Asian/Other E-Book

Vidyan Ravinthiran

• Herausgeber: Icon Books
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 304

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

A perceptive exploration of poetry, race, and otherness from one of our most promising voices in criticism. Vidyan Ravinthiran was born in the north of England to Sri Lankan Tamils, and moved to the United States five years ago. Considering identity in both its political and psychological senses - as these concepts fuse, or fail to, at different times and in different places - he leaps adventurously between memoir and criticism, understanding his life through poetry, and vice versa. Ranging from Andrew Marvell to Divya Victor, he writes both about and through poems, discussing Sri Lanka; experiences of racism and resilience; intergenerational trauma; pandemic parenting in an autism family; relationships shaped by the internet; growing up with a speech impediment and being sent by one's aspirational brown parents to elocution lessons; and the relative invisibility of South Asians in Western television and film. This electric, compelling hybrid memoir discovers a new way of writing about the self and also literature.

Leseprobe

ALSO BY VIDYAN RAVINTHIRAN

POETRY

Avidya (2025)

The Million-Petalled Flower of Being Here (2019)

Grun-tu-molani (2014)

CRITICISM

Spontaneity and Form in Modern Prose (2023)

Worlds Woven Together: Essays in Poetry and Poetics (2022)

Elizabeth Bishop’s Prosaic (2015)

EDITED

Out of Sri Lanka: Tamil, Sinhala and English Poetry from Sri Lanka and Its Diaspora (2023, with Shash Trevett and Seni Seneviratne)

Angular Desire: Selected Poems and Prose by

Srinivas Rayaprol (2020, with Graziano Krätli) Arvind Krishna Mehrotra: Selected Poems and Translations (2019)

 

 

Asian/Other is a work of nonfiction.

Some names have been changed, along with potentially identifying characteristics.

Published in the UK in 2025 by

Icon Books Ltd, Omnibus Business Centre,

39–41 North Road, London N7 9DP

email: [email protected]

www.iconbooks.com

ISBN 9781785788628

eBOOK 9781785788635

Copyright © 2025 by Vidyan Ravinthiran

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, or by any means, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

Book design by Brooke Koven

Printed and bound in the UK.

 

Four months in North America. White graduate classmates are puzzled that a twentieth-century South Asian might share the experiences of a Medieval Jew. Their imagination stops at my brown skin. There has always been a civil war beyond the Northern Province. Those at risk cannot afford ignorance. I have learnt to recognize the languages of domination and gather a community of resistance for a dangerous journey toward necessary transformations.

—Yasmin V. Tambiah

The chameleon darkens in the shade of him who bends over it to ascertain its colours.

—S. T. Coleridge

CONTENTS

Opening

Because you were there

Start thinking and stop living

Victim and accused

Pandemic

To be Frank

Impediment

Tsunami

Love in the Bush years

Aerial roots

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

BIBLIOGRAPHY AND APPENDIX OF POEMS

CREDITS

Opening

The fading light trembles like something alive—shy, shifting—on the wall abutting my childhood bed. I hear my son crashing down the stairs, and sounds of delight from my parents, for whom he can do no wrong. This is the room in which I grew up, in Leeds, in the north of England; the very wall to which I turned my head, rejecting conversation with family and refusing for years to attend school— studying at home, instead, alone, and achieving, like the precocious brown child I have never ceased to be, the grades required to flee to Oxford and reinvent myself.

It is the room to which, irrationally—how easy it is, to be retrospectively self-deprecating—I feared I’d never return, during the pandemic years when my wife, son, and I were isolated in the US (we’d only just moved there) by the travel ban. Unable to visit our families here in England or have them fly over to help us parent: What if my mother and father die, I used to wonder, before this is over?

The walls were repainted in bright colors by my father during my teenage years, to cheer me up. The sky-blue paint is giving way, its craquelure revealing the pink underneath— where that blur of sunlight expands and contracts like a single-celled creature only just now beginning to experience in the most minimal way what it is to be alive.

