Contemporary Poetry

200 contemporary poetry

expectations. Gunning offers an insightful reading of the texture
and porosity of Nagra’s poetry:

Nagra’s portrayal of working class Punjabis is always less

about verisimilitude to a reifi ed culture, or an authentic

capture of an idiom, as it is concerned with the possibilities

of refracting this speech into his poems and of dislocating the

expectations of an audience who receive a racialized perform-

ance as indicative of a particular way of being in the world.

The voices that speak in Nagra’s verse are alienated; they

reveal less of the worlds that their named speakers inhabit

than of the poet’s concerns that his enunciation will always

be over-determined by the pre-text of racist or patronizing

liberal-multicultural expectations of the British Asian poet.^79

This textual density and transcription of radical speech patterns
is evident in ‘The Man Who Would Be English’. Seeking assimi-
lation into a community through football, the speaker becomes
part of a group: ‘we plundered up gulps of golden rounds for the
great game.’^80 Within this poem there lies a carefully orchestrated
tension between vernacular such as ‘just for kicks’, and the more
archaic language of ‘lark-about days of school’ (p. 15 ). These
phrases add an intertextual intrusion into the layering of the text

• performing a ventriloquising of familiar phrases. This need to
  assimilate phonetically is a survival strategy, which requires that
  the speaker’s voice is ‘passed’ ‘into theirs’ (p. 15 ). A desire to be
  unobtrusive is asserted by the negatives: ‘I wasn’t Black or Latin or
  / managed by a turbaned ghost’ (p. 15 ). But the assertion is chal-
  lenged by the intrusion of a wife’s voice, clearly marked in stacca-
  toed syntax, taking her husband to task for his affi liation. The wife
  brutally emphasises the degrees of difference: ‘Lookk lookk ju nott
  British ju rrr blackkk.. .!!!’ (p. 15 ). Another poem, ‘The Speaking
  of Bagwinder Singh Sagoo’, renders a voice which criticises the
  sexualisation of the ‘western’ woman selected for him in the UK.
  Malapropisms add to the texture of his berating. His beau’s actions
  towards the praying father threaten to ‘give him cardigan arrest’
  and cosmetics are described as ‘odour toilet’ (p. 27 ). The language
  of television advertising and consumption intrudes upon the