Fashioning Identities

Poems addressing the cross-pollination of cultural identities through clothing, art – and even memories of ex-boyfriends, bring together an honest and witty portrayal of Indian customs and heritage in a global society

- SHRIYA ZAMINDAR

“Snow White hid with the Seven Dwarfs because they did not own bloody passports,” reads a line from Supriya Dhaliwal’s self-referential poetry in The Yak Dilemma. Not to be mistaken with garden-variety romanticism that finds space in lines devoted to blooms and boughs, Dhaliwal’s verses are edgier, fuelled by her radical thinking, and highlight the importance of our identities in the fast-moving world.

“If you want to write about flowers, that’s fine, that’s your thing, I want to talk about the bigger issues that dominate our lives that people don’t talk about,” clarifies Dhaliwal. She questions her place in society, taking you from Dublin, Cairo, to the hilly town of Palampur, in Himachal Pradesh. And amidst all the eloquently put cultural discourse, she also offers a glimpse of Indian fashion’s emergence in the Irish landscape.

ON IRELAND AND YAKS

The Palampur-born poet’s work is the result of her search for a book that combined the subjects she loved to read – converting daily quotidian happenings into think pieces likened to the works of Zadie Smith. “It’s all about breaking boundaries,” she says. “I wanted The Yak Dilemma to have already existed for me to read, it wasn’t there so I felt like I had to create it for myself.”

A recipient of the 2021 Charles Wallace India Trust Fellowship from the University of Kent, Dhaliwal developed an interest in thinkers such as Iris Murdoch and Irish novelist Samuel Beckett while studying literature at St. Bede’s University in Shimla, and later at Trinity College, Dublin. “My background and the places I have called home are what complete me as a person, and through these poems, I tried to understand those parts of me better,” explains the writer.