{"id":1173,"date":"2024-04-11T18:21:31","date_gmt":"2024-04-11T18:21:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.worcester.edu\/magazine\/?p=1173"},"modified":"2024-04-12T10:34:24","modified_gmt":"2024-04-12T10:34:24","slug":"what-were-reading-false-offering-by-dr-rita-mookerjee","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.worcester.edu\/magazine\/2024\/04\/11\/what-were-reading-false-offering-by-dr-rita-mookerjee\/","title":{"rendered":"Reading: Dr. Rita Mookerjee’s new poetry collection, False Offering"},"content":{"rendered":"

Liberal and Interdisciplinary Studies Assistant Professor Rita Mookerjee\u2019s first full-length collection of poetry,<\/span> False Offering<\/span><\/i>, published by JackLeg Press in Nov. 2023, addresses topics ranging from religion to pop culture staples to being a person of color growing up in a rural part of Pennsylvania. Mookerjee has studied African literature, post-colonial literature, women\u2019s and gender studies, and food studies. Her next collection of poems, <\/span>Banana Heart<\/span><\/i>, will be published\u00a0 in the fall.<\/span><\/p>\n

Staff writer Rebecca Cross sat down with her to talk about the book.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"

Liberal and Interdisciplinary Studies Assistant Professor Rita Mookerjee<\/p><\/div>\n

Q: When did you start writing poetry?<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

A:<\/b> 2001. The first poem I ever wrote was a spoken-word poem. I wrote it when I was 11 because I was very angry that my parents would not let me go to the mall without an adult. [She laughs.]<\/span><\/p>\n

Since then, poetry is where I go when I don\u2019t have a place to put something I\u2019m feeling, whether that\u2019s rage or irritation or frustration. Poetry is definitely the place that I prefer to go when I have those big, capital-F feelings.<\/span><\/p>\n

Q: The title poem, \u201cFalse Offering,\u201d describes ancient Egyptian priests selling fake ibis mummies to unsuspecting penitents. What was the inspiration behind this?<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

A:<\/b> When I learned about this, I was so mystified because you\u2019re traveling all this way through the Necropolis to get this offering, and then you just end up with a mummy that\u2019s this weird chimera bundle of random animals. There was just an obscenity to it that I was very taken with.<\/span><\/p>\n

Yesterday, I was looking at a politician\u2019s Twitter page, and he was posting pictures of their morning prayer, and I was immediately reminded of the book of Matthew and how it\u2019s very clear in scripture, you\u2019re not supposed to be bragging about how much you pray.<\/span><\/p>\n

I think \u201cFalse Offering\u201d is about taking inventory of why you\u2019re practicing a faith and considering, if all of the bandages fall away and it turns out that you didn\u2019t really have what you thought you had in the first place, where does that leave you?<\/span><\/p>\n

Q: A number of your poems are inhabited by Hindu, Judeo-Christian, Haitian, and ancient Egyptian deities. Where did this interest in religion come from?<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

A:<\/b> While my parents definitely did the best that they could in terms of giving us important cultural experiences and explaining to us different faiths, different practices of religion, the amount of exposure I had as a young person was very limited. There was never a space that we would go to to either pray or observe a holiday or give offerings or anything like that.<\/span><\/p>\n

As a result, I think the entire process of worship and the rituals became very mystifying to me. I\u2019d been to Sunday school or to synagogue with a friend, and I could understand why people enjoyed that or why people found solace in those spaces. But at the same time, I just didn\u2019t get it. Like, to me, it was just a huge inconvenience because I was like, Jen and I are over here having a slumber party, and now she has to get up and go to Sunday school.<\/span><\/p>\n

I\u2019ve now read the Bible many times as a scholar of literature, and I think there are a lot of really beautiful teachings, but when I was a kid growing up, all of it was so confusing to me. And I think what was most confusing was the hypocrisy. Like, people would say, you can\u2019t do x, y, or z or you\u2019re going to hell. And I\u2019d be like, okay, but it also says you can\u2019t mix cloth, and there are certain foods you need to eat at certain times.<\/span><\/p>\n

