Loose Can(n)on: Literary Tradition in Daljit Nagra's British Museum - Academic ...
←
→
Page content transcription
If your browser does not render page correctly, please read the page content below
2021-4103-AJHA – 11 FEB 2021
1 Loose Can(n)on:
2 Literary Tradition in Daljit Nagra’s British Museum
3
4 This paper considers the ways in which the poet Daljit Nagra engages
5 with concepts of canon and tradition in his most recent collection,
6 British Museum (2017). Throughout the collection, Nagra provides
7 readers with a multifaceted insight into the ways in which a plurality
8 of ‚cultures‛ and ‚traditions‛ — literary, historical, political, religious —
9 might function within contemporary notions of what it means to be
10 British and to live, as a writer, with both the legacies and consequences
11 of literary heritage. British Museum, this paper argues, explores what
12 it means for Nagra to be connected to and grounded in the canons of
13 English Literature, and how he makes sense of his own position. The
14 discussion, like British Museum itself, is framed by a consideration of
15 what happens when we review canons of culture and their place
16 within an increasingly diverse society. Underlying the inevitable
17 conflicts and dislocation involved in (re-)defining traditions and
18 cultural canons, this paper considers the ways in which Nagra
19 identifies, through plurality, a fundamental desire for the meaningful
20 connection of canonical culture with the diverse 21st century world.
21
22 Keywords: Daljit Nagra, British Museum, tradition, English Literature,
23 literary canon
24
25
26 Introduction: Turning Traditions Upside Down
27
28 The publication of Daljit Nagra’s first two collections of poetry, Look
29 We Have Coming to Dover! (Nagra, 2005) and Tippoo Sultan’s Incredible
30 White-Man-Eating Tiger Toy-Machine!!! (Nagra, 2011), immediately
31 established him as a writer engaged with what Noel-Tod (2017: 36)
32 terms ‚the conundrum of national identity‛. Nagra’s interest in
33 changing perceptions of culture and in ideas of cultural ‚ownership‛
34 and appropriation has continued. Nagra is increasingly interested in
35 engaging creatively with (re-)readings both of liminal cultures and
36 societies in the process of change (Green, 2020) — even, and perhaps
37 especially, where this requires us to challenge received cultural
38 formations and ‚roots‛. Nagra’s subversive yet sensitive handling of
39 cultural transformations in Ramayana (Nagra, 2013) — by intention a
40 ‚bastardized‛ version that draws on a plethora of traditions —
12021-4103-AJHA – 02 FEB 2021
1 demonstrates his facility in enacting the ‚translation‛ of literary and
2 cultural artefacts as they come into contact with other traditions. Green
3 (2020: 3) sees Ramayana as ‚at the same time an act of ownership and
4 ‘de-ownering’‛. In many ways British Museum (2017) is engaged in a
5 similar project. In this case, however, it is the canons of mainstream
6 British culture and attitudes towards them that Nagra brings under his
7 creative microscope.
8 British Museum explores ‚the kinds of secondary movement‛
9 (Green, 2020: 5) traditions and canons have to make in the process of
10 cultural transition (Clifford, 1997). In negotiating these waters, Nagra
11 provokes his readers to consider whether and in what ways works of
12 art or other cultural productions are ever truly nationally definitive. He
13 considers the significant ways in which reading and interpretation
14 relate to cultural experience, adopting a stance that is both critical and
15 appreciative, or ‚aesthetic‛ in Rosenblatt’s sense of the word (1986). In
16 interesting ways this highlights how, for Nagra, modalities of writing
17 and reading are inevitably political activities centred on questions of
18 cultural identity and ownership. As in his previous collections, Nagra
19 remains preoccupied with the politics of language. So British Museum
20 can be read, on one level, as an overtly politicised ‚conversation‛
21 between Nagra and English Literature, addressing directly his position
22 as a British Asian poet — ideas redolent of Bhabha (1994). As well as
23 being a political crucible, however, British Museum also displays
24 Nagra’s deep affection for the British literary tradition. The rifts thus
25 exposed, however, may lie less in the ‚fact‛ of literary canon than in
26 orientational disjunctions between readers and texts.
27 Such issues are brought to the fore in a set of poems addressing
28 cultural storehouse and locations, such as the British Museum, the BBC,
29 Hadrian’s Wall, The Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology in
30 Cambridge, and the Poetry Library at the Southbank Centre. In these
31 poems, Nagra considers how British society publicly presents and
32 understands culture — both British and global — and the complex
33 historical and political relationships this implies. Contrastingly, he also
34 presents us with a number of more intimate cultural locations: the
35 home (‚Father of Only Daughters‛ (2017: 3)), the gurdwara (‚Prayer for
36 a Gurdwara‛ (2017: 5)), trains (‚From the Ambient Source‛ (2017: 26-
37 7)), and the classroom (‚The Dream of Mr Bulram’s English‛ (2017: 36-
38 7)). The counterpoint thus established in the collection between public
39 and private spaces allows Nagra to explore sometimes contradictory
22021-4103-AJHA – 02 FEB 2021
1 views of what it means for him (and his readership) to live in the
2 ‚British Museum‛. In ‚Prayer for a Gurdwara‛ (‚017: 5), for example,
3 the contemplative space of the poem culminates in Nagra, ‚Sikh by
4 birth, secular by nature‛ (5), posing a subdued but politically explosive
5 question about the Guru Granth Sahib: ‚when has our holy book ever
6 hurt Britain?‛. Readers are left with the troublesome pressure to answer
7 as they try to place this experience within their vision of contemporary
8 Britain and its complex relationship with minority groups and their
9 ‚books‛, which are often perceived as cultural, and even political
10 threats. Similarly, ‚Naugaja‛ (2017: 14), a poem that offers a sensitive
11 consideration of the ways in which cultures engage, highlighting the
12 ways in which a generation of Sikh immigrants and their alternative
13 cultural canons have ‚enriched‛ the ‚values of Britain‛ (14).
14 Such deft weighing of alternatives and their roles in establishing a
15 British culture for the 21st century is typical of Nagra’s (serious)
16 playfulness. Huizinga (1955: 132) observes that play is a central
17 component of ‚the structure of creative imagination itself‛. There is a
18 strong sense of such creative play throughout British Museum, albeit it
19 this is sometimes an edgy and dangerous game with much at stake.
20 Huizinga’s suggestion that ‚the writer’s aim, conscious or unconscious,
21 is to create a tension that will ‘enchant’ the reader and hold him
22 spellbound‛ (132) resonates with the tensions that Nagra’s poetry
23 produces.
