Daljit Nagra Research Articles

Roots and routes: Literary archaeologies of British museums in contemporary Black and Asian poetry

This article explores some of the ways in which contemporary poets are tracing the roots and routes via which objects have come to, and continue to, reside within the walls of the museum. Focusing on poetic mediations of British Museums — on the Museum of London, the Manchester Museum, and the British Museum — the article analyses the works of Bernardine Evaristo, Inua Ellams, and Daljit Nagra. These poetic mediations can be read as literary archaeologies — as the concept is used by Evaristo — which speak to the histories, movements, and contemporaneous moments of colonial encounter that take place within the institution of the museum. The article moves to consider the way in which literary archaeologies might chart both a history of migration — looking at Bernardine Evaristo’s The Emperor’s Babe — and the migration of objects which are displayed in museums in Britain — with a focus on Inua Ellams’s poem Tusk — before going on to examine the museum as institution, as it is presented in Daljit Nagra’s collection British Museum. Setting these distinct, but complementary poetic interventions alongside one another, the article asks: how do these literary archaeologies respond to the histories and present-day stories told by — and about — British museums in the twenty-first century?

Poetry in a Global Age by Jahan Ramazani

Reviewed by: Poetry in a Global Age by Jahan Ramazani Ama Bemma Adwetewa-Badu Poetry in a Global Age. By Jahan Ramazani. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020. If poetry has historically been seen as a provincial, local, or national genre, then Jahan Ramazani’s most recent book, Poetry in a Global Age, adds to an emergent discourse that rethinks poetry within transnational, global, and planetary scales. Readers of scholarship on poetry are likely familiar with the work of Ramazani, the University Professor and Edgar F. Shannon Professor of English at the University of Virginia and an Editorial Board Member of this journal, particularly his two prior books that dealt with postcolonial and transnational poetry, A Transnational Poetics, published in 2009 and winner of the Harry Levin Prize for the best book in comparative literary history published in the years 2008 to 2010, and The Hybrid Muse: Postcolonial Poetry in English, published in 2001. After more than two decades spent meditating on this constellation of topics, Poetry in a Global Age develops further attention to cross-cultural and cross-national poetics through “an approach to poetry that highlights literary confluences, commonalities, and conflicts that cross national borders” (9). The poets Ramazani highlights within this net include both writers who may be familiar and others who may be unfamiliar to readers, such as Isaac Rosenberg, Thomas Hardy, Claude McKay, Elizabeth Bishop, Karen Press, Arun Kolatkar, Daljit Nagra, Wallace Stevens, Derek Walcott, and W. B. Yeats. Along the way, he enmeshes their work alongside theorists and scholars, including Franco Moretti, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Arjun Appadurai, and Bruno Latour, who help us view poetry through the refractive and multidimensional aspects of globalization, modernity, and theories of the world in literature. Both interesting and intriguing, the title of the book and the early announcement of the book’s approach speak directly to current discourses surrounding “world literature” as a field of inquiry and an approach or method for literary study. The key difference in terminology, besides the quite evident [End Page 121] focus on poetry, is Ramazani’s use of the word “global” as opposed to “world” or “planet.” Poetry, according to Ramazani, has a “relation to globalizing processes . . . which . . . significantly precede the 1990s” (12). Poets utilize these processes to “create textures, forms, and voices that embody and reflect on the experience of living transnationally and interculturally” and what it “feels like to live in a global age” (13). For example, Ramazani notes regarding Seamus Heaney that “his extensive travels . . . generate an ever-wider range of geographic and cultural reference in his poetry,” something that Ramazani says becomes especially evident to a student of global studies (177). The term “globe,” then, begins to highlight the “interplay between the world and the ball-like maps that help us imagine it,” and the term can “help check the national ghost in the transnational paradigm” (21). Ramazani’s approach to this paradigm is exemplified well in the introduction to the book, where he anchors his argument with a reading of Leonard Read’s “I, Pencil” to situate the poem on a global and planetary scale. As Ramazani will do with readings of other poems, he notes how the globality of the poem can be found in the “coalescence of money, labor, commodities, and skills” that emerges in the planetary scales of a rather ordinary writing instrument (1). The book’s arguments are frequently reinforced by inclusions of theoretical material, usually after the analysis of a poem, such as his engagement with Bruno Latour alongside his reading of “I, Pencil.” Perhaps the most distinctive feature of the book is its international scope, which still remains rare in poetry studies. Throughout the ten chapters, Ramazani makes widespread yet specific claims about the place of globalization in poetry, so the sweep of the book—its transnational scope, transhistorical archive, attentive close readings, and large steps through poetic literary history—bolsters both a reimagining and a reaffirmation of the global range of poetry, reigniting our understanding of some individual poets and poems, and resituating broader conversations of the world within a poetry-focused literary study. These claims are supported by what I see to be three distinct parts of...

