Prac Crit

From the Ambient Source

by Daljit Nagra

Interview

by Edward Doegar

We’re due to meet in the piazza outside the British Library. The day is warm; it would be hot if it weren’t for the intermittent push of the breeze. The piazza looks faintly foreign – the sky a lazy, unrealistic azure against the decisive angles of red brick. Every so often a thick, fumy gust of King’s Cross air spoils my daydream. Daljit has not arrived, which makes him uncharacteristically late; uncharacteristic of my experience.

My experience began in 2009 when I enrolled at the Faber Academy and met Daljit, the tutor. It is a role that suits him; teaching, as well as writing, is a vocation. He worked for many years in secondary schools as both an English teacher and guidance counsellor and is now a Senior Lecturer at Brunel University. In addition to his paid work, he spends much of his free time encouraging and mentoring emerging poets. I daren’t count the hours he has spent helping me. If poetry has become the lens through which I see the world most clearly then Daljit is my optician, changing my prescription every so often to stop me walking into the walls of my own opinions. Even in accepting this interview he was generous and encouraging, making it clear he wouldn’t read the outcome since he didn’t want to inhibit any criticism I might offer.

By the time we met in 2009, Daljit had already published his first book, Look We Have Coming To Dover!, which won the Forward Best First Collection prize and South Bank Show Decibel Award. It made him only the second living non-white author on Faber’s poetry list (the other was one of his heroes, Derek Walcott). In the eight years since he’s been busy, publishing a second collection of poems, Tippoo Sultan’s Incredible White-Man Eating Tiger-Toy Machine!!!, and a version of the Ramayana, both of which were shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot prize. His most recent collection, British Museum, was published in May. He’s currently Poet in Residence at BBC Radio 4 and was recently elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

So whatever else he is, Daljit is now undeniably a member of the literary establishment. And yet he’s changed remarkably little in the time I’ve known him, retaining and relishing an outsider’s perspective.  Often this has found its way into the poems as subject matter – exploring the pressures of literary tradition, the demands of the market, the cast of the canon. An early poem, ‘Booking Khan Singh Kumar’ (the name is a pseudonym, since discarded – an amalgam of conflicting Indian identities), develops a refrain of ‘Did you make me for the gap in the market / Did I make me for the gap in the market’. It proves ancestor to the belligerent heckles of ‘GET OFF MY POEM WHITEY’ in the latest book, the subject of Anna Thomas’s essay in this issue of Prac Crit.

Head-on antagonism is tempered by an outsider’s anxiety. Some of Daljit’s poems try to shake us out of our dogmatic slumbers, others seduce us, but none take our agreement for granted. Yet in the pub, Daljit often has me nodding along before I know it, suddenly a co-conspirator. He is a strange mixture of boisterous noise and bashfulness. There is something provocative about his enthusiasm, fervent in opposition and questioning in consensus – a well-intended antagonism that hears other points of view. I’ve noticed that when he is listening most carefully, he stops meeting my eye. His gaze falls into focus on the middle distance over my shoulder. It makes me consider what I’m saying more strictly, slows the pace of my presumptions. Likewise, later, when the ‘interview’ begins, he will become more careful and deliberate: formally provisional and querying.

After only a few minutes Daljit arrives, a bundle of affectionate energy: smiley and apologetic; solicitous and gentle; awkward and kind. We argue a little about who will pay for the coffee and then hesitate over several suitable tables. Eduardo Paolozzi’s statue of Newton comes into my eye line. Newton sets his compass either side of Daljit’s head like a phrenologist trying to measure the spirit inside. I feel I better leave Daljit to his own words…

ED

We’re sitting here in the piazza of the British Library in order to discuss your new book, British Museum, so Britishness seems a good place to start. What pulls you to such places, such themes? Towards Britishness?

DN

It is my birth-home, Edward, it’s where I live. And maybe we have to seek constantly a re-affirmation of that for ourselves – that I really am here, I really live here – because so many things are constantly pushing you off the centre ground of your dwelling. Maybe people like us –  outsiders, or inside outsiders – maybe we feel that we have to keep asserting our identity into being, maybe it’s an unconscious impulse.

