Membery

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 the Punjabi script of Gurmukhi. The poet searches for a place of articulation, as the poet learns of a larger, more personal dialect aware to the world — its separations and its divisions. Formally daring and lyrical, the poems of membery weave memory, Sikh spiritual tradition, family, country, and language acquisition as they forge the author’s own language.

Preeti Kaur Rajpal expertly frames poetry as a space particularly conducive to conversation between artistic traditions, genres, and types of rhetoric. But this capacious book is not simply a tribute to modernist influence. Rajpal places experimental technique and its array of forms — including templates that are not germane to poetry, footnotes, and hybrid texts — in dialogue with religious texts, urgent human rights issues, and nonwestern philosophy. In such a way, Rajpal forges a complex, multifaceted poetics of social justice. Indeed, she reveals literature as a hypothetical testing ground, where language is no longer constrained by categories or genres, and this fluidity can give rise to new — and more ethical ways — of moving through the world. Here, the poetic text is revealed as intervention, as corrective gesture, as reversal. membery is the kind of book that takes up residence in one’s memory.