Preeti Kaur Rajpal’s membery opens with a manglacharan–an invocation: “first guard at the gate / majuscule to adorn / the one.”
In these first lines, Rajpal is in part describing ੳ, the first letter of the Gurmukhi script in the Punjabi language, which she says is described by a mnemonic used to memorize this and other letters. But “manglacharan” is also an initiation. The reader is at once invited and warned, adorned and guarded. The speaker’s voice beckons and protects. This linguistic and visual portal into membery is just the first of many moments in which Rajpal nimbly juxtaposes the dualities of language and feeling that defines this luminous debut collection.
membery is structured as a journey. Each section is as an udaasi, referring to the spiritual travels of Sikh Guru Nanak Dev Ji. Beginning with our initiation into the text’s structure and language, Rajpal’s speaker is marked early in the collection as generous–both in her explanation of the travels and in her willingness to lead us through. Throughout membery, language is both a metaphor for and the literal site of the speaker’s journey. Linguistic portals abound, from the “backlight of history” in a research archive of documents on the Partition of India (“the archive”) to the many and clamorous sonic landscapes of Patiala (“the place of articulation”). For Rajpal, language is multitudinous–each body, being, and material has and makes language. These languages emerge throughout, and their expression is visceral, arresting, rich with memory, and often–despite references to grief and loss–celebratory.
In “the place of articulation,” Rajpal writes: “past police checkpoints while the heaving saavan sky bribes a tin monsoon / mosquitoes drone in a raag of malhar... / [our grandmother] 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.” There is a cacophony in her scenes that affirms the music (“raag of malhar”) of a place and all the beings who exist there. If Rajpal signals dangers ranging from the grave–police checkpoints, jingoism’s menacing sweep in the US after 9/11– to the surprisingly lovely–a “rusty microwave / emitting zap-dusted radiation stars” and silk garden snakes (“ecdysis”)–her poems deftly consider all and return, more frequently than not, to oneness, to song. “Laughing / frogs,” she concludes in “the place of articulation,” “in a pounding kin-minh as our webbed feet circumambulate our divine.” All things make language and music, and all participate in the divine.
Rajpal’s deft interweaving of languages and of different layers of sound and experience are reinforced throughout membery by her use of form. That most poems are not punctuated–or are punctuated strategically and in surprising ways, as in “the scent of a s|l|i|c|e|d orange lingers”–adds to the voice’s urgency. In the paired poems “counting your stars in patiala” and “watching the wagah,” for example, the busy profusion of life in Patiala– “flies fly body to body as we lay in first light’s mortuary / their emerald hulls full of life its leaves and hums”– exists in noticeable textual proximity to the Wagah, or ceremonial closing of the border between India and Pakistan. It is as if, in the chasm opened up by Partition and border zones–the latter literalized by the ‘chasm’ between the two blocks of text in “watching the wagah”–new worlds and modes of expression emerge and flourish. There is a threat embedded even in the celebratory motions of the Wagah– “each side slices / the wires by a thread a blade in their fingers” – but also distinct movement and sound. Enjambement and running-over of lines contribute to this sense of profusion. In these poems as elsewhere in the collection, a parade of sound, color, noun, and language overlays a careful structure beneath– we are on a specific journey, and the journey is narrated with and defined by abundance.
In several poems, Rajpal moves between Punjabi and English with virtuosic ease. It is a delight to marvel at her technical skill. In “the second language,” which is framed by a drawing that evokes sentence-diagramming, Rajpal plays with the idea of a basic early educational instruction (“a is for apple”) writing instead, “at first bloom in the fleshed apple of language i am abloom in alphabet.” The poem riffs on the many more exciting possibilities of “a” in English, made more complex by the juxtaposition of “a” with letters in Gurmukhi. There is pleasure in this profusion, and Rajpal is generous in imparting the joy of linguistic mastery.