ED

And do you feel that about the physical space too? I know that you often spend time here, at the British Library, as a preferred place to work. Is that purely for the amenities, because it’s a nice place, or do you feel you need to assert your right to be here by being here?

DN

I hadn’t really thought about it like that. I think I just want to use the resources, because there are these ineffable book resources. In that sense a place like this represents the best of British identity to me. In the way that the place where I grew up would represent the worse of British identity: a very white, deprived, racist, knife-stabbing area.

ED

Where was that?

DN

Near Heathrow airport, a place called Yiewsley. Apparently it’s still a very white working class, deprived area. I work near there now, which is really peculiar, so I feel I’ve come full circle but in a very different role. Do you feel that sense of British identity? I feel my name, my skin colour, makes me have to affirm myself, whether it’s just to wake myself up to it – to question my own identity – or whether it’s to challenge or provoke other people.

ED

I don’t know. I think it’s alive as a constant question in a way that it might not be for some people. The question ‘Do you feel appropriately British?’ seems embedded into a lot of experiences…

DN

But I guess we both exist between codes. My code would be between my Indian background and the white identity I have; for you it’s the same, you’ve got a white identity and an Asian identity.

ED

…perhaps…

DN

But is it more an intra-identity for you rather than an external one?

ED

Well, for me, there’s always a concern or a worry about dressing up. You know, about appropriating an identity I don’t have a right to; the White British part too, but especially the Indian side. Do you have any concerns around that sense of throwing the voice, or dressing up? Many of your poems, particularly in the first two books, have been dramatic monologues often written from the point of view of a first generation immigrant, which you’re not.

DN

‘Dressing up’ is probably a really good way to put it. I’ve got that ‘Vox Populi, Vox Dei’ poem in this book. That’s a form of dressing up – taking on the guise of someone else’s sensibility, then inserting something of a different identity into it. You’re wearing very English clothes but with something of the Indian-ness or maybe the brown skin creeping through. So you can’t quite wear that disguise. I read some of those poems as parody poems to a certain extent, slightly comic; say the British Museum one or the Globe poem in my second book. I like that tension. To me – as the writer – they don’t feel genuine; they don’t feel earnest, while they appear to be earnest. Maybe it’s about license. Do I have the license to take on this authoritative voice? I quite like the comedy of taking on this high Shakespearean voice, which I don’t see as an earnest voice.

ED

And where is this coming from? Is it a form of irony? I know that you were very interested in the German Romantics when you were working on your version of the Ramayana. Has that fed into that earnest/non-earnest approach?

DN

Yeah, I spent a year and a half reading German Romantics, for some reason. I was working on this other project, and I think that’s fed into a lot of the poetry in this later collection. Maybe it’s that shifting between spaces which Romantic poetry was so aware of; understanding that they didn’t exist exclusively as a national project, how they tried to embrace other nationalities and other sensibilities – whether it be Goethe with his Divan, the translations of Persians, or the way quite a lot of those poets took on the North Indian tradition, engaging with, say, Kalidasa. Those principles fed into my writing from that Globe poem that ends the second collection onwards, where the voices… it feels like parody to me, it creates a slightly ironic space between me and my words. I don’t know how that works for the reader, but what interests me is the frisson between me, the writer, and these words coming out. They almost feel liminal, if I can put it that way, these words you see in stone, in epitaphs, these really loud Latinate wonderful Shakespearean words; for me, when I write them they feel slightly humorous.

ED

And do you feel any anger at not being about to use those words earnestly? You might think that it must be thrilling to write earnestly in that register…

DN

Yeah, I hadn’t thought of it as anger; I think I’ve seen it as mischief. A place of colonisation. The occupation of someone else’s language – and the pleasure of that. Now I’m going to be highfalutin! I’m deliberately going to Shakespeare up! Deliberately put on a grand voice. Almost taking on Auden, or Heaney or Walcott, those big bastion voices. That’s the way I see it myself; I’m not really sure if that’s how the reader sees it, I just don’t know. But that’s the way it is for me in the act of writing those poems. It’s wonderfully humorous to me, a parodic event.

