It was January 2019, in a university where racism could be subtle, but pervasive—like background white noise. I received a reading list for a poetry course I was going to take the next semester. In every class, we would go through two poetry collections, grouped together because both poets cared about the same things. Motherhood. Modernism. Ancient Greece. Each week was: white poet and white poet, white poet and white poet. Until the very last class—Citizen, An American Lyric, by Claudia Rankine, and Loop of Jade, by Sarah Howe. No topic was specified for the week, but it might as well have been Race: these two poetry collections have no shared themes. Rankine combines traditional lyric poetry with media and images to mediate powerfully on anti-black racism, microaggressions, and the experience of being black in the USA. Meanwhile, Howe, a Chinese-British poet, discusses her relationship with her roots and heritage as she journeys back to Hong Kong, finding answers, history, and awkwardness. We were, essentially, carrying out a reductive reading practice where poets of colour were only considered useful for their political and social ideas. By categorising these poets in a way that ran counter to their intended purpose, we were fundamentally misreading their poems.
I encountered Daljit Nagra’s poetry collection Look We Have Coming to Dover! while I was thinking through these ideas. I had never seen a poet combine Punjabi and English like he did before, and I could feel how much fun he was having with language and poetry. To me, Dover! was grappling with similar questions—how can poets of colour writing within a Western tradition be true to their own cultural background while not selling out their community? Will poets ever be classified according to their own will, and not by place of birth? And finally, can poems resist attempts at categorisation, and control their own life out in the world?
I. The Poem Took the Subway
The idea of poetry that travels is apparent, quite literally, in “Yobbos!”, one of the poems in Dover! A group of men see the poet reading a book on the London tube, and react with suspicion. It is not the narrator himself, however, but the poetry collection he is reading that they direct racist insults at. Judging the book by its owner, their reaction to Irish poet Paul Muldoon’s Collected Poems is, ‘Some Paki shit, like,/eee’s loookin into!’ By depicting this racist encounter, Nagra dramatizes the everyday processes of comparisons at work—between people and cultures, poetry and poets. This incident is as violent as it is common—the London metro has often been a site for racists. By using it as the setting for “Yobbos!”, Nagra indicates how frequent the experience of being compared is, how it is always loaded, and often violent. Nagra and Muldoon are both poets published by Faber and Faber, with one difference: Nagra is one of the only two poets of colour published by the company. In “Yobbos!”, he writes,
“A right savage I was—sozzled
to the nose with sprightly
Muldoon, squeezed into the communal
sweat of a Saturday tube home—”
The narrator of the poem, borrowing ironically from colonial language, identifies himself as a “savage”, squeezed together with Muldoon in the compartment and the stanza. Muldoon’s “sharp lemon-skinned” poems are misidentified by the “crew”. They instinctively compare it to its reader—and the Irish poetry being read by the Punjabi-British poet in the London metro, the circular heart of Britishness—is reduced to a single racist jeer. This comparison occurs because of pre-conceived suspicions the “yobs” hold around race. It serves to police Britishness, making it synonymous with whiteness, and equates two different cultural backgrounds along one erroneous standard.
Published in 2007, Look We Have Coming to Dover!, Daljit Nagra’s first collection focuses on what it means to be an Indian author who works squarely within the English poetic canon. He writes about the lives of first and second generation Indian migrants, mobilizing issues of assimilation, integration, and inter-generational conflict. Nagra’s collection asks crucial questions about contemporary poetry written by minority ethnic authors in the “Global North”: how can the resources of the Western poetic form be used politically to write about racial and structural inequalities? Is such a thing possible without further shoehorning poets into restrictive conventions? Poetry has also sometimes been perceived as notoriously local and regional, with T.S. Eliot calling it “stubbornly national”, and W.H. Auden branding it as “the most provincial of the arts”. Can contemporary poetry contest the boundaries of nationalism and economic globalisation?
Crafted through the act of comparison, relying on metaphors and similes, poetry animates the constant human endeavour to form connections by drawing on shared traits and experience. As Paul Hostovsky writes about his step-daughter’s penchant for the word “like”, ‘everything/is like something, not/exactly but sort of’. This is precisely why poetry lends itself especially well to Nagra’s project of articulating the invisible violence of everyday comparisons. He writes love poems in Dover! that hint at strains of violence and unpack the way people and stories are compared. In “Darling and Me!”, the first poem of the collection, a newlywed comes home after a long day at work to a romantic evening with his patiently waiting wife.
“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!”
