ARYA VISHIN
BEFORE YOU WRITE ABOUT GENERATIONAL TRAUMA FOR YOUR WHITE PROFESSOR, CONSIDER:
listen: I was taken aback when those guys presenting some campus org did not know what “rishi” meant. like, it’s in the name & you haven’t even googled it once? I remember immediately thinking, this is just the diaspora version of being a white saviour, and then I felt bad because I’m sure they’re doing good work and rishi is technically a sanskrit word anyway, but okay, it really is common & very easy to look up, so what gives. they do work in himachal pradesh—I think I pronounced it wrong too the first time I ever said it so whatever. pass. I’ve been. last summer I visited one of my uncles—I mean uncle in the indian sense where I don’t remember exactly how we’re related to each other—who got lost several times driving through the dharamshala hills to his house for keheva as if he hasn’t lived there for three decades. (I’m not translating keheva but it’s easy to look up.) he said to me Arya—do you know it means to be Kashmiri? across the table my father shrugged, as in, humour him? I wish I could have said yes but I said no. it’s been almost ten years since I last saw srinagar—same as my father, though it’s his birthplace & not mine, so I won’t pretend to live there but it lives in me. I read, poems & the news, the old & the current, & reach for the unfathomable in-between—because there is nothing people love to say about Kashmir more than they love to say it’s a complicated situation in a sympathetic tone and / or I heard it’s beautiful. sometimes they say was. it is beautiful. I am not sorry that I did not write you a war poem. I am also not sorry that I did not write you a poem romanticizing the florist’s shikara on dal lake at dawn & the snow on the himalayas & with detailed translation notes. I don’t want you to think this poem is apolitical but I don’t want you to think it’s political either. all this to say I have nothing against that student group but those guys could stand to google some things.
Arya Vishin is a mixed Kashmiri-American poet from San Jose, California. He is currently studying English & South Asian Studies @ UC Berkeley. You can find him on Twitter @thewodensfang.