In the year 1500, Guru Nanak Dev Ji stood before his aging parents to explain he could no longer remain at home to be their caretakers. The world around him was growing isolated with hatred, wickedness, and sin. With a divine message of peace and compassion growing within him, he felt he could provide healing to a broader audience and intended to spread the message love far and wide.
He set out on foot on the first of five udaasis, or spiritual journeys, to teach his message of humanity and love to the masses. He traveled in all directions, far and wide, over the next two decades sharing his mission of love, comfort, and salvation. His five udaasis brought him to various points across present-day India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Iran, Iraq, Egypt, Israel, and Jordan. He met and spoke with diverse followers of religions including Buddhists, Hindus, and Muslims. These journeys and his teachings planted the roots of the Sikh Tradition. It was in these journeys, away from home, where the connection with the divine grew strongest for Guru Nanak.
How do these historic journeys of Guru Nanak survive through time, passing from generation to generation? At present, we find ourselves, once again, in a world of hatred, wickedness, idolism, and, isolationism. Is there still a memory within us that connects us to Guru Nanak’s journeys and teachings? If so, where can we find that connection? How do we re-discover this collective memory? How do we break the divide between present and past? Is there a collective language understood by tribes of people over time? Perhaps, most important: How do we end the pain of being separated from the divine? Preeti Kaur Rajpal explores her own journey of memory discovery in a new collection of poems titled membery published by Tupelo Press. She uses poetry to weave the collective memory of generations that came before her with her own.
Everyone has a personal memory, an account, of the life they’ve lived. It lives within a language that’s personal and often only understood by the individual. We are made of memory. Individual memory. Our identity is memory. It’s how we understand ourselves as who we were in the past and who we are in the present. Rajpal, in her poetry, seeks to understand personal memory set against, and within, a collective memory—or what she calls post-memory—that is the gathered memory of the generations that came before her. The collection of poems in membery weaves her experience growing up a Sikh in America during the post-9/11 era with the post-memory of her grandparents’ expulsion from their homeland during India’s Partition. They were removed from their national identity but, at the same time, found a new blossoming of spiritual identity.
In membery, Rajpal sets out on her own set of five udaasis in a language of experimental poetry that seeks a vernacular connection with her learned Punjabi script of Gurmukhi. Her journey to the articulation of herself begins in language. An early personal memory recalls her father pronouncing the first oora ooth sound of the Gurmukhi’s first letter. She learns to trace the humped vowel. But in the next poem, “the place of articulation”, she recalls what is perhaps her first collective memory of her grandparents’ memory, when she learned the melody of Raag Malhar, which is sung or played during the late summer season to yearn for the monsoon rain season to begin:
...she orders we repeat the foreign croaking
our limited tongues press backs of our throats from the root lifting to our soft
palates under roof of thought home of far-mouth guttural songs where frogs live
just as we children found the frogs glot-glotting from their own throats...
The children, in their grandparents’ house in Patiala, learn to sing, to croak as the frogs do. This articulation of language, this change, is a collective learning within her family. It’s communal and it’s ancient as the collective memory of amphibians. Rajpal and the children in “the place of articulation” have yet to change and separate from the divine. As she alludes to in the final line of the poem, they haven’t changed from who they were: “frogs in a pounding kin-minh as our webbed feet circumambulate our divine.” Young, learning to articulate language, children are innocent, compassionate, and spiritually strong.