24 The ‚spell‛ of British Museum is cast by Nagra’s engagement with
25 the English literary canon. As Gunning (2008) has observed, Bloomian
26 influence (1973) provides lens for reading Nagra’s verse, but there is
27 also a liberal dose of subversive yet celebratory Bakhtinian carnival
28 (1965) at work. Nagra’s ludic engagement with the canon (Huizinga,
29 1955) effects a playful realignment between his own language and that
30 of the poets (and the other cultural influences) with which he engages
31 — an extension, perhaps, of what Gilmour calls ‚the disruptive
32 interplay between linguistic systems‛ (2015: 691).
33 The paper begins by establishing how Nagra’s British Museum
34 might be seen to challenge traditional notions of culture and cultural
35 expectations, exploring how Nagra adopts — in some senses akin to
36 Shakespeare’s Prospero — a magus-like role whereby he ‚plays with‛
37 and controls cultural icons and understandings of culture in 21st century
38 Britain. It then proceeds to consider ideas of identity and ambiguity in
39 relation to cultural — and especially literary — canons, discussing the
32021-4103-AJHA – 02 FEB 2021
1 important role of cultural ‚margins‛ and the role of these in providing
2 challenges to dominant modes of culture and cultural institutions.
3
4
5 Prospero’s Book
6
7 Particularly interesting in pursuing Huizinga’s metaphor of the
8 spell is Nagra’s use of the figure of Prospero. The Tempest (Shakespeare,
9 2005) book-ends British Museum and Prospero structurally stands
10 astride the collection. He is the first figure invoked in ‚Broadcasting
11 House‛ (2017: 6-10), where repeated imagery of ship and island
12 inevitably recalls the play, and ‚Meditations on the British Museum‛
13 (2017: 49-53), the final poem, leaves readers with a reflection on ‚our
14 fair isle‛ in which ‚Prospero’s surveillance hoards our every scripted
15 quip for the island of our interrogation‛ (49). Prospero is a particularly
16 rich figure Nagra, and the island of the play, he has stated, ‚in my head
17 always feels like Britain‛ (Green, 2020: 11).
18 Nagra is also convinced of ‚the importance of challenging cultures
19 to see themselves in accepting relation to others, an exercise in harmony
20 and peace through literary craftsmanship‛ (Green, 2020: 13). British
21 Museum seems, in many ways, to be an exercise of literary
22 craftsmanship in the difficult process of cultural harmonisation, and in
23 this, Prospero offers Nagra a rich vein of inspiration. At the end of The
24 Tempest (Shakespeare, 2005) the magus steps without the imagined
25 confines of the drama and assumes fellowship with the audience in the
26 ‚real‛ space of the theatre, inviting them to participate in the decision
27 about what is to happen next:
28
29 I must be here confined by you
30 Or sent to Naples. <
31 Gentle breath of yours my sails
32 Must fill, or else my project fails,
33 Which was to please.
34 (145)
35
36 This conclusion, like British Museum, conjures a state of
37 conditionality in which potential meanings and futures are submitted to
38 the reader’s judgement. As Nagra (the Prospero of the piece) draws the
39 collection to an end we are left poised in a space where literary and real
42021-4103-AJHA – 02 FEB 2021
1 worlds intersect. Unlike Prospero, however, Nagra-as-magus seems to
2 aim to trouble as well as to please.
3 Nagra’s invocation of Prospero, then, may be seen as self-conscious
4 literary disguise; an act ‚not only of deploying actions or submitting to
5 one’s fate in an imaginary milieu, but of becoming an illusory character
6 oneself, and of so behaving‛ (Caillois, 2001: 19). Nagra, like Prospero,
7 creates a manifestly playful literary world self-consciously aware of its
8 own imaginary. In controlling his ‚actors‛ and the situations they face,
9 Prospero engages in ‚authorial‛ work and ‚writes‛ his characters;
10 similarly, Nagra ‚writes‛ other authors from the canon of English
11 Literature, making them ‚actors‛ within British Museum. Tellingly, as
12 the physical spaces for his visions, Prospero invokes ‚The cloud-capp’d
13 towers, the gorgeous places, / The solemn temples, the great globe
14 itself‛ (Shakespeare, 2005: 115) — places with more than a passing
15 resemblance to the cultural institutions Nagra invokes throughout
16 British Museum. These seemingly substantial places, however, do not
17 offer the kinds of permanence and security of legacy that one might
18 imagine. Rather, as Prospero observes, ‚all which it inherit, shall
19 dissolve / And lie this insubstantial pageant faded‛ (115). Prospero, the
20 dominant cultural magus of British Museum, ironically brings into
21 question the extent to which accepted bastions of knowledge and
22 culture in fact provide the kinds of security and rootedness that canons
23 imply.
24
25
26 Canon as Identity
27
28 Canons and traditions of different kinds, and the relationships or
29 conflicts between them, are central to British Museum. The idea of
30 traditions as potentially problematic is established from the very first
31 poem of the collection where, in the intimate space of the familial home,
32 our view of the young daughter is shaped by the persona’s memory
33 and the traditional requirements of his own parents — how he was
34 ‚forced to remain in wedlock / to uphold the family name‛ (2017: 2).
35 Now, with his ‚second-chance life‛ he encounters the world in a new
36 way, his perspective turned both metaphorically and literally ‚upside
37 down‛.
38 Such topsy-turvy perspectives are also applied to the literary canon.
39 Gunning (2008), drawing on Bloomian (1973) notions of poetic
52021-4103-AJHA – 02 FEB 2021
1 influence, offers a reading of Nagra’s early poetry that places him in
2 anxious, even confrontational relation to English Literature. The
3 speaker-poet of ‚A Black History of the English-Speaking Peoples‛
4 (Nagra, 2011: 51) holds a troubled view of the literary canon, fearing
5 that he may be seen as:
6
7 a noble scruff who hopes a proud
8 academy might canonise
9 his poems for their faith in canonical allusions?
10
11 Nagra’s position in British Museum, extends this earlier position.
12 His engagement with canonical British culture and tradition is no
13 pietistic act of faith in a cultural monolith. His playful reworking of the
14 terms and forms of the literary canon demonstrates a project of forging
15 new and integrative languages — literary, cultural, and political
16 (Chambers, 2010). For Bhanot (2019), the establishment of ‚voice‛ in the
17 literary-performative act is a significant process in establishing identity.
18 What is perhaps most striking about British Museum is its multi-
19 voicedness as Nagra engages both with his own evolving literary voice
20 and with the plethora of canonical ‚voices‛ that find their place within
21 the fabric of his work. The ‚ownership‛ of these voices demonstrates,
22 perhaps, how Nagra continues a direction of travel first identified by
23 Chambers (2010) away from the cultural hyphenation of British-Asian
24 to a more liberating British Asian (Mishra, 1996).
