The Yak Dilemma

by Supriya Kaur Dhaliwal
Review by Manash Firaq Bhattacharjee

ISBN: 9781527271654

Publisher: Makina Books

Publication Date: April 15th, 2021

Page Count: 92

Supriya Kaur Dhaliwal’s first poetry collection, The Yak Dilemma (Makina Books, London, 2021), has an effortless maturity about it. She is a poet who encounters the world with keenness. The self is mediated through these encounters. She moves from poem to poem, like a traveller across time and place. Each poem is a place, where it is possible to be someone else. The migrant’s ability to translate her experiences brings these places onto the map of language. In these encounters the poet grapples with the “unheimlich” or the uncanny, to borrow a term from Freud that was used as a metaphor of the modern, cultural condition by Heidegger (in his essay, “What Are Poets For?”, delivered on the twentieth anniversary of the death of Rainer Maria Rilke, in 1946, after the devastations of World War II). 

The poet, according to Heidegger, is closest to realising our homeless condition, where we are banished from language. The unfamiliarity of the uncanny experience of homelessness has often drawn the poet to register and welcome what is other, often mirrored by the awareness of one’s own otherness. Contemporary poets often feel other at home, refuting Heidegger’s conservative nostalgia. We are not at home (in language) because we are seeking the encounter, the possibility of otherness. 

In the opening lines of the first poem, ‘Meet me in the morning on no man’s land’, Dhaliwal writes: “Meet me in the morning / on the no man’s land where our skins / lose their colour”. She is not interested in Heidegger’s lost gods, but in a future place where she can reclaim time outside the limits of representation. Colour here is a metaphor of desire: desire has no colour, or rather, it colours everything it touches and turns it into metaphor. She writes further in the poem, “In that bleeding / memory our bodies are countries / we trespass to walk from yes to / yes.” Desire wants to break the bleeding territory of countries with a syllable. The yes is an open sesame, a phrase that derives from the Arabian Nights, a magical phrase that opens doors. For Dhaliwal, nations are traps of history. The point of desire is to trespass nations. 

In the poem, ‘Roses for Karl Marx’, Dhaliwal mentions the 3 pounds she paid to enter the Highway Cemetery to visit Marx’s grave, and discover his afterlife neighbour, Eliot. From a ‘Room in Edinburg’, Dhaliwal looks at the mountains and discovers the thought: “If / one looks at a mountain long enough, it / might appear as something one / knows by heart / like I know your face”. The familiarity of nature in time is similar to human familiarity. In the next poem, Dhaliwal travels into unchartered spaces of a city in the month of September, where she discovers a pub where Keats was born, and where she spends time “drinking with Keats’s ghost”. She discovers flowers “like lifeless nomads, / belong only to the ground.” The poet suggests that human beings are not trees. They are not the kind of nature that is rooted to its spot. Human nature is nomadic in spirit. We leave homes for elsewhere. In her poem, ‘Arabic Lessons’, Dhaliwal recounts a conversation in a seminar room in Belfast, where she says in response to questions, “I am a foreigner… No, I am a poet.” These two identities get juxtaposed by accident. But they are connected. To be a foreigner and a poet is not just an existential case of alienation, but one that haunts the world of language. The poet from India is in Belfast to learn Arabic. It is an uncanny ambiance. 

In another poem, Dhaliwal tell us she lived in Borgerhout, a district in Antwerp (in Belgium), “in the same neighbourhood as Vincent / van Gogh and waited / for metaphors”. In that description she found the metaphor of waiting elsewhere. Soon she was lost in teeming metaphors in the alien city where she was no longer alien, despite the German she didn’t understand. She found her home in metaphors.

In the title poem, ‘The Yak Dilemma’, Dhaliwal weaves a tapestry of a poem to unravel the magic of translatability. Translation itself is a metaphor of the elsewhereness of language, and crossing the borders of language. The yak is a metaphor of other animals, depending on the place. She learns these details in a country where you don’t find yaks. We are back to the uncanny. 

In the poem, ‘your bird/my bird’, Dhaliwal writes, “The bulbul on the barbed wire knows / nothing / of no man’s land.” She observes further, “The distance between the Jhelum and Satluj / is a wound’s width.” The poet is constantly drawing our attention to how it is in the nature of the human to create territorial wounds. She also writes in the poem, “if / you are a / citizen of everywhere, you a citizen of / nowhere”. Dhaliwal imagines the poet as the citizen of nowhere. This paradox of (not) belonging to a place is the only guarantee of our freedom.  

In a long-titled poem, Dhaliwal writes, “History clots the blood running in our / veins / like the words of a prayer in an ancient / language.” The poet looking for the future is running away from history. History interrupts the flow of blood by its bloodshed. Prayers are languages and they don’t divide. History interrupts the fate of prayers. 

In the wonderfully crafted poem, ‘Unmapped Cities’, Marco Polo and Kublai Khan meet again after Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities. She writes, mediating between Polo’s cities of memory, and Khan’s translatable cities: “It sounds like it is a city in a past / century / but I can assure you that it belongs / to the future instead.” Dhaliwal believes the future can be retrieved from the past. She does it herself in her poems by translating the migrant experience into English where she is in love with other tongues. But there is also lust, which she calls “desire’s absurd grammar”. The borders of language are absurd, be it science or poetry. But absurd grammar, like lust in relation to desire, still retains the possibility of language. The absurd is writable. In the end of the poem she writes: “It is uncanny how languages / are lost / in one city to be disregarded in another.” She discovers the uncanny in that geo-cultural space where the fate of language is coloured by difference. Each language is a cosmology secured by space, and becomes insecure beyond it. It is the fate of the migrant to discover the limits – or territories – of history. In our times, the migrant poet is closest to discovering the uncanny.   

In ‘Migrant Words’, Dhaliwal is translating, and changes the colour of her English poem with aromatic interruptions from Punjabi. Mother tongue and other tongue converge. It is while ‘Reading Agha Shahid Ali in Northern Ireland’, that Dhaliwal tells us: “When I read my Anglo-ghazal / in a theatre about the partition of Punjab… // someone calls my lot of people refugees. Agha, how little we knew! / We were exiles in every land.” The camaraderie with Ali rests on the shared fate of the migrant looking for refuge in language.

Supriya Kaur Dhaliwal was born in the Himalayan town of Palampur, India. She studied at St. Bede’s College, Shimla; Trinity College, Dublin; and Queen’s University, Belfast. Her poems have been translated into Arabic, German, Italian; and have appeared in Ambit, Banshee, Cyphers, Gutter, Poetry Ireland Review, Poetry Jukebox, Poetry London, Rattle, The Bombay Literary Magazine, The Irish Times, and elsewhere. In 2018, she was one of the twelve poets selected for Poetry Ireland’s Introductions Series. Supriya is the 2021 Charles Wallace India Trust Fellow at the University of Kent.

Manash Firaq Bhattacharjee is a poet, writer and political science scholar. He is the author of The Town Slowly Empties: On Life and Culture during Lockdown (Headpress, Copper Coin, 2021), Looking for the Nation: Towards another Idea of India (Speaking Tiger, 2018), and Ghalib’s Tomb and Other Poems (London Magazine Editions, 2013). He has contributed to The New York Times, Los Angeles Review of Books, Guernica, World Literature Today, among other publications. 

13 April 2022