There are so many rules, and you\u2019re only choosing some of them. Why is that? And today, I know why. But as a child, I was very disturbed by the disconnect that I saw between these things.<\/span><\/p>\n

Q: You mention \u201cwhite space\u201d in a couple of different poems, like \u201cInfestation\u201d and \u201cI Grew Eyes at the Nape of My Neck.\u201d What is the significance of that in your poetry?<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

A:<\/b> If you live in a super rural area, there\u2019s probably some likelihood that you\u2019re not going to have a ton of diversity in your community. That\u2019s where I was growing up. <\/span>It occurred to me several times when I was in elementary school that it didn\u2019t matter if I sat quietly and did a good job and paid attention. It didn\u2019t matter if I goofed off and spoke back to my teacher, which I did a lot. It just didn\u2019t matter because everything about the world that I was in wasn\u2019t for me, and it wasn\u2019t going to be kind to me or supportive of me. <\/span>And so I tried to find a lot of pathways out of that rural space\u2014quite literally. I moved to New York when I was 18. Even then, when I got my master\u2019s, when I got my doctorate, time and time again, I would find myself in these situations where people wanted me to have a certain identity and a certain set of politics that I just don\u2019t have.<\/span><\/p>\n

And even when, say, well-intentioned white readers might come to my events or my talks, sometimes they\u2019re still coming in with this very specific expectation for what someone who looks like me is going to say and think and do. Most of the time I can navigate it, but it is exhausting because it seems to happen more often than not. <\/span>Another expectation of that white space that I find suffocating is people really want me to give them my American dream story, and they really want to hear a tale of poverty and suffering that ends with me, you know, joining the professoriate, and what a wonderful thing that is, and how grateful I am for those opportunities.<\/span><\/p>\n

And the fact of the matter is, yeah, I love my job. There are a lot of things that I\u2019m grateful for. And there are a lot of things that I\u2019m mad about right now. <\/span>So I think one of the expectations that people don\u2019t have is that an Indian woman poet is going to be really militant and outspoken.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"Q: Speaking of militant, the poem \u201cA Man Threatens to Shoot Me on Behalf of \u2018Infidels for Trump\u2019\u201d has some really great righteous anger. It talks about the Hindu goddess Kali, who wears a belt of severed male heads and then ends with the lines, \u201cwatch your neck because \/ I\u2019ve got plenty of room on my belt for you.\u201d What\u2019s the story behind that poem?<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

A:<\/b> Like everything in that book, that\u2019s something that happened in my life. I was single and online dating in Florida. Online dating wasn\u2019t really something I had done before, and I was really struck by how many people on Tinder, Bumble, or what have you, would greet you with a slur or a sexual comment or just be rude.<\/span><\/p>\n

I was really floored because I had in my bio very clearly what my politics are and what I do for a living and things like that. So I hoped that would be enough to dissuade people, but actually, what it did was encourage people who are bigoted and have a lot of hate to match with me and then send me these really violent, bizarre comments.<\/span><\/p>\n

So this person matched with me and then sent basically a copy and paste with lots of gun emojis and stuff like that. All of this violent rhetoric about how, under Trump, he and his \u201cinfidel gang\u201d were going to round up and kill people like me, and that it was their country, etcetera, etcetera. <\/span>And I think my first response was to laugh because it was so heinous and unprompted. But the more I thought about it, the more upset I got because here I am just trying to have a nice little fun date on a Friday.<\/span><\/p>\n

I don\u2019t really remember people talking to one another that way before 2016. And so the poem, I think, is me trying to make sense of a cultural moment where either out of my own naivete and ignorance or out of the world genuinely changing, I\u2019m trying to make sense in that poem of what to do when people are just cruel.<\/span><\/p>\n

Q: You have several poems about icons of pop culture, like Sailor Moon and Tamagotchi.<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

