Exiles and Pleasures: Taunggyi Dreaming by Jaspal Kaur Singh

In Exiles and Pleasures: Taunggyi Dreaming, the brilliant new book by Jaspal Kaur Singh, sensuality and trauma twine and unbraid, each lending an unnerving incantation to the other. Singh’s book works simultaneously as an act of lyrical historical documentation and witness, and as a testament to and celebration of the rapturous. Miraculously, along the way, Singh, time and again, uncovers the unexpected overlaps between the corporeal and the ecstatic—that which we inherit, and that which we are compelled to reinvent. In Singh’s careful hands, the erased names of the dead can again be conjured and therefore remembered in the juice of a broken mango, the ferment of tea leaves, the sliver of ginger that hisses as it fries. This is a book—yes—about exile and estrangement, but also about the ferocity and persistence of joy, and about how a willingness to engage the pleasures of the flesh in the aftermath of the atrocities perpetuated thereon can be not only an act of rebellion, but an act of re-dedication. This is a beautiful and essential book.

–Matthew Gavin Frank, author of Flight of the Diamond Smugglers

For decades, Singh’s writings have shed a light on the stories and spaces between lands, bodies, and languages. Now, in Exiles and Pleasures: Taunggyi Dreaming, she turns to her own ancestral voices and external/internal migrations. I am haunted by Singh’s honeyed mix of story and song as she takes readers through “the land of the greenghosts” and heartbreak, revealing the power of fierce love & defiance across even fiercer distances. This collection is a testament to those on the margins who belong nowhere and everywhere, who speak with “tongues split, heart loaded.” We are all the better for the silences Singh has broken and the wholeness her words have set out to reclaim.

–Patricia Killelea, author of Counterglow

A vein that runs through the consciousness of many South Asian writers is colonialism, a primal trauma which complicates one’s place in the world given the unending constraints of class, gender, nationhood, and familial obligations that have been induced by modern history. Jaspal Singh’s collection goes beyond the conventional two-dimensional understanding of the colonizer-colonized tension by recalling the Indian experience in Burma. Singh’s poetry harkens back to this heartbreaking moment as it played out for the Sikh family, especially the women, at the center of these poems, who do their best to maintain the joy of life throughout whatever ordeal—raids by gun-toting Burmese soldiers, ethnic harassment, and forced migration. For Singh, Shan Mountains mix with Punjabi fields in spite of political decrees against hybrid spaces; the slaughter of monks in Rangoon and whispers of Amritsar during Partition also find their way into larger ruminations of self.  In later sections, her poetry captures how traumas in other “fragmentary shadowy spaces”—from South Africa to Armenia—also carry a sense of the uncanny, familiar and alien, in that beauty and atrocity can exist on the same page as easily and as fluidly as identities of foreigner, native, and “other” coalesce in the effervescent memories of migrants.

–Seri I. Luangphinith, University of Hawaiʻi at Hilo

This debut collection of poems, Exiles and Pleasures: Taunggyi Dreaming expresses delicate, deeply felt intangibles of life, childhood, family matters and the diasporic consciousness. Jaspal Kaur Singh pens her poems in a skilful, creative and eloquent manner. Nostalgia for lost homes together with a cartographic movement across continents and cities is evocative.  A rich tapestry that weaves pangs of homelessness, displacement, search for new homelands and extraordinary explorations of three generations of courageous, inconvenient and disobedient women.  Singh’s poetic aesthetics confers a sensuousness to her art, and cross-cultural and multilingual connections provide a cosmopolitan place where readers can dream, sing, and assimilate alongside the poet. She writes with a musician’s ear and heart’s depths of listening that consciously unfolds the lines of the poems.  A sublime and beautiful collection of words across oceans.  In reading the poems and listening to them, we get the sound and the meaning of Singh’s emotions, her images continued to float across our mind as waves break upon the shore.

–Rajendra Chetty, Author of Fatima Meer: Choosing to be Defiant, President: English Academy of Southern Africa