ED

Is this part of a purposeful change in your writing? There’s a change of tone or emphasis of expression between the last book and British Museum isn’t there? I did a bit of counting and you’ve moved from having 139 exclamation marks, to having 3 in this book.

DN

Have I got three in this book? They’re not mine are they? I know I’ve got ‘Goats and monkeys!’ That’s Shakespeare’s.

ED

You’ve got Eliot too, and there’s one that’s yours – ‘No English talk at home!’ at the start of ‘Cane’ too.

DN

Well, again, that’s not really me… in the sense that it’s the mother voice in the poem, which the poem explains is said in Punjabi.

ED

So clearly you didn’t want any exclamations in your voice. And that’s a big shift in style from former books. The exclamatory mode seems to have been replaced by questions. In the last book, there were 38 questions, in British Museum there are 117 questions.

DN

Are there 117, really? Wow, I had no idea there were that many.

ED

Often the questions are rhetorical or appear to be, playing the hinge of that possibility perhaps… Why, was that shift needed?

DN

Well, I remember talking to my editor, Matthew Hollis, when I’d shown him a bunch of poems that were slightly quieter and he’d said try and do more of that if you can. I think at that point I started thinking about the question mark as a musical principle for the book. Because the thing I really liked about the exclamation mark was the kind of lift-off it has. In the earlier books I was really trying to work the poem, to warrant the exclamation. Whereas in this book I like the idea of the question mark, the way it curls up at the end, the way the voice curls up. The question mark felt metaphorical in itself, the musical principle of the question mark felt a good metaphorical match for the inquiry into the nation state within the book. This turning in on itself, the curving in of the voice as it comes to the end. In a way that Britishness, for me, in my collection, is about questioning ourselves within ourselves – and then, sort of, looking out. That musical principle seemed to energise the work. So I think a lot of the work in this book came from the question mark, it’s peculiar how the work could sort of come out of the punctuation. That’s peculiar isn’t it?

ED

In spite of, or perhaps because of all the questions in the book, it feels somehow more certain than Tippoo Sultan’s Incredible White Man Eating Tiger Toy Machine!!!.

DN

Yeah, I feel part of the effect of the exclamation has always been throwing the onus on the reader. How to deal with this heightened, exclamatory, ejaculatory event that’s going on on the page. But with a question, because it’s quiet it has a quiet confidence. The question seemed to have a relationship to political inquiry that had a certain certitude, where you could create contradictions and set up one proposition against another which would be polar opposites. They had to be definite. Once or twice in the book I talk about that split-nation mode or mentality. So I think the question mark really worked well for that kind of thinking.

ED

And how does that relate back to the comic? You’re saying there’s a comic element to the inquiry in ‘Broadcasting House’ or ‘British Museum’: is the question mark involved in that comedic setup?

DN

The more rhetorically lifted, the more certain I appear, the more in tune I am with the canonical register, the more laughable the whole experience feels to me, as if I’m almost on autopilot mimicking a great voice. Comedic in the sense that there’s a space there that’s comedic to me, as the writer, because I’m not sure this voice is plausible to the reader. That someone who is from an ethnic minority can actually speak on behalf of ‘us’.

ED

So the humour you find in it is a form of insecurity and anxiety then? That’s not an inherently positive statement…

DN

It’s a kind of nervous laugh, instead of a confident ‘ha ha’. A betraying laugh maybe.

ED

A betraying laugh that’s sort of about whether you as the writer have the right to speak for ‘us’. Is that right?

DN

Yeah, that legitimacy issue.

ED

And that legitimacy is tested in the pronouns used throughout the book. There’s an obsessional drift between first person singular and plural, from the ‘I’ to the ‘we’ to the ‘us’, which is quite deliberate.

DN

Yeah, I want to capture that anxiety. It took a lot of work to try and get those right. Hopefully there’s a tension across the collection. In the first book, I had some poems that were pro-arranged marriage and some that were anti-arranged marriage, whereas in this book there are poems that are pro-this pronoun and anti-that pronoun. I wanted the book to feel like the pronouns were arguing against each other, that they almost undermine each other.