A:<\/b> One way that I tried to make sense of my world was with things I liked to do. Anime and cartoons were a big part of my world. I think I liked Japanese cartoons specifically because it felt like something that didn\u2019t belong to all of these white people in my community. It wasn\u2019t mine either, but it felt different enough that I could go to that space and look at drawings or creatures or monsters that were like nothing in the world around me, and that was comforting.<\/span><\/p>\n

Q: The book has a sweet poem about your mother, \u201cPortrait of Sujata Who Never Dresses Down.\u201d<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

A:<\/b> I think it took me 30 some years to understand what she was doing, and that\u2019s why I really wanted to memorialize her in that poem. Because when I was growing up, I was embarrassed. I was like, why is she putting on all this jewelry and lipstick and getting all ready to go to the grocery store? That\u2019s not what so and so\u2019s mom wears to the grocery store, and I felt very self conscious about it. And now today, I do that same thing myself. If I want to be treated properly, I\u2019ll go in dressed to the nines. A lot of women of color I\u2019ve spoken to as I\u2019ve gotten older have shared that exact experience.<\/span><\/p>\n

Q: The collection has several other tender poems about your family: \u201cRooh Afza,\u201d about your father, and a poignant poem about your sister, \u201cHard Water.\u201d<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

A:<\/b> With \u201cHard Water,\u201d my sister is getting sick. We are seven years apart, and we\u2019re very close. The thing with bipolar disorder is that it doesn\u2019t present in children. You really start to see the symptoms in adulthood. Even then, because it\u2019s not a lateral set of symptoms and experiences, it\u2019s not easy to diagnose. There were a lot of times near the time of her hospitalization where I just didn\u2019t know what was going on with her. I wasn\u2019t hearing from her. There was so much confusion for me as her older sister and as someone who had always been the one that she comes to with problems or comes to with a dilemma or needs advice. Suddenly there was a thing in her world that I couldn\u2019t advise her on. <\/span>I was in so much pain because it was my favorite person in the world suffering, and suffering in a way that I couldn\u2019t do anything to limit that suffering or help take on some of the burden of that.<\/span><\/p>\n

I\u2019m happy to say that my sister has come a long way since I wrote that poem. And she\u2019s very open about her struggles with her health, and I think, not to speak for her, but I think something that she wants is for people to find that poem and be able to put words to what they\u2019re going through and what they\u2019re experiencing. The sooner you can name it, the sooner you can ask for help.<\/span><\/p>\n

In immigrant communities and communities of color, mental health is just seen as this western import. So, I think I really wanted to break a silence and let other people know, you\u2019re not alone.<\/span><\/p>\n

Q: A number of the poems are about rural Pennsylvania, where you grew up. I wanted to ask you about \u201cIf I Could Rename My Town, I\u2019d Call It Lost,\u201d which starts with the lines, \u201cIt was something like Dorothy in reverse, clicking my heels \/ in quiet desperation, willing myself to an emerald city \/\/ because the place where I grew up is cursed.\u201d<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

A:<\/b> Yeah. I think something that doesn\u2019t occur to people sometimes is how diametrically opposed a lot of our experiences are as Americans. Like, despite the fact that we live in the same country and maybe we do a lot of things the same way, depending on where you live, you can have a really wildly different experience.<\/span><\/p>\n

While I wasn\u2019t necessarily someone who experienced poverty, I lived in an impoverished place. I was going to school and seeing how some of my classmates didn\u2019t have clean clothes. No one packed them a lunch. Maybe they wouldn\u2019t have sneakers for gym class. Things like that, that I certainly didn\u2019t think twice about. I didn\u2019t realize or appreciate it until much later, but there were people right there in front of me, experiencing hardships that no child should ever have to experience.<\/span><\/p>\n

