Tag Archives: Diya Chaudhuri

The “Birthing” poems are a series, obviously. Can you talk a little bit about this series?  How many poems are there?  What got you started?   What space do you envision these poems take up in your work as a whole?

I did my undergraduate thesis under Natasha Trethewey, who writes those wonderfully researched books of poetry like Bellocq’s Ophelia and Native Guard, in which she inhabits a place and a time not her own, and in which she speaks through the mouthpiece of characters other than herself.  I more or less wanted to wear her poetic flesh at the time, so I tried my hand at a series of historic poems for my thesis.  I actually think of them as the Partition poems, since this little triptych belongs to a larger series of poems about my father’s childhood experiences as a Hindu displaced from East Pakistan (Bangladesh) to India.  I’ve revisited the project a few times since finishing the thesis – sometimes for graduate workshops, sometimes just for kicks, and once for a great seminar I took on childhood and trauma.  This particular poem was written recently, in grad school. Though I don’t want to be that Indian poet (Indians are just SO. IN. this season), I’ve not been able to put this project to bed just yet.  I have no idea what the experience of religious displacement is like, so I have to step outside of my corner of the world – but really, I’m stepping into an experience that I’ve inherited from my father.  That interplay between what I can’t possibly know and what I feel I have a responsibility to learn and document is terribly stressful, but terribly sexy.  I don’t know what space the Partition poems will ultimately take up in my work, but that space will be either terrible, stressful, or sexy. Continue reading →