| Life is a bloody highway
Violence can better a man. Take Rajinderpal S. Pal – born in India, he emigrated to London at the age of five. It was the late ’70s and England's National Front movement was just beginning. Raj couldn’t walk home from school without a racial confrontation. Such a frightening place had profound effects upon the boy, but, mysteriously, he became neither bitter nor angry. Whatever trauma he suffered sowed the seeds for his soul; open-minded, with a worldly view.
His mystifying reaction to systemic violence is apparent in his writing.
"Much of the first book deals with racism... There is a line from Billy Bragg where he says, ‘What do they know of England, who only England know?’ – it’s a very limited knowledge that people have, and they think that’s the entire world. For them it is, but for me that whole experience taught me there is much more to this world than me and my culture."
The poet eventually moved (at the age of 15) from London to Calgary. Used to the rigours of English grammar school, he came to Lord Beaverbrook high school.
"Looking back," he says, "I’m not a big fan of grammar school. At the age of 11 it was decided for you if you were to live a life of certain privilege or not. You don’t know what the hell you want to do with your life at that age."
But for all its shortcomings, grammar school had held his interest. In Canada, Raj became bored.
"School wasn’t working. I hung out at Kelly’s Records."
He chuckles, and as we are sitting in the beer gardens at the Calgary Folk Music Festival, one wonders if that is when his love of music began.
"No, I started loving music because my father was a poet. He passed away when I was 10 – and the first time I saw him I was five. He had come from Britain to India to bring the rest of the family back with him. He was fairly well established in the Punjabi community. I remember going to my father’s poetry readings when I was six years old – he wrote in Punjabi, which is very musical – it lends itself to poetry better than English."
When Raj’s father passed on, Raj inherited his library, and at the age of 10 was reading T.S. Eliot and Chekov. These writers influenced him, but Raj’s poetry is non-traditional. He gained the courage to buck tradition through Fred Wah, a professor and writer of local notoriety.
"He gave me a sense to be honest with what you're writing, but not writing merely to make statements."
Raj’s sensibilities are revealed in the title of his book: Pappaji Wrote Poetry in a Language I Cannot Read. That is, incidentally, the only line Wah liked in Raj’s first manuscript, the sole reason he got accepted into Wah’s creative writing class.
"Fred now denies that story, but it’s true," he says.
The title concerns Raj’s relationship with his father, principally the fact his father wrote in Punjabi, which Raj neither reads nor writes.
"I can hear his poetry, but I cannot read it. He was a stern man, and the poetry expresses admiration and fear of him – and a sense of absence."
Here, then, is an offering of the results, from the first poem Raj ever published:
My mother’s skin
is old and cracked
tips of fingers and soles of feet
dry and mapped....
when father's father grew old
his legsno longer worked
and my mother had to carry him around...
she... still talks of the shit
under her fingernails
and how that was her duty
That, dear readers, is why you chose him as Calgary’s best author. He laughs at the distinction.
"I am thrilled and amused. Two years ago the book came out and I was nowhere in the Best of Fast Forward readers poll. Last year, a year after the book came out, I was runner-up, and now two years later, I’m the winner. So I figure I really don’t have to write any more. Ha! Besides, getting all my friends to vote was expensive."
Raj’s sense of humour speaks volumes – that he can laugh so readily after the strange and daunting route of his childhood is an accomplishment in itself. That he was able to distill his experiences into poetry – that is travelling life’s highway in damn fine fashion. |
