Routes E-Book

Rhiya Pau

• Herausgeber: Arachne Press
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Seitenzahl: 61

Beschreibung

At the core of this debut collection is a question – what is worth holding onto? Through poetic experiments that blend the academic and the artistic, Rhiya Pau queries complex characters and tender landscapes. Routes journeys from Ba's kitchen in Sonia Gardens to Independence hour in Delhi, across the pink shores of Nakuru, to meet a painter on Lee High Road. Celebrating fifty years since her community arrived in the UK, Pau chronicles the migratory histories of her ancestors and simultaneously lays bare the conflicts of identity that arise from being a member of the East African-Indian diaspora. In this multilingual discourse exhibiting vast formal range, Pau wrestles with language, narrative and memory, daring to navigate their collective fallibilities to architect her own identity. '[Routes]...holds up to the light the wisdom of the past, and asks what else is passed down along with it...a work of humane intelligence, formal experiment and linguistic verve' - Sarah Howe, Judge of Eric Gregory Awards 2022

Leseprobe

First published in UK 2022 by Arachne Press Limited

100 Grierson Road, London, SE23 1NX

www.arachnepress.com

© Rhiya Pau 2022

ISBNs

Print: 978-1-913665-71-5

eBook: 978-1-913665-72-2

The moral rights of the author have been asserted.

All rights reserved. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior written consent in any form or binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

Except for short passages for review purposes no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission of Arachne Press.

Thanks to Muireann Grealy for her proofreading.

Cover design © Suman Gujral 2022

ROUTES

RHIYA PAU

Contents

Preface

Roots I

Oral Traditions I

Bandhani

Enough

Homecoming

Sightseeing

From Madurai to Rameswaram

The Highway Hunters

Ride for Darjeeling

Pilgrims

At a Dhaba, Dahl is Frying

Calling on Monsoon

The Girl in the Water

Inheritance

Silverware

Oral Traditions II

Black Eyes

On Lust:

On Shame:

saturday night fever

Goddess

Last Spring

Five/Eight Thousand Miles Away

Roots II

Thought Experiments at Oriel

Partition

Conflict of Interest

Kaliyug

Entropy

Author’s Note

We Gotta Talk About S/kincare

To Save the Planet: or To Send Your Kids to Private School: or After You Send Your Kids to Private School, but Before You Have Enough:

Ode to Corelle

Routes

Mombasa Heat

Sonia Gardens, 1999

Sonia Gardens, 2004

Sonia Gardens, 2011

Dying

Departure Lounge

Eighty-Five in Dove Park

Salutation

Beyond

Roots  III

Notes

Acknowledgements

Preface

There is an illustration in Brian Greene’s book The Elegant Universe, of a peach seed being bombarded first by marbles, then by smaller pellets, and finally by particles of light. The experiment uses the patterns of these objects as they scatter to uncover the architecture of the fruit seed, with the moral being that smaller firing objects produce a more granular expression of the target. This simple illustration, calling attention to the limitations of the tools we use to interact with the world, is one I continue to revisit.

When my Ba and Bapuji moved to the UK in the seventies, they never suspected that their grandchildren would not be fluent in their mother tongue – that instead we’d hold clunky, grammar-backward sentences like marbles in our mouths. Words are the smallest unit of discourse and imagination, and without a breadth or precision of vocabulary, we have been left with a tepid understanding of one another. Across the South Asian diaspora, I find our intergenerational relationships malnourished in this absence of language. Although we cannot name the loss, we do our best to fill it with rituals of cut fruit, oily earth-fragrant head massages, summer riches of puri and pulped saffron mangoes and the enthralling melodies of qawwali and kirtan.

All this is to confess that, although as a child I was well steeped in culture, I learnt much of my history in translation. Bapuji was a mighty man, a freedom fighter in the Independence movement, and yet I frequented India most often through the white man’s gaze, watching Ben Kingsley’s portrayal of Mahatma Gandhi, reading Kipling and Theroux, studying the British Raj from white-washed curricula and even experiencing my first back-packing trip through the country with two white male university friends.

Ultimately, all that we experience is the collateral of history. We each have different tools with which to probe the past, and while the scatter patterns produced may vary in resolution, the facts represented are all equally valid. It is how we interpret these facts, specifically our willingness to acknowledge and address the limitations of our knowledge, our faculties and experiences in constructing narratives from these facts, that determines the integrity of the history we accept. No historic narrative is an entire truth, and yet there are narratives which parade as such, their insularity fuelling deep structural biases. Our comprehension of the past shapes how we engage with the present, and so it follows that the presence, or absence, of diverse historic narratives impacts the politics of the present.

At Oxford University, an institution where any part of your identity that fails to overlap with the white middle class goes unvalued and dismissed, I found there was very little left of me. I was quick to internalise the narrative that regardless of how well you knew ghazals and garba, you were uncultured unless you listened to Radio 4 and read Voltaire. Earnest in continuing my education, I left university with a self-curated reading list which included Dickens, Proust and several works by Kafka (in the hope that I might finally grasp the appropriate use of kafkaesque). The list, aptly compiled in a room adjacent to Oriel’s infamous Rhodes statue, included just two women (the Brontë sisters), and no writers of colour. This is how we assimilate erase ourselves.

In the Spring of 2020, the pandemic coursed through London’s care homes, taking with it some of the few surviving memories of our community’s epic tri-continental migration. Routes began as an effort to chronicle this history, documenting the joys and struggles of upheaval, re-rooting and reinvention.

The release of this collection marks fifty years since my family, and much of our community, arrived in the UK. To understand who we are and how we got here, you must first understand that our history is deeply entangled with the history of this country. For over a century our migratory patterns have been determined by colonial pressures, namely the colonisation and resource extraction of the South-Asian subcontinent, the movement of indentured labourers from India to East Africa and other colonies, the Indian Independence movement, the Partition of India as drawn up by the British, the rise of East African nationalism following independence from the British, and the expulsion of Asians from Uganda that ensued. It holds, as a result of the role Britain has played, and independent of our status as citizens, that diasporic history is British history. Our telling of it belongs in British literature, in school curricula and in Oxford’s lofty spires. We must assert this against the narrative tides.

Bapuji was born in Kenya but moved to India in the 1940s to become a freedom fighter in the Independence movement. He spent time living at Gandhi’s Sabarmati Ashram, where he trained as a social worker and travelled across the country participating in protests and sit-ins which often turned violent – he was laathi-charged by British soldiers on multiple occasions and in one incident he was shot in the leg. In the 1970s, Bapuji moved our family to the UK, where he dedicated his remaining years to community service and in the 1990s was awarded Membership of the British Empire (MBE) by the Queen, an accolade of which he was exceptionally proud. His is just one story in a generation of British Asians who lived through British India, Independence and Partition and still celebrate the Queen’s Jubilee.

Conversations with our elders suggest that they do not find these realities conflicting – they have compartmentalised fragments of their identities in order to survive. For me, writing Routes