Anita Felicelli's writing appears or is forthcoming in the New York Times, Salon, San Francisco Chronicle, LARB, Juked, Kweli Journal, The Dr. T.J. Eckleburg Review, The Normal School, and elsewhere. Anita edits at the South Asian blog The Aerogram and is the author of Letters to an Albatross (BlazeVox, 2010) and other books. She was born in Madurai, but raised in the Bay Area, where she lives with her family. She recently completed a short story collection (Love Songs for a Lost Continent) and is working on a novel. Follow her if you like: @anitafelicelli.
There is a total silence in the West on India’s culture of dissenting women in the face of severe patriarchy and authoritarianism. It doesn’t quite fit, does it, into the dichotomy carved out for Indian women by Americans and the British...
The assumption is that people with mental illnesses are voiceless, can’t speak for themselves in a way that is reliable, in a way that other people want to hear or be led by. People want to hear stories of mental illness, but they don’t want to hear it from the people on the frontlines, the ones being devastated.
A round- cheeked girlchild comes awake in her crib. The green swaddlings tear open I first encountered the last poem I loved, Galway Kinnell’s “Under the Maud Moon,” eleven summers…