Indivisible anthology: your purchase in part benefits Levantine Cultural Center

Indivisible: An Anthology of Contemporary South Asian American Poetry  Edited by Neelajana Banerjee, Summi Kaipa, and Pireeni Sundaralingam (University of Arkansas 2010)

The first anthology of its kind, Indivisible brings together American poets who trace their roots to Bangladesh, India, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka. According to poet Yusef Komunyakaa, this incredibly beautiful anthology of poems "is an unbroken map of lyrical recollection." The poems gathered here take us from basketball courts to Bollywood, from the Grand Canyon to sugar plantations, and from Hindu-Muslim riots in India to anti immigrant attacks on the streets of post-9/11 America.

Levantine Review presents you with three poems by three poets featured in this important anthology. Visit the Indivisible web site.

—Sholeh Wolpé

Bushra Rehman

Ami's Cassettes

The other day, I found my mother's cassettes from the eighties
they were full of love songs from Indian movies
Ami used to tape them from the TV while she cleaned

And I thought back to the orange carpets
the sofas with their plastic
the way everything was dusted and perfect

I tried to fill the memory with her music
to come up with something peaceful,
something splendid
but the tapes they just didn't play that way

You see, they caught all the background noise:
the sound of babies crying
children fighting
fire engines going
and then the sound of a child being hit

The children wouldn't stop making noise
until my mother's own voice would break
then there would be nothing
but the sound of her crying
and the sound of music
in a language
my mother was dying to hear

I thought back to the orange carpets
the way that I would press my face against them
and against the plastic sofas
until the perspiration would make it stick
and listen to the sound of her crying
and all the love songs of longing
they promised everything
missing in that house
with its orange carpets
everything missing in the plastic
everything she ever recorded.

Bushra RehmanBorn and raised in New York City, Bushra Rehman has also lived in Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. She is co-editor of Colonize This! Young Women of Color on Today's Feminism (Seal Press, 2002) and author of the poetry collection, Marianna's Beauty Salon (Vagabond Press, 2001). Her work has appeared in publications such as The New York Times, India Currents, NY Newsday, ColorLines, Curve, and SAMAR, and anthologies such as Voices of Resistance: Muslim Women on War, Faith and Sexuality (Seal Press, 2006) and Stories of Illness and Healing: Women Write Their Bodies (Kent State University Press, 2007).Her work has also been featured on BBC Radio 4, the Brian Lehrer show, and KPFA radio. She has just completed her first work of fiction, an on-the-road Desi adventure novel. Visit her site.

Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

Indian Movie, New Jersey

Not like the white filmstars, all rib
and gaunt cheekbone, the Indian sex-goddess
smiles plumply from behind a flowery
branch. Below her brief red skirt, her thighs
are satisfying-solid, redeeming
as tree trunks. She swings her hips
and the men-viewers whistle. The lover-hero
dances in to a song, his lip-sync
a little off, but no matter, we
know the words already and sing along.
It is safe here, the day
golden and cool so no one sweats,
roses on every bush and the Dal Lake
clean again.
The sex goddess switches
to thickened English to emphasize
a joke. We laugh and clap. Here
we need not be embarrassed by words
dropping like lead pellets into foreign ears.
The flickering movie-light
wipes from our faces years of America, sons
who want mohawks and refuse to run
the family store, daughters who date on the sly.
When at the end the hero
dies for his friend who also
loves the sex-goddess and now can marry her,
we weep, understanding. Even the men
clear their throats to say, "What qurbani!
What dosti!" After, we mill around
unwilling to leave, exchange greetings
and good news: a new gold chain, a trip
to India. We do not speak
of motel raids, canceled permits, stones
thrown through glass windows, daughters and sons
raped by Dotbusters.
In this dim foyer
we can pull around us the faint, comforting smell
of incense and pakoras, can arrange
our children's marriages with hometown boys and girls,
open a franchise, win a million
in the mail. We can retire
in India, a yellow two-storied house
with wrought-iron gates, our own
Ambassador car. Or at least
move to a rich white suburb, Summerfield
or Fort Lee, with neighbors that will
talk to us. Here while the film-songs still echo
in the corridors and restrooms, we can trust
in movie truths: sacrifice, success, love and luck,
the America that was supposed to be.

Chitra Banerjee DivakaruniBorn in India, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni came to the United States in 1976. Her collections of poetry include Leaving Yuba City (Anchor Books, 1997), Black Candle (CALYX Press, 1991), and The Reason for Nasturtiums (Par- amananda, 1990). She has received both the Allen Ginsberg Prize and the Pushcart Prize for her poetry. Divakaruni has also published several novels, including One Amazing Thing (Hyperion, 2010), Palace of Illusions (Doubleday, 2009), Sister of My Heart (Anchor, 2000) and The Mistress of Spices (Anchor, 1998). Her books for children include Shadowland (Roaring Brook Press, 2009) and The Conch Bearer (Aladdin, 2005). Divakaruni's collection of short stories, Arranged Marriage (Anchor, 1996), won the American Book Award. Her work has appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, the New Yorker, Best American Short Stories, and the Pushcart Prize anthology. She currently teaches creative writing at the University of Houston, Texas.

Jeet Thayil

September 10, 2001

How much harder it is to speak
when I have spent the whole day silent.
I would like to stop someone,
leave my room in the evening
and stop someone, a man without hope,
or a woman bent double, as if she were
searching the sidewalk for gems
caught in the cracks, and I would tell her
that each of us walks with the same
impossible burden, knowing
that only the stars will last-
she will listen to me, hear what I say
and go on her way, bent over as before,
never looking up at the approaching sky.

Jeet ThayilJeet Thayil was born in Kerala, India, and educated in Hong Kong, New York, and Bombay. His four poetry collections include These Errors Are Correct (Tranquebar Books, 2008) and English (Penguin/Rattapallax, 2004), and he is the editor of The Bloodaxe Book of Contemporary Indian Poets (Bloodaxe, 2008) and Divided Time: India and the End of Diaspora (Routledge, 2006). His writing has appeared in London Magazine, Verse, Stand, Agenda, Poets and Writers, the Cortland Review, Drunken Boat, the Independent, and the Poetry Review. He is a contributing editor to Fulcrum, a Boston-based poetry annual, and an editor of the multimedia arts journal Rattapallax. Thayil is a recipient of grants and awards from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Rockefeller Foundation, the British Council, and the Swiss Arts Council. In 2004, he moved from New York to New Delhi and currently lives in Bombay.