The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
Arts
8 — Wednesday, April 7, 2021 

Ann Arbor is never entirely 

quiet. But of the many sounds 
you hear drifting through the 
city, those of a band with a bossa 
nova feel often aren’t among 
them. And yet, on a slightly chilly 
Saturday afternoon, a group of 
around 40 people and I found 
ourselves masked up and spread 
out, sprawled all over Lawrence 
Street as a jazz/rock band played 
on the porch of a yellow house. 
Perching on curbs, leaning against 
buildings, standing on porches and 
roofs, audience members lounged 
and danced and tapped their feet, 
clapping along. Most were dressed 
in the colorful, artsy way typical 
of the creatives of Kerrytown. 
Someone with pink hair danced 
loosely 
and 
expressively, 
and 

the musicians joked with the 
audience. There was a communal 
atmosphere, 
the 
feeling 
that 

everyone gathered there were 
friends or friends of friends. 

It is the musicians who reside in 

this house who came up with the 
idea of sharing their music with 
their neighbors and whoever else 
feels inclined to come. Their porch 
concerts have been occurring 
weekly — Saturdays at 2 p.m. — 
on their porch at the corner of 
State Street and Lawrence Street. 
Members who live in this house 
are in the band Kektus, a funk 
band made up of School of Music, 
Theatre & Dance jazz students. 
However, each week they bring a 
guest from the local scene to jam 
with them, or some of their own 
friends to sit in, and share a wider 
variety of music. It is a mindset 
typical of the jazz community, 
which is all about learning from 
other musicians by playing and 
hanging with them. 

The band of five — a mix of 

household members and friends 
— stuck close together on their 
makeshift stage, communicating 
steadily with nods, calls and 
twists of expression. Ann Arbor 
locals Mei Semones and Reggie 
Pearl (both on guitar, alternating 

lead vocals) led the band, taking 
turns singing a mix of each of 
their originals and covers that the 
crowd sang along with. Supporting 
them were Music, Theatre & 
Dance sophomores Ben Wood 
(on bass) and Sam Uribe (various 
percussive instruments). Addie 
Vogt — who currently lives in Ann 
Arbor but attends The New School 
in New York — plays drums. The 
singers, although clearly close and 
very good at combining creatively, 
had distinct styles.

Semones 
sang 
in 
tones 

classically described as “silvery.” 
Her voice seemed to float and skip 
where it pleased, with the breeze 
sometimes carrying it past the ears 
of the eager listeners. Her original 
songs carried a gentle bossa nova 
to them and worked their way 
into the in-between feeling that 
comes early in a partially cloudy 
afternoon.

Meanwhile, Pearl’s music took 

on the anger of punk with the 
education of a jazz musician. The 
snake-like fluidity of her voice 
recalled 
Australian 
musician 

Jaala, 
while 
her 
yowls 
and 

yelps evoked American singer-
songwriter, Angel Olsen, at her 
most fearsome. When asked about 
her music writing process, Pearl 
replied, laughing, “I feel like it’s 
just like, life happens and then I 
sit in my room and write about 
it.” To hear such a powerful voice 
switch to a light, laid-back tone is 
a shock that always comes when 
hearing creatives speak about 
their everyday selves.

And yet, even with such separate 

music emerging from their writing 
process, the two clicked deeply 
and musically. Olsen and Pearl 
met at Berklee School of Music in 
Boston. They were able to fasten 
onto each other and combine their 
voices without ever overpowering 
the other. Semones’s bleached 
pixie cut, both of their chain 
jewelry all serve to set them apart 
from typical jazz musicians. The 
other players, two University of 
Michigan students and another 
Ann Arbor local, found their 
groove in the band too, having fun 
and performing in a way that came 

naturally. This was music played 
for the love of music, and the love 
of sharing it.

“What are you hoping people 

get out of this?” I asked, and 
immediately, 
Vogt 
cried 
out, 

“Happiness!” She went on to 
explain the sudden influx of 
audience members that occurred 
halfway through the first song, as 
people were drawn to the tunes 
from all over the neighborhood. 

Since there weren’t any other 

gigs to be had, Wood said they 
figured they’d play on their porch 
and see who came. “And people 

ended up coming,” he shrugged 
with a modest laugh. As the 
concert ended, friends called up 
to the porch, shouting hello and 
finding joy in reconnecting after 
a long winter spent in quarantine.