And now when I go back to my town, I see it\u2019s just been ravaged. We, as Americans, have a responsibility to speak out and advocate when we know there are communities that are suffering. <\/span>Just thinking about the realities of young people right now who might be marginalized in some way or might be queer, growing up in places where there are already so many issues at hand and so many social problems, so many structural problems, we\u2019re not setting them up for success. I have a lot of love for people who are from little middle-of-nowhere towns like myself because the odds are just not in your favor.<\/span><\/p>\n

At the time that I wrote this poem, there were about 24 people in my graduating class who are dead. And now I\u2019d say there\u2019s about 36. And that\u2019s a class of maybe 100 people. I mourn that people have to grow up in an area where you are so at risk for addiction, or not having the resources you need to be well, or not being able to recover from an injury or take time off work, things like that.<\/span><\/p>\n

It\u2019s not an elegy in title, but I think it is an elegy.<\/span><\/p>\n

Q: Another poem that stood out to me was \u201cShoes in My House: An Allegory,\u201d which describes an episode where a friend visiting your house refuses to take off her shoes. Now, I\u2019m definitely a shoes-off-in-the-house sort of person, so I immediately was like, \u2018Oh, that friend is so rude!\u2019 But this poem isn\u2019t about just a rude friend; it\u2019s about that white space.<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

A:<\/b> Oh, absolutely. I think that\u2019s why it was so abrasive to me. In Asian households, there are important reasons why we\u2019re asking you to take off your shoes. Whereas in the household of my white friend who wouldn\u2019t take off her boots, she doesn\u2019t have a cultural reason why she\u2019s wearing her boots.<\/span><\/p>\n

My home is very sacred to me, so when I invite someone into that space, I\u2019m not saying you need to thank me on bent knee, but it is a gift. I\u2019m going to feed you, and we\u2019re going to have a nice little time. And then the refusal to respect the way that I like my house and the way that I like people to be in my house, it just felt cruel and selfish in this really specific way. Kind of like the Tinder moment with the Trump supporter, it was just a record scratch moment for me. I couldn\u2019t wrap my head around why someone would be so unkind.<\/span><\/p>\n

Q: I\u2019m a big fan of the killer, knock-you-out last line. I really loved the ending of \u201cThis Is Not a Form of Play,\u201d which is really almost an ode to opossums: \u201cI find you lucky \/ enjoying night as it was meant to be enjoyed […] \/ thriving in places where people forget to look \/ people forget so much.\u201d<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

A:<\/b> Oh, I\u2019m so glad you like that. Yeah, I feel like even I neglect that poem sometimes because I don\u2019t know how to explain it to people. Like, I just really love opossums. They\u2019re so smart and clever. And, I think they\u2019re so neglected and underappreciated. The fact that they can remember, \u2018Oh, I had a really good egg over here.\u2019 I find that so charming.<\/span><\/p>\n

Q: Another line that really knocked me out was in \u201cHamsapaksha, or the Swan\u2019s Wing Mudra\u201d: \u201cthe skin I call my own is streaked with danger.\u201d And this is another poem that has some of that righteous anger.<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

A:<\/b> Yeah. That poem was more of a sad day. I was thinking about, on the one hand, I always tell my students, \u201cpower in numbers\u201d and \u201cthey can’t kill us all.\u201d Like, fight, fight, fight. But at the same time, there\u2019s something so exhausting about constantly fighting and constantly trying to make a case for your existence.<\/span><\/p>\n

In the ending of that poem, you just get that image of the swans descending. And people don\u2019t know that swans can be very violent. We don\u2019t think of them that way, but they can be. So I wanted to have that ominous swan imagery.<\/span><\/p>\n

Q: How do you approach writing a poem?<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

A:<\/b> Definitely by using a physical notebook and a pen, which I only say because now that\u2019s unusual in the field. I don\u2019t know a ton of other writers who really lean on a physical notebook. <\/span>In that draft, I just get concepts out. Maybe I\u2019ll know, \u2018Okay, this is gonna be a sestina. This is definitely going to be a sonnet.\u2019 But I don\u2019t hold myself to anything necessarily when I\u2019m just writing on the page. I usually want to preserve an image or something like that.<\/span><\/p>\n

