Поэт Игнатий Алоизиус представил новую книгу о материнской утрате и анонсировал литературный фестиваль

The poems in Ignatius Aloysius’ poignant new collection “Bone Dust Mother” inhabit the shadowy plane where grief, family and identity converge. Written in the wake of his mother’s death, the collection ranges across many years and vast distances, tracing the contours of the poet’s relationship with his mother, his formative years in India and the complex histories that often shape immigration and assimilation. Aloysius writes with uncommon candor about his earliest experiences in the United States, and he explores with insight and sensitivity how the personal and political are often impossible to disentangle. In addition to “Bone Dust Mother,” Aloysius discusses the challenges of writing autobiographically after publishing his debut novel, “Fishhead: Republic of Want”; the role poetry played in helping him confront his grief over his mother’s final years and her eventual passing; and how language itself becomes a locus of translation for cultures, generations and identities. We also had a chance to talk about the inaugural South Asian American Literary Festival, scheduled for Saturday, August 22 at Chicago’s South Asia Institute. As its co-creator and curator, Aloysius has worked unflaggingly to create a vibrant new community program in celebration of South Asian American literature. Family relationships often serve as a springboard to an exploration of larger histories. Were there moments when a poem in “Bone Dust Mother” unexpectedly shifted from the personal to the political, or vice versa? Ah, a gateway first question. Love it! This is true; family relationships are the impetus. It’s what we have and aspire to maintain from a distance through our own sensibilities and windows of survival. Since I’ve become part of the larger South Asian diaspora outside the homeland, I ponder questions of history, migration and separation more urgently in my poems. This is what I hold on to. It’s what I know. The U.S. is home for me. But a vital question lingers: So where are we now? This place is complicated. It’s become challenging as an immigrant to feel safe in the body’s house. The present is uncertain; the future is a penumbra of an absolute darkness. My poetry submits to the pressures of both separation and opportunity, speaking to my innate naiveté and courage to step forward, be seen and heard and address what’s personal and political in my work, which includes releasing songs with Hapticwound. The subject of immigration has become oppressively political in recent times, as you know. It’s hard to look away and not make it personal, despite my naturalization. The shift, as you put it, is an actual daily struggle for me, though writing frees me in a profound way that nothing else can touch. Grief is rarely static. Did your understanding of your mother and her passing change as you wrote this collection? Grief surprises. It takes on a life of its own, folding neatly into memory’s fabric, informing all meaning and understanding, pressing against the heart. There’s love and pain. So, no, it’s not static. Gosh, I have so many questions still as I continue picking up the pieces! I miss my mother very much, because her life was not a comfortable or ordinary one, even by patriarchal Indian standards, and I was unable to change that for the better for years, due to hard family dynamics. When her health turned suddenly, I was in shock at first, and the words for my first poems in the collection poured out of me in the beginning after she passed away, while I struggled to assimilate my thoughts about her, about us, and put them in any sensible order, as duty demanded my attention on the ground. Time, however, reminded me that I wasn’t letting go, but rather tying new threads to that experience, because it would keep me going. It had to. As I became more objective in the backwash and as the collection grew to become its own celebration and emotional albatross, taking a few years to come together as a body of work, I made this significant loss a part of my living, my silo. It continues to feed my sense of the world, which shows me that life is brief and fragile, that family is everything, whether you have it or not. Appreciation and goodwill prevail. It’s what she left me. Many immigrant narratives involve translation between languages, but also between generations and value systems. How does the theme of translation in its various senses inform the poems in “Bone Dust Mother”? In this collection, translation happens loosely for me, not intentionally or fully. It happens through known phrases, words, reactions and interactions—what memory allows, what feels right between two worlds and peoples. Let me add by saying that assimilation for me—the perennial recipe for being American—gradually chipped away at my native tongues (a fault of my own), until I seemed to lose much of what