For the past two weeks I’ve been travelling around Britain and Ireland with Canadian poet Priscila Uppal, giving readings with her at universities, literary festivals and libraries. This is what I’ve learned: Priscila is definitely a cat person; Great Expectations was the book that made her want to become a writer; she’s an obsessive runner and has a penchant for vintage dresses, hats and red lipstick; rock biographies are her guilty pleasure; she has an equal adoration for John Donne and U2, likes steak and greens, and has a series of photographs of herself with statues of famous writers — Priscila tweaking Balzac’s nose, Priscila and Oscar Wilde making out. And then, there are the poems.
Priscila is one of the most exciting contemporary voices I’ve heard anywhere in the world. Funny, smart, saucy, surprising—her poems are difficult to categorise but let me offer you a few titles so you can get a sense of them. Items Recovered from Homer’s Wastepaper Basket; My Computer is Developing Autism and Other Disorders; I Refuse the Gift of Reincarnation; and my personal favourite, I’m Afraid of Brazilians or Visiting the Ancestral Homeland Is Not the Great Ethnic Experience Promised by Other Memoirs.
Priscila was born in Ottawa in 1974 to an Indian father and Brazilian mother. When she was two, her father, in a freakish incident, swallowed contaminated water in Antigua which attacked his insides and turned him into a quadriplegic within 48 hours. When she was eight, her mother ran away. “My family was on the tragic and turbulent side,” she says, laughing. Other poets might have succumbed to a quagmire of sentimentality. Not Priscila. She finds ways for opposing ideas to cohabit: the personal and the political, mythology with the contemporary, cruelty and compassion. She is also the only poet I know who created for herself the position of Olympic poet.
Her work offers little by way of India, Brazil, or even Canada. Instead there are “teeth, ribbons, and chairs,” riffs off Greek myths, history, science, shoes, Ovid, Freud, the news. “I’m interested in absurd situations and moral quandaries,” she says, “I envision my role as a kind of social worker. I want to promote intelligent thinking, healthy living, ways to cope with pain, and hopefully offer a little wisdom along the way. We’re missing that now. There’s very little moral direction. I find I’m teaching more ‘How to Live’ classes than the aesthetics of a book.”
Priscila has published widely — seven collections of poetry, two novels, essays and translations. She also writes plays. Her next book is a memoir called Projection: Encounters with My Runaway Mother. Twenty years after her mother disappeared, Priscila found her by accident on the Internet. She then went to visit her mother in Brazil, and the memoir is a result of that trip. “It is not,” she says emphatically, “going to be an Oprah-style memoir where everyone has a barbeque and sings Khumbaya…Reconciliation and forgiveness aren’t always the healthy option…I don’t believe in closure.” She says it best in one of her poems: “This house has no doorbell, no knocker, no windows to peer inside./And you are as old as your childhood./And eternity rests out the back.”
The writer is a dancer, poet and novelist.
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