Matwaala:
The birth of the south Asian diaspora poetry festival
Pramila Venkateswaran
Writing about the cultural nuances in our experiences on two or three different continents opens up multiple questions and meaning-making as we navigate cultural gaps and hurdles. Immigrant diaspora stories are valuable as we perceive the rich tapestry of the United States that is reflected in the writing. Unfortunately, not much of South Asian writing in America is visible. Matwaala : South Asian diaspora festival fits into this yawning gap in American literature and provides a haven of meaning which is so desperately needed in our exploration and understanding of American history and literature.
Matwaala brings South Asian poets together to read their work in public places where audiences are eager to hear meanings that are drawn from the stories that make our lives in the diaspora and when we travel back and forth between South Asia and the West. These stories also constantly disrupt any fixed ideas people have of the “West” or “back home” since both have been and are changing constantly. For example, globalization brings McDonalds and the iphone to Chennai, while caste-specific restrictions operate in South Asian families in New York; or hard-hitting women judges are influential in India, while South Asian girls are experiencing opioid addiction in urban America. The paradoxes, contrasts, and the similarities are many, and who can bring these out but poets and writers writing about these who straddle different continents?
When I coordinated the Matwaala festival in 2017 in New York, I was pushed by an urgency to bring South Asian poets from outside New York to read. I realized in the last couple of decades teaching in Nassau Community College and giving workshops in the tri-state area that people are simply not aware of South Asian poets, except perhaps of Tagore. Perhaps folks might mention one contemporary South Asian poet from the U.S., but even that is a rarity. My mission was to bring poets who people may never have heard of but who have made striking contributions both in the U.S. and internationally. My mission was also to bring lesser known South Asian poets who were gradually coloring the field of American literature with their bright and powerful words. During the 2017 festival, we awarded Saleem Peeradina from Michigan as the poet of honor. He is a household name in India, but did anyone in the U.S. know this? Usha Akella, from Austin, Texas, whose brainchild Matwaala is, writes spiritual and feminist poetry, is a veteran of several poetry festivals where she has garnered many awards, and who has a daunting poetry resume. Ravi Shankar from Sydney via Connecticut, more well-known in the U.S., brings a bright new voice to a kind of poetry that pushes against the edges of language. Sasha Parmasad, whose roots span Delhi and Trinidad, brings the evocative notes of the Caribbean and her father’s passionate challenge to British rule into her fierce and lilting verse. Varsha Shah, who writes both in Gujarati and in English, brings the cleverness of wit and humor into her edgy poems. So here were a variety of poets who wrote very differently from one another despite calling themselves South Asian / Indian. They challenged any stereotype of what South Asian poetry could mean to the American public.
I wanted the festival to span all the way from the belly of Long Island to the heart of NYC. Besides the invited poets from outside New York, we wanted more poets to read at the festival and hence sent a call out. Poets from the New York tristate area responded to the call to read at Asian American Writers Workshop, a jewel among literary venues for Asian American writers, was one of our venues, where everyone from Vijay Seshadri to Meena Alexander to Ranjan Chetre, and about 15 others read to a packed audience. It was brilliant.
At my college, undergraduate students exposed to the above poets were excited to hear such a range of poems. Many participated in the student reading that was part of the festival. South Asian students were excited that they would be hearing from poets who spoke like them, which encouraged them to share their work. One of the students read his poems in Urdu, along with the English translation and received the typical “Wah Wah” from an exultant audience.
When we talk about inclusion and challenging a white/mainstream-centric publishing and literary presentations, many of us feel the subject is stale. It’s true that festivals and publishers are becoming more open to diasporic writing, but the pace is glacial. Take a look at poetry magazines in the U.S. How many South Asian poets can you count? The same few poets of South Asian origin will appear over and over again in the top magazines. One wonders if the editors ever bother to check the poems by other South Asian poets coming down the transom. Efforts such as VIDA: Women in the literary arts have undertaken the task of counting women and minorities in different publications to highlight gender disparities. Matwaala reflects a similar effort to bring to light the writing that is happening right under our noses—writing by people whose names sound funny and from “elsewhere”, and who don’t fit into any stereotype. Rich traditions that make up the diaspora in combination with the American literary traditions produce some brilliant writing, as we see in Srikant Reddy and Harpreet Kaur and many, many more. The beauty of an Agha Shahid Ali poem or the language play in a Bhanu Kapil poem is the kind of range I am talking about.
My poem “Dot Sale” written at a time when the dot was intriguing to mainstream America, but not exotic anymore, still opens up questions about exoticization or vilification of the other. There are always two extremes in treating the other, seldom the ordinary. I use humor to expose this. In a prose poem I recently wrote, “Diary Entry, 1948,” about a traditional widow who shrugs off tradition as something totally unhelpful, the voice in this poem seems to partake of traditional images at first only to shun all of them. So the voice becomes interesting it its shift from the expected to the unexpected, thus creating irony and humor. In both, language is a diasporic one, borrowing from multiple traditions.