Nagra uses half-rhymes and alliteration for rhythm: the words “di, done, and dinging” in the first line, the rhyme of “go-go” and “tango”, and the differently pronounced “r” sounds in “roti” and “rumba” create a musical effect. Song and dance are motifs in the poem, with a variety of dance forms being mentioned: disco, bhangra, Bolero, and tango. Combined with the invocation of Pakeezah, a sweeping romance, these devices set up a “Singh-Song” romantic atmosphere, creating an encompassing sensory experience. Soon, a strain of menace enters the marriage and the poem; when discussing the indignities of Jimmy John’s girlfriend bringing his dinner to the pub, the husband mentions that his wife would receive a “solo punch in di smack” if she were to embarrass him in public. I could never quite pin down the character of the husband: does the poem hint at him being a domestic abuser, making the “whirlwind married month” crueller than it appears?
II. A Poem and its Writer Walked into a Bar…
The epigraph to Dover!, the second instance of intertextuality (after the reference to Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach” in the title), is an excerpt from George Orwell’s essay “Marrakech” (1939), that reads:
“The people have brown faces—besides, there are so
many of them! Are they really the same flesh as yourself?
Do they even have names? Or are they merely a kind of
undifferentiated brown stuff … ”
The epigraph poses the rhetorical questions that the poems respond to, as Nagra satirises Orwell’s Orientalism and his inability to move past the limits of empire. It also expresses his fears about the representation of his community, and about his own reception as a poet: will they ever be recognised as individuals, or will their identity always be pre-determined as ‘merely a kind of undifferentiated brown stuff’? In Dover!, the dramatis personae burst onstage, they are seen and heard, declaring clear identities and opinions in dramatic monologues—even in seemingly similar poems, no two characters are the same. Differentiation then, is one of the key aspects of the volume. This passage has been quoted in Edward Said’s Orientalism, where Said writes:
“Aside from the picturesque characters offered European readers in the exotic fiction of minor writers…the non-European known to Europeans is precisely what Orwell says about him. He is either a figure of fun, or an atom in a vast collectivity designated in ordinary or cultivated discourse as an undifferentiated type called Oriental, African, yellow, brown, or Muslim.”
Said’s comments lie at the heart of Nagra’s project: as we see in “Darling & Me!”, the trope of the Sikh immigrant as a “figure of fun” is dismantled. The first line of the poem is taken from the iconic ringing of the barman’s bell in T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland. Re-written in non-Standard Punjabi-English, or “Punglish”, it tells the reader that they are on unfamiliar linguistic footing. In my classes, this was a poem white professors didn’t know how to read out: as Rachel Gilmour writes: ‘Speaking English “like a native” looks very different here’.
Why did I enjoy this reclamation of the English language? This type of non-standard pronunciation, as Nagra has pointed out in interviews, was mostly used in television programs that mocked the figure of the South Asian learning English. These shows impact ideas of representation in the UK: they portray the migrant as an intruder into the myth of a homogeneously white, English-speaking nation. They also portray a community with differences in access, class, caste, and gender as “an undifferentiated type called Oriental”. Humour moves beyond reductive caricatures as Nagra has fun with language. It plays on sounds and intonations: it is poetry.
“Darling and Me!” forms a set with the last poem of the collection, “Singh-Song!”, which is a more poignant love poem. Set behind the shelves of a Nine-to-Nine shop, the poem depicts the good-humoured canoodling of a newlywed couple. It is light-hearted and romantic, as it describes the life of an Indian shop-owner, and the symbiosis between economics and love:
“from di stool each night she say,
How much do yoo charge for dat moon baby?
from di stool each night I say,
Is half di cost ov yoo baby ,
from di stool each night she say,
How much does dat come to baby?
from di stool each night I say,
Is priceless baby—”
The poem revels in the comic and poetic potential of working with a hybrid of two languages, as puns peep out, and words from different cultures dance into rhymes. The shopkeeper narrates:
“cos up di stairs is my newly bride
vee share in chapatti
vee share in di chutney
after vee hav made luv
like vee rowing through Putney—”
“Singh-Song!” is one of the delightful poems in the volume in which cultural collisions are a source of fun and possibility. Nagra plays with puns that traverse linguistic and geographical distances to come together, as “Putney” means wife in Punjabi, and is also a locality in the UK, and “pinnie” means turban, and also apron. The rhymes set up by chutney/Putney/pinnie animate Alicia Stallings’ point in “Presto Manifesto!”: ‘Rhymes may be so far apart, you cannot hear them, but they can hear each other, as if whispering on a toy telephone made of two paper cups and a length of string.’ In this collection, poetry becomes a way of signalling: we are not alone.
