|
Literary Review
POETRY
Jamming of two worlds
SHYAMANTHA ASOKAN
|
British poet Daljit Nagra draws on his experiences as a Punjabi boy growing up in London.
|
Photo: Sarah Lee
Immigrant experience: Daljit Nagra’s works spotlight the Indian community in England.
British poet Daljit Nagra has won literary awards and media attention since his first collection, Look We Have Coming to Dover!, was published in the U.K. last year. The writer’s witty poems throw a spotlight on England’s Indian communities by drawing on Nagra’s experiences as a Punjabi boy growing up in London in the 1960s and 1970s. Nagra is one of the first British-Asian poets to attract national attention in the U.K. Look We Have Coming to Dover! won the Forward Prize, a major national poetry award, for the best first collection in 2007. Nagra is set to launch his collection in India this spring. Until now, he has been showing English readers what goes on inside Indian communities; this year, he will be exposed to an audience whom he feels are “the authorities” on his subject matter. Here he discusses the themes of the first collection, and the challenge of connecting with readers in India.
What were the central ideas behind your first collection?
I wanted to write about Indians first arriving in Britain; I felt it was something that hadn’t been successfully written about in poetry, although it had been done in novels. I also wanted to look at the first, second and third generations and how they all relate to each other, to try and give a picture of how communities settle in to another country.
Your poems feature Indian characters working hard ‘from 9 o’clock to 9 o’clock’. How does this draw on your family’s experiences of England?
My parents came over in the 1950s; they worked overtime and at the weekends. All my relatives started working in factories and later set up their own shops, where they sold fruit and vegetables, medicines, newspapers, alcohol…they even set up post offices in the back! They were successful because they were constantly working.
Your writing also explores how first-generation parents ‘weep’ over their errant, westernised second-generation children. Does this reflect your own experiences?
My family come from a farming background near Jalandhar. In England, they expected us to behave as though we still lived in those villages in India... Some wanted all of that experience, while some were more pragmatic, or became more pragmatic. My writing tries to explore those different attitudes.
The poem “Our Town with the Whole of India” describes a district that migrants have turned into a mini-India. Did you spend a lot of time in such areas while growing up?
We lived in Uxbridge, a white, working-class area of London, but at the weekends we used to go to an area called Southall. It was called Little India in the 1970s. To me, it was just like the India I saw in Bollywood films.
Was racism a problem at that time?
The presence of the National Front (a right-wing political party) was very important. A lot of kids at my school were pro-NF because their parents were; they were parroting their parents’ rhetoric about ‘Pakis’. In our area, there was an Asian pub, there were white pubs, and there was an NF pub that you didn’t even walk past.
Your first collection features several dramatic monologues, and your Indian speakers often have heavily accented speech. Why?
In some of the poems, I use phonetic spellings such as replacing ‘of’ with ‘ov’ and ‘the’ with ‘di’. I did that partly because I wanted the reader to be immersed in the accent and in ‘Indianness’. I wanted the voice to have to go through their mouth. In other poems, such as “Bibi and the Streetcar Wife”, I haven’t used phonetic spellings but the speaker is clearly not English. Her syntax is out of place, she gets certain words wrong and she uses odd imagery.
Do you feel nervous about emphasising that British-Indians often have this accent, especially when it has previously been used as grounds for mocking them?
The accent has been ‘racialised’; it has been made fun of on the television and in the streets. But I think it’s a beautiful voice, and it’s important to use it to talk back to the racialised voice. I want to say, ‘I’m using this voice and I’m proud of it, so now it’s your issue’. I’m not mocking my characters by giving them this accent.
Your poems combine Punjabi slang with English literary allusions. How do you ensure that both British and Indian readers understand all of your references?
I don’t think you should apologise for density, but if I’m making allusions I try to make sure the poem is still clear on the surface. For example, “Look we have coming to Dover” functions perfectly well without the reference to Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach”. It’s just that, if you want, you can get another layer out of it. I also wanted to use both English and Punjabi slang to show the jamming of the two worlds. We had a Punjabi glossary for the English edition, and we may replace that with a dictionary of English slang for the Indian edition.
How do you think Indian readers will respond to the collection?
I’m sure they’re curious to see how we ‘sort of’ Indians live. And I want to know what Indians in India think of us: are they ashamed or proud of us? To some degree, this audience are the authorities on what I’m writing about, but I’m not intimidated by that.
Are you interested in Indian literature?
I’ve enjoyed reading Kalidasa plays; they’re fantastic, odd and interesting. I also go back to classic Hindu texts like the Mahabharat, although I do feel slightly excluded from them. I know how to read something by Ovid or Homer because I feel I know about the world they’re projecting. I don’t know enough about the Indian literary tradition yet, so I feel slightly alienated. It’s something I have to become more knowledgeable about.
Shyamantha Asokan works on the world news desk at The Financial Times in London.
* * *
Darling & Me!
Di barman’s bell done dinging
so I phone di dimply-mississ,
Putting some gas on cookah,
bonus pay I bringin!
Downing drink, I giddily
home for Pakeezah record
to which we go-go, tango,
for roti - to kitchen - she rumba!
I tell her of poor Jimmy John,
in apron his girlfriend
she bring to pub his plate of
chicken pie and dry white
potato! Like Hilda Ogden,
Heeya, eaht yor chuffy dinnaaah!
She huffing off di stage
as he tinkle his glass of Guinness.
We say we could never eat
in publicity like dat, if we did
wife advertisement may need
of solo punch in di smack.
I pull her to me - my skating
hands on her back are Bolero
by Torvill and Dean. Giggling
with bhangra arms in air
she falling for lino, till I
swing her up in forearm!
Darling is so pirouettey with us
for whirlwind married month,
that every night, though by day
we work factory hard, she always
have disco of drumstick in pot.
Hot. Waiting for me.
Nagra’s English glossary for the Indian reader
Hilda Ogden: 1970s soap opera character; a typical northern English housewife
Chuffy: Euphemism for curse words such as “bloody”
Torvill and Dean: Olympic gold medal-winning ice-skating partnership from the 1980s
Printer friendly
page
Send this article to Friends by
E-Mail
Literary Review
|