Visiting for Christmas, and with my parents helping with childcare, I am here to, by finishing this book, make sense of my past. Yet what life is, and how to live it—how, rather, it lives us—has never puzzled me more. The large subjects that I and my reader have in common begin to morph beyond understanding. What happens to identity politics, when we recognize that “identity” is nothing like as simple as we claim, and that we are often other, potentially mysterious, even to ourselves? What political alternative exists, to our incandescent, algorithmically envenomed appropriation—yes, I’m redefining that term—of world events to our dopamine-canalized, outrage-addicted brain chemistries?

“If you’re not angry, you’re not paying attention.” How well does this stand up, to fury’s commercialization? I speak of ragebait, forms of authorized egoism, and how rhetorics of pride may not cure subjugation, but exist in dangerous oscillation with it; also, of how powerful terms are trivialized (consumers “identifying” with pizza brands finding their own “voice”). Memoir is guilty too, when our styles of nonfiction, the stories we tell about ourselves, exaggerate the coherence and continuity of our personalities. Everyone becomes the hero of their own story, with others reduced to bit players.

I am reminded, by the engineered likeability of much nonfiction—where blurts of self-exposure seem to purchase the authority, to make generalizations—of the habit South Asians have, of leaping to accommodate themselves to whiteness, by abbreviating and Westernizing their polysyllabic names.

ON THE LAST EVENING of my Christmas stay, with my son Frank safely asleep, and my wife at a restaurant with a friend, my parents offer to cook their famous spicy roast chicken—a Sri Lankan–British fusion unique to our household. The ingredients need to be inauthentic, prefabricated: Paxo stuffing, Aunt Bessie’s roast potatoes, Yorkshire puddings sold by the frozen dozen. Then my mother applies her marvelous spice rub, and all is transformed.

As we’re sitting down to eat, my father finds something to say. Clearing his throat, he asks—why is it that my fouryear-old son, his grandson, doesn’t yet know how to read?

Don’t we know that reading is the portal to knowledge; that there is a reason schools for the gifted exist, in the US; is it not the case that Frank’s peers are already ahead of him, that his teachers are shortchanging him, that we—my wife and I—simply aren’t pushing him enough?

If you want the recipe for my mother’s roast chicken— the rub that embrowns and textures those crappy potatoes and stuffing balls too, transforming even Bisto gravy into a luscious lava of colliding taste-sensations—you’ll require one tablespoon of chili powder (the hottest you can find), half as much coriander powder, and quarter tablespoons of pepper, Jeera powder, and garam masala. Dry roast the mixture until aromatic. Stuff the chicken with as many unpeeled garlic cloves as it will accommodate.

For the argument about my insufficiently hothoused son, one can also list ingredients: substances explosive in isolation and, when combined, cyclonic. Not just immigrant ambition, or South Asian immigrant ambition, but the traumatized hyperurgency of Sri Lankan Tamils, desperate to elevate their children above and beyond even the faintest memory of harm (arson, rape, detainment, murder) “back home.” Even to the holding camps Tamil children took their textbooks, to keep studying—learning English and becoming part of the colonial administration prior to Independence, was both how Tamils thrived and what brought upon them the retributive fury of the Sinhala-Buddhist majority.

“You taught yourself to read by the age of three! Give me one month with Frank, and he will know how to.”

If, reader, you are a South Asian parent looking to get your child into Oxford or Harvard, and raiding these pages for advice: this is not the book for you.

CAN THERE BE EXCELLENCE without neurosis? Might the potentials within a child unfold spontaneously, organically, with guidance and encouragement, certainly, but sans shame?

This book is about how literature, and poetry in particular, provided me with a way out and a way in: with a place where the powers fomented in me (and I’ll always be grateful for that) could unfold in unworldly, surprising ways.

“If poetry comes not as naturally as the leaves to a tree it had better not come at all,” wrote the Romantic poet John Keats. Forcing your child’s growth, you might produce a prodigy. Or someone who’ll never feel good enough, someone who lacks even in their most applauded and passionate pursuits that special bonus energy available only to those who’ve found—playfully and passionately—a path all their own.