I knew at first. The poems in “Bone Dust Mother” employ words from the homeland that are necessary and effective. The aim of the work was to move my poetic delivery through the conduit of our dominant vocabulary and point of view, since I am looking at events of the past in a present American timeline and experience, which is what I know best and trust as a contemporary writer. In “A Future Awaiting Me” and “Welcome to America,” among other poems, you explore some of your earliest experiences in the United States, including your flights from Mumbai to Chicago, where you moved to attend art school. You also touch on some of your experiences as a young man in India and abroad in your novel, “Fishhead: Republic of Want.” What have been the most interesting (and perhaps most challenging) aspects for you in regard to writing about your past? I appreciate how you’re bridging both genres in this question. “Bone Dust Mother” is an epistolary work, where I, as the author, am addressing my mother (i.e. the spirit of my mother) about the good and difficult times we both shared while together and apart, but the collection is written without the expected norms of what the epistolary form anticipates in a body of work tied to letter-writing history and practice. My poetry collection experiments with lyrical form, while the novel, being literary in essence, is quite metafictional in nature, where I use the epistolary occasionally and introduce destiny (fate, karma, moirai) as the overarching novel’s first-person narrator, observing the world of that young, desperate Indian character, Fishhead. So aside from the novel, where creative technique and fabrication weaves magic through observed life (in India and the U.S.), I have never put down on paper my earliest experiences of leaving the homeland for America. I just wasn’t ready emotionally and psychologically to attempt that. It has been a while! The challenge for me in the poetry collection was that I needed to trust my memory and heart to state the facts as best as I could and express them lyrically. In a way, “Bone Dust Mother” is an account of events past and known, a poetic memoir, if you will. I’m speaking from a place of truth and understanding, and questioning too, but holding destiny close to the heart, in fact. There’s a higher power at work where my adult pantheistic consciousness is concerned. Identity is often imposed from the outside rather than existing as something individual and organic. How did you negotiate this tension in your poems? I suppose this has much to do with borders and self-preservation, this process of acknowledging one type of individual or group while outing the other for whatever reason. It’s wrong, though there’s power and control in doing that, wouldn’t you say? I was not without hate- or race-filled tensions imposed on me, mind you. I’m a survivor. That’s still happening, more so now. But it’s true that you become more aware of yourself, your identity, the moment you step into a foreign or unfamiliar place. Such a point of view isn’t exclusive to one side of the fence and who’s there. If you’re relocating, you almost have to put aside what you know and trust about yourself, as you learn new ways to live and speak, act, fit in and earn acceptance. Poetry affords me a certain word-power to play hopscotch with sensitive and difficult subjects, giving me surprising ways to express a vulnerable thought in a line or verse. I use the phrase “creative concealment” to curtain demonstrable objections I may have, because I clearly don’t fit the mainstream and must find other lyrical ways to express myself and be understood. Perhaps, I’m doing this in “Bone Dust Mother.” The word assimilation returns for a quick minute here: For decades, I worked and lived through the American system without needing to worry about who I was originally, until now. It wasn’t necessary or expected, having to declare myself at every turn before. Until now. I lived and worked hard to fit into my new environment, grow from it. I made every effort to absorb American life as quickly as possible. I spoke and wrote English understandably, so that wasn’t a problem. My accent could be an advantage or disadvantage, depending on the circumstance. The immigrant lives with these tensions always, which feeds everything, writing especially. As mentioned above, you’ve published a novel, “Fishhead: Republic of Want.” What led you to poetry for this new book? Let me go back a bit in time: In my MFA, I had both novels and poetry inside me, so I took fiction as a major and poetry as an elective. My craft was terrible, but I was hungry to learn quickly, hungry for new things, and I had truly supportive and hyper-talented teachers! People I’ll always admire. Since finishing school, I’ve been working with both genres and often view fiction and poetry as going together—and nonfiction too. They seem inseparable and an integrative practice for