Shakti's Words: An Anthology of South Asian Canadian Women's Poetry

Laurence Steven is Chairman of the English Department at Laurentian
University and author of Dissociation and Wholeness in Patrick White’s
Fiction.

While ostensibly this anthology presents the works of eight
South-Asian-Canadian women poets, only five of them are well
represented. Arzina Burney has three poems, while Tilottama Rajan and
Nilambri Singh each have only one. The editors mention none of these
three in their introduction; nor do they mention Surjeet Kalsey, though
she has ten pages devoted to her work. Editorial comment is reserved for
Himani Bannerji, Lakshmi Gill, Suniti Namjoshi, and Uma Parameswaran.
Perhaps this is as it should be, since they seem to be the stronger
poets, but without a greater selection from the others we have a hard
time knowing, and are left with the perhaps unjustified feeling that
some names were included to create a movement in Canadian poetry where
none exists.

Having registered these reservations, we can still say there are good
things in this volume. Immigrant feelings of separateness as well as a
consciousness of being female seem to be central to many of the poems.
But others present more “universal” themes such as aging and death.

Bannerji’s “Paki Go Home” explores alienation and rejection:
“And a grenade explodes / in the sunless afternoon / and words run
down / like frothy white spit / down her bend head . . .” Although
many of us have never experienced such blatant racial discrimination,
most of us can empathize with being ostracized. Parameswaran’s “By
Dying Sudden One Night” deals with the sudden death of her mother.
Namjoshi’s prose poem, “In Her Fortieth Year” is an amusing
account of growing older: “And in her fortieth year she suddenly gave
birth to her own mother.”

There is a lot of experimentation with poetic structure throughout the
anthology. Parameswaran’s “I Wish I Knew What to Tell You, My
Daughters” lists three possible endings for the poem under the
headings “a,” “b,” or “c.” Bannerji’s “Doing Time” is
prose-like in structure, and begins by asserting that “This is not a
poem, nor the introduction to my poems, because I cannot write poetry
anymore.” Gill’s “Klee Symphony” attempts to reproduce Paul
Klee’s Cubism-influenced angularities on the page.

Despite its questionable context, this collection gathers some
interesting poetry.