In Memoriam: Reetika Vazirani, Jehan Vazirani Komunyakaa

This is a tribute to an artist and her child, lost to the world this week, gone too soon.

This is my elegy for a woman with whom I worked, all too briefly, but whose abundant gifts as a writer, teacher and colleague have been a source of joy and inspiration. She had a precise, analytical approach to craft that reflected the scientific training of the aspiring physician she had once been. Beneath that, however, she was passionate, vulnerable and sometimes brutally frank, but never mean-spirited. We spoke together of what it was to be mother, artist, worker, lover -- how it can seem that, without some overarching faith, to be all of these things at once is to be none of them fully -- at least not in a way that feeds you, helps you to carry on.

This is a message of condolence to the man with whom she made a child -- a fellow artist -- luminous in his own way, and even more renowned. You and I have never met, although there was a time when she and I planned dinner parties -- our families coming together and exploring the possibilities for friendship. There is, in such an instance, never a right thing to say, except perhaps this: I am sorry, so sorry.

This is a tribute to poet Reetika Vazirani, her son, and the family they left behind. A series of stories in the Washington Post this week brings news and unfolding details about the apparent murder- suicide of Vazirani, 40, and her two-year-old son Jehan. Their bodies were found July 16 at the Chevy Chase, Maryland house where Vazirani had been house-sitting for novelist Howard Norman and poet Jane Shore. Jehan's father is Pulitzer-Prize winning poet, Yusef Kumonyakaa. According to a second story, Vazirani struggled with depression, and reached out for help in her final hours. A third story ponders the possible link between having an artistic temperament and being susceptible to psychiatric illness.

Vazirani was born in India and immigrated to the US as a child. She earned degrees from Wellesley College and the University of Virginia, and went on to hold teaching appointments or writer's residencies at UVA, Sweetbriar College, the University of Oregon, and The College of New Jersey. At the time of her death, Vazirani had been working at William and Mary College in Virginia as a Writer-In-Residence. In the fall, she and Komunyakaa were to join the faculty of Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia.

In the community of poets, her work was widely read and respected. Vazirani's second book, World Hotel (Copper Canyon, 2002) won the 2003 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award. Her first book, White Elephants won the 1996 Barnard New Women Poets Prize. Other honors included a 1994 "Discovery/The Nation" Award, a Pushcart Prize, the Poets & Writers Exchange Program Award, and the Glenna Luschei/Prairie Schooner Award. Her work has been published in such venues as Agni, Antioch Review, Callaloo, Partisan Review, and Ploughshares.

Tragedy would be compounded if the circumstances of this past week caused the world to forget, or never to know, the artist that she was. In remembrance of that, let her speak:

"Daddy always cautioned me
how many rupees it took to get
a dollar; and when I bought my first
Chanel lipstick, it was as if
I might have bought a cow in India.
It was always like that-what I
could have had were we in Delhi.
So that on holiday at Reno Road
he'd hint that Washington was not
like home. That's why he didn't want
me window-shopping downtown"

Literary Review page on Reetika Vazirani

More information on Reetika Vazirani's life and work is available on her
American Academy of Poets page, with links to several poems.