Membery

Compare retailer offers

About this product

In membery, Preeti Kaur Rajpal uses the tool of memory towards her own articulation of language. She writes through post-memory, that is, the memory of the generations after a great human calamity imparted to them through family and community story-telling, materials, silences, and spiritual practice. She uses post-memory to describe her grandparents’ experiences of violent expulsion from their homeland during Historical India’s Partition. She braids this with her own and her family’s experiences as Sikhs in America during the post-9/11 era, a time of increased racialization of Sikhs. Through these subjects, she renders a poetry which explores memory’s communal functions — how memory can make one a part of and also how it can sever apart membership from nationhood, the family, and even within the self. The poet writes of birhaan, the pain of separation from the divine, as understood in the Sikh tradition, used as a metaphor for the griefs and losses explored through history. These histories span from monumental moments of global consequence to small awakenings in the poet’s childhood. In membery, the poet proceeds on her own odyssey for a vernacular, set within her acquisition of t

More from Tupelo Press, Incorporated