I S S U E 8
At the Shoreline: A discussion on kinship and identity
In this call-and-response epistolary exchange, writers Sarala Estruch, Gita Ralleigh, and Rushika Wick, of the South Asian women’s poetry collective Kinara—which also includes poets Anita Pati and Shash Trevett—circumnavigate the intersections of gender, heritage, and place with the pandemic as backdrop.
Gita Ralleigh: The name Kinara, meaning border, riverbank, or shoreline, evokes the shifting nature of identity and representation. Within our collective we all have very different poetic practices, we come from different communities and nations of origin. I found the resonance of borders, liminal spaces, edge lands, and shorelines showing up everywhere. For example, when reading a 2008 interview in The Guardian with the novelist Jhumpa Lahiri, who grew up in Rhode Island: ‘The part of the earth that I’ve always felt most at ease with,’ she says, ‘is not the ground, but sort of the water’s edge.’
I remember soon after we came up with the name, I went on a brief family holiday by the English coast and there it was: a holiday house named Kinara. I took a picture of the sign and sent it to my fellow poets. During the pandemic, our need for connection became paramount. Many of us launched our poetry debuts into this strangely hushed, emotionally fraught time. Our online meetings, where we shared the work of poets we loved, as well as our own, proved a welcome respite, an equivalent of the often-derided ‘safe space’ where we could share our thoughts, fears, and anxieties.
Several of us attended a Poetry School workshop on maps and mapping with Vahni (Anthony Ezekiel) Capildeo, who first planted the seed of Kinara. What does a map of home look like? Capildeo asked us. Why did we find this question difficult to answer? In notes from the workshop, I find a map of my London suburb, criss-crossed in red ink with journeys to school, to my parents’ workplaces, to our friends, to the shops. How small, how cramped and confined these lines seem compared with the giant crossings—geographic, cultural, and psychic—my parents had already made. Reading a 2017 essay by Taiyon J. Coleman in Places Journal called ‘Places as Maps’, I find this quote:
A poem becomes a map when it crosses boundaries of identity and experience, when it shows us how to move through and beyond the spaces that keep us from one another and keep us from our own humanity. The poem as map situates readers within larger contexts: cultural, historical, social, and spatial. It layers personal and universal experiences, interior and exterior perspectives, and then it invites us to transgress them.
Sarala Estruch: I was anxious about the idea of the collective as a space for British South Asian women poets. As a mixed-race woman with a complicated relationship to my paternal relatives (who are my Indian relatives), I have had a conflicted relationship with my ‘Asianness’—always feeling that I fall short, that I’m not ‘Asian enough’, and feeling more at ease claiming a mixed-race or mixed-heritage identity rather than an Asian or Indian identity. I suppose the truth is that I feel uncomfortable with labels. On the other hand, despite—or perhaps because of—my ambivalence to labels, I am very interested in identity, and have found that my positionality as a woman writer of mixed European and Indian ancestry has led me to a heightened political awareness. As I have grown both as a writer and as a more politically engaged person I have begun to see my positionality as one of incredible resource and richness, as well as resistance.
Historically, mixed-race people and diasporic peoples have been perceived as lacking—lacking wholeness, belonging, ‘culture’ and ‘home’, where ‘culture’ and ‘home’ are considered a single, stable thing or place—rather than hybrid. It is hard growing up as a mixed-race person and/or as a person of the diaspora with this narrative hanging over you—the narrative that you are not whole, or that you are (perpetually) displaced (the latter is also true of the experience of exiled persons). I have been delighted to see a shift in recent years in the work of mixed-race poets and diasporic poets, in which pluralistic identities are being embraced and celebrated. I particularly admire the writers who embrace the layered nature of identities, while not ignoring the challenges that are inherent in these identities, nor romanticising (and certainly not exoticising) these identities.
Rushika Wick: I had a similar concern—was I (could I ever be) authentically ‘Asian’? Did I even want to identify as such? Being a visibly brown girl growing up in a non-urban context in the 1980s, I had to grapple every moment with people confronting my perceived otherness, offering assumptions around my experience. The responses being sought from questions such as, ‘Where are you from? / What’s your heritage?’ still occupy residual space in me, albeit settled within a more resolved multiplicity—second generation, Sri-Lankan, Sinhalese (in solidarity with other ethnic groups), educationalists, Christian, Buddhist, agnostics, migrants, those who left others behind, those who don’t know all the folk names of the garden plants, etc. Such identification was woven from a very different personal topography compared with my peers who seemed to have strong and legitimising connections to the Wye Valley flora or Northern Soul music that excluded my experience.
