Shailja Patel: Rebel and renaissance woman

When my eyes caught the title Migritude, the word Negritude sprang to my mind. The introduction explains Migritude as a combination of ‘migrant’ and ‘attitude’, a loaded word in US parlance. To me, both connotations serve the poet’s intention. Nurtured on Negritude philosophy, I find it easy to see the link between Patel’s view and that of the founders and proponents of Negritude. Like them, Patel recognises and reclaims her state of being a migrant, along with the consequences attendant upon that reclamation.

Its combative stance notwithstanding, Migritude is adorable in its rebelliousness. For behind this tough-talking rebel is a thought-provoking Renaissance woman with an encyclopaedic knowledge of our world, past and present. No one is spared from her scathing criticism. From oppressive colonisers to neo-colonial exploiters, to strict parents who want the best for their children, Patel admonishes, rejects, or offers advice and reconciliation.

Migritude’s forty-nine pages could be a manifesto for the revision of world history. It deftly packs in two centuries of ravage and pillage of the so-called ‘undevelopable’ peoples of the world by a handful of European bandit nations. It also castigates independent African countries that have become the current oppressors and exploiters of their own citizens.

The volume is in two parts of seven and ten pieces respectively. It is a mesh of varying genres, unified by the poet’s eye-popping phraseology, inlaid with biographic footnotes. Though I devoured the volume in one sitting, reviewing it is a more difficult task. It is too delicate and too good to be touched. One doesn’t know what to focus on or what to ignore.

Patel is a veritable ‘onye oka okwu’ - a master word artist. Her philosophy is beyond her years, and she puts it out there in unique thought and word combinations. Many of her jaw-dropping lines and words jump out at you, but the poet warns:

‘before you claim a word, you steep it/in terror and shit / in hope and joy and grief / …you have to sweat and curse it / …pray and keen it / …you have to earn/its meaning.

One asks ‘What kind of new thinking is this?’

For many readers who experienced direct colonisation, Migritude will make painful reading. It is a throwback to when we were less than nothing, or at best, robotic machines serving inhumane masters who uprooted light at gun point, sowed darkness across the world.

How Ambi Became Paisley takes the reader through years of exploitation carried out in the most unthinkable ways in Africa and Asia. The poet asks:

‘Have you ever sliced a heart on a curve? Which piece would you keep? How many ways can you clone an empire? Dice a people, digit by digit? How do you price a country? What’s the mark-up on the shapes of fruit in the dreams of its people?’

And how does one handle these types of questions?

In Idi Amin, the poet speaks for the entire Indian population of East Africa, who suffered the atrocities unleashed by the tyrant, backed by Britain, the US and Israel, countries that could do business with him.

In The Jewellery, she talks briefly about the mother, the central pillar of the family who struggles to save family’s meagre fortune in jewellery. She travels in winter to Britain to put the savings in Midlands Bank for her daughters. The poet returns to Kenyan history, the rapes and torture perpetrated by the British on women in the Mau Mau liberation struggle. Perhaps the fate of these women inspired Swore I’d ever Wear Clothes I couldn’t Run or Fight in. Here, she takes on the sari, the traditional garment that:

‘made you vulnerable. A walking target. Saris made you weak.’

She asks:

‘How could I run if a man attacked me, and I was wearing a sari? How would I fight?’

Shilling Love is perhaps my favourite piece. It speaks for most third world parents who act their love for their children instead of speaking it:

‘They never said / they loved us/those words were not / in any language / spoken by my parents. 1975 / fifteen Kenyan shillings to the British pound / my mother speaks battle. Love is a luxury / priced in hard currency / ringed by tariffs…’

Though the tension between mother and daughter is thick, the poet still pays loving homage to her mother, the family soldier who arms her daughters with education so they can:

‘take on every citadel.’

The hard-working silent father is also honoured for he gave up his dream job to:

‘wring profit from underneath cars’
to feed his family. He is a man of honor who claims:

‘you must / finish what you start you must / march until you drop you must / give your life for those / you bring in to the world.’

This first half of the book ends on a sad note of what it means to be a brown citizen of East Africa:

‘I learn like a stone in my gut that / third-generation Asian Kenyan will never / be a Kenyan enough / all my patriotic fervour / will not turn my skin black’

Part Two of Migritude opens with The Making/Migrant Song/Sound the Alarm. It contains the most memorable thoughts of the poet for her parents, as well as what I consider the most beautiful line in the book. Thus, to sound the alarm [you">

‘make it out of the sari that wraps you / in tender celebration / like the mother you long for / make it out of the mother you got / in all her wounded magnificence…Distill it from the offering / of his hands / to fifty years of labour to guarantee / that his daughters would never / have to work with theirs make it / to find out / what your own hands are good for.'