25 To return to Bhanot’s ideas, however, it is important to consider the
26 extent to which Nagra’s poetic performances in British Museum
27 represent not just surface or presentation, but also depth and interiority.
28 Heidegger (2002: 45), proposes poetry’s capacity to reveal truth through
29 what he refers to as ‚projective saying‛, a form of language that offers
30 the potential for the disclosure of truths by bringing forth articulations
31 which are ordinarily hidden. In Nagra’s work we often encounter what
32 might be termed ‚double-textedness‛: we necessarily read Nagra’s own
33 poetic utterances as projective extensions of his own literary reading.
34 Both Bakhtin (1982) and Barthes (1974) insist that processes of
35 interpretation are affected by the extent to which meaning is perceived
36 as fixed — the extent, in Bruner’s terms (1986), to which readers avail
37 themselves of subjunctivizing space. British Museum systematically
38 engages with the interstitial (subjunctivizing) spaces between the
39 literary canon and Nagra’s own verse. In these spaces, the liberating yet
62021-4103-AJHA – 02 FEB 2021
1 anarchic functions of Bakhtinian carnival (1965) are never far away. As,
2 for example, in ‚GET OFF MY POEM WHITEY‛ (2017: 38-40), a poem
3 that captures Nagra’s relationship with the English literary canon at its
4 most troubled, worrying at the boundaries of canonicity and the idea of
5 poetic ‚roots‛. He has referred to this poem as ‚a Caliban-like rant‛
6 (Green, 2020: 11), this character representing for Nagra the ‚tortured
7 embodiment of conflict‛ (11). The conflicting emotions and statements
8 of this poem capture the difficult heart of Bakhtinian carnival.
9
10
11 Ambiguity to the canon
12
13 The dilemma of canon in British Museum is captured in the figures
14 of Mr Bulram and Mr Kabba, who might be seen as dichotomous
15 ‚externalisations‛ of the poet. Nagra admires Bulram’s ‚attempts to
16 seek dignity and acceptance of the past and his need to find a way for
17 people of colour to lose their embittered attitude‛ (Green, 2020: 9). ‚The
18 Dream of Mr Bulram’s English‛ (2017: 36-7) posits him as an
19 inspirational teacher who hopes ‚to spin their minds/timeless with
20 Chaucer, Donne, Keats and Byron, /with Tennyson and Browning‛ and
21 ‚our tongue Shakespearean‛ (2017: 36) — a tongue sublimated by
22 allusion to Hamlet (Shakespeare, 2013): ‚this flesh feels too solid‛ (36).
23 The attraction of canon and its language is captured in Bulram’s
24 striving for ‚This heartfelt Word evermore, this shared tongue‛ that is
25 embodied in the King James Bible and those who ‚grafted the English
26 canon‛ (37). Bulram’s vision of English teaching, however, is not bound
27 by the conventional canon, as the presence of Martin Luther King and
28 Wordsworth’s desire to possess ‚a canvas-bound Arabian Nights‛ (37)
29 attest. Movement beyond the canonical confines of literature is a means
30 of understanding that literature is a force that ‚springs universal‛ (37),
31 though we might question whether Nagra feels Bulram has become
32 ‚too English‛ and can no longer fully see the problems with the
33 ‚exotic‛ tradition that the Arabian Nights and other such texts offered
34 colonialism.
35 It is both contradictory and apt that this paean to the humane
36 benefits of literature should be succeeded by the stormy Kabba-like
37 literary world of ‚GET OFF MY POEM WHITEY‛ (2017: 38-40). Here
38 Nagra vilifies the idea of his poetry as ‚text-book samples / of the
39 multicultural or the postcolonial‛ (40). This is literature as contested site
72021-4103-AJHA – 02 FEB 2021
1 of ownership, limitation and control. The poem resides on the borders
2 of discomfort, making bleak fun, creating discords, violating language.
3 Here there is no space for cleanliness and sanitization, but ideas of
4 ‚taste‛ remain, nevertheless, at the poem’s core: ‚your editors boast
5 they elect by taste / if they like me they think I’m exotic / if they think
6 I’m too English I’m a mimic’ — a fear captured in the poet’s invocation
7 of Beecher Stowe’s (1981) ‚Uncle Tom-ti-Tom-tease‛ (38). The mocking-
8 ambivalent voice of the poem simultaneously reveres and lambasts
9 canonical English Literature:
10
11 is your holy word a Whitey canon
12 when I drool at your canon
13 I drool at your lowing herd centuries of verse
14 (39)
15
16 The political past also looms large: ‚when I think of your canon do I
17 think of your cannons / if I allude to your canon do I soil your canon‛
18 (39). The poem with angry — yet also comic and absurd — tone
19 proposes an unvarnished conceptualisation of canon and literary
20 history, however, the poem is ultimately conceived in canonical terms.
21 In his recognition that ‚now Caliban’s my voice‛ (40), Nagra recognizes
22 the ties of the literary canon even at the margins.
23
24
25 Culture at the Margins
26
27 An ambiguous sense of (non-)belonging is also evident in ‚Cane‛
28 (2017: 11), where Nagra highlights ideas of cultural division, placing the
29 study of literature in contradistinction to the culture of the family home.
30 The imperative ‚No English talk at home!‛ (11) stands in sharp contrast to
31 the young man who ‚steal*s+ off to study for an English degree‛. The
32 literary classics are a world away from the mother’s ‚sloppy
33 Pollywood‛ — the speaker’s patronising use of ‚Sloppy‛ and ‚polly‛
34 leave an unpleasantly vindictive note in riposte to the mother’s refusal
35 to accept the son’s education. The uncomfortable counterpoint
36 established here enacts Nagra’s observation that ‚it’s difficult to take a
37 hard, fast line on hybridity‛ (Chambers, 2010: 94). British Museum is
38 deeply imbued with the need to displace stereotypes and to explore the
39 ways in which divergent histories and identities function in 21 st century
82021-4103-AJHA – 02 FEB 2021
1 Britain and globally (Clifford, 1997). Nagra is alive to the ways in which
2 cultures (dis)connect, exploring ‚the imagined unities of tradition‛
3 (Gunning, 2008: 97). It is significant, therefore, that throughout British
4 Museum he returns to the idea of borders and boundaries, be they of
5 language, of colour, or of culture.