We didn’t have a childhood steeped and rooted firmly in consistent Asian traditions, rather our own family culture took centre stage. There were, of course, family gatherings where women of varying ages would wash up in the kitchen, tidying leftovers (‘Remember, some people do not have enough to eat.’) into yellow ice-cream tubs rather than smart new purpose-specific Tupperware. I recall baulking at the gendered nature of such domestic activity (the men talked politics and philosophy in another room) whilst acknowledging how powerful the Great Aunts seemed to be, how nimble in their advanced years, and wondering what enabled this—perhaps a more collectivist society creates vital connections and roles for its older members to thrive. In many South Asian cultures, females are still expected to conform to e.g., passive, and chaste stereotypes, with care-giving and familial compliance upheld as virtues. The intersectionalities of breaching expectations of the ideal Asian feminine whilst playing a UK gender role and being an artist make for interesting literature. There are profound impacts of internalising gender inequality—creation of complex work and narratives is required to enhance understanding of how these are negotiated. The Earth Works of Anna Mendieta spring to mind—a desire to commune with soil, plants, elements in a yielding that is an empowered female gift, yet this sits alongside how women are still symbolically buried alive in attempting to navigate societies and their own identities.
GR: Ah, those family gatherings! My parents were active in the local Indian community which gathered for ‘cultural events’ every weekend. I remember how an aunty in sari and full make-up might grab the microphone to read her own poetry, or an uncle would begin crooning a ghazal by Ghalib. I shied away from all this when younger but now I’ve come to appreciate my parents’ conviviality. Naseem Khan, the arts activist, talks, in her memoir Everywhere is Somewhere (Bluemoose Books Ltd, 2017), of mushairas in a local cinema, ghazal concerts in living-rooms, dance performances in local church halls. For my parents’ generation, if a thing didn’t exist, you created it yourself. As did the 1980s’ Asian Women Writers Collective (whose members included Tanika Gupta and Meera Syal) who swapped their writing by post and provided childcare at meetings. Although this may seem unfashionably ‘second-wave’ as a feminist stance, it made me think (as someone who only begun writing after having children) of how even now, very few spaces (retreats, residencies, even poetry readings) accommodate those with caring responsibilities.
Growing up as a young brown woman in the ’90s, I sought the voices of others like me. Novelists (Rushdie, Roy, Ondaatje) were mainstream but sadly I knew nothing of the South Asian women poets writing at that time: Imtiaz Dharker, Moniza Alvi, and Sujata Bhatt to name a few. The poets of South Asian origin I might have named (Tagore, Faiz Ahmed Faiz) were men. I was also unaware until embarrassingly recently, of a long history of Indian women poets writing in English, including Dorothy Bonerjee, Sarojini Naidu, Kamala Das and Eunice De Souza—a lineage extending back to the Victorian era.
RW: In contrast to that wonderful early relationship with ghazals, our childhood literary experience was robustly colonised—comprising Wordsworth and Keats, with my grandfather sitting in the verandah and wistfully reciting ‘To Daffodils’ whilst Mynah birds and Indian Cuckoos sounded in the palms. We ‘went back’ to Sri Lanka every summer for languid weeks on end, living in a Joseph Cornell box of curiosities (strange shaped snacks, gigantic insects, lizards, disease) which occupied simultaneous space with the boredom of rupture from UK youth culture which had provided precious currency and signifier (no media/access to music/cigarettes/fashion). Strangely, I felt a deep connection with the red earth, the palm trees, the birdsong that spoke to me in a way that was undeniably home, and yet everything else—people, culture—felt alien. One of my areas of focus via visual poetry is the rendering of constructed architectural/site plans from past memories overlayed with what such places signified when I was within them as a child. Many of them relate to times and places in Sri Lanka.
In terms of the burden of identification—I suppose I have chosen in my own poetics and practice to pursue whatever interests me—free from cultural legacies. In some ways, I feel that being an artist is an intervention, it facilitates an individual’s integration whilst paying tribute to and articulating the richness and strain of their inherent multiplicity. It does this against a backdrop of modern capital and productivity where art is often positioned as superfluous or a luxury. In this way, being an artist can be viewed as an act of resistance in itself. On reflection, much of what I write about is how the body is impacted by social experience or how agency is positioned in discourse. This links to Sharon Olds’ ‘apparently personal’ at times, which is necessarily shaped by identifications, although I follow my heart in terms of direction of writing.
