Immigrant by Usha Kishore, eyewear Publishing, 2018. 79 pp. $14.99
Review by Pramila Venkateswaran
In the last few decades, the Empire has struck back, writing in the colonizer’s tongue, peopling, and becoming leaders in, the colonizer’s land, continuing to encounter racism and sexism as immigrants who are second and third generation, while figuring out more ways to resist bigoted laws and behavior. Usha Kishore’s Immigrant, a marvelously wrought volume of poems, comes at a vital time in British politics. It exists in the maelstrom of postcoloniality and examines its effect on the everyday lives of people who are othered because of their origin. Immigrants are not simply victims, but learn from their traditions of resistance: “the periphery takes up arms: / ...marginal aesthetics / of resistance in bhangra dances / and subterranean poetry.”
What happens to the postcolonial body, the immigrant other functioning in the periphery that is central to the mainstream politics polarized between multiculturalism and racism? The immigrants who people Kishore’s poems struggle to be seen and heard in an England that is split between tolerance and preserving the values of Empire. Even the immigrant, like Kishore herself who teaches high school, who can speak about Shakespeare and write a brilliant imitation of Lewis Carroll’s “Jabberwocky” (“The Jabberwock Replies”), she still has to prove that she belongs, that she is relevant like anyone else in the country. To be seen as people, as equal, is indeed the immigrant’s hope, and Kishore voices this in her evocative verses: “I seek / the ambience of mosaic territory, / sans nations, sans borders, sans disputes.”
Poems to note, too many to mention here, are “Understanding Caliban,” where Kishore deftly moves from describing Caliban’s life, how he was propelled “out of his sea-sorrow into a new world,” to the analogy between Caliban and Indra, both lighting the “fiery metaphors” of the immigrant’s journey in our minds; “Teaching Tagore to 10A/S,” where the character in Tagore’s story becomes the speaker of the poem—her “thoughts drift back to that river bank, / where I left my water pot and my heart.” The poet, stumbling in her effort to explain to her students the great Indian poet magically connects with the students when they engage with the text and “new rain / floods my being;” and “You and Me,” where we encounter the moment of recognition: “my Indian thoughts / fire your British hearts, something in your / Englishness warms my Malayali soul.”
Kishore observes that language does separate us. Although she feels the sadness of writing in an “alien tongue” instead of her mother tongue, that she is “trespass[ing] into English verse,” she recognizes that Sanskrit, that ancient tongue no longer spoken but alive in scripture, poetry and the arts, is indeed her soul language and feeds the spirit of her expression: “Vedas are the distant / soundtrack woven into my mind.”
Immigrant is a symphony of languages, Arabic, Urdu, Tamil, Malayalam, French and Sanskrit, a music that we hear in London and other European cosmopolitan cities. Yet the discord due to difference is glaring. Kishore lays bare the suffering of immigrants in poem after poem and captures our attention with the beauty of her lines, proving that the diaspora indeed actively shapes mainstream language and culture, that contemporary British literature is shaped by diasporic poets like Usha Kishore.
What happens to the postcolonial body, the immigrant other functioning in the periphery that is central to the mainstream politics polarized between multiculturalism and racism? The immigrants who people Kishore’s poems struggle to be seen and heard in an England that is split between tolerance and preserving the values of Empire. Even the immigrant, like Kishore herself who teaches high school, who can speak about Shakespeare and write a brilliant imitation of Lewis Carroll’s “Jabberwocky” (“The Jabberwock Replies”), she still has to prove that she belongs, that she is relevant like anyone else in the country. To be seen as people, as equal, is indeed the immigrant’s hope, and Kishore voices this in her evocative verses: “I seek / the ambience of mosaic territory, / sans nations, sans borders, sans disputes.”
Poems to note, too many to mention here, are “Understanding Caliban,” where Kishore deftly moves from describing Caliban’s life, how he was propelled “out of his sea-sorrow into a new world,” to the analogy between Caliban and Indra, both lighting the “fiery metaphors” of the immigrant’s journey in our minds; “Teaching Tagore to 10A/S,” where the character in Tagore’s story becomes the speaker of the poem—her “thoughts drift back to that river bank, / where I left my water pot and my heart.” The poet, stumbling in her effort to explain to her students the great Indian poet magically connects with the students when they engage with the text and “new rain / floods my being;” and “You and Me,” where we encounter the moment of recognition: “my Indian thoughts / fire your British hearts, something in your / Englishness warms my Malayali soul.”
Kishore observes that language does separate us. Although she feels the sadness of writing in an “alien tongue” instead of her mother tongue, that she is “trespass[ing] into English verse,” she recognizes that Sanskrit, that ancient tongue no longer spoken but alive in scripture, poetry and the arts, is indeed her soul language and feeds the spirit of her expression: “Vedas are the distant / soundtrack woven into my mind.”
Immigrant is a symphony of languages, Arabic, Urdu, Tamil, Malayalam, French and Sanskrit, a music that we hear in London and other European cosmopolitan cities. Yet the discord due to difference is glaring. Kishore lays bare the suffering of immigrants in poem after poem and captures our attention with the beauty of her lines, proving that the diaspora indeed actively shapes mainstream language and culture, that contemporary British literature is shaped by diasporic poets like Usha Kishore.
