Tiffany Troy

Look for me among the ghosts of night-blooming jasmine:

A Conversation with Yamini Pathak about Her Mouth A Palace of Lamps

Yamini Pathak’s Her Mouth A Palace of Lamps illuminates the speaker Yamini (whose name means both night and turmeric). In the collection, the “shadow swells to become song” and that song becomes the “Goddess skin” that Yamini “wear[s] … to work / at the Monday morning meeting.” The mouth sings of Yamini’s secrets “like a rice-ball pressed warm and sticky between our palms,” imbibing both tales and food. The interconnectedness between food with womanhood and culture is underscored throughout, as when “Ma mixed boiling daal with buttered rice        scooped with her fingers     taste/ of her skin      lilt of her tale in my mouth.” Each section of the collection explores a different aspect of ragini, traveling across time through Yamini’s childhood and adulthood and vast landscapes across “the long spine of India” with “the curls/ of its dialects.” Ultimately, song becomes the means by which Pathak “travel[s] to forsaken spaces, forgotten stories told in the melancholy of monsoon.”

Tiffany Troy: How does “[Prelude]:” introduce the readers to what is to follow in Her Mouth A Palace of Lamps? I, for one, was immediately drawn to the first line: “I first sang raga Durga” and how it sets up the importance of Indian music (families of raga and raginis) to the speaker, Yamini, and etymology of her name “Yamini” (as night and turmeric) as recurring motifs throughout your collection.

Yamini Pathak: I wanted to introduce the reader to the ragini, the feminine counterpart of a raga, which is akin to a scale in western classical music. I also wanted to share some of the nuances that a raga or ragini embodies and what they mean to me. Rather than do so through a series of notes (although I do have a Notes section at the back of the book), I wrote this information into the poem called “[Prelude]:.”

Each section of the collection explores a different aspect of the ragini, which corresponds to the poems in that section. The first section, dedicated to the parent raga or “thaat” contains poems exploring my maternal lineage, and tells stories from my mother, grandmother, and women elders whose names have been lost to me. The second section, “alaap,” which consists of improvised notes and further develops the raga in the musical sense, contains poems that grapple with losses — of homeland, father, and a sense of self. The final section, “Pakad” refers to the identifying notes of a raga and gestures towards poems of identity that come through experience and aging.

As you’ve intuited so beautifully, “[Prelude]:” introduces the reader to the motifs of the collection — the protective Goddess who is also a mother astride the lion, silence, song, and night.

TT: What was your process in writing this debut poetry collection? I am curious how you landed upon the ragini structure. Who inspired you along the way?

YP: The poems were written individually over several years (the oldest poems here were written in 2018/2019) and I think of the collection as a gathering or assembly of voices — my own and the voices of my ancestors that I’ve listened for. As a child, I had briefly taken singing lessons in classical North Indian music, and fell in love with it. Each raga and ragini has a lineage, a preferred time of day when it should be sung, and a mood or character associated with it. A ragini is so alive, it felt necessary to intertwine its structure with my poems.

Many poets inspired me in the years when I was writing these poems but three who especially come to mind are Lucille Clifton, Meena Alexander, and Aracelis Girmay. Clifton and Girmay taught me ways to connect to my ancestors, known and unknown. I identified with Clifton’s deceptively domestic poems and her recognition of the kitchen as a space for formative experiences. Alexander’s poems, which contemplate ancestry, the loss of homeland, and a home-coming to one’s body and self also influenced my work.

TT: I love how you say “deceptively domestic,” because in your LitHub essay, “Love and Sustenance: Why Indian Mothers Obsess Over Feeding Our Kids,” which draws from excerpts from your poems in the collection, you speak of your ambivalence as a young immigrant Indian mother thinking about whether to hand-feed your children. Food, like music, feels intertwined to this collection. Could you speak about how it comes up?

YP: Food is one of the elemental ways we connect to the world, and to each other, isn’t it? I think of the physical bond between my mother and me when she hand-fed me as a child in “I Have Eaten under Her Skies.”  In another poem, “Mirch Masala,” I explore spices and their historical, social, and personal importance. A mango can taste of friendship, homesickness and sometimes, a rebellious teenage desire for adventure in these poems. A secret can be held sticky, like a rice ball in a child’s palm. Cooking dinner for the family holds me up in a moment of grief. It’s not only what we eat, but how we prepare food, how we consume it, and with whom, that holds emotion and importance for me.

TT: Your collection features different forms. Take “I Have Eaten Under Her Skies” and “Mirch Masala,” for instance, the caesura in “Mirch Masala” creates a different kind of pause than the line breaks, much as section breaks in “Mirch Masala” help you transition between lyrical vignettes. For you, does a poem find its form or vice versa?

YP: I use caesura to offer silent spaces, much like rests in music, allowing the reader to pause with echoes of whatever was just read. In general, I’m a person who moves more slowly through the world than most people I know. Emptiness feels like a gift to me in our over-stimulated lives. It is hard for me to say exactly, but in most cases, I would say the poem finds its form. For instance, in “Ghazal for the Children Born Far from Home,” it feels natural for me to contain all of that longing in a ghazal, the form that is most associated with desire for me. I enjoyed writing in the hermit crab forms, surprising myself in “Manifesto for the Indian Widow who Wishes to Live” and “Excerpt from Field Guide to Broken Birds.” In the case of “Field Guide,” I wanted to play, and the poem came after I determined the form. If I’m being completely honest, I think I haven’t even scratched the surface of all that form can accomplish for a poem and it is an exciting area of poetics that I want to explore further.

TT: If you have any advice to your younger self, what would it be?

YP: Poetry has helped me to make friends with uncertainty and silence. I would tell my younger self that it is fine not to be the loudest voice in the room, that I will be heard by those who need to hear me even if they have to “look for me among the ghosts of the night-blooming jasmine.” I came to writing poetry late in my life after more than a decade of working in the corporate world, where I was rewarded to mask doubt and pretend to be positive even when things did not feel right in my gut. I would tell the young woman that every feeling is valid and to be curious when she feels fear or discomfort. To ask questions can shift you out of a negative space or place of judgment even when answers are not apparent.

TT: What are you working on today?

YP: I’m working on a project to translate the poems of Kirti Kesar, who was an Indian poet, scholar, translator, and journalist, from the Hindi language. Her poems were written during a time of political extremism in her home state of Punjab, and she wrote in the voices of ordinary folk caught in the crossfire of militant forces and corrupt governmental agencies. I feel fortunate to have had the opportunity to speak with her a few times before she passed away this October, and I’m an admirer of her sharp political acumen, compassion, and fierce championship for the underprivileged. I also feel the stirrings of a hybrid project involving poetry, prose, and sound but so far it is very amorphous, and I can’t say much about it.

TT: Do you have any closing thoughts to your readers of the world?

YP: While putting this collection together, I kept thinking of my sons. In some ways these poems were seeking to preserve and honor traditional practices, rituals, and modes of thinking that my children and other children of the Indian/South Asian diaspora cannot access by living in the US. To younger readers who are children of the diaspora, perhaps these poems will allow you a glimpse of that world. It is difficult to know what to say to one’s readers because I have no control over where it goes or how it will be perceived. All I can do is extend an invitation, to step into my speaker’s world and be led by her even when the language and terrain seem unfamiliar.