Red Henna Blues by Jaspal Kaur Singh

 

In Red Henna Blues, Jaspal Kaur Singh’s disarming, beautiful, heartbreaking, redemptive, and entirely sui generis fragmented lyrical memoir, ideas of home and family, estrangement and power are dismantled in the ways that the homelands and communities about which Singh so intricately writes were likewise dismantled.  Singh’s work in these essays is an act of rebuilding that which was irrevocably lost, but also an illuminating of the voices which resisted oblivion—with spirit, with love, with the proof of a different, more humane iteration of power, and with the sort of lyric badassery that braids scream with incantation.  These essays dare to pick up the shards of a “shattered kismet,” to exhume that which once “remained submerged in the promise,” (in Singh’s words), and—without ever forgetting or forgiving the agents of the shattering and the submerging—fashion them into a fresh story, an unforgettable rebuke, and an aria of the celebration of survival.

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

 

Jaspal Singh’s newest book, Red Henna Blues, is a luminous tapestry of memory and collective longing, an affirmation of the enduring presence of familial connections & disconnections across lifetimes. Rooted in many voices and many lands, each story contains the seed of the other— the result is a lush and insightful collection that is sure to take its rightful place among the literature of diaspora. But Singh’s writing is so much more than an archive of the war-torn. Here you will find memorable moments of love and resistance, sharpened blades and even sharper-tongued women. This is a book to give your granddaughters, your mothers, yourself. Red Henna Blues is at once a testimony to all that has been lost and all that is worth fighting for.

–Patricia Killelea, Author of Counterglow

 

In this mesmerizing gathering of essays and vignettes, Jaspal Kaur Singh takes readers on a moving journey into the Indian diaspora of Burma (today’s Myanmar), sharply recounting an extended family’s trials and tribulations through a century of British colonial power and postcolonial violence. In writing that is self-consciously hybrid, she weaves memories and recollections into a generational tapestry that mirrors not only the fragmentation of family throughout the global diaspora, but also the, often tattered, contours of ancient folk tales and oral legends. Most crucially, if these stories accrue into a kind of literary legacy, for family and readers alike, and bear witness to patriarchal violence done to women, girls, and other marginalized groups within colonial and postcolonial/neocolonial contexts, they also act as vehicle for resistance and rewriting, thereby revealing the fierceness of the diasporic life-forces. Although they are suffused with disturbing stories of abuse and psychological and emotional coercion, they are also brimming with the sensual and intoxicating smell of teas and spices, and of bodies in ecstasy and euphoria. As the title (and title story) of this powerful collection suggests, postcolonial/global South women—whether in India, Burma, or diasporas elsewhere—sing the blues to this day to protest and to inspire change.

–Michael Wutz, Editor, Weber—The Contemporary West

 

In Red Henna Blues, Professor Emerita Jaspal Kaur Singh crafts a multi-genre collection of narratives of the Sikh diaspora via Burma, India, and the United States. Blurring the always suspect distinction between autobiography and fiction, Singh’s memoirs, poetry, essays, and short stories elicit familial and cultural traumas within which there is pleasure and sensuality, sharp strokes of wisdom, and even moments of humor. The people who inhabit Red Henna Blues are sketched evocatively, their humanity resonant with the echoes of linguistic and corporal specificities, and in the poetics of inner lives and outward actions. These ‘tales’ evoke the vivid sensory experiences of postcolonial worlds such as India’s, and, in doing so, continue a long tradition of women telling stories that reveal the richness of lives lived in the interstices of violence, displacement, and forgetting. A great pointer for Sikh writers who are yet to arrive!

–Sri Craven, Professor, Portland State University

 

This is a story of Burma and India’s midnight daughters who are endowed with an extraordinary power that enables them to rise above the vicissitudes of life in patriarchy, and in translocation. From her first-hand accounts of war and child abuse— some of which may be trauma trigger for some of us—to the quaint customs of Shan State, Jaspal Kaur Singh writes with economy and control. One of the most relatable books I’ve read in recent years.

–Ko Ko Thett--author of Bamboophobia