Authors Electric

March 21st, 2019 was World Poetry Day. For those of us lucky enough to be at Lit Books that night in Malaysia, it was a feast of poetry at The Noise of Time - Readings on World Poetry Day . Pusaka  organized fourteen poets to read poetry in 11 languages (Malay, English, Mandarin, Bengali, Arabic, Persian, German, French, Spanish, Malayalam and Russian...with translations into English). Led by organizer and emcee Pauline Tan, the room resonated with the words of Omar Khayyam, Wang Wei, Paul Eluard, Cesar Vallejo, Else Lasker-Schüler, Bei Dao, Mallika Sengupta, Goenawan Mohamad and many other voices, both ancient and contemporary. I chose to read a Bengali poem by Mallika Sengupta, translated brilliantly by Amit Mukerjee  titled Prithibir Ma (Mother of the Universe): Unbound, my hair spread over the sky created dark stormclouds. My green dhanekhali sari became the lush fabric of forests. Stealing the melody from my throat birds chirped into morning s...

The festival banner and book display, with heritage buildings reflected in glass. The event is supposed to start at 10.30pm . At night. The blurb advertises: Readings: Unprotected Text   Join us for an intimate session of pegging the patriarchy, wild ‘super’ liberalisms and other kinks. Where words are used to express our deepest wants and desires. For mature audiences only. Readers: Amir Muhammad, Ivan Coyote, Kyoko Yoshida, Regina Ibrahim, Shih-li Kow, Stephanie Dogfoot, William Yang Hosted by: Pang Khee Teik I am attending the  Georgetown Literary Festival from November 22-25, 2018 . This is Penang, where open-air food stalls feed hungry hordes well into the night; this is truly a food paradise. I expect most of the festival-goers to be gorging on char kway teow and penang laksa if they are up at all, and I walk into  Gerakbudaya Penang's  spacious bookshop at 10.25, not expecting a crowd. The lovely interior of the boo...

As I write this post from Malaysia, under a tropical sun, I am struck by how universal the festivities of Christmas are, even in our modern fractured world. In this majority-Muslim country, Christmas is celebrated with Open Houses as Christian families open their doors for non-Christian friends and family.  There is no snow, there is food, there is feasting...and the emphasis is on the ties of friendship and family.  A green Christmas in the tropics is a warm Christmas indeed. Two years ago, I read a story by the Godden sisters, recounting five years of their childhood spent in the Indian village of Narayanganj, during World War I.  I was enchanted.  Jon and Rumer Godden wrote Two Under the Indian Su n story as adults, but it is infused with the childhood wonder and daily astonishment of life in British India. This book was published in the US in 1966 by Knopf/Viking and is a delightful retelling of a childhood in India by two accomplished writers. And now...