'My contact with S Asians was through movies'

Priscilla Uppal, award-winning poet, novelist, literary critic and professor of English at York University, was amongst the five Indian/Indo-Canadian writers invited to the 12th Blue Metropolis International Literary Festival, Canada's largest literary festival, in Montreal last month. Ajit Jain caught up with the author.

How was your first experience of Blue Metropolis?

It was fantastic; one of the things I liked about it was the inventive programming. So many different events were happening. I participated in five events, including my book launch, workshops for high school kids, mini-translations of some parts of my poetry, panel discussions. It was a very full five days.
At a discussion with Indo-Canadian writer Sheema Khan, I talked about one of my recent novels To Whom it May Concern, which is about how I grew up. My book is not autobiographical, but it is based on the story of my father, Avtar Uppal, who met with an accident and became quadriplegic. My mother, who is from Brazil, couldn't handle the stress and returned to Brasilia.
It describes some of the experiences my father had and how his children grew up part South Asians and part Brazilians. My contact with the South Asian community was through watching movies and reading books. We spoke English and French at home. We are always negotiating what we want to bring in, what you want to incorporate from the other culture and what you want to discard. I am not negotiating two cultures, but five to six cultures. And this is what I am writing about.

How about influence of your mother's culture?

There is some influence in terms of the fact that I went to a Catholic school and learnt all the teachings of the Catholic faith. I was baptized, but I am not a practising Catholic. I retain some interest in Brazilian music, movies, etc. I retain some contact with my mother.   

How did you become a poet?

It is the way I grew up in Ottawa, which is home to different cultures. I was always curious about the families of our neighbors and friends. I was nosy as to what they discussed at the dinner table. I always read books on languages. I love writing poetry and fiction, short stories and essays.  

Tell us about the launch of Traumatology at the festival.

It was a bilingual launch. While I read out seven poems from my book in English, another writer, Barbeau Gagneau, translated and read them out in French.

Another event was a contest between translators. They picked one of my poems and assigned it to two translators. There was also a French writer whose poems were translated similarly in English. The different versions were put up on a screen, and followed by a discussion on why one translator made a specific choice and which was the best translation. It turned out to be real fun, more so for me as I am fully bilingual.

Fiction writers are known to be reclusive. Are you?

To write fiction you need a lot of time alone because it is a long piece of art. It requires years of dedication.  But I am a teacher, an art activist and doing social work. My writing is a sort of social work and I never want to lose contact with people. Unlike many others, I don't want to be a writer living in an ivory tower.

I was the poet-in-residence at the Winter Olympics in Vancouver. I was there writing two poems plus an article every day for athletes and their families. The collection of those poems, Winter Sports Poems, will appear as a book in the fall.

Who are the people you believe your writings touch?
I write about young people and their issues a lot. My first novel was about an incident with a teenage girl that was widely written about in the news. I don't have any specific demographics, but I think my writings are meant to start discussions about social work, social issues; they are part of social dialogues in the world.