Preeti Kaur, a People’s Poet
Preeti Kaur
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Preeti Kaur spent sleepless nights writing a collection of poems after the August 2012 killing of Sikh worshipers by a white supremacist at a Wisconsin gurdwara. She states, “I felt that someone, maybe me, needed to put something out into the world which spoke to all of our different embodiments — as hyphenated people, as Sikh-Americans, as Sikhs who are part of a kaum in the global sense, as an immigrant community, as citizens of the world, as citizens of this nation.” The result is “Letters Home,” which connects the Oak Creek, Wisconsin, tragedy to other events of racial violence in U.S. history. The poems address Balbir Singh Sodhi, Vincent Chin and in the excerpt below — America at large. please forward: to the 50 states/ the white house/ all territories/ the flagged patch on the moon america: i stand half mast, america i grieve for all nights Waheguru Waheguru Waheguru -preeti kaur *A Sikh prayer invoking acceptance of sacrifice. Literally, it means “May I experience Your will as sweet to me.” The complete text of “Letters Home” can be found on Preeti Kaur’s website, The World I Stitch. Her poetry appears in Qarrtsiluni, The Langar Hall, On Being, in The Loft Literary Center’s spoken word CD ¿Nation of Immigrants?, in the South Asian Magazine for Action and Reflection and the Calcutta-based Sikh Review. Her work will also be published in an upcoming anthology from The Memoir Journal. Where are you from in California? What was it like to grow up there? I am from a small town in California’s San Joaquin Valley. My hometown is actually the center of California, marked by a palm tree and a pine tree along a spot on the highway which cuts through the town. The pine represents the northern half of the state and the palm represents the southern half. Maybe it is an accurate representation of the San Joaquin Valley as a metaphor of divide. Maybe it is an as a metaphor of divide. It was wonderful to grow up in a small place, in the way that as long as your basic needs are met as a child, one does not assume there is anything very different about a small place. The San Joaquin Valley is primarily an agricultural economy and geography, politically conservative and unlike the rest of glamorous California. Today the San Joaquin Valley is known as the most impoverished area of the country, with a resurgence of the kind of extreme poverty previously experienced during the Depression. I grew up in a comfortable home, thanks to both of my parents, but outside of home I witnessed this disparity every day. Migrant farmworkers’ children would come to school daily smelling like urine because their families simply couldn’t afford to wash their clothes. The San Joaquin Valley isn’t a big metropolis or even a favored area of the state, where massive social programs and educated do-gooders are hovering around to fix such problems. Instead problems simply existed, stagnating. Witnessing that kind of disparity required me, and I think many young people who grew up in the Valley, to recognize that the world is complicated. We each had a choice on whether or not to be sensitive to those complexities, at a young age. At the same time, growing up in a rural area was isolating. I grew up in a strict Sikh household in this small place. During the ’80s and ’90s there weren’t many Sikh or Punjabi. How did you start writing poetry? I grew up paying careful attention to language. In the Sikh tradition our sacred text, the Sri Guru Granth Sahib, is written with extreme detail to rhyme, rhythm, and metaphor. My father’s lessons in trying to impart the pronunciation and recitation of Sikh prayers helped to tune my ear to the ways words can have a musicality of their own. As I grew, he explained the multiple meanings of these words, their layered intentions towards introspection; I became enchanted with metaphors, especially those that permeate Sikh theology. I also grew up respecting oral tradition. Punjabi culture is notable for its oral tradition of poetry and song. I remember attending functions with other Indian families in neighboring towns, where Uncles would take the stage and start reciting poems, on and on, and Aunties would recite the wildest boliyaan to dance gidha. My grandmother was the major force in growing my appreciation of language, though. I used to write letters in Punjabi to my grandmother, since she had only been educated till the fourth grade and understood none of my English. She would respond with these effusive letters full of love and also with lines of poetry, specifically dohras, which are couplets of rhyming verse. It felt like magic every time I would receive a dohra written just for me. My most memorable is one dohra she wrote in her last few years of life, where she talks about standing on the terrace drying her hair. A flock of crows flies by and she asks them to deliver a letter of love to me in America. (It sounds infinitely better in Punjabi.) Her ability to execute language gorgeously, despite a limited formal education, emboldened my love of language’s worth. I adored my grandmother. If she thought poetry was the best thing ever, then I felt it was something I should pay attention to also. It wasn’t until I encountered June Jordan’s Poetry for the People at the University of California, Berkeley, that I started formally studying and writing poems. I think it was love at first writing. “You Bring Out the Punjabi in Me,” inspired by Sandra Cisneros’ “You Bring Out the Mexican In Me” seems like a poem that begs to be read out loud. Have you given readings of it? Actually, no, I’ve never done a public reading of this poem. The funny thing to me is that no one reads it as I intended. I intended it to be a manifesto on the only true culture, which is not the homogenous dictates of popular culture or some faux nostalgia, but is what I live in my personal daily practice. Well, that was one purpose. Some of the lines were also intended to be love-poem-ish, but I never got around to reading the poem to the intended recipient. Sometimes love poems bury themselves in poems which sound like they are about something else. In “Where-Ever It Is Dark” the voice is one of a young Sikh boy who wears a patka and is bullied at school. What inspired you to write it? I wrote the poem in response to a friend disclosing that his 8-year-old nephew, with whom I had become buddies, had gotten into a fight at school because of his patka and was distraught at having to defend his identity as he knew it. In one way, it is inspired by all the young men I have known in my life who have grown up with a patka. It’s very fashionable amongst Sikh men these days