ED

Do you find it problematic when other people use ‘us’ or ‘we’?

DN

Yeah, absolutely. I think it comes from that, doesn’t it? When you see other people talking on your behalf. And underneath it all, I guess, is this question: can anyone speak for a complex society? Especially a complex multicultural society. Some of this led me back to thinking about Hannah Arendt when she explains that nation states are really bad constructions. You need to have two conditions for nation states to work: the myth of the origin of soil (that people come from that soil) and that we’re a homogenous people. And at no time in history has that ever really happened, yet we impose the theory of nation states onto people who are always very mixed and hybrid. We still live with that kind of idea. So for anybody to speak for all of us I think is a really perverse act. That in itself is a kind of comic act, but it’s never seen as comic – so that’s why it becomes very funny. Because it’s seen as a serious event.

ED

You’ve a couple of poems in the book that are effectively praise poems for writers you really admire. There’s ‘From the Ambient Source’ about Heaney, which seems to imply that he was speaking for you… is that fair, or is it more ironized than that?

DN

Well, more that he’s a mentor figure. That he teaches me how to speak with gravitas. Gravitas in the sense of being able to speak earnestly, respecting the earnest voice that you are constructing. I think Heaney seems to be at one with the voice, the self and the voice. In the way that Walcott seems at one with the self and voice. It’s finding a way to bridge the gap between the self and what’s said. Instead of feeling too comic. So I admire their serious, earnest devotion to the craft, but for someone with a more contemporary sensibility, I think it is hard to achieve. Living in London, for example, you can’t speak for such a mix of people. It’s just very different.

ED

There’s a line in that poem, ‘so we’re uprooted, yet rooted, utterly humane’: is that something you’re searching for – the resolved paradox of that?

DN

Yeah, and within that being rooted, feeling like you belong in an entitled space. In a legitimized space. So that you can be uprooted and know that when you land you’ll land somewhere secure and safe and wanted. Which I think Heaney probably felt in some way in Ireland, in a way that an ethnic minority doesn’t necessarily feel. That the moment you become uprooted people are questioning you, your place there. I guess the whole of my collection is about being uprooted, in the sense that a question is an uprooted thing – it’s an elevated, uplifted voice that wants to land at an answer. But by problematizing, creating questions, am I seen as a rooted person? Do I speak for a community? It feels important as a writer to feel that you’re connecting with people in a serious, earnest way.

ED

So it’s important to you to be doing that in a serious and earnest way and yet…

DN

I don’t feel I can do it.

ED

You don’t feel that you can ever do it?

DN

No, not yet, not this far. I haven’t ever felt I could do that. Maybe it’s a distrust of words. The words innately are game, are play, and therefore how can you construct really complex, serious, profound thoughts with words? You can use numbers to construct laws of the universe, but constructing laws of humanity is very hard.

ED

So do you see that as something that poetry ought to be doing, constructing the laws of humanity? Shelley and all that?

DN

Hopefully you feel that when you’re writing poems, that what you’re saying might be really important in some way, rather than farcical. I’ve been reading a lot about tyrants recently and I was reading something about Dionysius of Sicily from the 5th century. He wrote loads of poetry alongside being a friendly tyrant. On the island he had this philosopher, Philoxenus, locked up and he asked for him to be taken out of jail and brought before him. Dionysius of Sicily then reads some of his poems to Philoxenus and asks him what he thinks… and the philosopher says ‘well I’d rather be sent back to jail if you don’t mind… your poems are that bad’! I think we all live in fear of that. That the clever man might come up to us, like Philoxenus, maybe the clever scientist, that they come up to us and say ‘actually, fuck, this is so terrible just lock me up – I’d rather die than hear your rubbish’. As writers we all live in fear of the clever man, the Philoxenus. We’re all a bit like Dionysius of Sicily: he thought his poetry was really good, but we come up against a clever man – and my god!

