Deś

by Sati Mookherjee

In this formally inventive poetry collection, Sati Mookherjee resurrects a shared precolonial pan-South Asian identity, history, and culture in joyful defiance of the nationalist and sectarian movements of today. 

This unusual poetry collection emerged from the author’s interviews of her Indian, Pakistani, and Bangladeshi immigrant family and friends in her native Pacific Northwest about their personal histories: of partition and childhood, immigration experiences, and religious and metaphysical beliefs. The resulting poems reflect the kaleidoscopic identity of the South Asian (“desi”) diaspora—the world’s largest diaspora. At this ugly historic moment, desi-ness offers a real-world model of a joyful, plural community, even as such tolerance is under grave threat from both today’s American right-wing anti-immigrant movement and the toxic nationalism and sectarianism of South Asian geopolitics. The poems themselves are a diaspora of forms: hybrid cross-pollinations of American tradition (Frost, Penn Warren), ancient Indo-Persian-Arabic forms, and self-invention. In a time when hatred of the other is normalized, this book holds love, celebrating a kinship tradition and shared homeland—a Deś—that is both precolonial and extant, borderless, found not on any map, but held in the collective un/consciousness of the desi diaspora. In defiance of nationalist rhetoric that would see us divided by language, religion, and country of origin, Deś joins the decentralized global movement of scholars, artists, activists, and young people reclaiming the beauty of a shared, precolonial composite culture.