Celebrated Anglo-French poet and writer Cecile Oumhani has journeyed to France, Canada, Tunisia, England and much of Europe. She has a strong Indian connection, with her mother being born in India. With her powerful, innovative narrative style that uses memory to recreate the past and weave it into the chuffed fabric of her life and her mother’s, Cecile intersects her family history with the history of the two World Wars and the current tsunami of conflicts. As a writer who sees the world with compassion and grace, she has earned herself a place in world literature with Like Birds in the Sky, a collection of short stories. Excerpts from an exclusive interview.

Your deeply entrenched poetic vision is evident from the first page of your book. At the beginning of this project, how did you think about shifting gears from one genre to another? How easy was the telling?

Ever since I was a child, the written word has been a source of fascination. It was always like picking a pebble in a brook, gazing at its changing colours, turning it over and over again for days on end. Whether I am writing a poem, a short story or a novel, the music of words plays an essential part. It is also true that shifting from one genre to another was a challenge, especially at the beginning. The different voices in fiction, all the facets of everyday reality made it necessary to distance myself from a solely meditative relationship with words. Like in a symphony, each musical instrument has its own score. You will find for instance that the matter-of-fact tone of one character enhances passages by contrast; a little like different colours on a painting.

You’ve dedicated this book to your mother, Madeleine. Could you tell the reader your earliest memories of her which are not in the book?

Madeleine followed her French husband from Edinburgh to the French provinces, where she spent the rest of her life. Leaving our house to go to school was like crossing an invisible border between two worlds. She was perceived as an outsider and so was I. Our home was a mix of Scotland, Belgium and India. The girls at school had never heard of the curries that she loved cooking. She very often told us about her ayah drawing rangolis on the threshold of her house. Did she become a painter because of Jiva?

She was born in Guntur in 1920 and was sent to boarding school in Aberdeen in 1927. She only saw her parents once every two or three years. They finally returned to Europe shortly before World War II broke out and her dream of family life starting anew never materialised. They all emigrated to Canada in the 1950s. Throughout her life, Madeleine waited for letters from her family. I will never forget how she sat us around the table to read the letters sent by our Canadian family.

In one of your stories, I could actually feel the grey dust on the facade of buildings in old Paris. Could you speak about this remarkable connection between place/ space and memory?

Our family was scattered around the world. I have so many memories of different places and houses and some no longer exist today. My dreams sometimes take me back to these lost worlds and so can the written word. Places have a materiality of their own that we certainly feel more intensely during childhood. It is especially moving to find that what is no longer reachable still exists in a different dimension. The written page is a space where we can retrieve the past and try to understand what puzzled us and escaped us. Our inner worlds are constantly in the making… age and experience reshape our memories and place them in new perspectives.

Your style is imagistic and the meticulousness with which you capture the essence of an emotion or a space reminds me of some of Marcel Proust’s essays, especially on memory. Could you tell the reader how retrieving memory happens for a writer?

The world around us holds precious moments. Too often we are absent-minded, too preoccupied with irrelevant things to realise what we have just missed. This may have to do with memory and the past, but also with characters, stories we may meet for the very first time, just walking across the street. One of my novels was inspired by the face of a woman I saw at the airport in Budapest. I was on my way to a poetry festival in North Macedonia, not very long after the end of the wars in former Yugoslavia. I only knew that this young woman was flying to Sarajevo or Pristina. I was struck by her sadness. I could not stop thinking of her until I finished writing a new novel, which was an attempt to understand what filled her eyes.

I loved the opening story, The Summer We Went to Canada. Through nostalgia, you very adeptly gesture towards the current situation with migration, refugees, resettlement and diasporic dilemmas.

My parents passed on two different cultures to me. My family lived on different continents. Separation, not being able to share important moments, and coping with loneliness are painful. But I am so grateful to them for the two languages they gave me. They also made it easy for me to feel at home in different countries and places, and learn other languages. Identity is always in a state of flux, I agree with you. But this constant movement is also synonymous with new perspectives and horizons. I deeply believe in resilience and the role it plays in creation. Arts and literature are fabulous continents where we can try and come to terms with these secret wounds.

You being a wonderful amalgam of European cultures and then being married to a Tunisian makes you eminently suited to talk about multiculturalism. Do you think it has not worked? Or has it? Where and why has it failed?

We are going through dark, scary times. I so wish people remained open-minded and tolerant, eager to learn from the other. Our planet is under threat, and it is urgent to stand by each other as human beings to try and face the challenges, more than ever before in the past. We have no other option but to face them beyond any borders if we want humankind to survive.

I find, as a professor of English, both at the University of Toronto and now Loreto College, the young undergraduate and graduate students hardly read, especially poetry. As a poet and professor, what do you think we can do to promote reading among young scholars?

I also find that in France young people read less than before and especially poetry. Teachers and professors often complain about this. I personally think that meeting students, even high-school students, can play a great role in changing their attitude toward books and reading. I am regularly invited to hold workshops in high schools. Some students find poetry intimidating at first but soon become enthusiastic once they have started. I remember one high school not far from Paris, where a small chapbook is published at the end of the year, with a poem by each of the participants. It also gives them the opportunity to meet the publisher and learn about publishing and editing.

What do you think was the most challenging part about writing Like Birds in the Sky? How long did you take from idea to submission?

I felt the urge to write Like Birds in the Sky in my mother’s English — the language she spoke to us, the language of the books she read to us. It was a challenge and at the same time, I discovered a part of myself that had always been there but did not really know. Each language is a specific way of relating to the world, of inhabiting it. And patterns do tend to repeat themselves. My daughter has lived in New York for many years and these stories came as I travelled across the Atlantic to stay with her, often for long periods of time. One generation after my mother, I have decided not to spend my life waiting for letters but to write my own imaginary letters to bridge the oceans between us.

What’s your next project?

Each book carries another one that is already yearning to be born. The publication of Like Birds in the Sky has led me closer than ever before to a novel inspired by my mother, her childhood in India, and her inner exile.

Julie Banerjee Mehta is the author of Dance of Life, and co-author of the bestselling biography Strongman: The Extraordinary Life of Hun Sen. She has a PhD in English and South Asian Studies from the University of Toronto, where she taught World Literature and Postcolonial Literature for many years. She currently lives in Calcutta and teaches Masters English at Loreto College