Red Silk: An Anthology of South Asian Canadian Women Poets
Edited by Rishma Dunlop and Priscila Uppal
Mansfield, 169 pages, $19.95
British imperialism ignored Canada, save as a bulwark against U.S. expansion in the Caribbean and as a provider of cannon fodder in the Great War. But India was its true Other. Sure, Britain bought Nova Scotia's apples and Newfoundland's cod. However, from India it adopted Paisley designs, cotton, rubber, rice pudding, tea and a gallimaufry lexicon.
India was, in truth, Britain's preferred colony, both for horrendous (and lucrative) exploitation and reciprocal influence. Thus, formal study of English literature was refined in India in the Victorian era (as a "psy op" political prop), while Indian ideas such as karma won the British "homeland." Once India — and Pakistan — achieved independence in 1947, Britain was no longer "Great."
By then, however, Empire-engineered population relocations had occurred, and a South Asian diaspora to Africa, the Caribbean and the Pacific established. Being a proudly white Dominion, Canada utilized bureaucratic legalisms to bar South Asians (along with Africans, "coloured" West Indians, Jews and others) from entering the country during the first half of the last century. In the mid-1950s, though, blatantly racist immigration rules gave way to subtly racist ones, and South Asian-heritage peoples began arriving in Canada from India, Sri Lanka, Pakistan and Bangladesh, as well as lands of previous "exile."
The contributors to Red Silk: An Anthology of South Asian Canadian Women Poets, edited by Rishma Dunlop and Priscila Uppal, are the daughters of the Empire's retraction and the Dominion's renaissance. Most were born in Canada to immigrant parents between the 1950s and 1970s, and so have come of age during a period of Canadian decolonization ("nation building"), a process spurred, culturally, by South Asian-heritage writers such as Michael Ondaatje, Rohinton Mistry, Bharati Mukherjee, Reshard Gool, Cyril Dabydeen, Rienzi Crusz, Shyam Selvadurai, Ashok Mathur, Shani Mootoo, Samuel Selvon, Anita Rau Badami and Neil Bissoondath. Problematically, though, most of the names just cited are male, and fiction writers. Red Silk corrects the omission of anglophone women poets.
Previous cultural-specific anthologies have showcased South Asian Canadian women poets Lakshmi Gill, Himani Bannerji and Uma Parameswaran. To reject representations of themselves as transplanted exotics, spurn "poetry about being South Asian" and seek recognition of their identities as "firmly Canadian writers," Dunlop and Uppal foreground a (mainly) new generation, one suspicious of the "homogenizing tendencies ..... of Western scholarship," aware of "the inadequacy of [the] label ..... South Asian woman" and respectful of "formally diverse" poetry.
Thus, Red Silk yields rich and divergent verse that addresses, frequently, the stresses between "home" cultural traditions and "dominant" Canadian values — that can be reactionary (as in the silly dispute, a decade ago, about turbaned Mounties) or progressive (as in support for gender egalitarianism).
To highlight the "Canadian" poetry of their younger group, Uppal and Dunlop omit Gill, Bannerji and Parameswaran. In addition, the editors reproduce the Ontario and West Coast bias in anglo-Canadian poetry, thereby missing the work of Quebec's Anurima Banerji and Nalini Warriar. Inexplicably, too, the editors leave out Ramabai Espinet and Shani Mootoo. No matter: They do allow us 11 poets to ponder.
Famously, in Black Orpheus (1948), Jean-Paul Sartre asks French readers, "What would you expect to find, when the muzzle that has silenced the voices of black men is removed? That they would thunder your praise?" His questions ridicule such vain hope. Similarly, the contributors to Red Silk are not interested in placating or applauding their brother and sister Canucks. No: The anthology attacks orthodox prejudices, but is also savvy about processes of hybridity and multiculturalism. Maple syrup and curry, and other cultural essences, mix, masala-style.