SE: Yes, all writing is shaped by identifications, really, isn’t it? We can’t escape who we are, not completely, even if we try to, for instance when writing fictional scenes. In life as in art, I am continually unlearning the negative narratives that abound around mixed-race identities and diasporic identities, and re-learning to embrace the multi-faceted nature of my identity—the fact that I have several rich cultures and histories (European, Indian, and, also— through my maternal line—Algerian) to draw upon. Being a part of the Kinara collective has significantly helped me in this journey, because I think this is a process that we are all engaged in as women writers of colour living in a white majority country, and as women poets who are either part of the South Asian diaspora or who are exiled from South Asia; we are each of us combatting the boxes, negative stereotypes and narratives which would have us not tell our stories or which would have us present simplistic, reductive and/or exoticised versions of ourselves.
As a collective, we are careful to allow space for all of the various parts of ourselves that society would have us discard. We support each other, in that we provide a space that both acknowledges our similarities and our myriad differences, and that sees both our similarities and differences as cause for celebration and as sites for creativity and collaboration. To return to the wonderful quote you mentioned earlier, Gita, I think that, within the collective, we are all working towards writing poems as maps, poems that cross ‘boundaries of identity and experience’ and show us ‘how to move through and beyond the spaces that keep us from one another and keep us from our own humanity.’ Perhaps that is the work of all poets.
RW: I was achingly concerned that extended family did not read my poems about sex, sexuality, sex-workers, drugs—even though why not? There is some yoke of the Victorian-Asian feminine that hovers in a flock of taboo. Had I been male, I believe that no one would have batted an eyelid. In some ways my personal work is more preoccupied with addressing gender inequalities than anything else as I see this as a unifying and powerful discourse which enables solidarity, and the impulse must be shaped by those experiences of gender I talked about earlier.
I am starting to write more about my hybrid identity and perhaps this has arisen as a result of the collective and such solidarity. I also believe that as a poet there is an ethical duty to participate in art politically, exerting the privilege of free voice (and by that, I mean all choices made in life are political in one way or another). It would be isolationist to not participate in building a progressive and complex discourse around the literary freedoms, quality, and insights offered by female South Asian voices. Inspired by my Kinara peers, I am starting to see more connections to diasporic themes within my own writing. For example, I am currently working on a new collection which is loosely sci-fi witness poetries from a future humankind who have mostly left Earth. There is a clear narrative around migration and how the relationships between those remaining and those who have left evolve. Influences include Jorie Graham, Ilya Kaminsky and Frank O’Hara as well as Asimov and the Bhagavad Gita.
GR: Your new collection sounds fascinating, Rushika; I can’t wait to read it. I love that our collective has inspired you to explore your hybrid identity further. I also find great personal comfort in the work of Cuban American artist Ana Mendieta. As part of the introduction for an art show by women of colour, titled ‘Dialectics of Isolation: An Exhibition of Third World Women Artists in the United States’ (1980) she wrote:
Do we exist? . . . To question our cultures is to question our own existence, our human reality. To confront this fact means to acquire an awareness of ourselves. This in turn becomes a search, a questioning of who we are and how we will realize ourselves.
And later in the same piece:
As non-white women our struggles are two-fold. This exhibition points not necessarily to the injustice or incapacity of a society that has not been willing to include us, but more towards a personal will to continue being ‘other.’
I have found solidarity in other voices, other women who are both determined enough to continue being ‘other’ and to do so on their own terms. Poets I’ve learned from in this respect include Shivanee Ramlochan, Kharaini Barokka, and Nisha Ramayya.
The whole of Mendieta’s piece has become something of a personal manifesto for me and part of the reason for Kinara. I so often felt, while growing up, that the very fact of my ‘Indianness’, those cultural expectations of being a good girl from a decent family were stifling—and silencing—constraints. I claim every right to question the gendered expectations I grew up with. But I have begun to refuse, equally, the assimilation required to feel I belong in ‘British’ literary culture, for example in the pronunciation of my name, the use of my mother- tongue or even the wholesale adoption of a particular aesthetic that constitutes ‘good’ writing.
The poet Sascha Akhtar wrote for PEN Transmissions in her beautiful ‘No Memories Except Memories of a Memory’ of a rootlessness, a deracination passed down from one generation to another. She describes how language loss, the loss of a ‘mother tongue’ compounds an absence of history—denying us the oral storytelling of elders as well as the work of previous generations of poets and writers. In my work, I choose to employ memories, dreams, fantasy, and the imagination in order to return what has been lost to me, to continue in my stubborn pursuit of being ‘other’. I accept that (unless one publishes under a pen name/anonymously) work may be received by others in a conflicted and complex way, with intersections of race, culture, religion, gender and overlays of colonialism and exoticism all affecting a reader’s response. This is not something I can control, and like both of you, I choose not to allow this awareness to prevent me writing both within and beyond these borders.