6 The ‚deliberate tension‛ (Green, 2020: 7) he cultivates capture
7 Nagra’s position as ‚an outsider, but inside at the same time‛ — his
8 liminal sensibility. ‚Hadrian’s Wall‛ (2017: 15) provides a good
9 example. Written from the edges of an historical empire, this poem
10 embodies ideas of political separation and exclusion. As a physical line
11 of defence, the wall represents a space where canons, cultures and
12 traditions both meet and are separated. This is a wall located at the
13 margins of the cultured Roman world ‚to keep out the barbarous‛ (15)
14 — a word troublingly repeated throughout British Museum. It serves as
15 a symbol of the dangers surrounding definitions of canon, with divisive
16 views of what is ‚in‛ and what is ‚out‛. These dangers are highlighted
17 in the final lines of the poem: ‚To keep us / from trespass, will our walls
18 be raised/watchful as the Great Firewall of China?‛ (2017: 15).
19 Other important boundaries in the collection include the trenches of
20 World War 1 (‚On Your ‘A 1940 Memory’‛, 2017: 20-1), the border
21 between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland (‚From the
22 Ambient Source‛, 2017: 26-7) and the River Lethe (‚Sleeping in
23 Lindau‛, 2017: 28-9). This last poem, set ‚On the borders of Lindau‛
24 (28), considers the painful experience of cultures meeting and
25 separating: ‚whoever can face up to horror / and survive must be held
26 by a vision at root‛ (29). For Nagra, however, healing is possible, and he
27 upholds:
28
29 A primal vision
30 that firms you to suggest we can eradicate
31 our own chambers of hate for we are big
32 people who can forgive.
33 (29)
34
35 In such forgiveness lies the promise of ‚a berry harvest big as kind
36 dreams‛ (29). Nagra seeks to transcend borders whilst also honouring
37 the cultural, political, historical and religious pain they represent. These
38 are awkward cultural and political negotiations indeed, but Milosz
39 provides a symbol of overcoming hate and forging commonality.
92021-4103-AJHA – 02 FEB 2021
1 ‚On Your ‘A 1940 Memory’‛ (2017: 20-1) is one of a number of
2 poems in British Museum in which there is an overt dialogue with other
3 poets — in this case, Siegfried Sassoon. Liminal spaces (No-man’s land)
4 and margins (the trenches) are important here. The poem recalls the
5 famous incident recounted in Memoirs of an Infantry Officer (1974) when,
6 having single-handedly stormed the German line, Sassoon sits alone in
7 an enemy trench reading poetry. His insanely brave action is captured
8 in the anachronistic reference to ‚kamikaze‛ (20). In a further act of
9 historical-spatial (dis)location, Nagra also invokes Britain’s colonial
10 past as deaths on the Somme mutate into ‚an image of Britain, / whose
11 kin made a killing in India‛ (21) — recalling additionally the fact that
12 Sassoon’s family had made its wealth in the Orient. As in ‚GET OFF
13 MY POEM WHITEY‛ (2017: 38-40) Nagra is alive to the literary-
14 historical as well as the homophonic connection between ‚canon‛ and
15 ‚cannon‛.
16 Nagra, however, desires to transcend such liminal spaces and
17 boundaries, seeking a cultural redefinition of Britishness. One of the
18 ways he achieves this is through his use of literary and other
19 (sometimes distinctly ‚lowerbrow‛ cultural references — Only Fools and
20 Horse and Strictly Come Dancing are good examples. In this respect,
21 British Museum continues a trend established in Nagra’s earlier work.
22 As Gilmour has noted, language and the collision of languages has
23 always been at the heart of Nagra’s work. Approaching this from the
24 perspective of Bakhtinan dialogic (1982), Gilmour (2015) considers the
25 overtly heteroglossic and multilingual possibilities of Nagra’s poetry.
26 Her reading of his work emphasizes the inherent ‚ownership‛ and
27 ‚power‛ that go with language. She sees Nagra’s work as enacted
28 response to a linguistic politics where ‚monolingual ideology continues
29 to hold sway‛ (688). His poetic project in British Museum challenges a
30 monolingualist perspective with English as ‚the guarantor of culture,
31 education, social cohesion, economic advancement and moral order‛
32 (689).
33 By drawing upon cultural icons from across the spectrum of taste,
34 Nagra proposes his own alternative ‚canon‛ of Britishness. Inevitably,
35 whilst honouring plurality and diversity, this exposes the inherent
36 insecurity (linguistic, social, cultural, political, literary, moral) that
37 silently underpins a monolithic and unitary view of culture and
38 language. Bakhtinian dialogism and carnival apply as Nagra engages in
39 what might be seen as cultural heteroglossia. The celebratory listing of
102021-4103-AJHA – 02 FEB 2021
1 both ‚high‛ and ‚low‛ cultural milestones in ‚Darling and Me!‛
2 (Nagra, 2007: 3-4), provides a preview of cultural eclecticism that
3 emerges in more extended ways in British Museum. Nagra’s is a world
4 in which strong transferrable capitals (Bourdieu, 1984) are not only
5 desirable but personally, culturally, societally, and morally necessary.
6
7
8 Talking to the canon
9
10 Bakhtinian dialogic functions in two senses in Nagra’s work: firstly
11 in that his poetry consistently inhabits the interstitial creative spaces
12 between poets’ own reading and writing; and secondly, in that it
13 exposes the interface between what poets write and what readers read.
14 These two processes enact Bakhtin’s reflection that ‚every word is
15 directed towards an answer and cannot escape the profound influence
16 of the answering word that it anticipates‛ (1982: 280). In British Museum,
17 this ‚dialogue‛ is immediately visible through Nagra’s use of epigraphs
18 which function as literary points of departure or as cultural markers to
19 be read simultaneously into and against the poems that follow.
20 ‚Vox Populi, Vox Dei‛ (2017: 4) opens with two lines from Robert
21 Graves’ ‚A Country Mansion‛ (2003: 374) — a title that in itself invokes
22 images of English pastoral and patriarchy. The lines, based on an
23 assumption of entitlement and inheritance, provide their own
24 privileged commentary on the poem’s cast-list of heritage figures —
25 Drake, Nelson, Darwin, Brunel, Newton, Clive of India — who
26 delineate canonical, cultural Britishness. However, so far from adopting
27 the kind of assertive tone we might expect, the poem is fundamentally
28 interrogative in mode, questioning the nature and the legacy of these
29 figures and the traditions and canons of history, science and empire
30 they represent. The poem’s opening demand — ‚Who are we at root?‛
31 (4) — captures Nagra’s unease as he explores the cultural relationship
32 between these historical figures — the ‚they‛ of the poem — and the
33 inclusive ‚we‛ (our 21st century sense of shared identity?). Indeed,
34 Nagra’s use of the first person inhabits a liminal space, as if questioning
35 whether the ‚I‛ can ever really be part of the shared ‚we‛. The effect of
36 this is to create an on-going sense of the poems of British Museum as
37 parodies, which provides a rewarding if unsettling lack of closure.