ED

But Dionysius of Sicily was making the law through decrees, not through his poetry…

DN

But it sounds like he wants his poetry validated. He obviously wants to weaken the philosopher by locking him up in jail to weaken his critical faculties, but even then the philosopher has enough faculty – you know, it’s the lion brought out of the cage in the Coliseum, isn’t it? The bull, the matadors – if the bull were to rise up against the matador.

ED

So how do you feel about performance then? If you’ve got that anxiety about someone calling you out, saying ‘no, that’s awful, get off!’ – how do you feel about performing your poems for an audience?

DN

That’s a really good question, because I used to feel quite comfortable performing – say, my first two books and the Ramayana – maybe because they were openly Baroque and comic and complicated and noisy and loud. I thought I’d feel much happier reading from this book – but I feel like I’m going through the motions a bit. Which is really disappointing. I haven’t really been enjoying my readings. I don’t know if it’s a fourth book sensation or whether it’s something about the work itself, which appears to be sincere in a way that the previous work never was. The earlier work was openly trying to be riotous and present me as a fool. I really enjoyed playing that part, the fool. Whereas here I’m trying to take on a more statesmanlike figure and I don’t feel quite comfortable with that at the moment. With this book I’m not sure if I believe in the poems – I believe in their contest of ideas or thoughts, but I don’t believe in the sincere voice. And I think that sometimes when you do a reading people are after the ‘ahhhh’ poem, where at the end they’ll say ‘ahhhh, that’s a lovely thought’. And I’m not sure that these poems are doing that, giving the ‘ahhhh’ voice or the heartfelt, personal emotion. I think they’re slightly more complicated than that.

ED

Well, there’s a mixture of styles of poems in the book. Because the book actually starts with an apparently personal poem that’s incredibly tender, ‘Father of Only Daughters’. And there are several poems that certainly appear to be personal and heartfelt in terms of autobiography.

DN

Yeah.

ED

So how does that play into that question, because on the one hand you’ve got these bigger rhetorical poems that have shifting pronouns that may or may not be sincere. But then you’ve also got these poems that appear sincerely personal.

DN

I think they’re much more a throwback to the stuff from the first or second book, where I’d start poems from the personal outwards. So I think they’re still there. I’m not sure if some of these are slightly more complex than the early poems, like the shame one – shame to shame – or ‘Cane’. It’s still really important to me to present the Asian male, in a sense extricated or excommunicated from a community. We often hear about Asian women but it’s really important to hear the Asian male story as well. So it feels these poems are something that’s trying to correct a misconception. So they’re from an earnest space in a slightly different way. But I always think they’re slightly tucked away in the books and slightly enjoy their tucking away. I know the first one is a very personal one, but generally they feel quite tucked away.

ED

One of those poems that starts with the personal and turns outwards is the poem ‘Even when we’re touching we’re making love’. This starts as an incredibly attentive domestic love poem about the speaker and his wife and then it turns to reflect on the threat and danger that many women feel just walking down the street at night. That shift is really startling in the poem.

DN

It’s taken me a while to get to that style as a writer, to not foreground the ego of diction and just letting the subject matter speak for itself. Yeah, those poems feel like a real responsibility in the face of the horrors of migration in recent years, which has really shocked me. And I think that they change the style of the book. I made myself watch Channel 4 News and read articles about migrants walking from country to country trying to find a home. And that’s really unsettled my feelings about Europe and Britain. And I think that’s crept into the book. Those poems are coming from there, asking us to consider our privileges again, to think what cosy, comfortable lives we lead. And having seen this from my window – I live in Harrow, a nice suburban area I guess – and I see women walking in the middle of the road at night. I’ve spoken to friends about this and quite a few women say, ‘yeah, I live in Hackney and if I’m coming home at night I walk in the middle of the road’ and I ask ‘well, why not the pavement?’ and they say, ‘have you ever lived in Hackney?’ You know that kind of thing. It sounds like it’s a really common phenomenon. It’s a much more socially aware poem, taking on responsibilities on behalf of other people maybe.

