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
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