Department of English

Faculty of Arts, Chulalongkorn University

 

Digging

(2007)

 

Daljit Nagra

(1966– )

 

Notes

7  Stanley knife: utility knife with retractable, snap-off, or fixed blade, called so mostly in British English-speaking countries after the popular brand of such knife; also called X-Acto knife (mainly US English), boxcutter

7  a rivering of blood: Hema reads this as an allusion to British MP Enoch Powell's "Rivers of Blood" speech on immigration. Do you think it is?



Odd Man Out: A Film Portrait of Enoch Powell, BBC (1995)
  • "Enoch Powell's 'Rivers of Blood' Speech," The Telegraph (2007)
    This is the full text of Enoch Powell's so-called 'Rivers of Blood' speech, which was delivered to a Conservative Association meeting in Birmingham on April 20 1968.
    The supreme function of statesmanship is to provide against preventable evils. In seeking to do so, it encounters obstacles which are deeply rooted in human nature.
    One is that by the very order of things such evils are not demonstrable until they have occurred: at each stage in their onset there is room for doubt and for dispute whether they be real or imaginary. By the same token, they attract little attention in comparison with current troubles, which are both indisputable and pressing: whence the besetting temptation of all politics to concern itself with the immediate present at the expense of the future.
    [...]
    A week or two ago I fell into conversation with a constituent, a middle-aged, quite ordinary working man employed in one of our nationalised industries.
    After a sentence or two about the weather, he suddenly said: "If I had the money to go, I wouldn't stay in this country." I made some deprecatory reply to the effect that even this government wouldn't last for ever; but he took no notice, and continued: "I have three children, all of them been through grammar school and two of them married now, with family. I shan't be satisfied till I have seen them all settled overseas. In this country in 15 or 20 years' time the black man will have the whip hand over the white man."
    I can already hear the chorus of execration. How dare I say such a horrible thing? How dare I stir up trouble and inflame feelings by repeating such a conversation?
    The answer is that I do not have the right not to do so. Here is a decent, ordinary fellow Englishman, who in broad daylight in my own town says to me, his Member of Parliament, that his country will not be worth living in for his children.
    I simply do not have the right to shrug my shoulders and think about something else. What he is saying, thousands and hundreds of thousands are saying and thinking - not throughout Great Britain, perhaps, but in the areas that are already undergoing the total transformation to which there is no parallel in a thousand years of English history.
    In 15 or 20 years, on present trends, there will be in this country three and a half million Commonwealth immigrants and their descendants. That is not my figure. That is the official figure given to parliament by the spokesman of the Registrar General's Office.
    There is no comparable official figure for the year 2000, but it must be in the region of five to seven million, approximately one-tenth of the whole population, and approaching that of Greater London. Of course, it will not be evenly distributed from Margate to Aberystwyth and from Penzance to Aberdeen. Whole areas, towns and parts of towns across England will be occupied by sections of the immigrant and immigrant-descended population.
    As time goes on, the proportion of this total who are immigrant descendants, those born in England, who arrived here by exactly the same route as the rest of us, will rapidly increase. Already by 1985 the native-born would constitute the majority. It is this fact which creates the extreme urgency of action now, of just that kind of action which is hardest for politicians to take, action where the difficulties lie in the present but the evils to be prevented or minimised lie several parliaments ahead.
    [...]
    The answers to the simple and rational question are equally simple and rational: by stopping, or virtually stopping, further inflow, and by promoting the maximum outflow. Both answers are part of the official policy of the Conservative Party.
    It almost passes belief that at this moment 20 or 30 additional immigrant children are arriving from overseas in Wolverhampton alone every week—and that means 15 or 20 additional families a decade or two hence.
    [...]
    Nothing is more misleading than comparison between the Commonwealth immigrant in Britain and the American Negro. The Negro population of the United States, which was already in existence before the United States became a nation, started literally as slaves and were later given the franchise and other rights of citizenship, to the exercise of which they have only gradually and still incompletely come. The Commonwealth immigrant came to Britain as a full citizen, to a country which knew no discrimination between one citizen and another, and he entered instantly into the possession of the rights of every citizen, from the vote to free treatment under the National Health Service.
    Whatever drawbacks attended the immigrants arose not from the law or from public policy or from administration, but from those personal circumstances and accidents which cause, and always will cause, the fortunes and experience of one man to be different from another's.
    But while, to the immigrant, entry to this country was admission to privileges and opportunities eagerly sought, the impact upon the existing population was very different. For reasons which they could not comprehend, and in pursuance of a decision by default, on which they were never consulted, they found themselves made strangers in their own country.
    They found their wives unable to obtain hospital beds in childbirth, their children unable to obtain school places, their homes and neighbourhoods changed beyond recognition, their plans and prospects for the future defeated; at work they found that employers hesitated to apply to the immigrant worker the standards of discipline and competence required of the native-born worker; they began to hear, as time went by, more and more voices which told them that they were now the unwanted.
    [...]
    “Eight years ago in a respectable street in Wolverhampton a house was sold to a Negro. Now only one white (a woman old-age pensioner) lives there. This is her story. She lost her husband and both her sons in the war. So she turned her seven-roomed house, her only asset, into a boarding house. She worked hard and did well, paid off her mortgage and began to put something by for her old age. Then the immigrants moved in. With growing fear, she saw one house after another taken over. The quiet street became a place of noise and confusion.
    [...]
    She is becoming afraid to go out. Windows are broken. She finds excreta pushed through her letter box. When she goes to the shops, she is followed by children, charming, wide-grinning piccaninnies. They cannot speak English, but one word they know. "Racialist," they chant. When the new Race Relations Bill is passed, this woman is convinced she will go to prison. And is she so wrong? I begin to wonder.”.
    The other dangerous delusion from which those who are wilfully or otherwise blind to realities suffer, is summed up in the word "integration." To be integrated into a population means to become for all practical purposes indistinguishable from its other members.
    Now, at all times, where there are marked physical differences, especially of colour, integration is difficult though, over a period, not impossible. There are among the Commonwealth immigrants who have come to live here in the last fifteen years or so, many thousands whose wish and purpose is to be integrated and whose every thought and endeavour is bent in that direction.
    [...]
    'The Sikh communities' campaign to maintain customs inappropriate in Britain is much to be regretted. Working in Britain, particularly in the public services, they should be prepared to accept the terms and conditions of their employment. To claim special communal rights (or should one say rites?) leads to a dangerous fragmentation within society. This communalism is a canker; whether practised by one colour or another it is to be strongly condemned.'
    All credit to John Stonehouse for having had the insight to perceive that, and the courage to say it.
    For these dangerous and divisive elements the legislation proposed in the Race Relations Bill is the very pabulum they need to flourish. Here is the means of showing that the immigrant communities can organise to consolidate their members, to agitate and campaign against their fellow citizens, and to overawe and dominate the rest with the legal weapons which the ignorant and the ill-informed have provided. As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding; like the Roman, I seem to see "the River Tiber foaming with much blood."




