Singing the Immigrant Generation

“Singing the Immigrant Generation” is a lecture-performance that offers a glimpse into the world of Punjabi poetry built by northern California-based farmer and writer Mohinder Singh Ghag – VanderBeek’s nanaji (maternal grandfather). VanderBeek engages the compositions of Ghag and his younger sister, Mohinderjit Kaur Thiara, to explore the secret language of immigrant-becoming-diaspora the two shared amongst themselves and among the literary society Ghag co-founded in the mid-1990s. Interwoven with these poems and their translations are personal stories of their family’s engagements with this poetry and new musical compositions based on their texts, forms, meters, and poetic conventions. 

Free and open to the public.