“Live music is amazing!” they 

all passionately agreed in their last 
statements. “Every Saturday at 2 
(p.m.) at the corner of Lawrence 
and State!” Listen for drums, 
guitars, possibly a horn. You can’t 
miss it.

In the meantime, you can find 

music by Mei Semones and Reggie 
Pearl on all streaming platforms.

The India-Pakistan Partition 

of 1947 was one of the deadliest 
religious genocides of modern 
history. The conflict left upwards 
of one million people dead and 
more than 15 million as refugees. 
Many 
Partition 
stories 
have 

been 
passed 
down 
through 

word of mouth, but others have 
disappeared entirely after more 
than 60 years. Consequently, 
despite the decades-long violence, 
very few people outside of the 
Indian 
subcontinent 
know 

about the lingering trauma that 
Partition has left on generations 
of South Asians. 

Author Anjali Enjeti hopes to 

change that with her upcoming 
fiction 
release 
“The 
Parted 

Earth.” The novel, set to be 
released on May 4, rescues the 
dying and forgotten stories of 
Partition. 

“What happens when we lose 

so many stories from a significant 

world event? We lose so much 
when we lose our family histories, 
when we lose our stories, when 
we don’t know the struggles of 
our ancestors,” Enjeti said in an 
interview with The Michigan 
Daily.

The Partition occurred in 1947. 

India had just won independence 
from the British Empire, its 
colonizers of 200 years. Before 
they retreated, the British Empire 
drew boundary lines separating 
Hindu-majority 
India 
and 

Muslim-majority Pakistan. The 
subsequent 
religious 
genocide 

was brutal. Muslims fled to West 
Pakistan (present-day Pakistan) 
and East Pakistan (present-day 
Bangladesh), while Hindus fled 
to the Indian states of Punjab 
and West Bengal. Animosity and 
tension grew between Hindus and 
Muslims, leading to widespread 
riots 
and 
targeted 
violence. 

This persecution continued for 
decades. 

“The Parted Earth” follows 

multiple characters who have all 
felt the effects of Partition: Deepa, 

a high school girl who leaves her 
home of New Delhi for London in 
1947; Shan, a lawyer with a broken 
marriage and a deep desire to 
know her displacement-riddled 
roots; 
Chandani, 
an 
elderly 

woman whose husband, also a 
victim of the Partition, recently 
committed suicide. The novel is 
a 
gripping, 
multi-generational 

story of families who must come 
to terms with their displacement.

“Partition 
is 
not 
just 
an 

event that just happened in the 
subcontinent,” Enjeti said. “These 
survivors, their children, their 
grandchildren, migrated to other 
continents and countries. They 
set up their lives elsewhere. These 
stories go with them.”

My family, with generational 

roots in West Bengal, has its own 
Partition stories. My grandfather 
crossed 
the 
border 
from 

Bangladesh to India in 1957 when 
he was just 18 years old, to avoid 
persecution as a Hindu. He arrived 
at a safe house in Kolkata where 
he met my grandmother, who 
had also fled from Bangladesh to 
India when she was six years old. 
Her father had been a doctor in 
Bangladesh, but left with his family 
in 1950 after hearing rumors that 
neighborhood mobs were planning 
to murder his family that night. 

My grandparents married and 

have lived in Kolkata ever since. 
I consider myself especially lucky 
to have heard my grandfather’s 
story before he passed away last 
November. Yet, what happens to 
the stories that are hidden and 
never told? 

***
Enjeti’s fascination with the 

Partition started in the ’90s. At 
the time, she was a lawyer and 

a mother. After encountering 
Salman Rushdie’s 1981 Booker 
Prize 
winner 
“Midnight’s 

Children,” Enjeti read anything 
and 
everything 
she 
could 

about Partition. “I just started 
voraciously reading every book 
I could get my hands on,” Enjeti 
said. 

When the internet became 

a household commodity in the 
mid-’90s, some of Enjeti’s first 
searches were about the Partition. 
She wasn’t getting far until she 
discovered the 1947 Partition 
Archive years later, one of the first 
widespread initiatives to make 
Partition stories accessible. Yet, 
the 1947 Partition Archive was 
founded in 2011, more than 60 
years after the actual event. 

“What really got me was that 

it had been so long, so much time 
had passed, and so many survivors 
would have passed away,” Enjeti 
said. “I wanted to emphasize not 
just Partition, but the legacy of 
Partition and how it affects the 
generations of people that follow.”

