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    Indivisible: An Anthology of Contemporary South Asian American Poetry
    Indivisible: An Anthology of Contemporary South Asian American Poetry
    Indivisible: An Anthology of Contemporary South Asian American Poetry
    Ebook406 pages3 hours

    Indivisible: An Anthology of Contemporary South Asian American Poetry

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    The first anthology of its kind, Indivisible brings together forty-nine American poets who trace their roots to Bangladesh, India, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka. Featuring award-winning poets including Meena Alexander, Agha Shahid Ali, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, and Vijay Seshadri, here are poets who share a long history of grappling with a multiplicity of languages, cultures, and faiths. The poems gathered here take us from basketball courts to Bollywood, from the Grand Canyon to sugar plantations, and from Hindu-Muslim riots in India to anti-immigrant attacks on the streets of post–9/11 America. Showcasing a diversity of forms, from traditional ghazals and sestinas to free verse, experimental writing, and slam poetry, Indivisible presents 141 poems by authors who are rewriting the cultural and literary landscape of their time and their place. Includes biographies of each poet.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherUniversity of Arkansas Press
    Release dateMay 1, 2010
    ISBN9781610752077
    Indivisible: An Anthology of Contemporary South Asian American Poetry

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      Book preview

      Indivisible - Neelanjana Banerjee

      Introduction

      Divisions

      A Mangalorean Catholic, I pray in Konkani, count in Kannada, swear in Tulu, sing in Hindi, write in English, and dream in American.

      —Ralph Nazareth

      South Asian American poets have roots in a multiplicity of languages, cultures, and faiths. As a result, there will always be inherent contradictions in grouping together writers of such differing backgrounds. However, the experience of living and writing in the United States ensures that these poets share at least one thing in common: they are all active participants in the world of American literature. In compiling this anthology, we aim to encourage both an examination of what it means to be an American poet writing today and an enriched understanding of the South Asian American experience. In light of this two-pronged mission, we hope that this anthology might play a role in enlivening the ongoing debates regarding both literary and ethnic divisions within the United States and the nature of our indivisibility, both as a nation and as a community of writers.

      While the history of literature is riddled with divisions, one key example of literary disunity is the split that occurred in the United States in the 1990s between writers claiming to represent quite distinct schools of poetry. Schisms appeared between New Formalism and Spoken Word, between introspective lyric forms, narrative identity-based poetry, and the theoretical constructs of Language Poetry.¹ Consequently, by the end of the twentieth century, American poetry seemed both overly academic and deeply divided, leading to a reduction in a general readership at home, while diminishing its standing abroad. In the last few years, however, the boundaries between these different aesthetic schools are increasingly becoming blurred. There is an exciting sense of the possibilities of cross-fertilization as a growing number of poets adapt and assimilate each other’s techniques, themes, and forms. Nevertheless, it should be noted that this process of exchange and resynthesis is already well established among American poets with South Asian roots, many of whom have extensive experience of borrowing and transforming ideas from a multitude of different traditions. Such writers are often equally at ease with narrative form as with fragmentation, with discontinuity as with dactyls. Thus, Tanuja Mehrotra’s threaded ghazals (a form Mehrotra created) merge the lyrical iterations of the traditional ghazal with the disjunctions of postmodern writing. Even when we consider the oeuvres of individual poets, we see a pluralism of form and content. For example, Faisal Mohyuddin’s work includes both the long-form narrative poem, embracing history and politics, and short bittersweet satires charting modern-day love.

      In his critical analysis of contemporary American poetry, Richard Silberg notes that the best U.S. poets today form a distinctive sphere with many different parallel poetries, relatively equal, blurring and fusing across their boundaries.² We would like to suggest that the range of poetry being written by South Asian Americans today, with all its distinct and symbiotic forms, characterizes much of what is most valuable in current U.S. writing. We would argue that, rather than being relegated to a literary backwater, South Asian American poets are an essential—and indivisible—part of the landscape of American

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