If her take on language is astutely playful in some moments, Rajpal also recognizes its power as a tool–to both make and break down. In “the fall,” she writes, “i am good with words now i am / good with knives too slitting open / a pomegranate seeded burnt apple / i shake the one thousand flaming / tongues falling into a glass bowl.” “the fall” follows “the excision,” in which an excised tumor is read as a text. There is a lot of making and craft in membery, much of it involving language, but Rajpal resists making alone, and here centers language that excises, extracts, or deconstructs. Making and destroying are often paired in these poems–there is an attention to craft (see “the ticking” or “the singing”) but also undoing. Rajpal reminds us that ideas originating in language–empire, maybe, or patriotism–have real, material consequences. In “the capture,” for example, Rajpal narrates walking through the halls of a university library, where books on Partition and the ideas they contain are inextricable from their physical being: “i pull out a book on the census / its half-truths and lies of counting / wrapped in the white bark of grand / trunk eucalyptus its infected stem / cankers and leaves of gall.” The ideas and memories are inseparable from the materials containing them. Rajpal both shows us how legacies remain and how to language-out of them–language both makes and undoes, and can be used to break ideas open just as it constructs them.
This ‘cutting open’ of language is arguably most noticeable in the long poem in the fourth udaasi of membery, “PATRIOT ACT, MISCELLANEOUS.” Adopting the footnote form of Jenny Boully’s “the body,” Rajpal explores the silences in the Patriot Act, specifically the ‘miscellaenous’ section, Title X, which Rajpal notes “names Sikh Americans explicitly, in response to the murder of Balbir Singh Sodi and the thousands of acts of violence, abuse, or intimidation of Sikhs in American in the immediate aftermath of 9/11.” The footnote form makes possible a deft commentary on what it means, in the language of this act, to be made marginal, as Rajpal writes, “locate yourself / on the unmappable ... enter again / into the terrace / of the page / the uncountable / nadir.” Filling in the unsaid, “PATRIOT ACT, MISCELLANEOUS” traces etymology (“terror: from proto-indo-european *tre – to shake. *tres – to tremble”) and the emergence of a cruelly othering question (“where are you from?”). In section 13, titled “origin story,” Rajpal returns to the concept of udaasi, or spiritual travel. Expanding on one of Guru Nanak’s stories, she writes here that udaasi “sounds / like melancholy in punjabi” and “like odyssey in english” and “means to be / outside of the home.” Her long poem writes a sense of place from the margins, filling in the voids and unspoken impact of both an othering and an invasive document.
membery is a linguistic and spiritual journey in the tradition of udaasi/odyssey, probing what it means to find belonging, or to be a member, of a complex network of identities, languages, and ideas. For a text that deals with emotional difficulty, membery is ultimately memorable for its beauty and generosity, which Rajpal demonstrates are imperative to re and un-making narratives of power. Her inclusive, numinous, and often gorgeous celebration of language asserts that what was never lost to empire or injustice (changed, importantly, but not lost or destroyed) flourishes. Weaving memory, language(s), and a deep awareness of their interplay over time, Rajpal arrives by the end of membery at a place of rebirth, of love. In the final poem “lafz,” the speaker stands “at the pool of immortality”; a “water belonging to no land.” She tosses a red stone (a recurring image in the collections) into the water. “Laughing and babbling,” Rajpal writes, “the water rises / the meet me she gurgles and remembers / the syllables of her own true name.”
KB Kinkel is a writer based in Massachusetts. Hispoems, interviews, and reviews have appeared or are forthcoming in Tupelo Quarterly, Ninth Letter, Prelude, The Rumpus, Poetry Online, and elsewhere. He holds an MFA in poetry from the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and is the author of the chapbook blood machine, a finalist for the 2020 Tupelo Press Sunken Garden Chapbook Prize and a semifinalist for the Poetry.ONL Chapbook Series Fellowship (2023). He was a semifinalist for the Bennett Nieberg Transpoetic Broadside Prize (Gasher Press, 2023) and was longlisted for the 2023 Frontier Award for New Poets (2023). He teaches English and creative writing at the Cambridge School of Weston (MA).