Monica Mody is an award-winning poet and scholar and Core Professor in the M.A/Ph.D. Mythological Studies with Emphasis in Depth Psychology Program, who will be presenting at Journey Week on “Where We Might Go in Lieu of Posthumanism: Building Indigenous and Decolonial Epistemologies.” I’m delighted to speak with Monica about her upcoming talk at Journey Week, as well as her two recent poetry collections and book tour in India. Journey Week is an immersive week of learning and connecting at Pacifica Graduate Institute, September 26th – 29th, 2024. For more information and to register, visit us here.
Angela Borda: You recently went on a book tour in India for your poetry book, Wild Fin. Where in India did you go and what was the travel experience like? Did you visit places you have a personal connection to?
Monica Mody: My informal book tour during my three weeks in India took me to Bangalore, Hyderabad, Chennai, and Goa, and I read in seven venues, including bookstores, a research university focused on information technology, an English Literature department in a women’s college, arts and cultural centers, and the Bengaluru poetry festival. At a few of these events, I was in conversation with fellow poets or academics. I read from Wild Fin, which came out earlier this year from San Francisco-based Weavers Press, and also from another recent collection, Bright Parallel. It was marvelous to meet contemporary poets, artists, and scholars engaged in creative and research work—the readings opened the way for some brilliant conversations. These places are all close to my heart in different ways. Bangalore is where I went to law school and where my family now lives. Goa is probably where I would be living if I still lived in India.
Angela: I didn’t realize you had a second book so recently published. Can you tell us a little about Bright Parallel?
Monica: Bright Parallel came out the year before Wild Fin. I had distanced myself from literary publishing after my first book, Kala Pani, came out, to focus on my Ph.D. Still, I was continuing to write. Poetry has always been one way in which I make sense of the world. I even included poetry and poetry-based epistemologies in my dissertation. Afterward, a dear poet-friend, who incidentally lives in India, learned about the poems whiling away in my hard drive and urged me to put together a manuscript. It was brought out in 2023 by Copper Coin Publications, a fantastic independent press. I think of the collection as charting my journey from the disenchantment of secular modernity to re-enchantment and becoming comfortable within a more complex reality. The poems speak to the ways in which I was changing as a result of studying eclectic esoteric lineages, and they follow my growing relationships with Earth and the ancestors—including the motherline—as well as with the cycles of birth, death, and rebirth known as the goddess.
Angela: Wild Fin has been described by Maw Shein Win as weaving “the reader through an eclectic warp and weft of grief and fury, rupture and suture, mysticism and calls for climate and social justice.” That is quite a review! How was the poetry received in India, and was the reception there different than in the U.S.?
Monica: Maw Shein Win, Divya Victor, and Carrie Hunter have offered terrific testimonials in support of Wild Fin, and I am grateful to them! The poems from both Bright Parallel and Wild Fin were able to create a beautiful, interactive field between the audiences and me everywhere I read. I was gratified by the engaged conversations these poems led to. That’s how poetry should be received. Would/do listeners in India listen differently than listeners in the United States? How any art is received is predicated more on norms among knowledge/practice communities—or literary subcultures—that don’t, in my experience, align to a national imaginary. The role of art varied considerably among my audiences during the readings on my India tour, and that did change how all of them engaged with my poetry.
Angela: As part of our upcoming Journey Week, you’ll be speaking on “Where We Might Go in Lieu of Posthumanism: Building Indigenous and Decolonial Epistemologies.” My understanding of epistemology is that it’s the study of knowledge and how the mind relates to reality. What would building indigenous and decolonial epistemologies look like as a counterpoint to what we have now?
Monica: Yes. Epistemology is the study of what provides us with the kinds of knowledge that we recognize as knowledge and use to determine our reality. Building indigenous and decolonial epistemologies entails, first, examining how we claim to know the nature of knowledge and how this is entangled with eurocentrism and coloniality, and, second, considering and re-rooting ourselves in ways of knowing and forms of knowledge that are in line with indigenous paradigms and paradigms linked with decoloniality. Centering our relationship to knowing in these dynamic paradigms can, I believe, provide us with alternatives to narratives of progress that are at the root of posthumanist expansion.
Angela: Of the many offerings that Journey Week will give, and one that intrigues me a great deal is “MYTHFEST! Experience the Power of Myth.” Can you tell us what MythFest! will consist of and who might be interested in it?
Monica: MythFest is a collaboration between the Mythological Studies program and the Joseph Campbell Foundation that celebrates myths and mythmakers. It takes place Friday afternoon during Journey Week at the walkway outside the Ladera campus’s Barrett Center. There will be information booths where anyone interested can meet students and alumni from the Myth program and learn about the program. JCF will have a booth/table, and is hosting interactive booths, such as “Meet a Mythologist” and “Nectar and Ambrosia,” as well as an hour-long Mythic Writing Workshop at 3 pm. MythFest will also feature booths from the International Society of Mythology and the PGI student group, Mythic Nexus. For anyone interested, this will be an opportunity to explore the world of myths in a fun way!
Angela: That sounds amazing! What are you most looking forward to during Journey Week? And what is the importance of this event for our community?
Monica: I am looking forward to engaging with scholars from different perspectives around how to care for the psyche, soul, and imagination, given the challenges of today. Pacifica could make an important contribution to shaping critical discourses around how to be human and our relationships to self/world, given the work and thinking that have been evolving here.
Angela: Do you have any upcoming projects that you’re excited about? Any courses you’re teaching in the Fall that you’re looking forward to?
Monica: I just finished a manuscript building on Gloria Anzaldúa’s theory of the borderlands that seeks to heal splits in consciousness engendered in the border zones of coloniality, modernity, and patriarchy in South Asia. It is based on my Ph.D. research and is currently in review. In the Fall, I am teaching the Psyche and Nature class, in which students engage with ecopsychological theories as well as indigenous thinking, knowledge, and practice to develop ‘wild’ metaphors and healing wisdom for themselves and communities, including our animate Earth community. I am also at work on an academic essay about divination as a mystical dialogue with the ancestors and the living universe based on my own practice as a diviner, taught within the African Dagara tradition brought to the West by Dr. Malidoma Somé.
Angela: Thank you so much for your time today. I look forward to your talk at Journey Week!
Journey Week is an immersive week of learning and connecting at Pacifica Graduate Institute, September 26th – 29th, 2024. For more information and to register, visit us here.
Monica Mody is a Core Professor in the Mythological Studies with Emphasis in Depth Psychology Program, and a transdisciplinary scholar, educator, and poet at the intersections of liminal knowing/language, earth-based wisdom, and decolonial frameworks of wholeness. She comes to her teaching and writing as a border-crossing and cross-genre practitioner. You can connect with her at www.drmonicamody.com.
Angela Borda is a writer for Pacifica Graduate Institute, as well as the editor of the Santa Barbara Literary Journal. Her work has been published in Food & Home, Peregrine, Hurricanes & Swan Songs, Delirium Corridor, Still Arts Quarterly, Danse Macabre, and is forthcoming in The Tertiary Lodger and Running Wild Anthology of Stories, Vol. 5.