FOR MANY SOUTH ASIANS a tension persists, between the identities we perform in the West, and forlorn or flourishing connections to the homelands our families either left behind, or exist in concurrently, with technology’s aid: plane flights, phones with multiple SIM cards, video calls across the ocean. Making it possible, for instance, for my cousin in Sydney to not only speak with but also seem to exist alongside (he claims it’s as good as being together) his father, who moved decades ago to Colombo after being imprisoned and fleeing his home in Trincomalee.

Imagine the scene. You’re talking to an acquaintance, not an outright stranger or friend, and the conversation takes a turn. The light in their eyes dwindles and your colleague, peer, ally, glances to one side and begins to imagine a future beyond this conversation with you. Or, to something they’ve said you can’t readily respond. You feel abandoned, cast out, an outsider. You have become, to quote the Romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “a jarring and a dissonant thing.”

How to grope toward that other state of being, in which— returning to Coleridge—“no sound is dissonant that tells of life”; where experiences of alienation can be lived through humanely and grasped as the impetus for structural change?

I ENVY, EVEN DISBELIEVE, writers with perfect, pungent, memories of their childhood. Mine’s a blur. Once, I sat in a bashed yellow pedal car, for which my father constructed a roof-frame out of fiberglass rods. Craning over the steering wheel, I gazed at my mother—who stood in the kitchen of our first house in Leeds (a different one; my parents were warned off places in Yorkshire where their brown faces were not welcome). But I’m only remembering a photograph in an album. The memory is false. I am its spectator, not its subject.

My memories have been replaced by my mother’s stories; reality has been displaced, by the myth she and my father, as Tamil immigrants to Yorkshire in the seventies, created around their high-achieving son. My parents decided I was a genius, when I was only a strange child: even hyperlexic children, as they’re called, can’t really teach themselves to read, unless you accept Plato’s theory of anamnesis. She claims I never had a temper tantrum—except when craving a picture book about cars, that she didn’t purchase until I sulked (and then she did), and which, over the coming months, I read till the pages tattered. In one of the tales in Hindu folklore of the blue boy-god Krishna, his mother Yashoda catches him eating dirt and pries his mouth open. Inside, chewed earth transforms as she watches into a working model of the universe. Stars, planets, everything, down to—I like to imagine—a recreation of Yashoda herself, peering into her son’s mouth. “I should have bought that book at once,” my mother cries—retelling the story to strangers. The message is clear.

I was a divine child; a gift; she should have listened to me, or rather to the force of unkillable Tamil brilliance uttering itself through me.

I was eighteen when I tried to kill myself. In love with a woman (twice my age and with two children) whom I’d met online, I now refused, having played truant for years, even to attend university—as my parents wished—here in England. My mother rejected a transfer to the US. Lying on this very bed, tracing my hand over the wall’s ridged, sky-blue paint, I swallowed my father’s heart medication. In the waiting room at the hospital, a friend asked my mother why she was there. She lied and said I had a fever—adding, after a pause, that I’d won a place at Oxford.

IMMIGRANTS OFTEN PRESSURE their children to excel. Those calcined by extremity, like Sri Lankan Tamils—a diaspora scattered by genocidal civil war—turn the screw with gusto. The child raised overseas must redeem the extended sufferings of their extended family, justifying generations of striving. But (here’s the rub) it isn’t asked only that the child high-achieve, but that they be happy about it. They must be continually, surpassingly, grateful on behalf of those who hadn’t such opportunities.

“Minority” has changed meaning. One can now be of a large group (cis-het white women, for instance) and be designated, in terms of power rather than numbers, a minority. I return to the original definition, to speak for the hyperminoritized: those who exist as a minority (Sri Lankan Tamil) within a minority (Sri Lankan) within a minority (South Asian). I feel for anyone who rarely sees on television a face resembling theirs; who gets left out of diversity initiatives in popular culture and working life; who doesn’t feel spoken for, or represented, and may even doubt the assumption that representation is reparation; the sort who glimpses themselves in the mirror and is startled by their own sheer untelegenic weirdness.