Enjeti’s perspective on the 

Partition 
is 
rich 
and 
hard-

hitting. In choosing a fictional 
approach, she puts a human face 
on the turbulence and trauma 
of Partition while remaining 
historically 
accurate. 
Enjeti 

doesn’t skirt around the violence 
of those long decades, but she 
does 
handle 
the 
devastation 

with a grace that enhances the 
plot. Readers are compelled to 
understand Partition from the 
eyes of a child and a middle-aged 
woman. “A river of apprehension 
flowed between homes not even 
one meter apart,” Enjeti writes. 
Even a child can understand that 
level of hostility. 

Enjeti’s novel has a nonlinear 

timescale, jumping between the 
past and present, from continent 
to continent. This model has been 
echoed by contemporary writers 
such as Khaled Hosseini, Jhumpa 
Lahiri, Jess Walter and Tatiana 
de Rosnay, all of whom influenced 
Enjeti’s writing. Enjeti, however, 
stands out in her graceful and 
digestible writing style. “The 
Parted Earth” is a much easier 
read than Hosseini’s “The Kite 
Runner,” for example, but still 
manages to explore themes of 
death 
and 
destruction 
with 

comparable depth.

But “The Parted Earth” isn’t 

just about the Partition. It’s also 
about family roots, ancestry and 
reclaiming a lost culture. This 
theme is personal for Enjeti. She 
grew up with an Indian father and 
a half-Puerto Rican, half-Austrian 
mother. With only half of her 
family in India, Enjeti felt distant 
from the Indian subcontinent, 
especially 
when 
she 
stopped 

visiting regularly after college. All 
of her relatives moved out of India 
when Enjeti was in her 20s, and 
she returned only years later for 
her cousin’s wedding.

“We 
were 
attending 
the 

wedding as tourists,” Enjeti said. 
“That was a jarring experience 
for me, to return to India and 
have virtually no family left 
there.” 

Enjeti felt she’d truly lost her 

connection with the Indian side of 
her family when her grandmother 
passed away. “I didn’t make the 
effort to know her stories and 
know her better while she was 
alive,” Enjeti said. “That regret, 
that guilt of her not getting to 
meet her great-grandkids before 

she passed, just really sat so heavy 
on me. Part of the book came out 
of that feeling.” 

Reclaiming 
one’s 
culture, 

discovering 
lost 
stories, 

reckoning 
with 
generational 

displacement — these concepts 
are hard to come to terms with. 
For anyone looking to delve 
deeper into their familial roots, 
Enjeti 
recommends 
starting 

with women in your family. 
“In most cultures, it is the 
matriarchs who hold the stories 
of their communities. They are 
the keepers of the stories, the 
archivists,” Enjeti said.

Personally, 
when 
I 
think 

back to my own grandma, who 
showers me with Bengali clothes 
and jewelry when she visits 
Michigan, I find that Enjeti’s 
words 
ring 
true. 
Fittingly, 

nearly all the narrators in “The 
Parted Earth” are women. Enjeti 
weaves together her own story 
with those of powerful female 
characters who have lost or 
become estranged from the men 
in their lives. “The women are 
our histories. They are the most 
authentic histories,” Enjeti said. 

“The 
Parted 
Earth” 
is 
a 

powerful 
story 
about 
the 

Partition, but it’s also much more 
than that. Enjeti intertwines 
themes of displacement, heritage 
and reclamation to show us the 
power of family ties in less than 
250 pages. The novel makes me 
want to preserve my own family’s 
Partition stories: to savor them, 
write them down or tell my 
children about them someday. 

“The Parted Earth” carries 

the strength of generations on its 
shoulders. It isn’t a light read, but 
it’s an important one.

Ever since being in a room with 

more than six people and human 
contact were substituted by life 
through a screen, culture has 
sought ways to continue blooming 
despite the circumstances. The 
Zell Visiting Writers Series has 
found a way to keep literature alive 
by switching real-life interactions 
between writers and readers 
to remote Q&As with authors 
from the University of Michigan 
community and beyond.

This 
past 
Thursday, 
the 

program hosted author Kathleen 
Graber, 
whose 
last 
poetry 

collection, The Eternal City, was 
a finalist for the National Book 
Award and the National Book 
Critics Circle Award. Graber came 
to talk about her 2019 book, The 
River Twice, a collection of poems 
described as “lyric philosophy, 
and a supreme consolation” by 
Pulitzer Prize winner Tracy K. 
Smith.