The collective memory of her grandparents’ removal from their homeland and the mass removal of their people from their homeland forces an articulation on her interpretation of her collective memory. That collective memory ages along with the human body. Rajpal is forced to experience the decline of her aging and confused grandfather. In “counting your stairs in patiala,” she is witness to the cruel effects of confusion and dementia while connecting to her grandfather’s past in being divided from their homeland.
i am thirteen and clean my grandfather’s
room bed wooden molding plaster walls
i fold a white sheet wool grey blanket no tassels
who are you he asks each corner tucked distance
i dust a dead bulb hanging between light
winter always lahore here patiala fifty years
since border cracked whip fenced sparrows
crossing flocks heads cut off pouring bodies
Her grandfather’s inability to recognize her is, perhaps for Rajpal, the first instance where she writes of birhaan, the pain of separation from the divine, which is used as a metaphor for grief and loss in history and thus, memory. These griefs and losses include well-known and monumental moments of global and national consequence to small, personal events that open the eyes of the poet. Here, in “counting your stairs in patiala,” she comes in contact with her grandfather’s own birhaan from his and his people’s collective separation during Partition. He is “always in the past.” That divide, now the border of Pakistan and India, fenced the sparrows and cut the flow of nature and divided the land’s inhabitants. Her personal memory of her grandfather, along with closing the divide with his collective memory, in this poem, as stated in its final line, opens her mind to notice and catch more memory: “a canopy of memory opening against a bone rain.”
Much of membery’s subject matter is Rajpal’s family. She climbs a mountain of her father’s laundry. Each dirty piece conjures a post-memory of his travels and notable events of his own life. She chops onions with her family in preparation for a meal following the death of her grandmother. In “the singing,” as a child growing up in California, she presses her nose to the kitchen window, maybe seeing an apparition of her deceased grandfather singing in the shade underneath a mulberry tree. She holds a piece of her mother’s lung after a tumor was removed. Her mother holds her milk teeth in her hands after they fell out. Her mother placed them into a gilded pill box. It is in “the fall” where Rajpal seems more grown up, “i am good with words now i am/ good with knives too slitting open/a pomegranate...” and another separation, perhaps the most important, comes with the death of her other grandmother and/or the birth of her mother. Like winter and spring, death and birth are seasonal. Memories are cyclical.
...each winter a death i return
to this body in a new life
san joaquin tule fog blankets
the ground covered in red
mouth I see and cannot see
december darkens my grandmother
kisses me and dies again in america
a hospital alone a drug interaction
my mother’s mother’s velvet stomach
lining tearing my mother’s last flower
setting the family on fire...
The poems in membery’s first three udaasis are woven threads of memory and post-memory. These form the foundation of Rajpal’s identity as a young Sikh woman living and growing up in America. She feels the pain of separation with her? family’s homeland. She feels the collective pain her elders experienced and continue to feel. The language and her articulation of language that illuminate her history have given her an identity. But, over time, identities change as world events change. Forced or joyfully, people grow. She writes a three-part poem titled “ecdysis” which refers to shedding of old skin like a snake sheds its skin as it grows. One can climb a ladder and grow in life, often shedding the skin of the past—yet, as in a cardboard, roll-the-dice game of Snakes and Ladders, experience can stunt growth. One day you’re climbing a ladder off success. The next, you’re sliding down the snake of stunted progress. Here, in part II of “ecdysis,” after her mother teaches her the game of snakes and ladders, the chutes, prove life’s downfalls come with uncertainty. Life is a roll of a lucky or unlucky pair of dice.
my father
wears the tallest turban bombs will fall
across euphrates striking in six months
i don’t know the compression of what will come
the drummed go-back-to-your-country snare
cold-blooded snake split dripped his open flares
hilting shovel beating his gold-hammered head flat
when he is forced underground.
As her parents, grandparents, and ancestors before her, she finds she’s not immune to historic events that will affect her life, shape her identity, and separate her from the divine. Following the events of September 11, 2001, Sikhs in America, among other religions and cultures thriving in the U.S., became a focal point of blame, racism, bigotry, and hate. The Patriot Act of 2001 was written and signed forty-five days after the events of September 11 and provided law enforcement officials a freer authority to use methods of surveillance and spying techniques in the name of national security. Title X of the law included miscellaneous parts that didn’t fit into other prominent sections of the Patriot Act. Title X names Sikh Americans explicitly, in response to the murder of Balbir Singh Sodhi, and declares that Sikh Americans’ civil rights should be protected against bigotry, discrimination and all actions of violence. Sodhi, a Sikh man living in Mesa, Arizona, was killed outside the gas station he owned four days after September 11. He was killed for the way he looked. The series of poems in “PATRIOT ACT, MISCELLANEOUS” were written in the form of footnotes. In footnote “6”, she alludes to the law itself and its inadequacies. The law contains no real solutions, no knowledge. They were written hastily.