Brexit, the pandemic and the battle with language: An interview with Daljit Nagra

This interview with the well-known poet Daljit Nagra was conducted in summer 2022 by Claire Chambers, with Rachael Gilmour providing questions in absentia due to a bout of coronavirus. In it, the three discuss such issues as ‘refugee tales’, poetic ethics and voice, the Brexit referendum’s emboldening of the far right and, of course, the COVID-19 pandemic. Above all, the conversation turns to Nagra’s bending of language via his use of ‘babu English’, his interpolation of Hindi and Punjabi words and his influences from such authors as William Shakespeare, John Milton and Nissim Ezekiel. Nagra looks in particular towards his fifth, forthcoming collection Indiom. In these ways, the interview develops on and updates interview with Nagra for Crossings and chapter on language and voice in Nagra’s first three collections.

Loose Can(n)on: Literary tradition in Daljit Nagra’s British Museum

ABSTRACT This paper considers Daljit Nagra’s engagement with concepts of canon and tradition in British Museum (2017). Throughout the collection, Nagra provides readers with a multifaceted insight into the ways in which a plurality of ‘cultures’ and ‘traditions’ — literary, historical, political, religious — inform contemporary notions of Britishness and shape his work as a writer living with the legacies of literary heritage. British Museum, this paper argues, explores how Nagra’s work relates to canons of English Literature, and how he makes sense of his own position. The discussion is framed by a consideration of what happens when we review canons of culture and their place within an increasingly diverse society. Underlying the inevitable conflicts and dislocation involved in (re-)defining traditions and cultural canons, this paper considers the ways in which Nagra identifies, through plurality, a fundamental desire for the meaningful connection of canonical culture with the diverse 21st century world.

“The Chalk Wall Falls to the Foam”: Reimagining Littoral Space in the Poetry of the Dover Cliffs

Abstract Where beaches and harbors have frequently been taken to signify openness and intermingling, a different coastal setting, the cliffs of Dover, overtly bespeaks opposition and closure. Demarcating the British coast at its closest point to continental Europe, the cliffs often stand for Britain’s supposedly elemental insularity. However, the chalk composing the cliffs makes them, in their own way, as malleable and permeable as a beach. I argue that poems by Matthew Arnold, W. H. Auden, and Daljit Nagra contest the cliffs’ association with an exclusive Britishness by focusing on their material composition. In these poems, the cliffs’ chalk—formed by fossilized marine microorganisms at a time when what would become Britain was at the bottom of a prehistoric sea—attests to Britain’s geohistorical contingency. Arnold, Auden, and Nagra use this chalk geology to develop a new model of British identity as contingent, permeable, and linked with the wider world. In these poems, that is, Dover’s cliffs collapse oppositions rather than enforcing them: they blur the lines between Britain and the world, past and present, organic and inorganic, human history and geological history. The literature of the Dover cliffs thus highlights the revisionary potential of this distinctive kind of littoral space.