13  haft:

14  lug: to pull, especially with some effort

17  jameen: Punjabi for land; Nagra glosses this as "ground beneath his feet" in the "Punjabi to Ungreji Guide" at the end of the poetry collection

18  war: to make war on, to fight

 

 

Epigraph, Look We Have Coming to Dover!


The people have brown faces—besides, there are so many of them! Are they really the same flesh as yourself? Do they even have names? Or are they merely a kind of undifferentiated brown stuff...
—George Orwell, "Marrakech" (1939)

 
Look We Have Coming to Dover!

I was born in England to parents who are traditional Sikh Punjabis and my collection is about the Britain where Indians came and settled. The reader should expect to be immersed in a community that often feels its values are self-evident. My community and its individuals intend to show their true colours. I hope the reader will experience this Britain from the ‘inside’.

The collection is heavily populated with first generation characters and their second and third generation descendants. I have sought to explore their thoughts, feelings and cultural attitudes towards their own community, other ethnic communities and the indigenous white population. I am interested in the diversity that exists within this small community. There is no consistent attitude across the poems. I have simply tried to be responsive to the practical and emotional needs of the character(s) in each poem.

As it is my own community that I am generally exploring, committing to such a fixed form as the English language in a poem on a page of a book has inevitably led to some struggle and some overheating. This is manifest in the words, grammar, syntax and rhythms of many of the poems. I hope this friction adds a vibrancy and excitement in line with the characters and their situations.

The poems are intended to be comic as well as enlightening experiences for the reader. Often my characters either seek to be funny or are exposed for their comedic value. For me this is a heartfelt empathy for their circumstances.

 

Writing

CC: You mention arrival, and of course Look We Have Coming to Dover! signals that in its title, with its optimistic exclamation mark. For me, though, the collection is more pessimistic than the jovial title suggests.
 
DN: The inescapable upheaval that accompanies migration makes it a dark experience. You can’t ignore displacement when people are moving from one part of the world to another, going from an intimately-known experience to unfamiliar encounters. You have to recognize that, otherwise the poetry becomes blithe, almost right-wing. Excessively optimistic poems about migration tacitly say people should fit in, and it’s their problem if they don’t. It’s important to respect the shift, the transition, and in some cases the trauma of upheaval, because people don’t expect the differences they have to deal with in the new country. In some cases, people from my background stay very tightly within Indian communities. However, Indians had to work with white Britons even in the ’50s and ’60s, so they couldn’t be hermetically sealed off. Growing up, there was much talk among immigrants about being overlooked for promotion in the factories, in favour of white people or Asians who spoke English very well. Even within the community itself, caste difference comes into play, in that people from certain castes would have a fluency in English that allowed manoeuvrability, something lower-caste Indians didn’t possess. I included many different voices in the book to indicate the febrility of people’s mindscapes.
[...]
CC: In ‘Yobbos!’, (11) the narrator is immersed in the Anglo-Irish poetic tradition, yet the eponymous yobs single him out for abuse because of his visible difference. Do you feel that hybridity is enabling, as Homi Bhabha tends to argue, or traumatic?
 