For the hyperminoritized, connections have to be made, creatively and riskily, across dividing lines. To feel, sometimes, completely alone—is to drift toward a cosmopolitanism of unexpected, life-giving, overlaps between the experiences, the writing (the poems!), of far-flung people. I can’t tell my own story (insofar as such a thing exists) without talking about poetry and the encounters with otherness it has made possible. And so I begin with South Asian poets, then proceed to people who resemble me less, or not at all. I hope that in this book, poems function as real, contestatory presences.

I’m not Indian or Pakistani or Bangladeshi or even part of Sri Lanka’s Sinhala-Buddhist majority. I am a South Asian with little in common with other South Asians, let alone vast bureaucratic categories (“Black, Asian, and Minority Ethnic” or BAME, in the UK, the “Asian American and Pacific Islander community” in the US). Moving from England to the US, I have shifted from being a member of a politicized underclass with a civil rights history, attacked in the street, stopped and searched, passed over for jobs, mocked for our voices and features, targeted with hate-stares and slurs—to being part of a supposedly “model” minority whose sufferings, including white-supremacist murder, are rarely discussed.

HERE IS A SERIOUS DIFFERENCE between the UK and the US. Every British person of color I’ve met scorns BAME as a category. It flattens particularities: we use the term when necessary, but in, often, a bitterly jesting way. Is it a peculiarly British gift, to participate in conventions ironically? Certainly, for Americans, it seems that wholehearted acceptance, or to use the hideous phrase, “buy-in,” is unavoidable. And so the manufactured demographic that goes by AAPI (or AANHPI, including Native Hawaiians) receives little pushback from progressives.

The problem is that “communities” cannot be stipulated into being. They form organically, as Divya Victor observes in her astringent, kinetic, multifaceted poetry (analyzing the murder of South-Asian Americans) on the subject of “kith”—as in, “kith and kin.” “Kin” means those like us, who wear our names and faces, people we love as we love ourselves. “Kith” is something else; it is

neither your mother nor your father nor your sister nor your brother; neither your grandmother nor your grandfather nor your aunt by blood nor your uncle by blood; neither your child nor your grandchild nor your great grandparent nor your great grandchild; neither of this generation nor the next nor the one prior; neither your cousin by blood nor your cousin by bone; neither inheriting nose nor skin nor brow nor boat; neither bestowing flesh nor tooth nor hair nor gait; neither in a manner of laughing nor holding a plate; neither descended from nor ascending to; neither named for nor named after; neither of brood nor blood nor stock nor pool; neither possessing by claim nor disowned by name; neither baptized at the ancestral font nor buried in the shared grave; neither living nor dead nor born nor bred; neither passed on nor passing away; neither like nor unlike nor resembling tissue and cartilage; neither by birthright nor by death rites nor by divination nor miracle; neither by gene nor gestation; neither by womb nor tomb nor cuckold nor platoon b u t by what is sensed or seen or heard or felt in what moves between those not of blood and yet belonging together either on land or in air or in water or on paper; either through name or race or face or place of birth or blame; either as sign or shibboleth or overheard epithet; either as mark on a forehead or caught in crosshairs; either for paycheck or paper or map or license or visa; either by the queue or queue or queen or quill; either by mandate or state or decree or fiat of fate; either in law or labor or abode or abhorred; either by hell or high water; either by tongue or trade or tendency to wander; either as a manner of walking into rooms or crossing the arms; either by headdress or footwear or part of hair; either by grain or meat or milk or holy book; as the days of the week or the names for the moon; as a manner of love or as a manner of hate; as a manner of leaning or standing erect; either by ritual or by roads taken; by the way something pleats or drapes or hangs or is latent; as a way you move or are at rest by passing or failing another’s test; either as a way of knowing or being known; either by the way a “we” exists or does not when we are not home; either as targets or by treason; either as a question of resemblance or in answer to a name: kith.

Victor’s phrasing is fiercely melodic, her syntax a riffing on rubrics immigrants must ceaselessly navigate—she writes elsewhere of filling out yet another governmental form on her mother’s behalf. She assesses what Paul Gilroy has called—a counterforce to Freud’s “narcissism of minor differences”— “the invaluable solidarity of the slightly different,” providing an alternative to the rhetoric of “community.”

