Daljit Nagra explores Britishness…
Daljit Nagra’s remarkable debut marked the arrival of a thrilling new voice in poetry. In Tippoo Sultan’s Incredible White-Man-Eating Tiger Toy-Machine!!!, his second volume, his writing shows every bit the same verve and excitement that made his first book an unmissable event.
|
||||||||
Tippoo Sultan’s Incredible White-Man-Eating Tiger Toy-Machine!!! takes its cue from the eighteenth-century automaton (a tiger savaging a British soldier) in a series of poems that begin at the throat of the old British Empire. In these vivid, real and sometimes surreal pieces, Daljit Nagra creates his own inimitable linguistic bhaji: where Shakespeare meets the Subcontinent in a range of forms from English sonnets to spectacular displays of ‘bollyverse’ or the tender love songs of the monsoon.
The poems take their bearings from cornershops and classrooms, the strange, part-arcadian, part-hellish streets of ‘Londonstan’ and the places where the north of England collides with the Punjab: from Larkin to the ladoos in Raja t’Wonder Dog. Little escapes Nagra’s tigerish gaze: race relations, family feuds, cultural inheritance, religious bigotry, the British honours system, Rudyard Kipling, the blurring of Kevin Keegan with Kabbadi.
Comic, hard-hitting, passionate, satirical, Daljit Nagra has written a book that is as powerfully thought-provoking as it is delightful.
++++
Life after Look We Have Coming to Dover! has changed dramatically for me. I moved house twice, I got married and I have two young daughters. In addition, I work just two days at school because of all the poetry work I have been getting over the past few years. I attribute all these changes to my Dover collection of course for books are truly life changing.
A few months after my first collection came out, in February 2007, I was awarded an Arts Council grant and I used this partly for research purposes. I went to the old seat of British power in India, Calcutta, and then off to Darjeeling. I wanted to see where the British Empire originally was and then I wanted to fast-track the journey from the burning heat of Calcutta to the cool of Darjeeling the English would take over the hottest months of the year.
I also used the grant to give me some research time so I read a few books about the British Empire. I was keen to explore my origins in Britain, which I regard as being the result of the historic contact between the British and Indians a few hundred years ago. This period in India and the subsequent research produced quite a few poems and the most successful ones are in my latest collection, Tippoo Sultan’s Incredible White-Man-Eating Tiger Toy-Machine!!!. I’m not interested in knocking or endorsing the empire but exploring some of the issues it raises.
Some of the poems seem to have sprung from very personal experiences, in particular because of my relationship with and marriage to a ‘white’ woman. I’ve been particularly intrigued by responses to our two daughters by family who have tried to appreciate the value of cultural mixing and in what ways children can be specifically Indian and English in behaviour. Some of this is explored indirectly in a few poems.
Mostly though I think I’ve been consciously trying to explore the state of modern Britain from the perspectives of my characters. I tend to allow language to create a sort of voice for a character and then I imagine what they think about things and allow them to speak freely. I try and keep my judgements out of my characters perspectives, as much as is possible anyway. In the case of one poem, School Daze Woz the Best Daze!? I found the speaker attacking other students, teachers, the sonnet form, I had put him in, and the reader. There is some repulsive language in the poem but I had to allow the speaker his turn once he had started. I am so pleased Faber allowed this hideous poem to go into print.
As part of my exploration of Britishness many key figures are explored or touched upon: queens such as Victoria and the two Elizabeths, Duke of Edinburgh, Cliff Richard, John Simpson, Winston Churchill and John Bull to name but a few. Some of these are treated comically but most with a grown up attitude, the latter has been a strange experience for me as I have avoided being flippant!