DN: In my poetry I try to express the complexity of these issues, because as a second-generation Asian growing up in an almost completely white area, being in-between was a vexed position. For my older brother and me, the solution was to act white. If you weren’t Indian enough you’d get moaned at, but if you weren’t white enough you’d be physically attacked, so that seemed the easier movement. In ‘In a White Town’, for instance, I’m not sure whether the central character is simply embarrassed of being Indian, or has gone so far as to become racist himself. I wanted to leave that poem hanging on the edge, the smell of curry in the air—which would have been a racist taunt in the 70s from my experience—for the reader to decide on the positioning of the speaker. It’s different for the third generation, my fourteen-year-old daughter, for example: she likes to see herself as an Indian. She’s made a positive move towards a position of solidarity, and is quite happy speaking English but being Indian, because the world isn’t under so much threat for her. I think positions are situational, contextual, and it’s difficult to take a hard, fast line on hybridity, so I’ve steered away from (often fairly rigid) theoretical positions.
[...]
CC: Could you say something more about the similar migration histories of British and Irish people, and your sense of the Anglo-Irish tradition? You might like to discuss poems such as ‘Digging’, which invokes Seamus Heaney to discuss an Indian character’s self-harm.
 
DN: The use of offensive terms such as ‘Paddy’ and ‘Paki’ in ‘Yobbos!’ reflects Indians’ and Irish people’s shared oppression, as both of those terms were born in the immigrant experience. I regularly return to Irish writers such as Cairán Carson because of their energized attitude towards Englishness. The Irish tradition challenges Englishness, and I think if you’re writing now, and you want to challenge the English lineage, you can’t ignore Irish writing and retain validity as a writer. ‘Digging’ is about exploring one’s lineage, and for Heaney this is about identifying with an Irish past to generate poetry. I can’t distinctly identify with my Indian past in my writing, which is why my poem is warped and self-destructive. My poem is partly about digging into the self rather than an imagined lineage, and going from that to an English tradition.
[...]
CC: Finally, your use of form is quite flexible and, while you’re not a free verse poet, there is a spontaneity in your poetry which, as we discussed earlier, is reminiscent of Lawrence. What purpose does your manipulation of traditional poetic form serve?
 
DN: I am very interested in form, although more so in the second book than the first. In the first book I wanted to use forms, but frequently break off from them. I am fascinated by the way the spoken voice constantly ruptures the iamb, so with the monologues, I can subvert the iambic tradition. There are other poems that allude to certain forms throughout: ‘In a White Town’, for example (18), is in a loose terza rima; and a number of poems have elements of the ballad. Many of my poems play with forms, because if you write poetry in English, you can’t ignore forms’ histories. In the second book I continue to explore the interface with form, and I certainly think it adds great political value.

—Claire Chambers, "'Meddl[ing] with My Type': An Interview with Daljit Nagra," Crossings: Journal of Migration and Culture 1.1 (2010)



1. From reading your biography, I see that your confidence in writing used to suffer. Could you pinpoint a time when you realised that what you were doing could be successful?

Only after Faber took my first collection. Even till then I assumed no one would publish me or I’d end up with an obscure tiny publisher.

2. How often do you write? Do you commit yourself to something daily or are you more spontaneous?

I regard writing as a hobby. I work full time, at school and various poetry-related jobs each week. So I write when I’m on trains, buses, aeroplanes and some evenings at home. Poetry can work well in short bursts.

3. What made you feel that writing in the hybrid Indian/English would appeal to a wider audience?

I never thought of an audience at all. I wrote the way that seemed the best response to all the literary tradition from Beowulf onwards. I fully expected little interest in the poetry community because my style is so particular and not a fashionable one.

4. The amalgamation of cultures is so vivid within your poems, do you feel that you have done both your British and Indian roots proud?

I’m not so concerned about making my roots proud as I am about ensuring I make my poems feel as though I have done them justice. I try to ensure I make each a poem as good as it can be. My responsibility is to the poem. I am not a politician or a doctor so I can’t have that kind of social mission. After all, I can’t speak for a community. People are much more complex than a mere poem.

5. Which other poets have influenced your writing?

Shakespeare remains the biggest influence. Then Milton. Then hundreds of contemporary poets such as Seamus Heaney, Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop and so on.

