The question that opens Shaheen Dil’s Letters to My Younger Self is deceptively simple.
“Where do you end and I begin?”
It is addressed to a girl named Choiti, the affectionate nickname Dil carried through childhood. But the question reverberates far beyond a single poem. It becomes the organizing tension of the book itself.
The collection unfolds as a series of letters across time, written from present-day Pittsburgh back through Old Dhaka, Karachi, Lahore, Chicago, Ann Arbor, the American Midwest, and Princeton. Each poem revisits a moment that once seemed ordinary to a child but now appears charged with meaning: a family veranda, the presence of household servants, the rhythms of language spoken at home, a debate tournament, a moment of exclusion, the quiet erosion of Bangla.
Dil came of age against a backdrop of political upheaval. Her father, the Bengali nationalist politician Shamsul Huq, spent long stretches in prison for his role in the Bangla language movement. Her mother, in many ways raising two daughters alone, anchored a household that was both crowded and fragile.
The poems return to that world with remarkable steadiness. They describe a household full of relatives and servants, the layered hierarchies of class and gender that structured daily life, and the early migrations that carried Dil across continents. Yet the emotional power of the book lies not in the events themselves but in the distance between what the child understood and what the adult now recognizes.
Several poems recount experiences that only later revealed themselves as violations. In another, a childhood memory of kindness at a debate tournament becomes, decades later, the realization of racial segregation. The young Choiti believed she and her sister had been given a large room as a gesture of generosity. The adult poet recognizes the quieter truth: the white students simply did not want to share space with two brown girls.
The poems do not seek to correct the child’s innocence. Instead they preserve it, allowing the adult voice to coexist with the earlier self who moved through the world without recognizing its structures of power.
Dil did not initially imagine these poems as a book. For much of her life she wrote privately. As a child she kept diaries until two incidents shattered that trust. In Lahore, a relative discovered and read her journal, exposing the blunt observations of a teenager who had written candidly about family life. Years later, a college roommate read another diary without permission. The sense of betrayal was profound.
Poetry, she discovered, offered a different kind of privacy.
Unlike a diary, a poem can hide its meaning. Dil continued writing poetry for herself for decades while building a life that included academia, banking, and consulting. Even her husband of more than fifty years did not initially know she wrote poetry.
That changed accidentally when he discovered a stack of handwritten poems in her study. Encouraged by him and by friends, Dil began sharing her work publicly in her forties. She joined poetry workshops, eventually becoming active in groups such as the Pittsburgh Poetry Exchange.
Yet the impulse that produced Letters to My Younger Self came from a different source. Dil had been working on another manuscript when she returned to a book that had long shaped her imagination: Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet. The idea of addressing a younger self suddenly felt possible.
The poems already existed in fragments. Memories of childhood, family, and migration had appeared in earlier drafts. But once the letter form took hold, the manuscript reorganized itself. Dil began writing new poems almost daily, filling in the trajectory from Dhaka to adulthood.
Halfway through the manuscript she realized something else. The girl called Choiti and the woman called Shaheen were no longer the same person. The poem that now opens the collection emerged from that moment of recognition.
“Where do you end and I begin?” she asks the child she once was.
In conversation, Dil spoke about the long private history behind the book, the betrayals that pushed her toward poetry, the role of language and class in shaping memory, and the complicated process of recognizing one’s younger self from a distance.
Q: Could you tell me a little about your childhood and the journey that eventually led you to poetry?
Shaheen Dil: I was born in Dhaka in what was then East Pakistan and is now Bangladesh. My father was very active in politics. He was involved in the Bangla national language movement, which meant he was frequently imprisoned, first by the British colonial government and later by the Pakistani government. So although I technically had two parents, in many ways my mother was raising us alone.
That said, in South Asia you are rarely truly alone. My grandmother lived with us. My aunt and uncle lived with us. We had servants in the household. There were always people around.
So it was a busy and lively home, but also one where my mother carried a great deal of responsibility.
As far as poetry goes, I began writing very young. I think the first poem I remember writing was when I was six or seven years old. It was for my mother’s birthday, and I wrote it in Bangla.
From then on I continued writing. I wrote poems and essays through middle school and high school, and I also kept a diary very faithfully. Writing was a way for me to record things and also to try to understand the world around me.
Sometimes I wrote things down even when I did not fully understand them.
Q: You mentioned keeping a diary very seriously as a child, but that at some point you stopped. What happened?
Dil: I had two experiences that made me stop writing diaries.
When I was living with my stepfather’s family in Lahore, my stepfather’s mother found my diary and read it. I had written quite bluntly about the family. None of it was flattering. So I got into a great deal of trouble.
I felt very violated. I felt that my privacy had been invaded.
Later, when I was in college, I started keeping a diary again. But my roommate read it without my permission. That was another betrayal.
After that I decided I would never keep a diary again.
Poetry became the alternative. A poem is more private. Even if someone reads it, they cannot necessarily understand everything in it. So poetry allowed me to continue writing honestly while protecting myself.
Q: So poetry became, in a sense, a coded diary.
Dil: Yes, exactly. It was still a way of recording my life and my thoughts, but it was less exposed.
Q: Did you continue writing privately for many years after that?