Heightened scrutiny of the other and the overwhelming drive to pigeonhole people of color brought on by a brutish right wing in the U.S., as well as the rigidity that has set into South Asian politics that restricts poets and journalists for their progressive views with threats and extra judicial killings. make Matwaala more relevant than ever. Matwaala highlights for folks everywhere the grayness in the chiaroscuro of our narratives. Matwaala poets are happily ensconced in the in-between spaces and from margins to centers, keeping their doors of plurality open.
Matwaala brings South Asian poets together to read their work in public places where audiences are eager to hear meanings that are drawn from the stories that make our lives in the diaspora and when we travel back and forth between South Asia and the West. These stories also constantly disrupt any fixed ideas people have of the “West” or “back home” since both have been and are changing constantly. For example, globalization brings McDonalds and the iphone to Chennai, while caste-specific restrictions operate in South Asian families in New York; or hard-hitting women judges are influential in India, while South Asian girls are experiencing opioid addiction in urban America. The paradoxes, contrasts, and the similarities are many, and who can bring these out but poets and writers writing about these who straddle different continents?
When I coordinated the Matwaala festival in 2017 in New York, I was pushed by an urgency to bring South Asian poets from outside New York to read. I realized in the last couple of decades teaching in Nassau Community College and giving workshops in the tri-state area that people are simply not aware of South Asian poets, except perhaps of Tagore. Perhaps folks might mention one contemporary South Asian poet from the U.S., but even that is a rarity. My mission was to bring poets who people may never have heard of but who have made striking contributions both in the U.S. and internationally. My mission was also to bring lesser known South Asian poets who were gradually coloring the field of American literature with their bright and powerful words. During the 2017 festival, we awarded Saleem Peeradina from Michigan as the poet of honor. He is a household name in India, but did anyone in the U.S. know this? Usha Akella, from Austin, Texas, whose brainchild Matwaala is, writes spiritual and feminist poetry, is a veteran of several poetry festivals where she has garnered many awards, and who has a daunting poetry resume. Ravi Shankar from Sydney via Connecticut, more well-known in the U.S., brings a bright new voice to a kind of poetry that pushes against the edges of language. Sasha Parmasad, whose roots span Delhi and Trinidad, brings the evocative notes of the Caribbean and her father’s passionate challenge to British rule into her fierce and lilting verse. Varsha Shah, who writes both in Gujarati and in English, brings the cleverness of wit and humor into her edgy poems. So here were a variety of poets who wrote very differently from one another despite calling themselves South Asian / Indian. They challenged any stereotype of what South Asian poetry could mean to the American public.
I wanted the festival to span all the way from the belly of Long Island to the heart of NYC. Besides the invited poets from outside New York, we wanted more poets to read at the festival and hence sent a call out. Poets from the New York tristate area responded to the call to read at Asian American Writers Workshop, a jewel among literary venues for Asian American writers, was one of our venues, where everyone from Vijay Seshadri to Meena Alexander to Ranjan Chetre, and about 15 others read to a packed audience. It was brilliant.
At my college, undergraduate students exposed to the above poets were excited to hear such a range of poems. Many participated in the student reading that was part of the festival. South Asian students were excited that they would be hearing from poets who spoke like them, which encouraged them to share their work. One of the students read his poems in Urdu, along with the English translation and received the typical “Wah Wah” from an exultant audience.
When we talk about inclusion and challenging a white/mainstream-centric publishing and literary presentations, many of us feel the subject is stale. It’s true that festivals and publishers are becoming more open to diasporic writing, but the pace is glacial. Take a look at poetry magazines in the U.S. How many South Asian poets can you count? The same few poets of South Asian origin will appear over and over again in the top magazines. One wonders if the editors ever bother to check the poems by other South Asian poets coming down the transom. Efforts such as VIDA: Women in the literary arts have undertaken the task of counting women and minorities in different publications to highlight gender disparities. Matwaala reflects a similar effort to bring to light the writing that is happening right under our noses—writing by people whose names sound funny and from “elsewhere”, and who don’t fit into any stereotype. Rich traditions that make up the diaspora in combination with the American literary traditions produce some brilliant writing, as we see in Srikant Reddy and Harpreet Kaur and many, many more. The beauty of an Agha Shahid Ali poem or the language play in a Bhanu Kapil poem is the kind of range I am talking about.
My poem “Dot Sale” written at a time when the dot was intriguing to mainstream America, but not exotic anymore, still opens up questions about exoticization or vilification of the other. There are always two extremes in treating the other, seldom the ordinary. I use humor to expose this. In a prose poem I recently wrote, “Diary Entry, 1948,” about a traditional widow who shrugs off tradition as something totally unhelpful, the voice in this poem seems to partake of traditional images at first only to shun all of them. So the voice becomes interesting it its shift from the expected to the unexpected, thus creating irony and humor. In both, language is a diasporic one, borrowing from multiple traditions.
Heightened scrutiny of the other and the overwhelming drive to pigeonhole people of color brought on by a brutish right wing in the U.S., as well as the rigidity that has set into South Asian politics that restricts poets and journalists for their progressive views with threats and extra judicial killings. make Matwaala more relevant than ever. Matwaala highlights for folks everywhere the grayness in the chiaroscuro of our narratives. Matwaala poets are happily ensconced in the in-between spaces and from margins to centers, keeping their doors of plurality open.