In one breath she celebrates her parents, in the other she takes on arrogant American attitude towards new immigrants. Once more, Patel speaks for the poor and deprived of this world, as she tries to share the philosophy of her people with these Americans who have:

‘never seen anyone divide a doughnut into three pieces.’

She explains:

‘We calibrate hunger precisely. Define ‘enough’ differently from you. Enough is what’s available shared between everyone present. We are incapable of saying, as you can so easily: Sorry, there’s not enough for you.

She proceeds to lecture them on the wisdom of deprived peoples and of American presumptions about immigrants:

‘How much we can do without is our strength – but you find it comic. Pitiable. Miserly. You ‘just can’t imagine’ how a family of eight lives in a one-room apartment…You mistake austerity, living without waste, for deprivation. You see, it’s our job to protect you from the discomfort of seeing inequality…’

This segment is compelling because every poor person, including non-immigrants, can identify with the poet’s observations of how wealthy Americans exploit immigrants by underpaying them for their services. As if that were not enough, they treat them as homeless beggars on whom they can dump their refuse. The poet literally explodes with anger in this segment. Fortunately, her sister comes to the rescue with a birthday gift for her in Sister/Cape. It is a scarlet wool cape, which cost fifty pounds, with which her sister said to her:

‘I see you. I believe in you. You shine.’

Though she wore this gift to every interview and every exam:

‘I didn’t make it. I failed the exams. I lost my work permit. I burned all my boats. I came to America.’

In America her aunt teaches her the importance of family, for the family forms a protective wall around you. Thus the poet knows:

‘what I carry in my suitcase. I carry my family. I carry my history. Over my saris, I wear my sisters.’

Maasai Women returns to the history of assault on Kenyan women by British soldiers, from1965 to 2001. Survivor One, an aspiring student, is raped by soldiers, and gives birth to a red-skinned baby; her education is over.

She still wonders if they attacked her because she greeted them in English, the language that was supposed to be her key to the world.

Dreaming in Gujurati retraces the poet’s childhood days when white children called her names and her elders made fun of her broken Gujurati. She brags of her father who speaks five languages stretching from India to East Africa:

‘Yet English / shrinks him down / before white men / who think their flat cold spiky words / make the only reality.’

She comes back with a challenge question for all immigrants:

‘If we cannot name it does it exist? What happens to a tongue of heavy-milk cows, earthen pots…when its children grow up in Silicon Valley?’

She will retrieve from Gujurati:

‘words I can weep and howl and devour / words I can kiss and taste and dream / this tongue / I take back.’

Here then is the return to the source for inspiration that Negritude advocates.

Shilling Love Part Two deals with what every immigrant fears the most – the US immigration service, which stifles immigrants’ efforts to bring over their loved ones for reunion. In this movement we can feel the angst of both parents and daughters as they wait feverishly for reunion at the airport. But:

‘four hours after / their plane landed / they have not emerged. And we know with hopeless rage / of third-world citizens / African passport holders / that the sum of their lives and labour / dreams and sacrifice / was measured sifted weighed found / wanting / by the INS.'

Finally the exhausted and exasperated father exclaims:

‘take the passports / take them / stamp them / no readmission EVER / just let me out to see my daughters.’

The volume ends with a Mother’s Letter and Shailja’s Response: Born to A Law. In her letter, the mother accepts that Shailja will probably never get married. Therefore she decides to give Shailja her Mangal Sutra (traditional marriage necklace):

‘Since you have stubbornly refused to get married, it seems your mangal sutra has to come from your mother instead of your husband!’

She is proud of her daughters though, for her friends always

‘say that each of my daughters is two sons put together!’

Shailja’s response:

‘Mother, I am forging a ship of glittering songs to sail your jewels in. Staking a masthead of verbs to fly your saris from! This work which snakes across borders, dodges visa controls / this is my intention, declaration, lifelong execution…’

Migritude forges fresh expressions that invigorate and inspire budding poets to take risks, experiment. My advice to readers would be ‘Don’t gulp it down in one sitting, it can be emotionally draining’, but Migritude is a must-read for all of who are tired of centuries-old traditional English poetry forms.

* Phanuel Akubueze Egejuru is professor of English at Loyola University in New Orleans, USA.
* Shailja Patel is a Kenyan poet.
* Migritude is published by Lietocolle in a bilingual English-Italian edition (ISBN 978-88-7848-400-9).
* Please send comments to [email protected] or comment online at http://www.pambazuka.org/.