38 Nagra portrays the quasi-religious power of these historical
39 Establishment figures, envisaging us ‚chant*ing+ our poetic names‛ (4).
112021-4103-AJHA – 02 FEB 2021
1 But these incantations do not lead to the kinds of certainty, the kinds of
2 ‚rooting‛ we might expect. The poem’s flurry of questions
3 demonstrates the extent to which canons of knowledge are open to
4 legitimate doubt and debate. When Nagra asks ‚Who else to deepen
5 us?‛ (4) he invokes wealthy alternative traditions of knowledge —
6 Julian of Norwich, John Barleycorn, the Tolpuddle Martyrs, Obama,
7 Septimus Severus. As in ‚Father of Only Daughters‛ (2017: 3), we are
8 left with a vision of a world turned ‚upside down‛ — the sense that
9 received wisdom, received history, received politics, science and
10 religion are insufficient to the moment; that ‚at root‛ (4) we are more
11 than this and that new versions of canon are needed in order to help us
12 see ourselves (Clifford, 1997).
13 ‚The Look of Love‛ (2017: 34-5) takes its epigraph from the Fourth
14 Book of Thomas Campion’s Bookes of Ayres (2016: 175). Here Nagra
15 plays uncomfortably with the word ‚Ape‛, capturing not only its
16 meaning of mimcry (a pertinent idea in relation to Nagra’s use literary
17 allusion) but also its less salubrious application as racial slur (‚I think
18 that I’m the ape in the room‛ (34)). As Rosenblatt (1986: 123) cautions,
19 ‚verbal signs carry both public, socially accepted, decontextualised
20 linkages between sign and object, and private, kinaesthetic, affective,
21 cognitive colourings‛, and it is this troubled space that Nagra exposes.
22 Another instance is his use of the word ‚barbarous‛. In ‚The Look of
23 Love‛ it is employed in relation to ideas of ‚bloodline‛, ethnicity and
24 culture — ‚Once I was coloured and you were English‛ (35) — and the
25 persona’s sense of not belonging: ‚I must not measure myself / by the
26 wealth of your heritage/which will never be imagined as mine‛ (35).
27 Bloodline proves to be another of the many boundaries that Nagra
28 explores. Such discomfiting concepts are sublimated at the end of the
29 poem, which contemplates the ‚accruing hints // of dark print‛ (35).
30 This is a poem where traditional canons and words have the power
31 simultaneously to bring together and to divide, a state of affairs
32 symbolised by the panopticon of stanza VI, the Benthamite (2008) and
33 Foucauldian (1995) overtones of which resonate in the prohibitive ‚I
34 must not‛ of stanza VII. Nagra senses that he ‚remain*s+ an Englishman
35 /who lights upon the booty‛ (35), but that this is a treasure he can never
36 quite own.
37 Other allusions to the literary canon are equally troublesome.
38 When, for example, in ‚Prayer for a Gurdwara‛ (2017: 5) Nagra refers
39 to ‚my Larkin train-brain‛, he captures the fragile and understated
122021-4103-AJHA – 02 FEB 2021
1 elegiac note of Larkin’s ‚The Whitsun Weddings‛ (1964: 21-3), and with
2 it something of the sadness, the nobility and the subdued hope that is a
3 feature of the fledgling marriages of Larkin’s poem, applying these to
4 the emergence of Sikh culture in England. He also employs evocative
5 dualities in a fashion akin to Larkin — brown/white, Asian/British,
6 mainstream/marginal, secular/Sikh — and through these dualities
7 makes a moving plea for tolerance.
8 Larkin is again a significant presence in ‚Ode to England‛ (2017: 30-
9 31) — a yearning poem capturing the desire to understand and to forge
10 personal belonging in a place that shapes its vision of itself via
11 nostalgia. Like Larkin in ‚Going Going‛ (2014: 194-5), Nagra piles
12 image upon image of an idyllic England:
13
14 your golden days
15 A brillig of bonbon and sherbet awnings for butcher,
16 baker, Lipton’s; the lanes wafting Yorkshire puds
17 with gravy that called home Brownies and Cubs.
18 (31)
19
20 Nagra’s serendipitous use of ‚brillig‛ recalls ‚The Jabberwocky‛
21 (Carroll, 2003), suggesting that such visions are both supremely British
22 and also nonsense. The cartoons of the final stanza also help establish
23 the cultural mélange of the poem. Like Strictly Come Dancing, The Archers
24 and Only Fools and Horses they represent an alternative (but equally
25 significant) cultural canon of Britishness.
26 As this web of allusions suggests, ‚roots‛ are very significant in
27 British Museum. ‚Vox Populi, Vox Dei‛ (2017: 4) asks ‚Who are we at
28 root?‛, a question redolent of sources and identity, tradition and
29 growth. It also echoes another of Nagra’s poetic inspirations, Seamus
30 Heaney, whose use of roots in ‚Personal Helicon‛ (1966: 57) envisions
31 an earthbound form of memory. It is significant, therefore, that the
32 word ‚root‛ and other words in the same family appear repeatedly
33 throughout the collection — ‚rootless‛ (‚Cane‛ (11)), ‚uproot‛
34 (‚Naugaja‛ (13)), ‚uprooted yet rooted‛ (‚From the Ambient Source‛
35 (6)); elsewhere, Czeslaw Miłosz is ‚held by a vision at root‛ (‚Sleeping
36 in Lindau‛ (29)). In ‚The Look of Love‛ (34), tradition is captured in the
37 image of a ‚bloodline/at root barbarous‛. Finally, the exhibits in
38 ‚Meditations at the British Museum‛ (51) ‚uproot my nice day out‛.
39 These repetitions and variations demonstrate the on-going complexities
132021-4103-AJHA – 02 FEB 2021
1 of Nagra’s relationship with cultural identity and his sense of his own
2 Britishness. As he has observed:
3
4 A lot of white British poets, like Philip Larkin, look backwards as if
5 they’re trying to define their roots by reference to some kind of imagined
6 past because they can’t face or articulate the multiculturalism and the
7 dynamic shifting of Britishness — that seems to me to represent an
8 ossification of British culture. Of course, people need to understand their
9 personal roots, but where roots are idealized and institutionalized to the
10 extent that they can never be challenged — that’s a problem. (Green, 2020:
11 14)
12
13 Nagra has a lively sense of how rootedness and tradition represent
14 significant challenges in the context of cultural transitions and
15 interactions. His evident deep love for the English literary tradition is
16 counterbalanced by a desire to distance himself from it. British Museum
17 both exhibits and debunks what Green (2020: 8) has called ‚the
18 entrenched monolingualism and political-cultural tunnel vision of
19 English Literature‛. Nagra, adopting a different perspective, sees
20 himself as speaking not ‚from the centre of Britishness‛ (8), but ‚from
21 the margins‛ (8). In his affectionate yet humorous use of the literary
22 canon, Nagra admits to ‚a sort of modern-day politics of retrograde
23 ‘owning’‛ (9) through which he makes the words and works of the past
24 function within his own literary ‚museum‛.