Dil: For decades.
I wrote constantly, but I did not show my poems to anyone. I did not publish them.
Even my husband did not know I wrote poetry when we first married. He discovered it accidentally many years later when he went into my study looking for a pen and found a stack of poems.
At first I felt that this was yet another violation. It felt as though someone had discovered a diary again.
But my husband is a literary critic. He read the poems and encouraged me to share them with other people. It took him quite a while to persuade me. Eventually I showed them to some poet friends, and they encouraged me to get involved in poetry groups and publish.
That is how I eventually joined poetry workshops and began sharing my work publicly.
Q: You built an entire professional life before publishing your first book.
Dil: Yes. I taught for a few years at Mount Holyoke College, but when my husband accepted a position at the University of Pittsburgh there were no academic jobs available in my field. So I went into the private sector.
I worked at Gulf Oil, then Mellon Bank and later at PNC Financial Services. After that I worked in New York for Protiviti, a global consulting firm. Altogether over 25 years in banking and 11 years in consulting.
All that time I continued writing poetry privately.
My first book did not appear until 2016.
Q: Your latest book, Letters to My Younger Self, is structured as a series of letters to Choiti, your childhood nickname. How did that idea emerge?
Dil: I had actually been working on another manuscript called Winter Colors. At the same time I was rereading Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet.
My husband is a scholar of German literature, so Rilke is always somewhere in our house!
Reading those letters suddenly made me realize that many of the poems I had been writing were already addressed to my younger self. They were really letters, even if I had not yet called them that.
Once I recognized that structure, the book almost wrote itself. I set aside the other manuscript and began writing the letters.
Q: Did the poems come quickly once you recognized that form?
Dil: Very quickly. I would sit down in the morning and another poem would arrive.
I write every weekday morning from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m.. That is my sacred time. I do not schedule anything during those hours.
When the letters began, I was writing almost one poem a day.
Q: Halfway through the manuscript you wrote the poem that now opens the book, “Where do you end and I begin.” What prompted that moment?
Dil: By that point I had written many letters addressed to Choiti. But I began to realize that the girl in those poems was not the same person as the woman writing them.
Choiti was very innocent. She did not understand many things that were happening to her.
For example, my sister and I were molested by servants when we were children. At the time we did not understand what was happening. We were six or seven years old. We did not have the language for it.
It was only decades later that I understood what those experiences meant.
The same thing happened with racism.
I describe a debate tournament in one of the poems. My sister and I were given a large room to ourselves while the white girls and teachers shared another room. At the time we thought they were being generous. We thought they were giving us a privilege.
Only later did I realize that they simply did not want to share a room with two brown girls.
So the poem recognizes that Choiti and Shaheen were not the same person anymore. At some point the child became the adult.
Q: Do you think that moment of recognition happened during college?
Dil: Yes, college was probably when I first began to understand some of these dynamics.
Before that I simply moved through the world without interpreting things in that way.
The book also returns frequently to questions of language. How did moving between Bangla and English shape your sense of identity?
Dil: Language was always complicated.
My mother tried very hard to keep Bangla alive in our home. She spoke Bangla to us all the time.
But when she remarried, my stepfather did not speak Bangla. So English became the household language.
We still understood Bangla, but it became less dominant.
Now when I go back to Dhaka I can speak Bangla, but it takes me a few days to stop thinking in English.
When we moved to Lahore, I had to learn Urdu and Panjabi, both new to me.
Language carries memory. When one language weakens, certain memories become harder to reach.
Q: Another powerful thread in the book concerns class, especially the presence of servants in your childhood home. How did you approach writing about those relationships?
Dil: It was difficult.
In Bangladesh even relatively modest families often had servants. The cook in our household stayed with us for more than thirty years.
In many ways she felt like part of the family.
At the same time the class distinctions were very real. Anyone in the household could give orders to the servants.
When I wrote about the servant who molested us, I also had to recognize that he was a seventeen year old boy working as a servant in someone else’s home. His life was very constrained.
So I was torn between recognizing harm and recognizing the larger social structure he was living within.
Q: You mentioned earlier that writing is solitary for you. Yet you are also active in poetry communities. How do those two things coexist?
Dil: Writing itself is solitary. I always write alone.
But community is important afterward. I belong to several poetry groups. The Pittsburgh Poetry Exchange is one. PPE was the first poetry community I joined, more than 30 years ago. Michael Wurster, the leader of PPE, was very supportive of my writing and urged me to begin publishing my poems. I also belong to a group called US1 Poetry that meets weekly on Zoom.
And during the pandemic when other PPE was not in session, six friends started the Porch Poets. We met on my back porch with heaters on, even during the winter. We continue to meet twice a month.
Those conversations are valuable. They allow you to see how other readers respond to your work.
But ultimately the voice has to remain your own.
Q: After writing these letters, how do you think about Choiti now?
Dil: I think she is still present in me.
One thing that has remained constant is that unless I have clear evidence otherwise, I tend to assume that people are basically good.
That may come from the innocence of that younger self.
Q: And writing this book was a way of continuing the conversation with her.
Dil: Yes.
The younger self never disappears. She simply changes form.
Writing these letters allowed me to speak to her again and perhaps understand her a little better.
