Author’s Note for Oral History Examination: This poem is part of a longer series exploring immigrant identity in the context of the fraught relationship between identity, power, politics, and faith both in both India and the US. Here, the consequences of even the threat of being construed as Muslim meet the speaker's embrace of the beauty and peace of Islam, following in a long tradition of inter-religious syncretism that exists in India.
from River Heron Poetry Prize final judge Alina Stefanescu:
"This poem undid me. The poet enters hesitantly with a hypothetical-- "If you were to feel"--and this tentative "if" becomes an anaphora which embodies living in limbo through expansive use of white space. I love the way the repetitions ask us to imagine (while also enacting the terror of being told one is reaching out of their space, not staying in the lane of Worthy Immigrant) how it feels to be foreign, and how a muted anaphora combines with a layering of borders through sensual details-- we learn how "borders / reach back to crook you." We don't get a sense of the speaker's selfhood until late in the poem, with the fear of someone finding the "Nusrat CD", the fear of being found rejoicing outside the borders of acceptable "Americanism."
This poem broke me open with its enacted reticence, its aching self-erasure, its pleas to be visible outside a community of support, and its ending which complicates the boundaries between skin and "borders." I wanted to read this as a subversion/reversion of Rudyard Kipling's colonialist "If", but it is so much more than that--so much more powerful. Read it alone in a room. Let its echoes undo your safety. Ask yourself what you want from BiPOC immigrants, be they non-Christian or not."
Shankar Narayan explores identity, power, mythology, and technology in a world where the body is flung across borders yet possesses unrivaled power to transcend them. Shankar is a four-time Pushcart Prize nominee, author of the prizewinning chapbook Postcards From the New World, and a recipient of awards and fellowships from Kundiman, Hugo House, Jack Straw, 4Culture, Paper Nautilus, and Flyway, among others. Shankar draws strength from his global upbringing and from his work as a civil rights attorney. In Seattle, he awakens to the wonders of Cascadia every day, but his heart yearns east to his other hometown, Delhi.
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