My favorite selection this week in the anthology, Asian American Poetry is a poem by Vandanna Khanna entited, "India of Postcards." Khanna loves to talk about "dust" If you asked her to describe the place of her birth, in one words, I'm guessing it would be "dust" because that word appeared in each of the five poems I read by her.
In this particular poem, she takes us on a journey through India, maybe because she's in search of something more than dust. The first stanza:
"We began in one corner of the city / and plowed through cows and dung / and scooters, marbled and dusted / streets to the other."
Just so you know, I'm in my room reading this poem out loud, and found a bitter and slightly angry tone to it. I think the shape of it suggests, a sense of urgency given there's no breaking for stanzas. So I steam rolled through it, as if I was on one of the scooters she mentions above.
And when I found the following line:
"We were / looking for the gods, for the one thing/ that shimmered more than silver, a pyramid/ or temple, a country--something we couldn't fit into our pockets."
I slowed down a bit and began to cry.
Because I already had established empathy. I already had read…
"The one thing we wanted we couldn't have"
in regards to something as simple as water and to know that it was the longing for “American - tasting water” left me as an American, feeling privileged, of course. But this poem also spoke of the fact that a country can create or covet so many material things like...
"trinkets / made of colored glass, hand-painted boxes, raw / silk..."
but there is nothing more treasured than what the Earth provides and sometimes real wealth is the things we can't even see or put in our pockets. It also spoke of the how it feels to not even see oneself as a part of a country.
"We wanted the India of postcards/ with our faces on the front."
So this poem is political, mystical, spiritual and full of imagery and sound. She wants the postcard to tell the whole truth but most postcards don't. She grounds us with the last line.
"We wanted the shards of something we can't name"
And this is what makes this piece so moving and universal because....don't we all?
~Venus
I love the contradictions in India of Postcards." How the speaker says:
ReplyDeleteThe only thing we wanted we couldn’t have:
Water—unbottled—un-boiled—pure, sweat,
American tasting water (9-11).
Clearly, the speaker wants much more than American water. She wants the comfort of her American home, but also an ancestral home, “ the shards of something we can’t name” (25).
The sense of isolation and dislocation are sharp, yet fit so smoothly in into the narrative that it creates a breathtakingly complex poem.
Right, right. The examination here finds how the images broaden us to a larger statement about conditions not only what is but also what isn't; what is had, and what is needed. Very good connection Venus
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