A
city that boasts some
35 languages spoken in our streets deserves an on-line Gallery of Writers
to give voice to that clamour of stories and cultures. Grassroutes
is
a project hosted by the University
of Leicester
which 'is
designed to foster local, national and international appreciation –
as well as critical recognition - for the best of Leicestershire's
writing.' They
have sought out examples of 'transcultural
writing from the 1980s to the present ...' and
their website is well worth a look, featuring many faces familiar to
me but so many discoveries too. It makes you realise how the city is
positively buzzing with literary inspiration. We are fortunate to
have a number publicly funded organisations that promote literature
and writers and one of these, WritingEast Midlands,
collaborated with Grassroutes on a commission which went to the
talented AnitaSivakumaran.
The
resulting poetry sequence of 'FiveVoices Leicester'
are not so much dramatic monologues as poetic
dialogues. I really enjoyed the strong sense of diverse
Leicester voices - these poems have the wonderful immediacy of
conversations overheard on a bus or in a queue. And Sivakumaran
reveals that as a new arrival to the city, she would 'chat to the
locals' and this gave her the idea for their form. My favourite
poem is probably Auntie from the Nuffield Sauna.
On first reading I found the use of indirect as well as quoted speech
a little confusing as to who was saying what. But it repays a second
reading or better still reading aloud. One voice, that of the
self-declared 'Auntie', rattles along, gathering up the poet's brief
answers into her own torrent of conversation.
'Call me Auntie,' she says. 'Come sit down.'
She comes here every day. Keeps her fit.
Should she pour more water? I will?'
Sivakumaran
has a great ear for the idioms of this kindly, bossy voice with its
tag questions: 'I
must be Gujerati no? No?' English
phrasing with an Indian twist from a British Asian who's 'never
been' to
the subcontinent she speaks so much of. The listing conveys the older
woman's curiosity and the barrage of questions with which she gently
bullies her newly adopted 'niece':
My family, fortune, friends?
My height, weight, sun, moon and stars and their respective
houses?
My expectations of matrimony?
There
is a very winning humour here: 'she
needs good girls in her family'. But
more than that, the recurring lines about adding water to fire up the
sauna deftly reveal an underlying theme:
'Closest she gets to tropical heat ...
Ooo baba, the heat is now roasting.
It must be like this all the time, no, over there?'
I
found this quite haunting - a Leicester woman who apparently longs to
connect to that lost 'homeland' by re-creating its tropical heat in
an English sauna. It's a typical throwaway comment from a second or
third-generation child of immigrants whose identity is still
referenced by a faraway, never-visited place. Instead, place names
and foodstuffs locate her cultural belonging: 'Eat
ghar ka khana ... good for baby'.
As
the 'Auntie' bustles about, ready to return 'to
some cool English weather',
I was left wondering about the implied relationship of the younger
woman who sits quietly, towel-wrapped, in the background of the
conversation. This poet's persona is somewhat reluctant ('Before
I can back out')
when she's snared in the intimate space of the sauna but something
passes between them that goes beyond family credentials. And now I
liked that Sivakumaran has held herself back in the dialogue and left
that space for the reader to sense out the subtlety of this exchange.
Equally
engaging are The
Butcher on Queen's Road
('A
good strong cleaver like this ... chops clean'),
The
Neighbour
reclaiming her cat ( 'a
bit of a stray myself')
and two others poems that feature local writers reminiscing and
aspiring to be part of a 'centre
of the arts for the New England'.
While you're at it, take a look on the Gallery page at Sivakumaran's
powerful poem Citizens
which particularly resonates after recent events in India. I cannot
get over the image of a man in the street cupping his penis 'as
if holding a chick'.
