Sandeep Parmar

It is difficult to consider Sandeep Parmar’s work without also addressing its place in the British literary landscape. One of Parmar’s central provocations is to challenge the othering of works by writers of colour, which are too often and too easily reduced to questions of marginality. Such works are indeed often placed under undue pressure to speak about, or on behalf of, a sense of cultural otherness, whilst simultaneously taken as signs of the predominance of ‘identity politics’ in matters of taste. Parmar’s recent piece in The Guardian responds to conservative lamentations about the ‘state’ of contemporary poetry; she writes that ‘identity-based poetry is not just the preserve of marginalized voices […] white men have been writing identity-based poetry for centuries.’ If Parmar can be said to be at the centre of this debate, then, it is because her work as a poet, essayist, academic and broadcaster have offered in recent years a vital critical perspective in conversations around race, canonicity and decolonization. Parmar’s prose writing unpicks and interrogates the very notion of ‘identity-based poetry’ and makes for a rich theoretical accompaniment to her own poems. Taken together, her texts disclose the simple but difficult truth that for anyone ‘excluded from the idea of literariness […] the stakes are indeed high’. 

In the essay ‘Lyric Violence and the Nomadic Subject’, Parmar questions given ideas of literariness, and identifies in the lyric I’s ‘inherent premise of universality’ a ‘coded whiteness’. The lyric ‘I’, she argues, is a subject position which takes as given a set of ‘aesthetic principles’ from which racialized subjects ‘have been historically excluded.’ In reflecting upon the problem of how poets of colour must ‘differently embody the ‘I’’, Parmar theorises the notion of the ‘fourth space’ as ‘an alternate space of becoming’, requiring ‘a rejection of culture that supersedes the complexity of the individual’. She puts this into practice in a collaborative written experiment with the British-Indian writer Bhanu Kapil. Parmar and Kapil’s dialogue textually embodies the overlap of voices and identities that form this ‘alternate space’ of postcolonial subjecthood, and Parmar begins her section of the exchange with the recollection of ‘Reading the Odyssey at fourteen in my grandmother’s front room […] The colour of his tunic. The glare of his hardware […] I read it twice listening to Vivaldi and the colours of longing were the motile sheen of grain.’ This vivid memory of longing calls to mind a ubiquitous postcolonial trope, that of the transformative encounter with a canonical text. In his 1985 article ‘Signs Taken for Wonders’, an inaugural text of postcolonial theory, Homi K. Bhabha identifies the recurrence in literature of the ‘sudden, fortuitous discovery of the English book’ by a colonized or formerly colonized subject. In such a moment, colonial authority is both reasserted and thrown into question. In her book What Is A Classic?, Ankhi Mukherjee recounts J.M. Coetzee’s description of ‘an afternoon in the back garden in the suburbs of Cape Town’, aged fifteen, when he heard ‘the music of Bach from the house next door’ and in turn became subject to the ‘impact of the classic’. The lingering, even uncanny emergence of European classicism is thus a contested site in postcolonial studies, and Parmar’s recollection of reading Homer whilst listening to the music of Vivaldi no doubt also has this sense of precedence in its ears.  

In Threads, the collaborative pamphlet where Parmar and Kapil’s essay was republished, poet Nisha Ramayya writes that the Odyssey acts here as a ‘marker of class and classicism, of European history and high culture, of symbolic and consequential journeys’. Reading it thus becomes a way ‘into assimilation, to certain white places, to certain European cultures’, providing an ambivalent passage through which the ‘person of colour is permitted to make her way out.’In her 2015 collection Eidolon, Parmar rewrites the Helen myth through a numbered sequence of fragmentary lyric poems. In so doing she offers a ‘way out’ to Helen herself, who is rendered here as an archetypal figure for silenced women: ‘we see the real Helen/is the false we/is the eidolon’, a classical ghost. Parmar addresses this spectral quality in the collection’s afterword essay, where she writes of ‘Helen’s multiple forms and her indefensible silences’, along with her own aim to ‘reinterpret Helen for a new age.’ Helen’s ‘silencing’ is, Parmar writes, ‘a symptom of the archive’, for ‘we don’t make archives of things that have not fallen somehow into obscurity or are in no need of preserving.’ 

This notion of archival fragility speaks back to ‘Archive of the Daughter’, a highlight of Parmar’s first poetry collection The Marble Orchard (2012). Using the cataloguing system of the scholarly archive (‘Box 1, folder 2 ‘Emigration’’), Parmar frames her own mother’s journey from India to Derby and on to Southern California as though it were an assemblage of objects and papers. In this vein the poem incorporates a wide array of sense impressions, experiences and locations: images of an ‘already Western dressed 6-year old’, of ‘snowballs’ hurled at a ‘black turbaned gentleman’, of moving through ‘Stanford, Northwestern, Harvard, London, Cambridge’. ‘Archive for a Daughter’ gives poignant shape to the contrast between the evanescent rootlessness of migration and the intransigence of the archive. Its suspension between these states offers one example of the way lyric form can be mobilised to bear witness to the fragile hybridities of postcolonial experience, rooted at once in the personal and the political.

The unstable binaries described by theorist Rosi Braidotti of ‘mobile/immobile’ and ‘resident/foreigner’ underpin, Parmar suggests, the ‘nostalgia’ of British society in the wake of Brexit. Parmar’s own poems thus serve to powerfully subvert such binaries by excavating archives of the ephemeral and spanning numerous continents. More remarkable still is the way Parmar’s critical writing similarly assumes this hybrid form, moving between the rigorous theoretical register of academic writing and more crystalline moments of lyric reflection that incorporate other voices, such as Kapil’s. The notion of ‘craft’ has been much politicised in recent discussions of contemporary poetry, and Parmar argues in her Guardian piece that this romance of literary skill is often ‘based upon conservative assumptions about poetic traditions, forms, style.’ What emerges undeniably, then, throughout Parmar’s own impassioned and intricately crafted writing, is that even aesthetic principles prone to weaponization against writers of colour can be wrested from the hands of cultural gate-keepers. As she herself writes: ‘My way in is my way out.’ 

Jack Parlett, 2019