Stung by a Charso-Bee: Daljit Nagra's Macaronic Ramayana

This essay argues that Daljit Nagra’s idiosyncratic adaptation of the Ramayana, in which the poet combines multiple versions of the ancient epic (from different parts of the Indian Subcontinent and Southeast Asia) is more than just a comic version of the Sanskrit classic but represents a serious attempt to ensure an old text’s relevance for a new readership. One way that Nagra manages to reach a highly diverse and widely dispersed audience is through the extensive use of interlingual wordplay, a technique that stylistically echoes the earlier diasporic writer Salman Rushdie. Reading this transnational version of the Ramayana through the lens of Jahan Ramazani’s concept of a macaronic poetics, the essay analyzes the lexicological, phonological, and typographic effects of Nagra’s poem, which combine to produce a faithful retelling of the ancient Hindu epic in a language and style that is thoroughly of the 21st century and that uses translingual puns to connect the Ramayana to a western audience as well as the Indian diaspora.

Moving world, moving voices: A discussion with Daljit Nagra

This interview explores a range of both emergent and persistent areas of interest in the work of Daljit Nagra. Nagra’s two latest books — Ramayana (2013) and British Museum (2017) — represent explorations of his interests in both “rootedness” — what it means to be connected or grounded in a cultural environment — and “route-edness” — what it means for cultures to travel and the impact of cultural journeying (Clifford, 1997). In both books he considers how cultures — both as individual and intertwined entities — in complex ways solidify and mutate; how they remain static and move. In this interview he explores his own shifting, layered, and sometimes uncomfortable relationship with diverse cultures, considering the extent to which and the means by which cultures “translate”. Underlining the inevitable clashes and dislocation such processes necessitate, via pluralism he identifies an essential desire for the meaningful connection of diverse cultures. Like the British Museum of the title of his most recent work, he sees the importance of his poetry as a project in human connectivity, asserting creative achievement, resilience, and value. In exploring these ideas, Nagra discusses the ways in which his work connects both to Indian culture in transition and translation and to canonical English Literature. This interview was conducted in Uxbridge, West London on 6 December 2018.

Re-evaluating the Postcolonial Exotic

This essay explores some of the effects recent developments have had on my earlier notions in The Postcolonial Exotic (2001). I will refer to two postcolonial writers, both of Sikh-Punjabi origin, who have come to prominence recently: the British-based poet Daljit Nagra and the Canadian-based poet Rupi Kaur. Both writers, Kaur especially, owe their popularity in large part to the skilful management of their self-image on social media. Both have attained a form of minor celebrity that they also comment on in their writing, whether this is articulated through an ironic politics of cultural branding (Nagra) or a self-empowering form of strategic exoticism that plays to an international (mainly female) audience while also reaching out to a more specific readership (transnational women of colour) with whose shared experiences of separation and suffering it identifies, and whose intersectional connections to histories of exploitation and marginalization it seeks collectively to represent (Kaur). Both writers are controversial, still one of the defining markers of celebrity; and both are clearly aware of, and indeed have sought to profit from, the mixed reception of their work. Both are attuned, finally, to the country-specific debates that surrounded the late twentieth-century incorporation of “multicultural” and/or “diasporic” writers into a postcolonial canon. More recently, similar debates have informed the emergence of world literature as a locally inflected global project. This exercise also tends to assume the translatability of the one into the other, and the easy digestibility of both cultural knowledge and literary form.