ED

So are the longer, rhetorical poems in the book (‘British Museum’, ‘Broadcasting House’) are those more about the responsibility of language, then? For language to be able to accommodate us and for us to live in? Is that more their subject – because they also seem to be socially conscious poems?

DN

Yeah, I guess in those poems the language is looking up at vast institutions and trying to speak for itself in the face of them, trying to understand its own role in constructing meaning and understand its own role in helping us define identity and our politics. So whether that’s ‘Broadcasting House’ – what is a British voice? – or ‘British Museum’ – how can we think of ourselves as we go into the museum? How can we use language to understand who we are, rather than just reaffirming our Western taste? Can we find ways for language to speak up for itself? So underneath it’s a responsibility, but I guess it’s more how language can stick up for itself in the face of the cement and concrete and glass that’s been constructed by man. In the face of science, I guess, and technology.

ED

Do you feel of yourself that you’re a happy poet? Do you feel that you’re an optimist in terms of your own poetic?

DN

That’s a hard question because you fluctuate so much as a writer. In that you despair of the irrelevance of your work – the Philoxenus coming up and laughing at you – but also you feel on good days the importance of it as a minority art, that it has something of joy to offer. I think that comes partly when I read other writers whose work I particularly enjoy. I think maybe someone else might enjoy my work and you see the value of an aesthetic, whatever that might be. The way Heaney finds a voice to talk about the conflict in Ireland, I would want to find an equivalent voice that helps us think about Empire. Because too often I feel you get these polarised perspectives and it’s too hard to inhabit a centre ground without turning somebody off. You need to find ways to welcome people into the room of conversation about really difficult issues.

ED

Do you think you poems are welcoming in that sense?

DN

I don’t know. I always feel I might be quite provocative, because I quite like taking on uncomfortable positions. Not so much in this collection I don’t think.

ED

There’s an antagonism to your style.

DN

Yeah, I hope so.

ED

Is that borne out of anger or anxiety?

DN

I think part of it is the prickliness of language. When you position it in certain places language doesn’t feel right if it’s calm and settled and quiet; it seems to rise up of its own volition. It’s like you can’t get a smooth calm sea, the wind hits it, and so something in the brain hits language. When you’re writing about a certain subject the drama of it lifts the words up – it kind of throws them up in the air. I think that’s where the prickliness comes from – it’s language-led, rather than self-led. Language itself gets angry and confident and violent and sarcastic and ironic.

From the Ambient Source

by Daljit Nagra

Approaching midnight and floating into the train
a silver-haired woman takes a seat. From her bag
slowly appears Heaney’s The Haw Lantern.

She flicks his leaves in a solemnness vacancy.
I’ve had too many pints of Heaneyken and smile
at my feeble joke while she settles near Clearances.

He’s propped so his verses starlight and populate
our underground. So her frailness seems unburdened
in a world where hope stands brave as Stormont.

I love the way his journey relaxes the vexed mind
so we garner the vocation of peace his lines demand.
So we’re uprooted, yet rooted, utterly humane.

A stop and the silvery woman must vanish.
I imagine her hover back to the pages of his airy Haw.
A motherly emissary and human phantoms dispersed

to fluoresce his work, and float as his lantern bearers
who wake me from my doldrums. Who charge me
for his mud haunted rhymes. My life is replenished.

Must he surge more alive now he’s so long gone?
I feel his heart through his meadow vowels, his words
from his island attachments wherever they please.

When he ploughs his Ireland, I see gourds and grains
sprout over the Raj. History becomes a raas, a roadmap
and texture of empire for nourishing grief with grace.

If he becomes my dream mentor, from beyond the tracks,
could he show me the way to dignify what we’ve buried?
That we merely host the train of accusative thought

from the angered outsider within. Could my mentor
guide me to gravitas discourse so we breach the divide
in ourselves for a shared memorial and commemoration:

the famines, the battles, our jurisprudence and chin-up…
We’ll always forge economic ties, could we board
the full-blown hoot of our past to embolden tomorrow?

I’d remain on the train of trains to never arrive,
ever lifted yet lowered and ready for a Mossbawn
visit, could we run through that again?

From British Museum (Faber, 2017).

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