me. Even in the novel, I did my best to invoke lyricism into it without risking its narrative appeal; that book came out first, and I learned so much from its process. I’m shopping a new lyrical novel now. But “Bone Dust Mother” emerged naturally as a poetic work, especially after I started writing poems on the plane to India after my mother passed away, when I had to go back to India to take care of her affairs more than once. Emotional fatigue and sleeplessness (I don’t sleep on planes) will talk to your psyche in sharp fragments. In my situation, I paid attention to them and tried to write these early feelings down, which I developed later as rough drafts of poems. Poetry seemed a natural fit for this expression about my mother. I even worked on a revision of the manuscript at a Ragdale residency during post-COVID times, which was so healing and fulfilling for me emotionally and psychologically. What is the genesis of the South Asian American Literary Festival? Did it begin with connections you made through the popular monthly reading series you curate, Sunday Salon Chicago? There’s a bit of local history behind this. I’ve seen a lot of support for Chicago-area Asian American writers in recent years, especially through events hosted by South Asia Institute, the Chicago Literary Hall of Fame and other groups like Kundiman Midwest and Banyan: Asian American Writers Collective. I became involved with South Asia Institute after they expressed interest in hosting my first collaborative poetry collection in early 2025, titled “Salt Pruning,” which I co-authored with former Santa Cruz, California poet laureate David Allen Sullivan. Since then, I’ve been in conversation with Shireen and Afzal Ahmad, founders of South Asia Institute, and I believe we collectively felt the need for a one-day South Asian American Literary Festival (SAALF) that would include a youth component. Hosted by South Asia Institute, this literary festival will be free to the public and the first of its kind to have support from the City of Chicago. Both Shireen and I worked on language for the major DCASE grant proposal, which we received, thankfully, and one thing led to another. The plan just blossomed. My work with the reading series Sunday Salon Chicago provided the outreach for a host of authors, panelists and participants. The team felt that I was the right fit to be SAALF’s designated curator and director, so I accepted. The lit fest is scheduled for Saturday, August 22, and I’m so excited for it. We hope to do it again next year. What conversations do you hope will emerge among the poets, prose writers and translators participating in the festival? To kick off the literary festival, I will be in conversation with our keynote speaker, Fatimah Asghar, an award-winning poet, activist and filmmaker (“Brown Girls”), whose new poetry collection “Daughter of the Mountains” came out in July. The collection focuses on decolonization, yearning for land that’s reachable and unreachable (the India/Pakistan conflict), exile (temporal dislocation), faith and identity. This will set the tone for our hourly panels for the lit fest, which will include readings from panelists and discussions on topics related to diaspora, trauma, identity, youth and forms of writing (ghazal, translations), plus author readings from local poetry publisher, Glass Lyre Press, which I will join for “Bone Dust Mother.” Authors’ titles will be made available at the event by select bookstores, along with a host of food vendors and related sponsors. Literary festivals are as much about building community as celebrating writers, creators and culture. What excites you most about SAALF? It’s the same thrill I get from hosting and curating Sunday Salon Chicago. This notion of putting together and facilitating a free literary festival in these challenging times invites a curious and supportive audience, gives authors a platform to be admired and heard, builds community and relationships, encourages commerce with books and food and fosters a one-day diaspora celebration of South Asian American culture that culminates with a DJ and dance, all in one impressive location. There will also be a concurrent art exhibition in the large gallery space on the first floor at South Asia Institute. They know how to put on a great show! South Asian American Literary Festival at the South Asia Institute, 1925 South Michigan, on August 22. Christine Sneed is the author of three novels and three story collections, most recently, Direct Sunlight (stories). She’s also the editor of the short fiction anthology Love in the Time of Time’s Up, and her work has been included in publications such as The Best American Short Stories, O. Henry Prize Stories, New Stories from the Midwest, New England Review, The Southern Review, Ploughshares, Glimmer Train, and the New York Times. She lives in Pasadena, CA and teaches for Northwestern University and Stanford University.