Air India Flight 182 Memorial in Stanley Park. | Photo by Joseph Mark Switzer
Renée Sarojini Saklikar’s collection Children of Air India is a poetic response to the tragedy of Air India Flight 182, the largest mass murder in Canadian history. On June 23, 1985, the lives of 329 people, including 86 children, ended abruptly when Flight 182 exploded over the coast of Ireland.
What followed was a series of investigations, inquiries and reports. News agencies, governments, and police agencies swirled about trying to acquire and disseminate information about what had taken place in this tragedy.
Saklikar’s collection of poems brings intensity, but also warmth to police language, journalistic terms, and the legal jargon we see in newspapers. Interweaving themes of personal loss, the incomprehensibility of murder and the rampancy of legal and corporatist society, Children of Air India ultimately produces a benediction for those who perished; it adds emotional grit to the discourse of an inexplicable act of terror.
For Saklikar, the tragedy was personal: she lost an aunt and an uncle in the attack. However, in order to write the book, Saklikar had to distance herself from the tragedy. Throughout the collection, the narrator is marked as “N,” and the niece is marked as “n.” The collection holds to no single perspective.
The discourse of tragedy
Saklikar’s poems add tenderness to the printed and presented material we encounter in the news and in the inquiries and investigations of Air India. The deluge of acronyms one would come across when reading the inquiries, the legal jargon and the factual descriptions of courtrooms are neutral and specialized in nature – all are formal and devoid of warmth. But Saklikar digs deep and exposes how emotionally charged they can actually be through her thoughtful incantations.
Saklikar teases out the emotional power of words like “decompression,” “fuselage” and “sentencing,” which would otherwise strike us as unremarkable or technical.
When we read of any public trauma, we often find ourselves swimming in unfamiliar discourse. Words like “redacted,” “exhibit” and “testimony” rarely appear in our day-to-day language. Saklikar infuses her poetry with these specialist words and tenderness, reinventing the language to depict a human emotional response to loss. The word “redacted,” which appears frequently throughout the collection, is legal jargon that has become a euphemism for information censored from public view. When someone reads or hears information pertaining to the death of a loved one, a word like “redacted” takes on new meaning.
Saklikar employs this word to remove the names of those who perished in Flight 182. While the language comes from the documents of the Air India tragedy, Saklikar insists the poems are fiction.
“It’s a work of the imagination. It’s not fact. It’s not reportage. But it is a kind of witness. These voices just started speaking to me, imaginatively, through the work of the language,” says Saklikar.
Breaking down the subject/object perspective
The poetry takes us inside courtrooms and police stations, into families’ homes and into the bomb-maker’s workplace. As the perspective jumps from poem to poem, the reader becomes the juror, the murderer, the family member, the victim and even the narrator.
“Murder creates this very interesting set of relationships. You enter without your will, into a series of relationships with the police, the government, the crown, the prosecutor,” says Saklikar. “One person [killed] is one too many. When it’s 329, it enters a kind of habitat, a kind of ecosystem.”
Children of Air India reminds us that regardless of our relationship to a tragedy, we are affected by it. These crimes are a part of humanity. We live in a long litany of violent acts. We are all implicated by these ecosystems.
Attend Renée Sarojini Saklikar’s book launch: Wednesday, Nov. 13, 2013, World Art Centre, SFU Woodward’s, 149 East Hastings St, Vancouver
