As I was reading the poems for this week, I was really interested in the complex relationship between the poet of color and the idea of home. For the poet of color even if they are born in America or have American citizenship there is always this question of “going home” and where that home is. I think this is best expressed in the work of Vandana Khanna.
In the poem Spell, the narrator and her companion are traveling through India. Her descriptions of the city going by are a mixture of positive and negative images that seem to address the feelings of confusion for a person who is coming to a place that her parents call home but that she has no concrete connection with. The images are juxtaposed in such away that even the readers are not sure how they are supposed to feel:
“Outside the car window—everything surging—
children scratching glass, never having seen anyone so pale,
broken animals, roads bitten away. India. When I look back
I will remember you crying in the heat of the car,
before we reached the Taj, before we climbed up
the steps, hot grass then cool marble under our feet. We thought
we had seen everything—the President’s house, India Gate with its guards
and faded postcards, Quitar Minar where the man pulled
your arms behind your back, around the pillar for good luck.
You hoped it was worth the ache in your back that followed.
We traveled the city like we didn’t belong, a place I should call home
but as foreign to me as to you.” (Asian American Poetry, 80)
At first the image that we get of India is rough and painful, “surging”, “broken” and “bitten away” but at the same time there are these grand images of the Presidents house and this bringing of good luck. The grand images of modern India and spiritual India are not enough to take away from the broken animals, heat and pain. And yet the narrator recognizes that there should be a connection here, “a place I should call home but as foreign to me as to you.” What is home to her parents and grandparents cannot, simply through visiting, be home to her. While there is the connection of ancestral history there is no personal history for her there except for what is being built out of this visit. She can name these places but she cannot connect with India on the street level.
The poem that follows it is The India of Postcards, where we truly get to see the disconnection between the narrator and the country, which she should call home. Again we get these negative images of an India steeped in illness: “there are so many—cholera, malaria, /meningitis.” (AAP, 81) This time these images are juxtaposed with the place the narrator does call home: “The only thing we wanted we couldn’t have:/ Water—unbottled, un-boiled—pure, sweet, / American-tasting water.” For the first time we get a truly positive description and it’s about America and the privileges of living there. There is a greatness to being able to say you have traveled to India, this we see in the trinkets that the narrator picks up, “hand-painted boxes, raw silk” but there is no beauty in staying there. There is only the ugliness of the disease, heat, dirtiness and cramped spaces. This place that someone calls home the narrator cannot because she cannot find the thing that is in the postcard, the beauty of truly being a tourist and not having to think about what is happening to a people that the narrator should call her own.
The struggle of home is something that all poets of color face. We even see it in the Indigenous poets from the Pacific Rim. Specifically I’m thinking of Po by Brandy Nalani McDougall. What McDougall is focusing on is the time before now, in a purer time that seems so beautiful, the illusion of “home”: “ Before the land was tamed by industry/ the Oceanside resorts and pineapple plantations, / before the cane knife’s rust, the dark time sickness…”(Effigies, 59). There is always a searching for the poet of color for the home of there parents or ancestors memories that they cannot connect to. There is a point where the poet wants to connect with their ancestral homeland, as opposed to the land that they call home, America. There is something about the creation of the space known as America, which makes it impossible to completely connect with the ancestral homeland. There is only the search for whats “Under all the glitter, / we wanted the shards of something we can’t name” (AAP, 81)
As I was reading and thinking about the issue of home I just kept thinking of all the times that I hear of people telling people of different ethnic backgrounds to go back to where they come from or to go home. Home is such a complicated thing for a lot of people but it especially is for those who are second and third generation Americans. There is no home but America for them and yet they feel the guilt of knowing that there is a country that they could call home but they can’t relate to it. Recently someone said to me, “If you went home you’d be eating spicier food than this.” and I asked “ You mean to Menlo Park? No I don’t think I would.” The person rolled their eyes at me and said “No I mean Africa.” This completely shocked me because I’m not second or third generation American. I have no idea how far I am in my family line from coming to America. How does it make any sense for me to call Africa home? Because there is an Ancestral connection? What truly makes a place home, is it ancestral memory or present memory? Even if I went to Africa today and met people that I had blood relation to I wouldn’t consider Africa home. What creates the place we know as home?
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one of my poets fb friends related a story of going out side of minneapple where she lives and the people in the smaller town asking her again and again where she was front..she kept saying minneapolis and they kept wanting something that matched her exotic looks. the home question is never satisfying bc you lose one forever and never fit in to the other. but people disrupted from home is what the u.s is about.
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I love your response to the ignorant remark. Ida said, "Right on!" had I been standing there. It shows a loyalty to self and what the self knows to be true that many people would not have the clarity of thought to recognize.
ReplyDeleteThe silliest part of the "Go Home" ridiculousness is that 100% of us were immigrants at some place in the chain. Not a single person living today has a "rightful" claim to this stolen place now named U.S. Those who live most closely with the land know, and pass down to their children, that She cannot be owned, and we thrive at her discretion. Our connection to a particular piece of earth is as much about the personality of that place as it is about our own.
Eboni -
ReplyDeleteI was thinking about this a lot too, in terms of place and the poet of color. Being first generation on one side of my family the question of connection to a place I've never lived in, a language I speak...somewhat, a food I love but a culture I've been immersed in fully only twice in my life. Should we feel connections to these places that we've never lived (if the immigration is in recent, immediate family history) but then we never truly feel completely at home in America as well because there are so many parts of our experience that cannot slot easily into the dominant American paradigm and yet yet when we try to organize around disconnects and difference in identity the party line is that "Everyone should just be an American" (at the same time we're being told to go home). Okay I went off the point a little but my point was that I really saw that in Khanna's poetry - trying to form a connection to a "home"land that everyone says you should be connected to but you just can't feel it. The need to connect to a cultural heritage our your parents but our connections to various identities that have been informed by a myriad of social/cultural/personal interactions sometimes disallow that connection because the experience of parent and child are just too distant from one another.
You should read Homelands: Wommen's Journeys Across Space, Race, and Time. Its a work that asks what "home" is to each writer and how. Not to mention it was written by two Mills Graduate Program Alums!
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