Priya Bains
- Norway -
Priya Bains (b. 1995) is a poet, translator, essayist and editor of the literary journal Vinduet (The Window). She made her debut with the poetry collection Med restene av mine hender (With The Remains of My Hands) at Forlaget October in 2021, for which she was nominated to Tarjei Vesaas’ Debutant Prize. The poems in the book depict themes such as love and violence, Sikh rituals and the political unrest of the 1980s in India, intergenerational trauma and storytelling – through the lense of migration within a single family. In 2021 she was awarded the Olav H. Hauge grant at Ulvik Poetry Festival and awarded the grant of the Poet laureate of Dei litterære festspela in Bergen in 2022. She has translated Aya Kanbar and Fatimah Asghar into Norwegian, and in 2023 she edited the anthology Alltid samme snø, alltid samme grense (Forlaget Oktober) with Burcu Sahin.
Priya Bains is a Norwegian poet, editor, translator and critic. Born in 1995, she made her debut with the poetry collection Med restene av mine hender / With the Remains of My Hands (Forlaget Oktober) in 2021. She was nominated for the renowned Tarjei Vesaas’ debutant prize for this work, and in 2022 she won the Olav H. Hauge Prize for younger poets at the Ulvik Poetry Festival. A part of the prize included making a commissioned work at the next festival, and in 2024 she performed the dystopian long poem «The Oil Dream», together with musician Mira Thiruchelvam.
Bains has been involved in numerous literary projects both on stage and in text since making her debut. From making the interdisciplinary magazine Abhivyakti together with artist and author Melanie Kitti in 2021, where they collected text, photography and art works by ethnic minorities in the Nordic countries, to being the book editor of the Norwegian feminist magazine Fett. In 2023 Bains translated the Swedish poet Aya Kanbar’s book Hypervirkeligheten (Solum Bokvennen) into Norwegian. She has also been a columnist for the newspaper Morgenbladet, and in 2024 she started working as the editor for one of Norway’s most important literary magazines, Vinduet.
In the epigraph for With the Remains of My Hands, Bains quotes the Swedish author Sara Stridsberg from her book Darling River: «The map is an unknown theory about the world that has very little to do with this forest that stains the wings of the insects in her hands. » * This sentiment can be seen as a key to much of Bains’ writing. Her questioning of the narrative: instead of putting trust in what is said to be there, on the map, by someone not necessarily being familiar with the landscape, you choose to study what is already there in the world and look for new connections.
In With the Remains of My Hands Bains writes forth a collective of voices. The voices of aunties and uncles, fathers and mothers and extended families are filling the poetic rooms with ghosts, rituals and scents, with stories from a past uprooted by migration, with expectations and disappointment. The poetic «I» does not figure as a voice of its own in this work, but it is almost as if you see the world through them, even without presence of a clear inner voice. One of the early poems in the book is a good example of this transfer:
familien sier:
du ville alltid tilhøre noen andre
vi så det på måten du slynget deg
nedover gaten på
ikke en eneste gang så du deg tilbake
som hadde ingen gitt deg et navn
som hadde ingen kalt på deg
the family says:
you always wanted to belong to somebody else
we saw it in the way you flung yourself
down the street
not once did you look back
as if no one had given you a name
as if no one had called upon you *
The nerve in this poem lies in the ambiguity in the family’s utterance. Is this actually something that someone in the family told the poetic I, or is this an expression of the inner fears of the poetic mind, the reworking of growing up in a white culture, far away from the place where your parents grew up? Is it easier to come to terms with a truth if you put it in the voice of someone else? Is it even a truth, or is it only a truth you are telling yourself?
The pamphlet Transformation / the Butterfly Variations was commissioned by KRAFT, a center for contemporary crafts in Bergen in 2022, as a part of a series called Parallell, where writers are invited to view their exhibitions and make a literary response. Bains responded to the exhibition M. Butterfly by the South Korean artist Kim Hankyul. Their work was playing with and questioning the Orientalist gaze upon the East in the Madame Butterfly opera by Giacomo Puccini, and the play M. Butterfly by David Henry Huang. In Bains’ retelling, the character Madame Butterfly is transported through different times. She exists in the Second World War, in contemporary time, and as the butterfly effect in a chaotic system. She is still waiting for the officer that she married to return. We know he won’t. Written in second-person singular, you are transported into a ruminating universe, with compressed blocks of texts that roam through Butterfly’s thoughts and impressions:
& you google heatstroke dizziness nausea & your friends annoy you when they call him a fuckboy because he doesn’t answer when you text him & all the time you have this growing sensation that something awful is going to happen & it raises more and more questions in you: why is it war he is choosing to pursue who actually is the enemy when is he coming back & you see the forest fires surge through places you have never visited & you think now it’s about to happen it’s about to happen the death of everything & you wonder if the wars will ever end & you feel it shift within you this thought that the enemy’s face looks like your own & you wonder if the officer thinks of this & if this is why he does not want to if this is why he prefers to kiss you in daylight because then he knows precisely how to trust you
When Bains is bringing this inner monologue into the present-day, it is both a reminder of the voicelessness of the character Madame Butterfly in her past configuration, a reworking of the Other in the present day, but also a reminder that there are many commons motifs that is linking the past to the present. Why is it war he is choosing to pursue, as a theme through the ages. The Haitian historian Michel-Rolph Trouillot comes to mind when I think about some of the themes that Bains explores. He writes: «We now know that narratives are made of silences, not all of which are deliberate or even perceptible as such within the time of their production. We also know that the present is itself no clearer than the past. » In Bains’ poetry, she explores the silences operating outside of the firm narrative, the map. She explores the forest that stains the insects’ wings, the family rumors like a stone in a shoe and the big bunches of mint lying on the kitchen countertop. Bains evokes the roots and rhizomes of the diaspora in her poetry, examining the cloudiness of the past as a position, all whilst searching for new ways of finding connections.
* my translations
- Eira Søyseth
Poetry
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(madame butterfly as chaotic energy reborn in our time) / (madame butterfly som kaotisk energi gjenfødt i vår tidsalder)
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(madame butterfly as sudden insight) / (madame butterfly som brå innsikt)
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* / *
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(madame butterfly as fatal story during the second world war) / (madame butterfly som skjebnesvanger historie like før andre verdenskrig)
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(madame butterfly as inheritance) / (madame butterfly som arv)
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(madame butterfly as excerpt from a timeless family feud) / (madame butterfly som utdrag fra en tidløs familiekrangel)
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(madame butterfly as butterfly effect) / (madame butterfly som sommerfugleeffekten)
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