IN BOTH THE UK AND THE US, the label “Asian” effects erasures, but of different kinds: in one place, it’s assumed to refer to South Asians, and in the other, to people of East Asian heritage. What is transatlantically shared, then, is a failure to grasp within prevailing coordinates the shadings of our planet’s biggest and most populous continent. “Asians” are an afterthought. They’re reckoned with blurrily, if at all.

WE HAVE IN THE UK a curious situation, where, despite being the country’s largest minority group, South Asians often go without popular representation (will there ever be a brown James Bond?). When we do appear, a North Indian stereotype predominates: bhangra and Bollywood. Light skin, not dark.

This needs stressing. Dark brown South Asians like me are, with fewer exceptions than I could count on the fingers of one hand, completely unrepresented on the small and big screen—I’m including Hindi films in this.

For lighter South Asians, makeup, technology, and careful lighting combine to idealize a complexion no brown person has ever had—I say this as the son of a vitiligo sufferer, and the father of a biracial, golden child. An entirely illusory, airbrushed hue, reminding me of a line from Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s long narrative poem, Aurora Leigh:

She was not white nor brown,

But could look either, like a mist that changed

According to being shone on more or less.

The South Asian must shape-shift to discover their niche in a visual hierarchy designed by, and for, others. You can be simultaneously stigmatized as socially undesirable—and as a slimy social climber who never earned their place. Though many South Asians become doctors, the one profession you’d think no one could gainsay.

SINCE, IN THE US, “Asian” rarely means South Asian, what other options are there? “Indian” works for some, but that word also refers to the Native people who have reclaimed it. “Desi” is popular, but often excludes Sri Lankans.

This slipperiness of identity means that South Asians are attacked both for what they are and for what they are not. Growing up in the north of England, my skin was repeatedly compared to excrement, but worse was being called a “paki”—the slur applied to all South Asians in the UK, not only Pakistanis, and rife in footage of the 2024 riots. Many of us have also been called the n-word, though, only in the US have I, personally, experienced the variant with “sand” in front of it. Islamophobia was at the center of the UK riots, and is also relevant in the US, where—though I’m not Muslim—I was, as a brown bearded man, accused at airport immigration of being a terrorist.

Sikhs have been killed by gun-wielding maniacs who thought they were Muslims and thought that all Muslims were terrorists. Sureshbhai Patel, an Indian grandfather visiting his family in Alabama, was identified by a caller as a suspicious “thirty-something Black guy”: the police, when he couldn’t understand them, slammed him to the ground and left him paralyzed. Was this anti-Black violence, or anti–South Asian violence? (The case against the police officer in question foundered when ten non-Black male jurors voted to acquit; two Black female jurors voted to convict.) Networks of exploitation and intergenerational trauma do not respect national borders. American exceptionalism creeps into our progressivism: those lamenting what the States have become still consider themselves special for occupying the place where all the important, terrible stuff is happening. They rarely consider multicultures the world over confronting their own legacies of violence.

APPLYING FOR A JOB in the UK (or when you have a poem published in a magazine) you fill out what’s called an Equal Opportunities form. We also find these five categories on the national census. Asians divide as follows:

Asian / Indian, a reference to the South Asian nation of India and British Indians

Asian / Pakistani, a reference to the South Asian nation of Pakistan and British Pakistanis

Asian / Bangladeshi, a reference to the South Asian nation of Bangladesh and British Bangladeshis

Asian / Chinese, a reference to the East Asian nation of China and British Chinese people

Asian / Other

In the 1950 and 1970 US censuses, South Asians were designated “other”—with a brief period in between, of being considered “white”; racial categories, including today’s, aren’t immutable. In England, South Asians used to be “black”: this is how the great Sri Lankan Tamil theorist and activist Ambalavaner Sivanandan described himself; the Southall Black Sisters, and the Organisation of Women of African and Asian Descent, have brought together women from Asian, African, and Caribbean backgrounds in feminist solidarity since the 1970s. In this respect, the Americanization of racial discourse erases Britain’s own civil rights history. Bhanu Kapil’s The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers documents a shared Afro-Asian experience:

By the end of the summer, my mother is living in a one-room damp-walled walk-up in Hayes, Middlesex, where George Orwell once taught grammar school English, and where a thirteen-year-old skinhead . . . pours milk bottles of urine into the black—the Paki, the Bangladeshi, the Sri Lankan, the Ugandan, the Ethiopian, the Jamaican, and the Gudjrati—letter boxes.