25 Seamus Heaney provides an excellent example of this. ‚Personal
26 Helicon‛ (Heaney, 1966: 57), to which we have already referred, likens
27 the roots of personal memory to a form of self-discovery. ‚From the
28 Ambient Source‛ (2017: 26-7) draws inspiration from Heaney’s The Haw
29 Lantern (2006). The beauty and clarity of Heaney’s poetry — ‚his verses
30 starlight‛ (26) — sits alongside the defiant political reality of ‚a world
31 where hope stands brave as Stormont‛ (26). Here poetry has the power
32 both to (dis)comfort and (dis)locate as Nagra envisions us ‚uprooted,
33 yet rooted, utterly humane‛ (26) and is entranced by the ‚mud-haunted
34 rhymes‛ (26) that capture Heaney’s spirit as a poet whose Irishness
35 places him on the margins of the British literary establishment. In
36 ‚Meditations on the British Museum‛ (2017: 49-53), the bog bodies of
37 North (Heaney, 1975) become charged political symbols variously of
38 revolt, oppression and sacrifice. In Nagra’s hands they are ‚The bodies
39 Heaney delved to evidence a turf of manoeuvre, empathy‛ (51),
142021-4103-AJHA – 02 FEB 2021
1 representing a locus for change, a possibility for a new way of viewing
2 historical events.
3 Nagra’s affinity with Heaney is evident — ‚When he ploughs his
4 Ireland, I see gourds and grains/sprout over the Raj‛ (26) — and his
5 words have an uplifting effect on Nagra: ‚My life is replenished‛ (26). It
6 is as if the Empire and Britain are brought into a new alignment by the
7 alchemy of poetry (Prospero’s magic?) so that ‚the texture of empire for
8 nourishing grief with grace‛ (26) can be allowed to function and a
9 restoration of literary equilibrium becomes possible. Nagra imagines
10 how he might follow Heaney’s example and allow poetry to liberate
11 him from the painful and shameful events of history:
12
13 If he becomes my dream mentor, from beyond the tracks,
14 could he show me the way to dignify what we’ve buried?
15 That we merely host the train of accusative thought
16
17 from the angered outsider within. Could my mentor
18 guide me into gravitas, so we breach the divide
19 in ourselves for a shared commemoration:
20
21 the famines, the battles, our jurisprudence and chin-up? (26-27)
22
23 Nagra also admires Heaney’s resolute and sometimes
24 uncompromising spirit. In ‚GET OFF MY POEM WHITEY‛ (2017: 38-
25 40), he alludes to Heaney’s famous lines from An Open Letter (1983),
26 objecting to his inclusion in The Penguin Book of Contemporary British
27 Poetry (Morrison, 1986) and the act of literary-political appropriation
28 that represents. Nagra affirms his spiritual kinship with Heaney adding
29 himself to the list of ‚the ones won’t stoop before the Union / of our
30 Queen cos their passport’s green‛ (38).
31 ‚He Do the Foreign Voices‛ (2017: 18-19) explicitly invokes both
32 Dickens, who uses the phrase in Our Mutual Friend (1997), and T.S.
33 Eliot, who employed it as a working title for The Waste Land (2002). It is
34 not surprising, therefore, that here Nagra addresses the idea of literary
35 canon explicitly. The elliptical allusiveness of canon is further
36 embedded in the poem as Nagra inscribes Eliot’s own literary
37 appropriation from Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (2007): ‚Mistah Kurtz – he
38 dead” (2017: 18). This is an example of what I have referred to
39 previously as Nagra’s ‚double-textedness‛, effecting a powerful literary
152021-4103-AJHA – 02 FEB 2021
1 realignment as Nagra substantially relocates the black voices that both
2 Conrad and Eliot had appropriated.
3 In its turn, Nagra’s reshaping of these voices is thrown into relief
4 against Kamau Braithwaite. This is no straightforward inversion and
5 rejection of outmoded literary voices and views, however. Braithwaite
6 ‚implied it was the voice / itself, not the words - / the Eliot twang, the
7 mock English - / that persuaded the empire’s embrace for colonial
8 verse‛ (2017: 18). Nagra, on the other hand, makes a powerful case for
9 the power of the words themselves. We are aware of a double irony
10 here, in that both Eliot and Conrad adopted and were adopted by the
11 English literary tradition in further levels of literary and cultural
12 appropriation and are then re-appropriated for different ends by
13 Braithwaite and Nagra. This is literature that is simultaneously united
14 and divided upon the rock of a common language. On such a basis,
15 Nagra critiques ‚The pile-up of white males in English anthologies‛
16 (18) and goes on to question the function of poetry in the face of
17 political power, where ‚somewhere just now a poet will be pulped / in
18 a state of terror‛ (19). What, he seems to be asking, is the cultural and
19 political function of literature on a global stage? In an act of cultural
20 grace and healing of the sort he envisages in ‚Sleeping in Lindau‛
21 (2017: 28-9), he manages to draw the affirming conclusion that literature
22 has the power to purify and that this healing quality exists outside of
23 narrow canons, however these may be defined. He recognises that ‚our
24 hoard of words must cleanse the world‛ (19).
25 ‚Aubade‛ (2017: 44-5), another poem of liminal space, sharing its
26 title both with poems by MacNeice (2002) and Larkin (2003) provides
27 an apt conclusion to this section. The cultural worlds of Bloomian (1973)
28 and Eliotian (1999) influence and appropriation are foregrounded as
29 Nagra observes: ‚I’m dissolved in a voice / that can’t sever from its
30 verse‛ (44). The canon of literature in one sense provides a secure
31 foundation, yet Nagra’s sense of self is also open to doubt, his poems
32 considered as ‚feeble conceits‛, and he is left pondering ‚Am I adrift in
33 my heritage?‛ (44).
