Jagdeep Raina, Author at INVERSE JOURNAL

Jagdeep Raina

Jagdeep Raina is an artist and emerging writer based in Guelph, Ontario where he teaches at the School of Fine Art and Music at the University of Guelph. Raina holds an MFA in painting from the Rhode Island School of Design and has been an artist in residence at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Madison, Maine; the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts; the Camden Arts Centre/Slade School of Fine Art in London; and the Miriam Dawood School of Art and Design in Lahore, Pakistan. Raina is currently a 2021 Paul Mellon Fellow at Yale University.

Everything I Wish You Had Told Me — A Poem by Jagdeep Raina

From the present time and within the terrain of scattered memory, artist Jagdeep Raina presents a poem that digs into a history of Kashmir beyond epochs, eras, regimes, rules, governorates, kingdoms and states. It is past all these that Raina retrieves a poetic voice, one that eludes fragmented human-made time and the constructs of its history, to give way to a Kashmiri being still on an unending quest. Fragmented time, fragmented geographies, fragmented histories, and the burdens they unleash on the present are in direct contrast with the continuity that these verses lend to the poetic voice of such a Kashmiri being as it traverses centuries and generations.