Kapil slides, across an explanatory dash, from “black,” to a word flung at me many times: that slur white people, after a drink or two, endeavor to deconstruct. “It’s not really offensive, is it? It’s just short for Pakistan.” By swapping “paki” into a list of nationalities—where it does take the place of “Pakistani”—Kapil skewers such complacence. She reminds us of a time and a place where “black” meant something different. Specificities—“Hayes, Middlesex,” Orwell’s teaching history, the “thirteen-year-old skinhead”—make for a constellation of data-points, each flickering and fading at the point of disappearing from view.

SO HERE I AM: the Asian/Other, slipping between categories. Identitarianism, now a mainstay of the Left, caused only death and destruction for Sri Lankan Tamils. During the riots of July 1983, murderers grabbed men off the street and smelled their hair. By the odor of the oil in it, they knew, this one is Tamil, not Sinhalese. They put a tire around his waist and set it on fire. Then they set his business, his dwelling, on fire. Sometimes his wife and children were still inside.

If South Asians are almost invisible, this gaseousness can be reconceived as a possibility. To not know—to not have already decided, aggressively—where you belong and who you are, can be liberating. I write in praise of uncertainty, curiosity, and an openness to otherness harder to maintain than we pretend.

Almost fifty years ago, Victor Anant wrote the following, in “The Three Faces of an Indian”:

It is in the nature of British civilisation to cherish people like me, homeless orphans. We are looked upon as children of conflict, born in transit, to be pitied. It is assumed that we will eternally remain torn within ourselves but that we can be taught to recognise our duality: the dear octopus of dichotomy never surrenders its victims. For nearly seven years, ever since I came to England, I have lived smugly and comfortably on the borderline, battening on the profits that derive from playing the role of cultural schizophrenic.

Half a century later, we haven’t got much further. Let’s consider experiences of displacement—literal (geographic), psychological, aesthetic—that, troubling the borders of being, have the power to both, as John Berryman said of poetry, “terrify & comfort.” Moments when it is possible to imagine different ways to live, and have conversations previously impossible.

I see poems as continuous with those moments.

SRI LANKAN TAMILS relate perfervidly to not only English people but also the English language. During the colonial period, Anglophone schools appeared in Tamil areas. As a result, Tamils became fluent and found roles in the British imperial-administrative system. I reiterate these details since it’s impossible otherwise to understand my parents’ decision to move to England in the seventies—many Tamils had to flee the civil war, but where to? They chose not to teach me or my sister their language, seeing it only as a vulnerability. To them, proximity to “Englishness” represented both protection from violence and a path to success and acceptance.

We were sent to speech classes to speak English without a stigmatizing accent. My sister asked for her National Health Service glasses in brown frames, believing they’d be invisible against her skin and she wouldn’t be bullied. My confused parents bought me blue, not black, shoes for school, and I was sent home. My father stocked our small, tired house with classics, unread, in fake leather from Reader’s Digest. English literature represented something ideal, sacred—my sister took up drama, and I began raiding those shelves day and night. It was a strange situation. I was doing something of which my parents approved: but since they worshipped only the idea of those books, I didn’t have to match them, overtake them, as lovers of literature (a friend of mine, son of an English professor, rebelled by reading only hard-boiled crime). Literature—soon, above all else, poetry—was my thing, a pursuit to be praised for but also an ideal privacy: a cabinet of secrets to unlock.