III. All Your Poets Are Other
Nagra has frequently expressed anxiety about the reception of his work, and is aware that his poetry is seen as a newsletter from a tiny community. Despite working with Western forms such as the terza rima, writing about British experiences, and being published in Britain, he is likely to be compared to poets from “Other Cultures” owing to his Indian origin. This fallacy within comparative acts, of grouping “others” together and presenting a unidimensional view of their work, is explored in “Kabba Questions the Ontology of Representation, the Catch-22 for ‘Black’ Writers”. In the poem, Nagra uses Kabba to question the process of categorising poets into “Other cultures” in the GCSE anthology. The poem begins,
“Vy giv my boy
dis freebie of a silky blue
GCSE antology with its three poets
from three parts of Briten—yor HBC
of Eaney, Blake,
Clarke, showing us how
to tink and feel? For Part 2, us
as a bunch of Gunga Dins ju group, ‘Poems
from Udder Cultures
and Traditions’”
Referencing Nissim Ezekiel’s “The Night of the Scorpion”, which was included in the section, he asks why Indian culture is represented only in terms of superstition and irrationality, since “vee hav doctors and rocket rickshaw amblance”, and how this representation will affect Kabba’s son’s self-image—will he become a “coconut” (slang for a brown person who has white ideals)? Kabba also says, “All your poets are other”, referring to the anthology’s co-option of Heaney, Austin, and Clarke, thus showing how “British culture” which is segregated from “Other cultures”, is also made up of contributions from Irish and Welsh poets.
Nagra has detailed the reasons for his reluctance to be compared to fellow contemporary Indian poets like Ezekiel. This kind of comparison, for him, leads to the segregation of Indian writers, to the detriment of Anish Kapoor’s statement: ‘Being an artist is more than being an Indian artist’. The poem “Booking Khan Singh Kumar”, for instance, was written in a climate in which art and publishing industries were facing criticism for rolling out diversity initiatives that were only “ticking ethnic boxes”. The name Khan Singh Kumar in the poem, a cultural implausibility that mixes Muslim, Sikh, and Hindu surnames, sharply satirizes attempts to equate different groups of people. The “booking” of the title implies the way the author is hired, put on display, and also how he is made into a book on a literal level—
“Must I wear only masks that don’t sit for a Brit
Would you blush if I stripped from my native skin
Should I beat on my chest I’m a ghetto poet
Who discorded his kind as they couldn’t know it.”
Linguistic exoticism has to fit into market demands, and is palatable to a certain extent; the poet wonders how far he can go, and how radical his poetry can truly be. Underneath the satire, however, lurks very real fear and self-loathing, as Nagra asks if his popularity will continue if he stops writing about Indian language and culture. This leads, then, to the question of whether writing by authors of colour should unhesitatingly be labelled “diverse”, and whether it is possible for them to just write.
IV. The Poem’s Station Has Arrived
These complicated experiences, embedded in poetry, show how cultural collisions can lead to trauma around identity and belonging. Nagra is not assigning a reparative function to poetry. Instead, poems become spaces where messiness and gaps can be understood, and used to form connections that might not be possible elsewhere. Restlessness emerges as a key ambition, with linguistic instability, constant trickery, and poems that refuse to settle. This helps us understand the quiet, brief piece “Journey” within Dover! that seems at odds with the loudness of the rest of the collection, but nonetheless, was a poem I printed out and put up on my wall:
“There you go
with your rucksack of clean clothes
and a flat rose in your notepad
wandering for the dream you had
where all the things you spilled
were back in their bottles, brighter
than ever ….”
The metaphor of the journey brings us back to the subway this discussion started on, and poetry is used to initiate a reconciliation. While Dover! persistently criticises cultural appropriation and fetishisation, it also imagines a more hopeful world. Its arresting characters give us glimpses into an imagined community that is loud, inviting, and fun. Nagra’s poems, which reach out to other literary works across time and space, are an antidote to feelings of division and fragmentation. Reading this collection reminded me of what poetry can achieve, an effect articulated in another poem about a subway—Louise Glück’s “October”—“you are not alone,/the poem said,/in the dark tunnel”.
Anushmita Mohanty is Senior Editor at ALMA MAG. She has studied postcolonial literature at St. Antony’s College, University of Oxford, and is interested in women’s writing and book history. When not reading or writing, she can be found taking photos of trees and attempting sit-down comedy.
