Koffler Centre of the Arts

The Koffler's Books & Ideas series presents an audio conversation between Canadian poet and professor Madhur Anand and Governor General Award winner Ali Kazimi.

Professor of Ecology and Environmental Sciences Madhur Anand’s experimental memoir, This Red Line Goes Straight to Your Heart: A Memoir in Halves, traces the author’s family’s immigration and settlement in Canada, following the upheaval of the 1947 Partition of India and Pakistan into separate states. In this unique genre-bending work, Anand weaves together the poetry of memory with the science of embodied trauma to illuminate how the pasts we carry cast a shadow on our current lives.

"I wasn't looking for a single thing. I didn't even know what I was looking for. Certainly as a scientist, I know the importance of having lots of data, as much data as you possibly can gather. For me, everything they were offering to tell me, or I was sort of soliciting a little bit - I gathered it all. And I have hours and hours and hours of voice memos because I taped everything - everything because I didn't know what I would end up using." – Madhur Anand

On June 12 2020, Madhur engaged in conversation with filmmaker, writer, visual artist and Associate Professor at York University Ali Kazimi to discuss her new memoir. Listen here:

Koffler Centre of the Arts · Madhur Anand & Ali Kazimi

The full interview has been transcribed for accessibility purposes. Please click here to view (PDF).

Read an excerpt (PDF) from Madhur Anand’s, This Red Line Goes Straight to Your Heart: A Memoir in Halves, where she meets with Dr. Sharma in the chapter titled "Alpha Decay Office Hours." You can purchase the book here.

Madhur Anand's debut book of poems A New Index for Predicting Catastrophes (McClelland & Stewart/Penguin Random House Canada, 2015) was published to international acclaim ("in every measure a triumph", Publisher's Weekly starred review) and was listed by Canadian Broadcasting Agency as one of 10 all-time "trailblazing" poetry collections. The book was a finalist for the Trillium Book Award for Poetry. In 2015, CBC listed her as one of 12 "Writers to Watch". Her more recent award-winning poetry and prose has appeared in a number of magazines including The Puritan, Brick, Longreads.com, The New Quarterly, The Walrus and This. Her work won the Thomas Morton Memorial Prize in Fiction in 2017 and was a finalist for the Frontier Poetry Industry Prize in 2018. Anand has also published critical and scholarly work in ecopoetics and as a literary reviewer in The Literary Review of Canada and elsewhere. She edited the first anthology of contemporary ecological poetry, Regreen: New Canadian Ecological Poetry (Scrivener Press) and currently serves as poetry editor for Canadian Notes and Queries, as Education Review Committee member of The Walrus, and on the Board of Directors for the Eden Mills Writers Festival. She is a professor at the University of Guelph where she was appointed the inaugural director of the Guelph Institute for Environmental Research.

Ali Kazimi is a filmmaker, author and media artist whose work deals with race, social justice, migration, history and memory. He is the recipient of the 2019 Canadian Governor General’s Award for Visual and Media Arts. His critically acclaimed documentaries include Narmada: A Valley Rises (’94), Shooting Indians: A Journey with Jeffrey Thomas (’97), Documenting Dissent (’01), Continuous Journey (’04), Runaway Grooms (’06), Rex versus Singh (’09) and Random Acts of Legacy (’16). The films have been shown at festivals around the world, winning more than 30 national and international honours and awards. Highlights include a Gemini Award (Donald Brittain Award) for Best Social/Political Documentary; Golden Gate Award, San Fran. Intl. Film Fest; Golden Conch, Mumbai International Film Festival. Kazimi has been recognized as an innovator in stereoscopic 3D cinema. He is a recipient of a prestigious John Evan Leaders Fund, from the Canada Foundation for Innovation for the Stereoscopic 3D Lab @York (2012-17). His book, Undesireables: White Canada and the Komagata Maru (2011) was nominated for both the City of Vancouver Book Award (2012) and the Roderick Haig-Brown Regional Prize in the 2013 BC Book Prizes. He received a Doctor of Letters (honours causa) from the University of British Columbia in 2019. alikazimi.ca

ABOUT BOOKS & IDEAS
Koffler Centre of the Arts’ Books & Ideas series spotlights provocative writers, artists and thinkers, celebrating literary excellence and fostering critical dialogue through compelling book launches, author talks and on-stage interviews. With a thematic focus on counter-narratives, the series features books that employ fiction, memoir, and photography as tools of resistance.

The 2020 Books & Ideas series foreground authors and books that explore the complexities of gender, race, sexuality and the diasporic experience.

Books & Ideas presented in partnership with Ben McNally Books. With generous support from Dorothy Shoichet & Family, the Estate of Joseph Koenig, the Koffler Family Foundation, the Ontario Arts Council and CIBC Wood Gundy.

Madhur Anand & Ali Kazimi

Photos