34
35
36 Institution Poems
37
38 Cultural space — whether physical, as in the case of museums and
39 institutions, or literary — can be problematic, and in British Museum
162021-4103-AJHA – 02 FEB 2021
1 Nagra attempts to capture his own ‚spatiality‛ of literature. In ‚The
2 Vishnu of Wolverhampton‛ (2017: 22-4) Sikh culture is considered in
3 relation to British culture. The poem’s emphasis upon skin embodies
4 ideas of self-perception and shifting identity. To extrapolate into
5 broader cultural terms, this may be taken to reflect the relationship
6 between bodies politic (museums, institutions and corporations) and
7 alternative institutions such as Gurdwaras and the transformations that
8 occur when these come into contact with each other.
9 British Museum offers a sequence of poems based upon notable
10 institutions — places that might be taken to represent cultural
11 storehouses of different kinds — Broadcasting House, the British
12 Museum, the Poetry Library, the Cambridge Museum of Archaeology
13 and Anthropology. These institutions, of course, relate interestingly to
14 ideas of canon — not necessarily always in the literary sense, but in
15 terms of culture and tradition more broadly.
16 ‚Broadcasting House‛ (2017: 6-10) presents an array of cultural
17 allusion, as if the works to which Nagra refers are exhibits. It opens by
18 invoking the figures of Prospero and Ariel. Prospero, as explored
19 earlier, is a central figure in British Museum. It is as if Nagra conjures
20 Prospero to assert order over the complex maelstrom of troublesome
21 history, culture and politics with which British Museum engages. To
22 what extent, the poem seems to ask, does the BBC in fact represent the
23 possibility of ‚a communal voice‛ (6)? Does it represent an acceptable
24 and sanctioned canon of broadcastable values? And how does this play
25 out in relation to a global politics where, whatever Britain’s own
26 inflated sense of its own value, the BBC attempts to ‚bridge what
27 seemed a commerce/between the globe-as-one and our land in tidal
28 retreat‛ (6).
29 Nagra’s reference of Eluard (1942) is significant here. ‚Liberty‛ was
30 composed in France under the strictures of Nazi occupation, and
31 Nagra’s allusion therefore brings into question the nature of the
32 freedom that the BBC represents. His explanatory gloss (‚In the poem,
33 the speaker wishes/freedom/for the magic of night and the white page/
34 and all the things besides‛ (7)) suggests that freedom lies not in
35 established certainties, but rather in the worlds of ‚magic‛, ‚night‛ and
36 the unknown potential of the ‚white page‛ — potent and pregnant
37 images.
38 Passus X of Piers Plowman (Langland, 1992) provides another rich
39 allusion, relating both to Broadcasting House’s ship-like architecture
172021-4103-AJHA – 02 FEB 2021
1 and to the BBC’s role as Noachian cultural ‚vessel‛: ‚There is a ship of
2 man / that becomes a ship of the world in Piers Plowman‛ (9). Sea-
3 faring imagery signals ideas of inundation and destruction (cultural?
4 political?) as well as the potential for salvation. Alternative cultural
5 canons, in this, are again part of Nagra’s cultural semantics. Ambridge,
6 from the iconic radio drama The Archers, along with ‚Christmas at Fools
7 and Horses, / seasonal dance-offs and celebs on sofas‛ (2017: 8) serve as
8 potential antidotes to the rantings of ‚angry callers, or ministers‛ (2017:
9 7). ‚Book at Bedtime‛ (2017: 8) also proves an unexpectedly anodyne
10 presence, turning Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover (2006) from
11 scandalous banned book into something that might ‚ruffle‛ (2017: 8)
12 the collective bed sheets of the nation. Perhaps for Nagra ‚Broadcasting
13 House‛ represents a metaphorical ark of culture — a means of both
14 escape and re-creation. The cultural canons Nagra scrutinizes are under
15 threat, but are also freighted with the potential to save themselves
16 through some Prospero-like intervention as embodied in the figure of
17 ‚the Plowman who ascends the Hill of Battles with ideals‛ (2017: 9).
18 ‚The Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology in Cambridge‛
19 (2017: 25) captures the idea of poetry in the ‚service‛ of culture: ‚the
20 dawn of my days as a poet-in-residence‛ (25). The poem exposes the
21 awkward truths at the heart of the museum — truths that are be further
22 exposed in ‚Meditations of the British Museum‛ (2017: 49-53). The
23 museum, a storehouse of sanctioned and permissible views of culture,
24 serves a ‚canonizing‛ function. So we see the Fijian Prime Minister
25 (‚our tyrant‛ (25)) viewing the sanitized and politically correct version
26 of his nation’s past that does not display ‘‛cannibal forks‛’ but instead
27 focuses on acceptable cultural artefacts: ‚the kava bowl and whale //
28 teeth‛, the whole experience served up with ‚the sweetest English
29 apples‛. There is a profound discomfort at the heart of this poem as the
30 museum’s curators write acceptable versions of cultural tradition for
31 public consumption and for the politic appeasement of the Prime
32 Minister.
33 The epigraph to ‚Meditations on the British Museum‛ (2017: 48-53),
34 from MacNeice’s ‚Museums‛ (2007: 29), appositely raises philosophical
35 questions about the nature and function of museums. MacNeice implies
36 that it is visitors rather than exhibits that ironically become the focus of
37 the museum. Nagra develops this idea, seeing the museum as a
38 ‚canonical‛ re-writing of British cultural appropriation. The exhibits in
39 the museum are framed within a uniquely British context: ‚millennia of
182021-4103-AJHA – 02 FEB 2021
1 /civilisation and handiwork as conceived by our fair isle‛ (49). This is
2 world culture as read and represented through British eyes. The
3 museum becomes, like the literary canon with which Nagra engages, a
4 means ‚to measure / by upheld mirror our own silk goods and grave
5 ills, our ideals‛. The exhibits in the British Museum, like the exhibits in
6 the Cambridge Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, are
7 ‚Cleansed of a barbarous home from which they were bled‛ (50). The
8 self-assurance of the nation that considers itself as civilized and
9 civilizing in the face of barbarity, glosses over the irony that it has been
10 guilty itself of barbarity in bleeding — both culturally and literally —
11 the peoples of its colonies.
12 The items on display are explicitly and appropriately connected to
13 the literary tradition that so enchants and troubles Nagra. They form
14 part of an essential continuum in terms of cultural canon that requires
15 him ‚to read between the lines a Burmese Orwell, / a Woolf in
16 workaday Ceylon and a canon of post-colonialists‛ (51). In his search
17 for ‚poetic grounding‛ (51), however, the meaning Nagra seeks lies not
18 in the lines of the canon (the Orwells and the Woolfs), but between
19 them. Nagra reads the canon not on its own terms but in the interstices
20 between it suggests.
