Pitri Paksha (পিতৃপক্ষ)
By Dipika Mukherjee
This week, SWWIM and Matwaala are coming together to celebrate women writers of South Asian heritage with a week of poetry and a SWWIM x Matwaala writing residency and reading at The Betsy-South Beach featuring visiting writer Nina Sudhakar and local writer Carolene Kurien. (The reading will take place on September 11 at 7:00 pm. Please join us in person or via Instagram Live or Facebook Live!)
Matwaala was launched in 2015 to increase the visibility of diasporic South Asian poets (from India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bhutan, Maldives, Bangladesh, Myanmar, and Afghanistan) in the mainstream American literary landscape. The name Matwaala in a transferred sense suggests the intoxication of poetic creativity. Matwaala showcases the diversity within the South Asian community—and within the Indo-American community.
A note from Matwaala: Matwaala, the South Asian Diaspora Poetry Collective, is honored to join hands with SWWIM in celebrating a week of South Asian poetry that celebrates Matwaala’s tenth anniversary. A thoughtfully curated selection of women poets offer us a constellation of rich poetry this week. Together with SWWIM, we affirm poetry’s power to bridge distances, and amplify voices.
In the fortnight of ancestors three generations of spirits live in my home, breathe in me coloring dreams until the sun moves through another equinox. My mother lives in Delhi, in a house I will inherit, calls from a balcony where she is pinching off a rosebush, dead petals and leaves in palm, voice diminished and jagged; the chasm vast between us. She asks: What happens to ALL those souls, so many of us, overrunning the planet now? How will they find rebirth? Surely some just die forever? She is eighty-nine. A Buddhist master said: There are two kinds of children in this world. One born to repay the kindness of parents; others born to take what their parents have. She asks her usual questions asks about conversations with my siblings, my day, my week; I am a child back from school, my words terse. Connectivity bars, screens pixelate and reload. Just when I think I have lost her, she blooms again onscreen, hand brimming with dead petals, pinching leaves into earth, mulching new buds. Note: Pitri Paksha is a 16-lunar day period in the Hindu calendar when Bengalis pay homage to their ancestors.
Dipika Mukherjee’s poetry collection, Dialect of Distant Harbors, was published by CavanKerry Press in October 2022, and won the Quill and Ink Award for Poetry in 2023; it was also shortlisted for a Chicago Review of Books (CHIRBy) Award. She is the recipient of a 2022 Esteemed Artist Award from the City of Chicago and teaches at the Graham School at University of Chicago. She serves as Literary Life Ambassador for the Chicago Poetry Center.
10/16 / Poetry Reading and Conversation with visiting poet-in-residence Lisa Rhoades & local poet Yael Valencia Aldana / The BBar at The Betsy-South Beach, Miami Beach, FL / Live and Live-Streamed on Instagram Live/Facebook Live at @swwimmiami / 7-8:30 pm EST / Free
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