Tippoo Sultan's Incredible White-Man-Eating Tiger Toy-Machine!!! by Daljit Nagra – review

Daljit Nagra's second collection explores linguistic identity to exhilarating effect

Kate Kellaway
The Observer, Sunday 31 July 2011
Article history

 

The 18th-century automaton that inspired Nagra’s title poem. Photograph: V&A Images

Even the title is a pick-me-up: animated, garrulous, entertaining and breaking an unwritten rule (since when were three exclamation marks welcomed in poetry?). Daljit Nagra's 2007 debut, Look We Have Coming to Dover! (only one exclamation mark in those days), was received with joy and won the Forward prize for best first collection. (Anyone who hasn't read it should prepare to be wooed and wowed.) It described life in the UK for British-born Indians, and also a cheerful resistance to assimilation, an irrepressible spark.

In this second collection, Nagra, a secondary school English teacher, is concerned (as perhaps might be expected) with linguistic identity (how and where his work fits in). A handful of poems touch on this in the context of literary tradition and colonial history. But these seem nervously honourable offerings in comparison to the unselfconsciously brilliant poems that tell a story – written in a mix of Punjabi English (or Punglish) and an adopted mother tongue. No special pleading is necessary for the wonderful, contradictory combination of broken English and runaway fluency or the sheer exuberance with which words hit the page. It is a delight: brokenness made whole. Here is the opening of "Raju t'Wonder Dog!":

First good penny I spent in

'uddersfield

after t'shop, were on a sweet-as-

ladoos

alsatian, against me wife, Sapna's

wishes.

Reet from t'off there were grief cos

Beena,

what's Sapna's friend, were visitin' –

showin' off her reet bonny aubergine

sari

t'spit o'Meera Syal.

There is much going on here: the English slang "grief" and "t'spit o", all wrapped up in erratic grammar as the narrative gathers pace with Alsatian and aubergine sari converging. The poem becomes a moving overview of a childless marriage: beautiful, sad and tenderly comic.

Nagra is particularly attuned to domesticity and to the absurdity that is sometimes the flipside of love. His rumbustious "The Balcony Song of Raju and Jaswinder" is a modern Asian version of Romeo and Juliet. This is how Jaswinder sees off Raju's advances:

Go away dirty boy, yoo is bad bad

lover

we danced in di car to Bally Sagoo

on di way from Henley to Sutton Hoo

and I luv it up di flumes or di Alton

Tower!

These poems beg to be performed (or filmed – the Alton Tower scene too good to stay on paper). The reason for Jaswinder's rejection turns out to be that Raju has "… bin through di ladies/ like a rickshaw round New Delhi". It ends in a mutual recollection about losing more than hearts in Hampton Court maze.

Other lovers are at large (although large appears not to be the word) for the meanly endowed author of "Phallacy", who confides:

To tell the truth, I'm really not

well hung,

And thus I hide from mates my

prince's state

This conk is king of my poor

frame, no trunks

Would lunchbox find to bank a

lady's gaze.

The combination of delicacy, sauciness and nicely crafted verse is delicious.

The title poem is inspired by an 18th-century automaton at the V&A that belonged to an Indian ruler and was made in symbolic opposition to the British. The tiger sinks his teeth into the neck of a supine wooden soldier. The witty inspiration is to translate the lion's last roar into a message. But make no mistake: Nagra's own fabulous "career in poems" has never been built on the "coolly imperial diction" he describes. His blood runs hot.

TIPPOO SULTAN'S INCREDIBLE WHITE-MAN-EATING TIGER TOY-MACHINE!!!

To flesh a career

in poems you rifle

through your stash

of coolly imperial

diction. Dying

to blood that hoard

swotted since foreign

kid of the class

who chewed the fat

of the raw meat minty

tongue that English

is

nowadays your wrought

state. You're awfully

scary once in your

stripes! You claw

at the mirror – overcome

by the camps of history!

Thus

when that top-hat sahib

screams, O God

your eyes are ablaze

observing themselves

in the cull you're

no longer mankind

once you're the Sher

of Punjaaab on the wallahs of the

rrrrraaaaaaaaaaaajjj!!!

Daljit Nagra