Room Magazine

Every Day, All the Time: Renée Sarojini Saklikar on the Creative Life

CARA LANG

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In 2014 I was living in Kelowna, B.C. and taking a few writing courses at Okanagan College. That winter, the college arranged for a reading by Renée Sarojini Saklikar. It was the first reading I had ever attended, held in a small, brightly lit classroom on the first floor of the college. I distinctly remember Renée’s overflowin­g energy, and the care with which each word exited her mouth. She spoke with a distinct cadence and seemed to be moved by some otherworld­ly rhythm, perhaps owing something to the fact that, as she says, the stories in children of air india, un/authorized exhibits and interjecti­ons (Nightwood Editions, 2013), belong to the dead and the collective. The book went on to win the Canadian Authors Award for poetry, and was short-listed for the Dorothy Livesay Award.

That evening, she began by asking anyone who knew someone affected by murder to raise their hand.

“So, there’s two of us in the room,” she said.

She went on to describe how her aunt and uncle were murdered in the Air India flight 182 bombing, and how this spurred her poetic and literary investigat­ion of atrocity. “Murder, mass murder, identity, what

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