6 when country cuts off first phalanges nib
lawyers write in a patriot’s ink
when country slices until meta-phalanges
lawyers write a patriot’s law
when elephants die
the trunk from which they breathe and drink
the nectar shrivels from umbilical reasonings
the bodies disappear
While Title X states that Sikh Americans deserve rights, the Patriot Act as a whole translates that law enforcement can do what they feel necessary to ensure terrorism doesn’t take place again. This means that one who may have brown skin, pray to a different God, or talk with a different accent, may be watched by law enforcement authorities. It allows unequivocal spying. Footnote “18” asks the author, seemingly repeatedly, “but where are you really from? He asked me again on page 40” There’s a fading, if not a loss, of identity for Rajpal during this time. The loss of family, the burning pain of bigotry, how could one not feel like a mere footnote in American society? Those feelings contain similarities to those post-memories of her grandparents.
The similarities between her characterization of the Patriot Act and Great Britain’s digital archive named The Road to Partition relate to each other in that they thrust power onto others. When the British left India following their own colonial conquest, they made a practice of burning what Rajpal calls “incriminating and revealing colonial documents.” This was called Operation Legacy, and Rajpal connects this practice of removal in her poem “the archive” with faded or grayed letter “i”s in the poem.
...
history’s halo flickers my halved discoveries
i drag my finger to transfer a queen’s viceroy
from british to our punjabi hands i warble
ascension into the missing pages in the scorching
my throat plumes as a babiha before the deluge
i sing prio-prio-prio-prio a rainbird’s song
summoning monsoon in the beloved’s absence
from my own beak i sanctum into the swarm
the sky a soot record of birdshot and exodus
i unearth birhaan here between the separation
of memory i touch the bonfire and i become
a poet
i write my own partition
from the shredding documents
lit feathers by history’s can of black oil
History, as an official archive of colonialists, congress, Patriot Acts, Partition, is working to fade and erase the “i” of a people, of a person. It is in this attempted erasure that Rajpal finds her true language, her true voice: a poet. It is in the pain of the birhaan that she finds herself, she finds poetry. She wouldn’t have been able to find it without the post-memory of those who came before her and the memories of self. Through history, and the pain of history, one can connect and learn to articulate the language of the self.
The five udaasis in membery connect the past to the present in the exercise of articulating language through poetry. The poems are experimental. They are birth stories and social justice. They are a testing ground where there are no formal constraints to the language and the form of the poetry. In the last udaasi she connects the loss of herself to the language of a poem literally written inside the tracing of her hand.
Guru Nanak set out on five journeys of his own in 1500 to spread compassion and love through his language. There’s rich compassion, love, and social justice to be found within Rajpal’s poetry. Like connecting stars, one can sit with membery and connect collective histories to personal history. Post-history is within us, and the articulation of language of within these poems shapes our ability to create constellations of our own. membery carries post-history history woven into one linguistic cloth. From “the spinning wheel”:
i never learn how to spin
cloth but i can hear Bhagat
Kabir singing to his spinning
wheel the charkha repeating
hundreds and hundreds of names
for Rabb while the spokes circle
a crimsoned cotton Bhagat Kabir
winding his own strings of grief
into the separated threads woven
taut across the spindles of time
Gus Jarvis is a former editor of the Telluride Watch newspaper in Western Colorado and served as editor of the Estacada News near Portland, Oregon. Among others, he’s written for The Drake and Spoke + Blossom magazines. He received his MFA in creative writing at Cedar Crest’s Pan-European MFA program in 2024 and lives with his wife, Torie, on a hogback just west of Montrose, Colorado.