POETRY
The way forward
RENUKA RAJARATNAM
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Transnational poetic configurations are one of the most significant forms of contemporary writing in Britain.
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NEW VOICES: Bernardine Evaristo.
Colours reds and yellows/bites of pink and orange,/the sun going down casting shadows/as the old Indian sits curled up,/playing a Scottish bag-pipe at/the snakecharmer's ball.
EVELYN MARIUS's poem "The Snake Charmer's Ball" captures the bewitching ambience of difference and diversity, foregrounding the notion of transnational plurality. In the poem we have a vivid dance of colours and shadows and the striking image of the Indian "curled up" creating magic by playing a Scottish pipe! The plurality is imaginatively demonstrated in the various shades and colours imaged in a motion of dance seizing the reader's mind by its sheer visual energy.
Cultural crisscross
Moniza Alvi.
Transnational literary imagination is emerging as one of the most significant trends of contemporary writing in Britain. In her spellbinding verse-novel, "Lara" (1991), Bernardine Evaristo tells the story of Lara, a London-born child of Nigerian, British, Irish and Brazilian histories. The novel skilfully combines ancestral and historical knowledges with a contemporary transnational consciousness. Shuttling between the great continents of Europe, Africa and the Americas, Evaristo's book moves within and beyond borders incorporating hybridised myths, music and poetry of the world. How then could we term and define this work as "black-British"? Identity labels, literary tradition and canons of common culture — each is a fabricated political construct which excludes more than it includes and thereby neglects the flow of cultural crisscrossing which often forge new forms of poetic creativity. Such creativity, shaped by multiple influences offers poets like Derek Walcott, Jackie Kay, Moniza Alvi, Sujata Bhatt, Debjani Chatterjee, David Dabydeen and Fred d'Aguiar a way out of the impasse that is upheld by the longstanding and continuing polarisations of American and British poetries. Poetic reconfigurations shaped by transnational influences provide an alternative reading that teases out some of the ways in which each writer finds their experience of cultural plurality to be enriching and creatively liberating.
Jackie Kay, an Afro-Scot poet, made her entry into the poetry world with the publication of "The Adoption Papers" (1991). In a poem called "Kail and Calloloo'", Kay satirises the issues of origin and identity. The poem opens with Kay's annoyance on being questioned on her origin by the passport office. The officials find it incredible to acknowledge her Celtic-Afro-Caribbean identity, which is an unacceptable contradiction for them.
You know the passport forms/or even some job applications noo-a-days?/Well, there's nowhere to write/Celtic-Afro-Caribbean... /they think that's a contradiction/how kin ye be both?
By employing the Scottish accent to point out that one can be a credible contradiction of both, Kay demonstrates the interplay of cross-cultural ingredients by humorously questioning the British hegemonic authority. Just as multiple-identities are not found in official categories, Kay's poetry too cannot be labelled under any applicable category. In Kay's poetry we find an intricate connection drawn between her cultural, subjective and poetic identities. Distilled through the rich inheritance of African oral tradition and the Scottish ballad tradition, Kay's work is layered with innate complexities. More recently, Kay has spoken of her creative and cultural indebtedness to Afro-American literature and the music of Blues and Jazz. Having authored a book on the Blues Singer Bessie Smith and a novel on the American Jazz musician Billy Tipton called Trumpet (1998), which all go on to constitute a transnational sensibility, to what extent do the labels "black" or "British" describe this sensibility?
Breaking free
Similarly, we see in Moniza Alvi, an Asian-British poet, whose poetic configurations are fraught by a transnational consciousness in an attempt to break free from fixed representations of gender, race and culture. Moniza Alvi was born in Pakistan and moved to England when she was a few months old. Alien to the culture of her birth-country, Alvi acknowledged that "... . my connection with that country strikes me so surreal and fantastical. Perhaps the country of my birth has become a symbol of other losses". Ironically, the loss of a birth-nation's inheritance forms a seminal feature of Alvi's poetry apart from the theme of cultural translation forged by the multiplicity of cultures: The ocean knew/I would be translated/into an English girl.
Alvi's collection Country At My Shoulder (1993) deals with the issues of identity, home and exile. Her recent volumes, Souls (2002) and How The Stone Found Its Voice (2005) show how her cultural transformation transcends beyond being "English" or "Asian" to effect an original self-reinvention of individualism. The second volume offers oblique perspectives on the global conflict of divided cultures. Seeking transnational connections in the world of art, Alvi's rich imagination recalls the paintings of Chagall, Miro and the surreal visions of Douannier-Rousseau. On aesthetic terms, Alvi relates her poetry to art in an intermedial fashion often evoking powerful dream-visions of everyday realities.
Indian influence
Where Moniza Alvi's birth-country, Pakistan, ironically evoked a sense of strangeness to her, Debjani Chatterjee's Indian origins, religious and mythological roots and cultural heritages are firmly mapped on to her poetry attesting both the identity and the influence of India on her sensibility. Chatterjee is a Delhi-born, Asian-British poet, who co-relates her Indian experience with places of other cultures that she has been exposed to during her travel, sojourn and study, notably those of Britain, Japan, Egypt and Hongkong : I move in many cultures, my friend/Of necessity I make them mine.
Debjani Chatterjee.
Chatterjee's lines from "Voice and Vision" in her acclaimed collection Namaskar, (1989), allows us to reflect on whether her poetry displays an integrative cultural articulation or does it indulge in tolerant expressions of diversity. Is this dilemma based on a strategy of a migrant's survival while negotiating with many cultural positions?
When I interviewed Chatterjee in Sheffield, U.K., on Diaspora Research, she voiced her views on the need for co-existence in an age of conflict. Poetry according to her "has the power to build good bridges across cultures". Engaged in a community promotional activity through `cultural creativity', Chatterjee is a key figure in multicultural writing in Britain today.
In her poem "Making Waves" from Namaskar, Chatterjee points the way forward to the reconceiving of the British nationhood on transnational terms:
News Flash: `Britain's no longer an island'.... /Eurospeak is now the lingua franca .../Linked to Europe, we're linked to Africa,/To Asia. So welcome, Britain, to the world!
The poem cheekily revises the nationalist notion of Britain when transnational connections arguably alter the political construct of a national identity.
While exploring their relations with the strangeness of a fast expanding world, each of the poets enter a creative and ethical process of reconstructing their transnational identities.
At this point, one wants to search for a new interpretative potential to unlayer the inherent poetics of progressive transnational alliances, which can beckon ways forward to an opening of global humanisation.
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