{"id":56473,"date":"2018-05-27T23:46:57","date_gmt":"2018-05-27T23:46:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=56473"},"modified":"2018-05-28T22:08:11","modified_gmt":"2018-05-28T22:08:11","slug":"not-a-british-subject-race-and-poetry-in-the-uk","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=56473","title":{"rendered":"Not a British Subject: Race and Poetry in the UK"},"content":{"rendered":"

Not a British Subject: Race and Poetry in the UK<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

The Los Angeles Review of Books<\/a>
\n2015-12-06<\/p>\n

Sandeep Parmar<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

As long as we have literature as a bulwark against intolerance, and as a force for change, then we have a chance. Europe<\/a> needs writers to explicate this transition, for literature is plurality in action; it embraces and celebrates a place of no truths, it relishes ambiguity, and it deeply respects the place where everybody has the right to be understood\u2026<\/p>\n

\u2014 Caryl Phillips<\/a>, Color Me English<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

Nature rejects the monarch, not the man;
\nThe subject, not the citizen: for kings
\nAnd subjects, mutual foes, forever play
\nA losing game into each other\u2019s hands,
\nWhose stakes are vice and misery.<\/p>\n

\u2014 Percy Bysshe Shelley<\/a>, \u201cQueen Mab\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

WHEN I LEFT LOS ANGELES<\/a> in the summer after 9\/11<\/a> to study creative writing in England<\/a>, I was only supposed to be away for a year at most. England was a country I thought I knew \u2014 I was born there, lived there for a few years, and returned to visit my maternal grandparents nearly every summer in my teens. Wanting to study poetry, I enrolled in the University of East Anglia\u2019s MA program. Based in Norwich<\/a>, the writing MA at UEA boasts Kazuo Ishiguro<\/a>, Anne Enright<\/a>, and Ian McEwan<\/a> \u2014 along with a host of lesser known but respectable poets \u2014 among its graduates. Compared to Los Angeles, Norwich felt strangely remote, enswathed by lakes and rivers and marshland studded by flint houses. Two hours from London<\/a>, and a bit further to Derby<\/a> (where my grandparents immigrated in the 1960s from Punjab<\/a>) I found myself at the desolate end of a train line, cut off from the multicultural Britain<\/a> of London and the heavily ghettoized Midlands<\/a>. Norwich \u2014 and UEA \u2014 could not have been any less ethnically diverse. Whereas inner-city Derby, in particular the multiethnic Normanton<\/a> road, felt like an entrenched if deeply divided community of Sikhs, Muslims, West Indians, and others, Norwich was eerily homogenous. When I inquired of a local cab driver about racism in the city, he assured me that it was not a problem because \u201cthere aren\u2019t any black people.\u201d This did not prove to be exactly true.<\/p>\n

What was I doing there? I should have asked myself. And what kind of poet would I become? I never thought to question my attraction to British poetry, or my unfounded sense of its legitimacy. At 21, I was drawn back to the country of my own and my mother\u2019s childhood for instinctual reasons I would only realize many years later. And so, forsaking sunshine, naively idolizing the English way of life as one giant costume drama, I wasted no time and devotedly read beyond the mere handful of 20th-century British poets I had encountered as an undergraduate at UCLA…<\/p>\n

…A recent review of Sarah Howe\u2019s<\/a> book begins with the publisher\u2019s blurb:<\/p>\n

Loop of Jade<\/em><\/a> is described as an exploration \u201cof a dual heritage\u201d \u2014 Chinese and British \u2014 a \u201cjourneying back\u2026in search of her roots.\u201d My heart sank a little. Without diminishing the importance of such endeavours, the intervening three decades of identity politics has also led to, perhaps, a sense of, well, here we go again<\/em>.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The reviewer misses the point \u2014 it is not \u201cidentity politics\u201d that is at fault here, but publishers who only stage a poet\u2019s racial identity when that poet is not white. Howe\u2019s book moves between lyric and experimental modes, and dodges the uneasy limits of poetic subjectivity. Her work retains a deeply intellectual authority over itself in an industry that would prefer to ornamentalize poets of color…<\/p>\n

Read the entire article here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A mostly white poetic establishment prevails over a patronizing culture that presents minority poets as exceptional cases \u2014 to be held at arm\u2019s length like colonial curiosities in an otherwise uninterrupted tradition extending back through a pure and rarefied language.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,8413,8,10],"tags":[14582,28697,24671],"class_list":["post-56473","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-communications","category-media-archive","category-uk","tag-los-angeles-review-of-books","tag-sandeep-parmar","tag-the-los-angeles-review-of-books"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56473","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=56473"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56473\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":56496,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56473\/revisions\/56496"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=56473"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=56473"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=56473"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}