On June 23, 1985, somewhere around latitude 510'N and longitude 1250'W, just off the south coast of Ireland, 82 children and 247 adults were murdered on Air India Flight 182. The majority of the victims were Canadians of Indian ancestry.
Among the mystery, lies, cover-ups, court trials, conspiracy theories and missing tapes, the stories of these 82 children have remained lost, forgotten from public discourse. It's these hidden stories, messages and lives that poet Renée Sarojini Saklikar resurrects in her BC Book Prize-nominated book of poetry, Children of Air India: un/authorized exhibits and interjections.
If you've ever felt that poetry was beyond you or hard to approach, Renée's book of elegies -- poems for the dead -- will change your mind. Readers will find themselves immersed in the exhibits and documents and ghosts who haunt the pages of what will likely become a seminal text in the ongoing narrative of the Air India 182 bombing, the largest act of terrorism in Canada.
The poems read like exhibits in a trial, but Renée is quick to say that it's a work of the imagination: "It's not reportage, it's not live testimony alone." That said, the book includes years of archival research, as well as glimpses into Renée's own tenuous and fraught relationship with the memory of the murders.
"It was terrifying, obsessive, overwhelming," Renée shared. "I literally spent years with all these documents. This is the first book of its kind in Canada, and so when you do something like that, there isn't a lot that you can build on. I think the inquiry into the investigation of the bombing itself ... there are over 17,000 documents, and I've only looked at a fraction. It became an obsession. It became overwhelming. It became this thing that would not let me go."
28/04/14 Huffington Post
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Among the mystery, lies, cover-ups, court trials, conspiracy theories and missing tapes, the stories of these 82 children have remained lost, forgotten from public discourse. It's these hidden stories, messages and lives that poet Renée Sarojini Saklikar resurrects in her BC Book Prize-nominated book of poetry, Children of Air India: un/authorized exhibits and interjections.
If you've ever felt that poetry was beyond you or hard to approach, Renée's book of elegies -- poems for the dead -- will change your mind. Readers will find themselves immersed in the exhibits and documents and ghosts who haunt the pages of what will likely become a seminal text in the ongoing narrative of the Air India 182 bombing, the largest act of terrorism in Canada.
The poems read like exhibits in a trial, but Renée is quick to say that it's a work of the imagination: "It's not reportage, it's not live testimony alone." That said, the book includes years of archival research, as well as glimpses into Renée's own tenuous and fraught relationship with the memory of the murders.
"It was terrifying, obsessive, overwhelming," Renée shared. "I literally spent years with all these documents. This is the first book of its kind in Canada, and so when you do something like that, there isn't a lot that you can build on. I think the inquiry into the investigation of the bombing itself ... there are over 17,000 documents, and I've only looked at a fraction. It became an obsession. It became overwhelming. It became this thing that would not let me go."
28/04/14 Huffington Post