to celebrate their turbans and flaunt their turbans as an accessory representing a resilient attitude (more power to them), to reverse the “post-9/11 gaze” and assert their personal humanity, but for young children, especially those growing up in the “West,” wearing a head covering is wrought with confusing complications. They are simultaneously juggling questions of who they are as people, who they are as small bodies, and who they are as bodies in forms that are presented different from their peers. My younger brothers, cousins in America and even cousins in India all came home from school crying routinely, after getting into an argument after being picked on for their patka. They would have their patkas ripped off their heads, be beaten up, and often relied on anger as a childhood coping strategy. The poem doesn’t derive specifically from any one of their experiences, although they each might insist I am utilizing their personal story, but comes from this trend of witnessing so many boys go through an unnecessary hazing on the playground. I recognize being bullied is not the experience for all young Sikhs in the West, but for many growing up in isolated environments, outside of the big cosmopolitan cities where people are more aware and accepting, becoming a scapegoat for everyone’s lack of understanding is common even today. You’ve described “Letters Home” as a “collection of poems which seek to connect the tragedy in Oak Creek with the larger narrative of violence in the name of deep-seeded racial hatred in this country.” (StarTribune) How did you manage to write those poems in the aftermath of the tragedy, posting just five days after the event? What propelled you to make the connection to poetry? Those poems were born out of the depressing realization that the Sikh community’s living nightmare over the past decade had come true. Obviously, it was a horribly sad and angering event, if one can call a mass murder in a place where people seek spiritual sanctuary an “event.” The poems were a build-up of the surface tension within me. I had written a few of the poem’s lines months earlier, regarding Bhagat Singh Thind’s ashes and how I felt his assertion that he was an American, in spite of the problematic way he went about it, continued to be denied. I had a professional interview where the first question the interviewer asked me was how long I had been in the country. This bothered me tremendously and wrecked my ability to relate to this interviewer from the get-go. I put those thoughts about being a perpetual foreign body into the imagery of Bhagat Singh Thind’s ashes, dispersed amongst five rivers spanning United States’ geography. When the killings in Oak Creek happened, I kept thinking about the extreme consequences of the notion of perpetual foreigner in this nation. At the most benign level, I might be asked offensive questions in a biased professional interview and denied an opportunity. At the most extreme level, a man in a turban, whether he has been in this country for decades or months, might be shot dead. I felt I needed to write to Bhagat Singh Thind again, at his post office box in Astoria, Washington. There were also so many conflicting media messages coming out at the time, where our organizational and community representatives were consumed with engaging in the performance of education of the masses, the media, and government entities. I think, as Sikhs, our community traumas in America sometimes take a backburner to feeding packaged information to outsidersI think, as Sikhs, our community traumas in America sometimes take a backburner to feeding packaged information to outsiders, in the hope that next time it won’t happen again, although we all realize that the information we are offering in sound bites, pamphlets and presentations pales in comparison to systemic racism and its far reaches. I felt that someone, maybe me, needed to put something out into the world which spoke to all of our different embodiments — as hyphenated people, as Sikh-Americans, as Sikhs who are part of a kaum in the global sense, as an immigrant community, as citizens of the world, as citizens of this nation. That is how I framed the various letters, invoking historical memory. I wrote the poems over three sleepless nights, after watching CNN for hours until my brain felt numb. Poetry, as June Jordan taught me, is a medium for telling the truth, so that is why that series of poems was born — to tell my truth. After the shootings at the gurdwara in Oak Creek, Wisconsin, you asked “why a tragedy against a minority racialized community does not deserve the dignity of a President’s gesture of shared national grief.” Did Michelle Obama’s visit to Oak Creek change the way you feel? I was disappointed that the President didn’t take the time to visit the families of the Oak Creek mass shooting. Michelle Obama is not an elected official, so while her visit was an appreciated kindness, it did feel to me that the racially-motivated deaths in Oak Creek were less significant to the President’s political agenda at the time than other mass shootings. I wondered if the President’s handlers felt that he shouldn’t appear in any photos with brown turbaned individuals, given it was election season and we still live in a super-sad existence of guilt-by-association, where the assumption is that a brown man in a turban could be a national threat. Tonight, as I wrote these words, the President mentioned Sikhs and Oak Creek in his State of the Union speech, so perhaps he has decided it is time to speak candidly on Sikhs as also Americans. At the same time, I know his visit would have only been symbolic. If we were to discuss true issues of fairness and justice, we would be asking very biting questions. Why does the War on Terror continue to exist? Why do declared and undeclared combatants die daily from drone warfare around the world in a borderless war? What does it mean when the President mourns the horrific deaths of innocent children from gun violence in this country — declaring rapid action that this will never again happen — but does not make the same urgent declarations at the innocent deaths of children in a small village in Panjshir, Afghanistan, or at the innocent deaths of children droned in Northern Pakistan? you bring out the punjabi in me you resuscitate the drowned punjabi yes, you drag out the punjabi in me yes, raja ji for you you habibi mithu rrrrrRrrrrRrrrrrrRrrrrr sonu yes, you spin the sufi out of me this life for you you bring out the sikh in me shiv kumar, THIS is the condition of the fakeer haan ji, ji for you i’d pay off every grain to my name yes you bring out the punjabi in me for you these ribs a jail of dried rivers |