While she sat in front of her 

bookshelf (a very nice bookshelf, 
by the way), I sat on my balcony 
with a cup of Rooibos tea in my 
hand, as I’ve been doing ever since 
Ann Arbor started teasing us with 
warmer weather. 

The event began with University 

of Michigan graduate student 
and Poetry MFA candidate Sara 

Afshar, who softly set the scene 
by introducing the author and her 
writings: a river, America and the 
flux of all things.

As a poetry lover myself, I was 

hooked from the beginning. The 
tea tasted sweet on my tongue as 
I was brought back to a topic from 
my favorite philosophy class in 
high school: the pre-Socratics. 
These ancient Greek philosophers 
thought that changelessness is the 
nature of all reality and that all 
can be explained within the realm 
of rationality and the physical 
world. 

After that prelude, Graber began 

reading off of her latest collection 
of poems, which takes on the 
ancient philosopher Heraclitus’s 
protean notion of change in the 
title and the opening epigraphs: 
“No man ever steps in the same 
river twice, for it’s not the same 
river, and he’s not the same man.” 
According to him, change isn’t a 
part of life: It is life itself. 

Her first poem placed the 

listener in a Richmond, Va., thrift 
store where everything costs a 
dollar, except on Mondays and 
Fridays, when everything costs 
only 50 cents. She talks about an 
interaction between a mother and 
a child in one of the aisles, about 
unemployment and about the 
melting ice caps, or, in her own 
words, “a harmony of tensions.”

She then picked up The Eternal 

City, her 2010 book inspired by yet 

another historical figure: Marcus 
Aurelius. I found these selections 
especially delightful as the vivid 
storytelling transported me to 
every curtain she rose. I loved the 
simplicity in some of her lines, 
which I have always preferred 
to a pretentious concatenation of 
words, deluged with the author’s 
hopeless 
hyperbolizing. 
You 

hated that last bit, right? My point 
exactly. 

“After my mother died, I 

expected to die myself,” “We were 
not written to be saved,” “How 
slowly time seems to pass when 
you are waiting.” These are some 
of the lines that I noted to savor 
after the webinar ended. 

I was surprised to find out that 

Graber had only embarked on 
her journey of publishing poetry 
twenty years ago, at the age of 
forty. She recalls having low 
expectations for herself, thinking 
she was likely to fail. But it was 
precisely this that allowed her 
words to flow unrestrained, like a 
liberation. Graber also mentioned 
the familiar feeling that you are 
writing the same thing repeatedly, 
but it was Heraclitus’s notion that 
salvaged her unease: The topic 
may be the same, but the context 
and yourself have undergone 
some sort of change since the last 
instance. In other words, it will 
never intrinsically be the same. 

This 
made 
me 
smile 
and 

simultaneously 
served 
as 
a 

reassurance. I like to write songs, 
but lately, I had been getting 
stuck in the conviction that 
what I was writing wasn’t any 
different, or any better, from what 
I (and others) had written before. 
Heraclitus came back into my life 
when I needed him most, and I 
have Kathleen Graber to thank for 
that. 

The webinar turned to a Q&A 

with the audience, orchestrated by 
MFA candidate Julia McDaniel, 
who began with some questions of 

her own. These questions revealed 
more about what went into the 
process of writing The River 
Twice and served as an insight 
into the more intimate aspects of 
Graber’s life and psyche, like the 
enduring “love” for Heraclitus 
she’s had since she was a teenager, 
for his illuminating Buddhist 
overtones and for leaving her with 
things to write about.

Attending the Zell Writers 

Series was a nice way to break 
from 
the 
mundanity 
of 
my 

academic routine. From my small 
Ann Arbor apartment, in between 
my last class of the day and the 
gym appointment I booked days 
in advance, I was able to indulge 
in the witty words of Kathleen 
Graber, a poet I was unfamiliar 
with but one I look forward to 
discovering more about. 

I took away many thing, but 

most importantly, solace for my 
lingering solipsistic thoughts. As 
Graber said, “the self is a nebulous, 
shifty thing.”

Porch jazz sessions bring dancing to Kerrytown

In conversation with Anjali Enjeti, author of Partition fiction novel ‘The Parted Earth’

The protean condition of the self: Poet Kathleen Graber joins the Zell Visiting Writers Series

ROSA SOFIA KAMINSKI

Daily Arts Writer

TRINA PAL

Daily Arts Writer

CECILIA DURAN

Daily Arts Writer

Fia Kaminski

Design by Jessica Chiu

Elizabeth Yoon