6. Your poems have a strong voice, at what point do you decide when a poem is finished?

I get a sense I can’t improve it anymore. I get feedback from my wife and then from my editor, and only then do I leave the poem alone.

7. How important is mentorship and guidance when writing poetry? Would you advise an aspiring poet to experience work-shopping or one on one discussions to forward their creativity?

It is vital. I had a mentor and my poetry improved no end. I couldn’t get away with easy lines and I had to defend my decisions. Above all, mentorship can be inspirational so you become more productive.

—Becky Ellis, "Daljit Nagra," I Don't Call Myself a Poet (2012)

 

 

Study Questions

  • Compare the violence done to self described in this poem with that in "X" and in "Booking Khan Singh Kumar." In what ways are these acts violent? Who are the actors of "violence" mentioned in the poems?

  • Look at the words shared between Heaney's and Nagra's "Digging." How has Nagra changed their meanings?

            

  

 

Vocabulary


diction
imagery
movement
trajectory
metaphor
meter
iambic
form
stanza
line

 

Sample Student Reading Responses to Daljit Nagra’s poem “Digging”


Response 1:

 

 

 

 

 

Name Last Name

2202235 Reading and Analysis for the Study of English Literature

Acharn Puckpan Tipayamontri

November 23, 2009

Reading Response

 

Title

 

Text

 

 

 

 

 

           

 

 


 

FAQ and Discussion
Q: What is this poem about!!!!!!!!

D1: Isn't it about a man ("shave hairs" on the thigh seems to suggest a male speaker) cutting the flesh of his thigh with a utility knife?

D2: He shaved the hair on his sweating thigh first, creating a rectangular patch of "good skin" that he compares "to the shape of a passport photo."

D3: "Passport photo," together with "deeper," "unconscious," "a cry," "myself" and "me," suggests the poem is about identity.

D4: Identity is so broad.

Q: Why does the speaker cut himself? What does he want? I'm so perplexed!!

D1: Why does anybody intentionally cut themselves?

D2: Slicing his skin is a war on himself (l. 18), a way to feel ("a cry" l. 15) and unfeel himself ("so the unconscious" l. 11).

D3: Is he trying to find himself? In line 16 he says "So this is me," as if he was looking for or trying to get at who or what he is.

D4: "I war / myself" suggests the speaker has a problem with himself.

Q: What's the significance of the poem being a triangular shape with a pointy end?

D1: It's an embodiment of the sharp instrument used to dig into himself. The poem is an incisive tool for digging into oneself, like the steel blade of the Stanley knife that the speaker uses to cut deep into his leg. Words on a page or a utility knife look innocuous enough until you use it to do something keen and startling, not to mention unsettling.

D2: "This," literally at the sharpest point, which is also the poem's end, seems to be also the figurative point, or purpose, of the entire act/action, both the action of the poem and the action of the speaker cutting his leg.

D3: And the poem itself.

D4: So "this" is the cry in line 15? Or eliciting the cry, or land, or meat?

D3: Or the poem itself, the poetry, the line(s) of verse that is achieved through digging.

D5: All those meanings for this seem to give irony to the neat pointy end in one word. It's ironic that identity has such multiple expressions that it can't be boiled down to one thing as the shape of the poem leads one to. Yet it's also wonderfully ironic that the single and singular demonstrative this can contain all those different or shifting meanings—that one word can refer to an enormous range of possibilities so cleanly and grammatically.

Q: How is Nagra's "Digging" similar to or different from Heaney's "Digging"?

D1: They're both about the work of the poet, the work of poetry.

D2: They're both about identity.


 


Links
Interviews


 

Media
  • "Daljit Nagra, Look We Have Coming to Dover!," Meet the Author (2008; 2:33 min.)

  • "Daljit Nagra," Poetry Book Society (2014; 5:33 min.)

  • Rowan Hisayo Buchanan, "Daljit Nagra—Poetic Voice and 'Phallacy,'" Inky Dumbbell (2014 interview; 10:26 min.)

  • Daljit Nagra and Jo Shapcott, "Poems Take Time," Faber Academy (2011; 1:57 min.)
 
 
Daljit Nagra



 

Reference

Nagra, Daljit. "Digging." Look We Have Coming to Dover! London: Faber and Faber, 2007. 39. Print.



Further Reading

Nagra, Daljit. "Jhoota Kunda Ballads: The Ghosts of Cranford Park." The Guardian 26 April 2008.


Nagra, Daljit. Look We Have Coming to Dover! London: Faber and Faber, 2007. Print.


Nagra, Daljit. "Singh Song!" The Guardian 14 September 2007.


Nagra, Daljit. Tippoo Sultan's Incredible White-Man-Eating Tiger Toy-Machine!!! London: Faber and Faber, 2011. Print.





 

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Last updated April 23, 2017