Global Anglophone Poetry: Literary Form and Social Critique in Walcott, Muldoon, de Kok, and Nagra by Omaar Hena

Omaar Hena. Global Anglophone Poetry: Literary Form and Social Critique in Walcott, Muldoon, de Kok, and Nagra. New York: Palgrave, 2015. Pp. xiv, 200. US$90. Here are two arguments you have likely encountered if you read postcolonial poetry: 1. Poet P, who uses English or European techniques, shows that we can consider those techniques wholly apart from their origins, because P uses them so well to present her non-English or non-European life, Those techniques are, simply, part of global literary scene, available for all poets equally. 2. Poet Q, who claims to eschew English or European techniques, demonstrates that poets must eschew them in order to represent non-English or non-European lives. Newly independent nations, especially those of African diaspora, need brand-new nation (Kamau Brathwaite); large, optimistic, non-European countries require new, unrestrained kind of language with the quality of sprawl (passim, Les Murray's name for wide-open, honest Australianness that his poetry also pursues). Omaar Hena's Global Anglophone Poetry: Literary Form and Social Critique in Walcott, Muldoon, de Kok, and Nagra is largely persuasive study of four Anglophone postcolonial poets that demonstrates and where both of these arguments can be wrong. Derek Walcott, Paul Muldoon, Ingrid de Kok, and Daljit Nagra are all, as Hena claims, receiving and repurposing canonical literary (2), among them epic, pentameter, end rhyme, florilegium, elegiac lyric, and dramatic monologue. Hena does more with modes and genres than with forms in strict sense, caring more for history than for acoustics--though he can certainly hear latter. All four of these poets are nationally, if not internationally, honored for their of modes and forms. And yet, despite what word mastery suggests, Hena finds that these poets show what forms, modes, and genres cannot do. Their poems demonstrate how aesthetic uses of language can sometimes make legible their own limitations before social realities and poets can use literary form to show limits of structural inequalities that limit what art and artists can accomplish (162, 43). Hena accurately argues that Nagra's poems of mimicry and persona--with their foolish-wise Black British and Asian characters--point to stereotypical expectations integral to British multiculturalism that has given Nagra his success in United Kingdom: without cultural bias that these comic poems mock, there would be no basis for comedy. De Kok's lyric and elegiac poems--traditional in mode, though written in free verse--show a marginal writer must link up with cultural capital of authors recognized as central to Anglo-American cultural core ... to become legible in global North (159; emphasis in original). Walcott accomplished similar linkage in Omeros (1990), epic that Hena argues is conscious of what it appears to have lost in making those links, in adopting European symbols and sounds. In Omeros, both system of ocean currents that sailor Achille must traverse and world literary system that Walcott has traversed--with its fish and pirogues, its hexameters and its nationalisms--propose an aesthetic model of globalism hemmed in ... inequities of global literary marketplace and global inequity more generally (29). The closer Walcott gets to success and power (both aesthetic and institutional) through his command of literary forms, farther he seems from relatively powerless, marginal St. Lucia that he wants to represent. Put more baldly: you can write St. Lucia in way that makes St. Lucia seem important and legible in Manhattan and Islington, or you can write St. Lucia in way that makes you seem close to real St. Lucia, but you cannot do both at once. Hena argues that this circle cannot be squared. It can, however, be made into subject for epic poem, boosted by puns and dialect spellings, as in name of Achilles canoe: In God We Troust. …

Punning in Punglish, Sounding ‘Poreign’

This essay explores Daljit Nagra's poetry – Look We Have Coming To Dover! (2007) and Tippoo Sultan's Incredible White-Man-Eating Tiger-Toy Machine!!! (2011) – in the context of contemporary British language politics. It argues that Nagra's approach to language – combining heteroglot, multivoiced experimentalism with an etymological attention to the historical constructedness of language – offers a riposte to monolingual ideologies, which also resituates English as a product and residue of colonial history. While Nagra's poems sometimes come close to regarding the histories enfolded within English as a linguistic and poetic impasse, they continue to invest in the notion of resistance and individual agency in language; and specifically, they revel in poetic dramatization of the accommodations and convivialities of everyday multilingual language practice.