SE: I strongly identify with what you’ve said and similarly feel that our collective is a safe space which brings with it incredible generative force. Another poet who embodies this resistance to assimilate you describe above is the writer Bhanu Kapil. I came upon Kapil’s work seven years ago, when my daughter was a baby, and felt such a powerful sense of recognition and release that I immediately went out and bought all her books; I used to stay up into the early morning hours, when the house was quiet and everyone was asleep, and absorb her words as though they were some essential nutrient that was vital for my survival. Early motherhood is, in many ways, a primal state, and I do feel that Kapil’s poetry and her blog (which is an incredible hybrid cultural/literary resource) were fundamental to my survival during those intense months of early motherhood when you are holding on to your sense of self by the edges of your fingernails. Kapil’s is an aesthetic of such hybridity/plurality that her works cannot always easily be described as ‘poetry’; in fact, many of her works resist definition, which is what I love most about her work: the way it draws upon and fuses together so many different genres (autobiography, memoir, fiction, science fiction, cultural and literary theory, documentary, history, film, photography, visual art and performance art, etc.) in order to create something entirely new.
GR: I had a visceral reaction to reading her book, Ban en Banlieue, on the cover of which she is lying, naked on the earth, in her back garden in Colorado. In the book, Kapil references both Ana Mendieta’s work and a series of performances she made while writing the book. The sentence that stopped me in my tracks was, ‘We walk through the rusted bracken to the lido, to the place where the Park Woods give way to the cultivated beach.’
Those woods, that same artificial beach are both only a short walk from my house. I can see the trees from my bedroom window. I felt my suburban garden flood with light and colour, with that recognition and release you speak of. Here was someone like me, a brown woman from the same suburban hinterland, who was unafraid to speak the truth, as she experienced it, through her poetry.
I have often thought (and in reference to Rushika’s brilliant coining of the Victorian-Asian feminine) that the essential text for a woman writer from my background is not Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own but her writing (in Professions for Women) on the ‘Angel in the House’. Woolf speaks of the importance of killing this Victorian vision of the idealised daughter, wife, and mother in order to spill truth, like blood, upon the page. Had I not killed her, she would have killed me, she writes. I read this existential fight, one needed to survive, in all of Kapil’s published work (like you, I have all her books). I particularly love how, in Ban en Banlieue, with its textual repetitions, leaps and hesitations, Kapil embodies a refusal to turn complex identities and existence into neat poetic soundbites of exoticism or immigrant woe.
SE: It is interesting what you say about resisting ‘the wholesale adoption of a particular aesthetic that constitutes ‘good writing’. In their ground-breaking collaborative book, Threads, Sandeep Parmar, Bhanu Kapil, and Nisha Ramayya discuss the stifling and often violent effects of the contemporary British lyric tradition upon poets of colour. Parmar, Kapil, and Ramayya are poets whose work I hugely admire, who empower me to write as I want and must write, and not by the rules of the market or what mainstream poetry deems as ‘good’ writing. Having received an English education—and having been raised in a pluralistic home culture, rather than having been steeped in a strongly Indian culture which could have provided me with an alternative literary tradition from which to draw—it isn’t always easy to resist the allure of the ‘contemporary British lyric’, since this is what is generally taught as ‘good poetry’ and is most commonly published and celebrated in mainstream publishing; however, being a member of the Ledbury Critics and a member of our Kinara collective have both helped me to create and appreciate my own canon of literature from which I am able to draw to create work which feels more important and authentic to me. These collectives have also helped me to realise that I value being part of a literary community and the morals/ethics of my work over external publishing success.
I wonder if this is one of the important functions of our collective; a space— perhaps a ‘fourth space’, as Parmar and Kapil would have it—for women of South Asian heritage to come together and not have to put on a mask or feigned poetic voice; where we are respected and free to write about whatever it is that we want to write about, and where we are free to draw from our own canons; we all understand the contemporary British emphasis on the lyric mode, to the exclusion of others, poses dangers to brown women poets in its dehumanisation through stereotypical and/or exoticised representations. In our own ways, we are writing against those dangers—we grow in strength through our collective resistance.
Sarala Estruch’s debut pamphlet is Say (flipped eye, 2021); her full collection is forthcoming from Nine Arches Press in 2023. Gita Ralleigh’s debut collection is A Terrible Thing (Bad Betty Press, 2020); her pamphlet Siren is forthcoming from Broken Sleep Books. Rushika Wick’s debut collection Afterlife As Trash was published by Verve in 2021.