After I have that written draft, I\u2019ll probably take that to the computer, and that\u2019s when I\u2019ll start to carve out a shape. I\u2019m very particular in poetic traditions and forms that I will use for myself. I like symmetry. I like shorter lines, and I don\u2019t mind committing to a longer poem or a very long series. That draft is usually when I\u2019ll pay attention to sound and form, enjambment, and things like that. <\/span>So at that point, I\u2019ll have a good sense of, do I want to get some more eyes on this, or do I want to put it in a completely different form? Then I\u2019ll go from there.<\/span><\/p>\n

Q: Were there any poems in this collection that were particularly easy to write or particularly difficult to write?<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

A:<\/b> There are some that definitely took me several tries to achieve what I wanted. Definitely the first poem in the book. That\u2019s one of the last poems I wrote for this collection. I had a very specific shape in mind. I wanted it to read like an assembly guide or something, and getting that shape right with the sonic qualities that I wanted, that was pretty hard.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cFalse Offering\u201d was super easy to write. It\u2019s like a one-sitting poem. Sometimes, when I nail it, I really nail it. Other times, I have to revisit a lot. My tankas take time for sure because there\u2019s a lot of counting. I have to be extra careful to make sure I\u2019m not messing up my syllables because I\u2019m a stickler about certain forms.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cLesson from the Oracle Who Had Seen Too Much\u201d was really hard. That poem originally looked very different, but when you\u2019re formatting for printing the book, my long lines were just insane, and there was no way they were going to fit. So I had to kind of chop that poem up and give it another shape to inhabit.<\/span><\/p>\n

Q: What is it about writing in forms, as opposed to free verse, that you find so appealing?<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

A:<\/b> I\u2019m interested in how something looks on the page just as much as I am in giving a killer performance. Anytime you encounter my work, I want it to be dazzling. I have a preference for really clean, deliberate shapes in poetry. That doesn\u2019t mean symmetrical. It can be something like the sawtooth edge, which my partner, the poet Dorothy Chan, does a lot. It has this cool, wiggly property, but it\u2019s still very controlled just like the teeth of a reel saw. <\/span>I think there\u2019s an aversion to form right now that I don\u2019t think is earned. Like, if you study a lot of classical music, and then you decide jazz is actually what you like best, you\u2019ve already really refined your craft, and now you can improvise confidently because you know all these fundamentals.<\/span><\/p>\n

In poetry, I feel like all these poets hate form and talk about how it\u2019s limiting or it\u2019s too neo-colonial to use, but I think that\u2019s a political act in and of itself. It\u2019s like I\u2019m writing in forms that these dead British men would have never been comfortable with me using, and I think that\u2019s kind of cool.<\/span><\/p>\n

I see so many poets not want to embrace form, but they never worked in form in the first place. I think learning is a lifetime process. When I picture myself in the writing trajectory of my life, I think I\u2019m just getting started.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Liberal and Interdisciplinary Studies Assistant Professor Rita Mookerjee\u2019s first full-length collection of poetry, False Offering, published by JackLeg Press in Nov. 2023, addresses topics ranging from religion to pop culture staples to being a person of color growing up in a rural part of Pennsylvania. Mookerjee has studied African literature, post-colonial literature, women\u2019s and gender […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[28,41],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1173","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-features","category-worcester-state-magazine-spring-2024"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nReading: Dr. Rita Mookerjee's new poetry collection, False Offering | Worcester State University<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.worcester.edu\/magazine\/2024\/04\/11\/what-were-reading-false-offering-by-dr-rita-mookerjee\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Reading: Dr. Rita Mookerjee's new poetry collection, False Offering | Worcester State University\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Liberal and Interdisciplinary Studies Assistant Professor Rita Mookerjee\u2019s first full-length collection of poetry, False Offering, published by JackLeg Press in Nov. 2023, addresses topics ranging from religion to pop culture staples to being a person of color growing up in a rural part of Pennsylvania. 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