Doing voices: Reading language as craft in black British poetry

This article offers a detailed exploration and comparative reading of two poems published roughly 20 years apart: John Agard’s “Listen Mr Oxford Don” (1985), and Daljit Nagra’s “Kabba Questions the Ontology of Representation, the Catch-22 for ‘Black’ Writers…” (2007). The former poem is well-known, being regarded by a range of scholars as the acme of (and often, shorthand for) self-reflexively dialogic black British voice poetry, as it emerged in the 1980s, that plays off the friction between writing and speech. The latter is a complex and satirical take on poetic convention and canonicity — including the legacies of 1980s black British poetry — that exploits a tension between written poetic convention and artifice on the one hand, and the idea of the voiced poem as conveying “presence” or “authenticity” on the other. Both poems direct us towards a structuring paradox in which the embodied immediacy of human voice is mediated through the graphic conventions of written poetry. Reading these poems together, the essay considers on the one hand, how ideas about poetic form, language, and voice emerge out of particular historical junctures; and on the other, how such attentiveness to context can help us to develop techniques of a postcolonial “close reading”, eschewing totalizing formulae or summative evaluations of linguistic dissidence.

Jahan Ramazani, A Transnational PoeticsA Transnational Poetics. Jahan Ramazani. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2009. Pp. xvii+221.

<i>Jahan Ramazani</i>, A Transnational Poetics<i>A Transnational Poetics</i>. Jahan Ramazani. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2009. Pp. xvii+221.

The 2011 Wasafiri New Writing Prize: Introduction

When Wasafiri was founded back in 1984, among its key aims was the desire to provide space for some of the most promising literary voices from around the world. It was in this spirit that we launched the Wasafiri New Writing Prize in 2009, as the magazine celebrated its twenty-fifth anniversary. Open to anyone around the world who has not yet published a complete book in their chosen genre of entry – poetry, fiction, life writing – the prize has grown from strength to strength. Each year we receive an overwhelming number of entries from all corners of the globe — from Argentina to Singapore, from Cameroon to the Netherlands, from New Zealand to Romania. And in just three years we have seen previous winners achieve further success in their writing lives. This year, Wasafiri editor Susheila Nasta was joined by three distinguished writers on the judging panel: award-winning author and recipient of the Caine Prize for African Writing, Brian Chikwava; celebrated prose writer, poet and playwright, Jackie Kay MBE; and Daljit Nagra, critically acclaimed poet, winner of the Forward Prize and ACE Decibel Award. After a long period of deliberation, three winners were announced and we are delighted to be publishing their entries here: ‘Room 618’ by Michael Marett-Crosby (Fiction), ‘On Growing’ by Abeer Hoque (Life Writing) and ‘Adin’ by Richard Scott (Poetry). Our congratulations go to the winners and to those who made the shortlist. We also wish to thank everyone who entered and supported the prize this year and we look forward to further wonderful submissions in 2012, when we open the fourth Wasafiri New Writing Prize.

Tippoo Sultan’s Incredible White-Man-Eating Tiger Toy-Machine by Daljit Nagra

Tippoo Sultan’s Incredible White-Man-Eating Tiger Toy-Machine by Daljit Nagra

Meddl[ing] with my type: An interview with Daljit Nagra

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Daljit Nagra, Faber Poet: Burdens of Representation and Anxieties of Influence

This article examines Daljit Nagra's recent poetry collection Look We Have Coming to Dover! in relation to the idea of the burden of representation placed upon minority writers. While Nagra has been lionized as “the voice of British Asian poetry”, his verse actually serves to question the homogenization of diverse individuals and communities implied within such labelling. The collection consists of a mix of confessional poetry and dramatic monologues, and is marked by repeated quotation from and parody of the English poetic tradition as well as a linguistic inventiveness in portraying the voices of British Punjabis: the article suggests that each of these aspects can be seen as part of Nagra's attempt to engage with his anxieties of influence. Crucially, these anxieties must be understood not only in the Bloomian sense of the writer's relation to tradition, but also as formed by the discursive expectations of a society structured by racialization.