Since my teens, I’ve read poetry more or less continuously. In every spare moment, I pick some up. This is so instinctive it may be neurotic: a coping mechanism that has morphed into a vocation. In short, books have been for me what smartphones are for others. I am tempted to say, with the Romanian poet Ana Blandiana, that the page, written or blank (expectant), is my real homeland. I love words and how they go, collisionally, together, and if at any point the here-and-there teleporting style of this book, with its by turns ecstatic and browned-off, quarrelsome, and exulting sentences, feels oppressive, I hope the reader will understand my trying to share that sheer linguistic excitement which has meant close to everything for me.

—But I was speaking of poems. Unlike prose, short lyrics can be read quickly. Don’t worry about failing to understand. This isn’t school, there’s no test to pass. It’s an adventure. In a world of language debased and manipulated, a poem is a reprieve. A tactical, guerrilla reclamation of your powers of attention. Poetry restores to you the texture and taste of time, reminding you that the music of words needn’t further the powers that be:

BISWAMIT DWIBEDY, “OPEN”

    Turning the light on

    the blue bodied boy

      does he know how

      to resist each morning

      2 summers we are

      riddled seers of

a restless sail and his memory

  just stops by your hand

reaching for the day’s mysteries.

Now it was time to think of coffee.

or syllables one must contemplate

        when he calls out

a question you mishear

        that is not what they want

We don’t call that noise but

kingdom opposed to other things

Biswamit Dwibedy writes experimentally; his aren’t poems where a single voice emotes clearly. Born in India, he has lived in the US and France: his poems don’t belong anywhere in particular. They haven’t clear footholds or hand-holds or signposts.

But I catch two Hindu references in this poem. The blue boy is Krishna, already mentioned; the “syllables one must contemplate” recall the sacred syllable “Om,” signifying the unsayable mystery of life. “Let there be light,” said the Judeo-Christian god, and Krishna in this poem does wake up and turn the light on. Each morning he must relearn how to “resist”—having forgotten overnight how to hold the world at bay. Maybe he’s just “blue” as in, depressed. He’s feeling blue. How can we help?

“His memory / just stops by your hand / reaching for the day’s mysteries.” You’re also waking up, blinking into the sunlight, wondering what to do today. How unpredictable every day is. No matter how much we ruminate, predict, strategize, there is always something in tomorrow slightly different from anything we could hypothesize today. A changed light, exceeding the imagination. This is what it means, for the boy to be “reaching for the day’s mysteries”: Dwibedy works a cunning reversal of the Romantic poet John Keats’s famous description of “negative capability,”

that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason—

This isn’t anti-scientific: Keats means only that we shouldn’t rush to protect ourselves against complexity by papering the world over with false explanations. (Conspiracy theorists have no negative capability.) Dwibedy’s Krishna, if that’s who he is, does the opposite: he reaches not for explanation but for those very mysteries we find so challenging to tolerate.

Someone—this boy—calls out to you, but you “mishear.” Why? Because of them, “they,” an oppressive conglomeration. The people who “want” something from him and from you.

Yet “we” have our ways of resisting. We’re tuned in, to what the great Russian poet—internally exiled by Stalin, for satirizing him—Osip Mandelstam named “the noise of time.” Is that what Dwibedy means by noise? Noise is (sound) matter out of place, meaningless, the opposite of music; neuroscientists explain our mood swings by pointing to the random “noise” the brain perpetually generates.

You and I and the blue boy, we know deep down our lives are more than so much noise. We call it something else: a “kingdom” opposed to that which they, them—whoever they are—press on us every day.

A poem is a tiny kingdom you can step into, anytime, and return from—readier to hold your own, no matter what comes.

Because you were there

At school I was bullied by a boy named, here, Tom—for the usual reasons, centering my overweight gracelessness and my habit of “reading the dictionary,” the accusation aimed at all brainiacs (though in my case, as I’ll explain, it was literally true). Our sports field was some distance from the school itself: we bused it there for rugby on Friday afternoons. One day a different boy, whom I’d never met before, took the seat behind me and whisper-chanted (like a mantra) words audible only to me.