21
22
23 Conclusion
24
25 This paper has only begun to touch upon Nagra’s engagement with
26 ideas of canon in British Museum. The list of names it could have
27 addressed goes on — Yeats, Auden, Forster, Frankenstein. Let us,
28 however, return by way of conclusion to the figure of Prospero, the
29 master of the isle. In ‚Meditations on the British Museum‛ (2017: 48-53),
30 Nagra observes how ‚Prospero’s surveillance hoards our every scripted
31 quip for the island/of our interrogation‛ (52). Let us not forget,
32 however, that the magus’ final act of reconciliation in The Tempest is
33 also an act of renunciation, as he drowns his book. And so Nagra is left
34 to contemplate: ‚No wonder / I stand in the Reading Room to rebut the
35 gods so I can voice // the best of our house‛ (53). Perhaps, via the
36 puissant figure of Prospero, Nagra is asking us to re-evaluate the role of
37 the book and the literary canon and to question how our frames of
38 reference might need to change if we are to establish a loose canon that
192021-4103-AJHA – 02 FEB 2021
1 more aptly reflects the world in which we live — the kind of existential
2 reconstruction envisaged by Ackroyd (1993).
3 British Museum offers not a slavish attendance upon the literary
4 canon, but a personally inflected showcase — a thing that is both
5 beautiful and ugly, ordered and messy, rooted and adrift, traditional
6 and non-traditional, politically correct and politically abhorrent, known
7 and unknown. In bringing together these dichotomous positions, Nagra
8 has curated for us in British Museum a collection that moves into a new
9 realm, a place ‚where Britain is guardian/of the legacy to ensure
10 monumental mankind stay immemorial‛ (53).
11
12
13 References
14
15 Ackroyd, P (1993) Notes for a New Culture. London: Alkin Books.
16 Bakhtin, MM (1965) Rabelais and his World. trans. Hélène Iswolsky. Bloomington,
17 IN: Indiana University Press.
18 Bakhtin, MM (1982) The Dialogic Imagination. ed. M. Holquist, trans. M. Holquist
19 and C. Emerson. Austin, TE: University of Texas Press.
20 Barthes, R (1974) S/Z. trans. R. Miller. New York, NY: Farrar, Straus & Giroux,
21 Inc.
22 Beecher Stowe, H (1981) Uncle Tom’s Cabin. London: Penguin.
23 Bentham, J (2008) Panopticon; or, The Inspection House. London: Dodo Press.
24 Bhabha, HK (1994) The Location of Culture. London: Routledge.
25 Bhanot, K (2019) ‘A Decolonial Reading of the Punjabi (M)other in British Asian
26 Literature. Third World Thematics 4(4-5), pp.377-94.
27 Bloom, H (1973) The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry. New York, NY:
28 Oxford University Press.
29 Bourdieu, P (1984) Distinction. trans. R. Nice. Abingdon: Routledge.
30 Bruner, J (1986). Actual Minds, Possible Worlds. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
31 University Press.
32 Caillois, R (1958/2001) Man, Play and Games. Chicago: University of Illinois Press
33 Campion, T (2016) The Works of Thomas Campion. London: Wentworth Press.
34 Carroll, L. (2003) Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass.
35 London: Penguin.
36 Chambers, C (2010) ‘Meddling with My Type: An Interview with Daljit Nagra’,
37 Crossings: Journal of Migration and Culture 1(1), pp.87-96.
38 Clifford, J (1997) Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century.
39 Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
40 Conrad, J (2007) Heart of Darkness. London: Penguin.
41 Dickens, C (1997) Our Mutual Friend. London: Penguin.
202021-4103-AJHA – 02 FEB 2021
1 Eliot, TS (1999) Selected Essays. London: Faber.
2 Eliot, TS (2002) The Waste Land and Other Poems. London: Faber.
3 Eluard, P (1942) Poésie et Verité. Paris: Roger Lacourière.
4 Foucault, M (1995) Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York:
5 Random House.
6 Gilmour, R (2015) ‘Punning in Punglish, Sounding ‚Poreign‛’, interventions 17(5),
7 pp.686-705.
8 Graves, R (2003) The Complete Poems. London: Penguin.
9 Green, A. (2020) 'Moving World, Moving Voices: an interview with Daljit Nagra',
10 Journal of Commonwealth Literature. DOI: 10.1177/0021989420911836/ ID: JCL-
11 19-0005.R2.
12 Gunning, D (2008) ‘Daljit Nagra, Faber Poet: Burdens of Representation and
13 Anxieties of Influence’. Journal of Commonwealth Literature 43(3), pp.95-108.
14 Heaney, S (1983) An Open Letter. Dublin: Field Day Publications.
15 Heaney, S (1966) Death of a Naturalist. London: Faber & Faber.
16 Heaney, S (1987) The Haw Lantern. London: Faber & Faber.
17 Heaney, S (1975) North. London: Faber & Faber.
18 Heidegger, M (2002) ‘The Origin of Work of Art’. In Off the Beaten Track. ed. J.
19 Young, trans. K. Haynes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
20 Huizinga, J (1955) Homo Ludens: a Study of the Play-Element in Culture. Boston,
21 MA: The Beacon Press.
22 Langland, W (1992) Piers Plowman. Oxford: Oxford World Classics.
23 Larkin, P (2003) Collected Poems. London: Faber & Faber.
24 Larkin, P (2014) The Complete Poems. London: Faber & Faber.
25 Larkin, P (1964) The Whitsun Weddings. London: Faber & Faber.
26 Lawrence, DH (2006) Lady Chatterley’s Lover. London: Penguin
27 MacNeice, L (2007) Collected Poems. London: Faber and Faber.
28 Mishra V (1996) The diasporic imaginary: Theorizing the Indian diaspora. Textual
29 Practice 10(3): 421–47.
30 Morrison, B ed. (1986) The Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry. London:
31 Penguin.
32 Nagra, D (2017) British Museum. London: Faber & Faber.
33 Nagra, D (2007) Look We Have Coming to Dover. London: Faber & Faber.
34 Nagra, D (2013) Ramayana. London: Faber & Faber.
35 Nagra, D (2011) Tippoo Sultan's Incredible White-Man-Eating Tiger Toy-Machine!!!.
36 London: Faber & Faber.
37 Noel-Tod, J (2017) ‘Poetry that provokes’. In Culture Features, The Sunday Times
38 June 4 2017, p.36.
39 Rosenblatt, L (1986) ‘The Aesthetic Transaction’. The Journal of Aesthetic Education,
40 Vol. 20, No. 4, 20th Anniversary Issue (Winter, 1986), pp. 122-128.
41 Sassoon, S (1974) Memoirs of an Infantry Officer. London: Faber & Faber.
42 Shakespeare, W (2013) Hamlet. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
43 Shakespeare, W (2005) The Tempest. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
21You can also read
