA from Queen’s University, Belfast. Can you talk about your experiences—learning poetry, the curriculum, mentorship and opportunities?

One of my most coveted experiences during my MFA year in Belfast was the weekly workshop with Ciaran Carson. I have always been very critical of the curriculum in any of the universities I have studied in thus far. It is always very white, very male-dominated. First-hand mentorship from poets who have much to share from their experiences is useful, but one does not have to always listen to them. I think it is the disagreements that surface in these MFAs from which we end up learning the most. At Trinity, I did my MPhil in Irish Writing and went on to write a dissertation on the fiction of Iris Murdoch. I also had the opportunity to work with the Samuel Beckett archives at the University of Antwerp during my MPhil year. These were all very enriching experiences.

Do you have plans (or hopes) for The Yak Dilemma to be published in India? What are your thoughts on the state of poetry publishing on the Indian subcontinent?  

I do not yet have a concrete plan for The Yak Dilemma to be published in India, but I am hopeful. I would really want my book to be more accessible to readers in India, and it would be ideal if I am able to bring it here. I have said this before, but it was a conscious decision to work on creating my book with an independent press in the UK. I would want that to happen in India too.

I think the state of poetry publishing on the Indian subcontinent, especially talking of Indian poets working in English, is very conflicted. Over the last few years, Copper Coin has emerged as an important independent multilingual publisher in India. I have adored the handmade books by the Writer’s Workshop in Kolkata and have always wished that there were more presses like that. Another such press I have adored is Blackneck Press in Dharamsala publishing books by Tibetan writers and introducing me to the work of poets like Bhuchung D Sonam and Tenzin Tsundue. The (Great) Indian Poetry Collective have produced important books by Indian poets at home and abroad. But the shelf-life of books that are not produced by publishing giants like Penguin and HarperCollins is not very long. This needs to change.

Do you share literary affinities with any Irish or Indian poets? When I read The Yak Dilemma, it most reminded me of If They Come for Us by Fatimah Asghar and Terrarium by Urvashi Bahuguna, and I was wondering if you were familiar with either of their work? If so, would you say that these are fair comparisons to make? 

I am familiar with some work by Urvashi Bahuguna but I have not read any of her books. I was very excited when Fatimah Asghar published If They Come for Us and I remember buying copies not just for myself but for my friends as well. I think Fatimah and I both write about a lot of similar subjects as two millennial poets trying to talk about Partition, identity and the stiff semantics of the languages we inherit and adapt, alongside our mutual admiration for ghazals in English and Agha Shahid Ali. But I think our approaches are very different. My poems are not as forward-thinking as Fatimah’s. They are still caught up in some rut looking for a direction to steer into.

Most of my formal training as a student of poetry comes from studying Irish poets. I owe them a lot for teaching me so much about craft, especially Derek Mahon, Eavan Boland, Ciaran Carson, and Colette Bryce. I think I was an undergraduate when I first read Tishani Doshi’s Everything Begins Elsewhere and it was a revolutionary moment because it reassured me that I could be a poet thinking, writing and publishing in India or wherever my poems decide to take me. An accidental encounter with Tsering Wangmo Dhompa in Belfast, a Tibetan poet currently living in the USA, directed me towards her books. I instantly recognised a literary sister in her not just because we became poets while growing up in the Himalayas in similar landscapes but because of a sensitivity that I instantly thought of as my own. The two contemporary books that I read over and over when I was writing The Yak Dilemma were Look by Solmaz Sharif and Us by Zaffar Kunial.

As the 2021 Charles Wallace India Trust Fellow at the University of Kent, can you tell us about your current project? 

I am currently working on a project that is a series of poems tethered to the life of the Irish theatre practitioner named Norah Richards who lived and worked in Andretta, a village near my hometown Palampur, for most of her life. My Norah comes alive in the modern world, goes out for a coffee with Annie Besant, grows exotic fruit around her amphitheatre and mud house, and marches with farmers at the Tikri border. My obsessions largely remain the same in this new project—there is a hell lot of material on houses (yet again), identity, borders, and art as a social and political practice. It is almost like what I am doing with Norah Richards is what Rilke did with Orpheus. Norah Richards is called the ‘Lady Gregory of Punjab’ in this part of the world and beyond, yet she remains a figure who is so alienated by the vices of our canon on both Indian and Irish soil. I might never be able to find certain answers but what is more important is to not forget the questions.

Supriya Kaur Dhaliwal was born in the Himalayan town of Palampur, India. She studied at St. Bede’s College, Shimla; Trinity College, Dublin; and Queen’s University, Belfast. She was the 2021 Charles Wallace India Trust Fellow at the University of Kent. The Yak Dilemma is her first full-length collection.

Sana Goyal is a PhD candidate in literary prize cultures and lives between Birmingham and Bombay.