Drafting this chapter, I tried transcribing what he said, within what James Joyce derisively called “perverted commas”—being aware that literary conventions deceive as much as they enlighten. The effect was wrong: comedic, falsely immediate, too exactly the memoir-tone I, like many of us, have grown addicted to (reading books like this one) but also doubt. For the restrictions necessary to its conventionalized performance of selfhood. Its insufficiently skeptical mythologizing of disconnected events. And its failure to really reckon with—turning to the philosopher L. A. Paul—the fact that, “just as knowledge about the experience of one individual can be inaccessible to another individual, what you can know about yourself at one time can be inaccessible to you at another time.”

So let me describe otherwise.

It was a dreamily vicious, repeated pileup of vowels and consonants out to sound ethnic. Within this singsong, “paki” reoccurred at rhythmic intervals. A susurrus poured like poison—with a strange intimacy; the boy’s breath touched my skin—into my ear.

THIS WENT ON for the entire twenty- or thirty-minute drive to the field. I was determined to ignore it. I left the bus without looking back, and in the changing rooms bumped into Tom. He looked at me and asked, did you hear what that guy said?

I played dumb. I will never forget the look in Tom’s, my former enemy’s, eyes.

“It doesn’t matter,” he said gently. “Just forget about it.” And he walked off.

INBLACK STAR, her study of Britain’s Asian youth movements, Anandi Ramamurthy quotes Shanaaz Ali—a member of the United Black Youth League, an organization formed in 1981 in West Yorkshire, where I grew up.

One of the kids said to me, “Oh go back to the jungle,” or something like that. And there was this teacher, and it was interesting, I don’t remember any of the names of all the other teachers but I always remember him. On one level I was quite frightened of him ’cos he was always quite strict and red-faced, Mr Wilkinson, and I remember him, kind of making a really big issue of it. He stopped the class and he said that, “I’m not having any of that” . . . And I suppose that stuck with me because it was somebody standing up for me.

Tom wasn’t standing up for me, exactly. Or was he? I remember him—his face, gestures—whereas my memory of the racist is gone. Maybe I never got a clear look?

The white person knows a hurled slur has extraordinary power. It can create an everlasting memory. It is in the racist’s gift—comparable to the supposed power of the lyric poet—to immortalize moments disappearing, otherwise, like, to borrow a beautiful phrase from Blade Runner, where it is spoken by an imperiled minority, “tears in rain.” Yet the aggressor’s particularity—their own name, face, accent—is typically sacrificed during this process, it doesn’t make the record. The power they’ve gained comes at a cost, for in the mind of their victim, the bully tends to lose their name, features, personality, to an identification with the world of whiteness itself. In this erasure the slur’s power resides. I am not made to feel that one person dislikes me (fair enough) but that they’ve spoken on behalf of a community—that dread word, again—rejecting all that I am.

As if not an individual, but the world, whispered or yelled the slur, that, even before it was uttered, lurked in the shadows, hid itself (not entirely successfully) within the most innocuous, sunlit, appearances.

DURING MY FIRST year at Oxford, I was walking to the English Faculty Library, preferable to the Bodleian because of its ugliness, which I found less distracting. Weighed down with books, I carried over one shoulder the satchel which has semipermanently damaged my neck and back (all those tomes!) by causing—said a physio, years later—an asymmetrical development of the muscles. The sun shone coldly, rockets of purple buddleia overhung the path, and along the wall of the cemetery patches of bird-shit glowed like grain-mustard.

A car drove past (these incidents often, I’ve noticed, take the form of “drive-bys”):

—Go home, paki cunt!

THIS IS HOW JOYCE represents speech, forsaking those perverted commas for the dash used by French novelists. It seems right for what happened here, because of the speed, and how the words (and a chucked bottle) came at me before I could respond.

Let us scrutinize this assaultive phrase, cloven (a caesura, resembling that of Old English verse) by the (spoken, implied) comma. “Go” and “home” repeat a vowel sound: it’s what scholars of poetry call assonance. “Paki” and “cunt” are consonantally linked by those guttural k’s. Except that sound preexists these words, it is in “go,” kickstarting with its harshness the whole exclamation . . .

Growing up with a speech impediment, I learned to look hard at words for their quirks. Studying poetry, this trick, or tic, or compulsion, came with me. Deconstructing that slur meant taking control.