The History of Migrant Birds: A Review of Home Thoughts

SUTAPA CHAUDHURI

Home Thoughts is a collection of poems by eight widely anthologised contemporary poets of the British Indian Diaspora, featuring the works of Shanta Acharya, Debjani Chatterjee, Mona Dash, Bashabi Fraser, Kavita A. Jindal, Usha Kishore, Soumyen Maitra and Yogesh Patel, all well known first generation Indian immigrants to the UK. Ably edited by Usha Kishore, herself a major voice in the British Indian diasporic poetry and Jaydeep Sarangi, a renowned postcolonial poet-critic from India, and published by Cyberwit in India, Home Thoughts is a confluence of minds and mores. Enriched with a comprehensive introduction that charts the long and varied history of British Indian diasporic poetry, the anthology not only brings the British Indian diasporic poets to a wider readership and gives a fresh start to a critical discourse in the ‘home’ country, but also makes a significant contribution to the postcolonial literary canon. A meeting point of the British and Indian cultures, Home Thoughts showcases the multifarious poetic voices of the British Indian Diaspora, thematically focusing on the myriad aspects of their hyphenated existences and highlighting the postcolonial concerns of immigrant space. Exile and homecoming, displacement and belonging, assimilation and resistance, adoption, adaption and the myriad appropriations and negotiations with the ‘new’ cultures of their ‘present’ homes that inform their daily existences as well as the new perspective on ‘home’ that they gain as diasporic writers—all are emotively attested in the poems included in this collection.

Home Thoughts showcases how “t+he inhabitants/straddle worlds” to experience “parallel truths.” As Mona Dash writes in her poem ‘Diaspora’: “In this drifting space/sometimes we tilt/we shift towards/where we ame from/sometimes we sink/into new lands” (p.49) for, as she reiterates in ‘A Certain Way’: “As an immigrant/there is no certain way to be.”(p.53) Like Dash, Bashabi Fraser too realizes that however different her two worlds may be, they carry “the same sea music…/ The same deep churning wave” (Sea Sound, p.62). With her own ancestry of “borderless knowledge” (Rabindranath Sonnets, p.65), Fraser becomes a “storyteller” weaving her “variegated yarn/Around my new world/…/in the language/Which has flowed between us/In diverse streams to meet in the confluence”(My Mother Tongue, p.58). Similarly, Debjani Chatterjee envisages “a different epic” (Ravana, p.40) with her “patchwork quilt…and my inheritance” as she details the “a desperate history…of amnesty/and rebuilding of homes and lives.”(Home, p.30) This urge to rebuild homes after the experience of displacement recurs again in Kavita A. Jindal as she lays claim to “The Path Between”. Like “t+he sea *that+ glides in and flows out/pulled by the moon”, she too has “arrived by plane” (p.67) with her “suitcases packed with dreams,”(p.69)— interestingly a line that recurs almost verbatim in Yogesh Patel’s poem ‘A Chaiwala’ (p.110)— and now feels ‘at home’ guarding the “local heritage”(p.67); she writes, “Here is where they meet at last/ The past and the present” (Where Home was, p.70). Usha Kishore’s immigrant persona too feels “A country stretches across my wings,/at times a burden, at others a blessing…/adding yet another story to the history/of migrant birds.” (Immigrant, p.79)

Multilingual and multicultural, these writers lay claim to a heterogeneous ‘English’ language. Skilfully combining the rich repertoire of imagery drawn from Indian cultural heritage—the history and folklore, myths and legends, proverbs and idioms, rites and rituals, flora and fauna, socio-political, geophysical realities of the subcontinent with the cultural ethos of their present British milieu and moment, these writers create a newer, more enriching poetic idiom. As Usha Kishore writes in “Postcolonial Sonnet”, her immigrant persona does not have “a language to claim as my own”(p.80) The diasporic writer writes in “english”, a “hybrid offspring of many liaisons,/a broken tongue of empirical dreams”—so that “*a+ new patois is born, with whiffs/of black pepper and cinnamon, with/smacks of Demerara sugar and cashew feni,/with hues of batiqued silk and dyed cotton,/ with a piquant penchant to disconcert.”(english, p.86). Plural and inclusive, the creative language of their poems is thus truly ‘a rich mosaic’ of memories and realities, embellished with the experiences, ideologies and perspectives of a transnational, borderless, glocal existence of a ‘global citizen’—intermingling and cohering the home and the world, the then and the now, the dreams and aspirations, mingled with nostalgia and lived experience.

For the poets in this anthology, ‘home’ is not unitary or finite, defined by a specific place, history, culture, language, geo-political borders or even time; ‘home’ is both here and there, then and now, limited and limitless. It is a fluid, metaphoric, indeed sometimes even virtual, creative space where the ‘global citizens’ can spread their migratory ‘pied wings’ and touch newer horizons. As Soumyen Maitra so succinctly puts it, the ‘memories’ of ‘home’ are “saved bit by bit/ Like intimate treasures”—they become the “life partner” of “old travellers”(The College Street of Kolkata, p.92). Though “neither here, nor there”, the migratory ‘cosmic’ souls adapt to their new locations and feel “At Home with Homelessness” as Yogesh Patel titles his poem, “becoming/ Naturalized as the Thames Whale/ In the far distant lands”(Just another Whale, p. 116). The poems in this collection, like their creators, are dynamic and versatile, spanning various genres, poetic forms, thought processes, concepts, contexts and attitudes to life. The complex linguistic crossovers and synthesis of ideas, ideologies and ethos exhibited in these poems, constantly importing and assimilating multicultural signifiers, not only attest to the fluid inbetweenness that the diasporic writers experience but also become the mark of their tremendous creative strength and thriving resilience—making their poems, as Shanta Acharya says, “pregnant with possibility” (Shunya, p.19).

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