Bio
Mohineet Boparai was born in India in 1985 and made Canada her home in 2018. She holds a B.A. (Honours) in English, an M.A. in English, and a Ph.D. from Punjabi University, Patiala. Her doctoral research, Subalternity and the Emergence of Agency in Selected Novels of Toni Morrison, Amy Tan, and Abdulrazak Gurnah, reflects her long-standing engagement with postcolonial and cultural studies.
Alongside her academic pursuits, she was an active debater and poet, earning university distinctions in both fields. She represented India in a youth delegation to South Korea. She also served as a Senior Under Officer in the National Cadet Corps, and completed extensive military training and community service through the program. She is also a recipient of the Silver Standard of the Duke of Edinburgh Award for Young People.
Mohineet’s writing spans the scholarly, poetry, and fiction. Her work has appeared widely in literary journals in the United States and India, and her poetry has twice been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. She is the author of three poetry collections, including Beyond Thorns (2022, Wipf and Stock Publishers) and Polychromasia (2019, Mawenzi House Publishers). Her scholarly monograph, The Fiction of Abdulrazak Gurnah: Journeys through Subalternity and Agency, was published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing in 2021.
Both her academic and creative writing are subsumed with a deep understanding of the human world and how mnemonics, psychology, politics, and culture inscribe it into existence. She believes that even though stories begin in medias res, one tale leads to another, and there is no going back to where it all began, except in metaphor and feeling. Authors are linked by this haze that surrounds stories, and each tries to fill in the gaps in emotion and memory by telling their own version of the story of life.
Writing for Mohineet is an act of redemption from the unpredictability of life. It is a way for her to make sense of the plethora of personal, and collective memories and how these link up with history that is recorded in the political and historical archives. Literature is a way for her to state what people have felt, and to explore how the human psyche informs their experiences. Drawing on her academic engagement with psychology and geography, she sees space and psyche as intertwined palimpsests—each continually rewriting the other.
She has held faculty positions in various universities in India and is now a teacher in Brampton where she resides with her family.
Polychromasia
Mawenzi House Publishers
Polychromasia, as the word implies, metaphorically looks at the many hues of life as it is lived, especially in India. It takes on love, through confessional poems, the biosphere through the idea of geographical space over human time, patriarchy, class, and caste as it affects people, and the practice and appreciation of art.
“To love. To be loved. To never forget your own insignificance. To never get used to the unspeakable violence and the vulgar disparity of life around you. To seek joy in the saddest places. To pursue beauty to its lair. To never simplify what is complicated or complicate what is simple. To respect strength, never power. Above all, to watch. To try and understand. To never look away. And never, never to forget.”
Arundhati Roy
