“Wonder why we can’t have normal food”: New Poetry from South Asian Diasporic Women poets

New literatures have emerged from processes of colonization that had once affected and altered the fabric of large territories of the world since the fifteenth century well into the latter half of the twentieth century. The newness of these literatures consists in their articulation often but not limited to the effects of colonization, the march of capitalism across the globe, the emergence of new diasporas and their struggle to find their voice in the new world, and so on. This paper hopes to locate some of these new voices in the context of South Asian poetry. The works of three diasporic women poets based in the West, but who trace their ancestry to countries such as India and Bangladesh will be studied in order to realize the imaginative connection that these poets forge with South Asia in the process of creating their work. Keywords— diaspora, new literatures, postcolonial poetry, South Asia, women’s writing.


INTRODUCTION
Over the twentieth century, 'new' literatures have emerged as a result of the processes of colonization that had once altered the fabric of large territories of the world since the fifteenth century well into the latter half of the twentieth century. Some of them trace their beginnings to the nineteenth or even late eighteenth century, "when English, Irish or Scottish settlers in the Caribbean, Canada or South Africa first began to create an overseas literature and enslaved or colonized people first began to reflect on their current situation and future perspectives utilizing the medium of what was then 'the colonizer's tongue'" (Middeke et al). This newness has taken upon varied forms across nation states and their Diasporas long after the end of colonial and imperial regimes.
In order to understand this paradigmatic shift in the rise of 'new' literatures, let us consider the Aime Cesaire's 1969 play Une Tempête, an adaptation of Shakespeare's The Tempest from a postcolonial perspective. In the play Césaire foregrounds issues of race, power, decolonization, and anti-imperialism. The play is set on an island in the Caribbean, and Césaire uses all of the characters from Shakespeare's version, with some additions and new renderings of the original cast. Significantly, in his version, Césaire asserts Prospero as a white master, Ariel as a mulatto and Caliban as a black slave.
As an African black man educated in French, Cesaire found that what colonization has taken away from him was not only land, but also his language, culture and identity. This gave birth to the idea of Negritude, which Cesaire explored in his first published poem "Return to My Native Land". The concept of Negritude or black consciousness is used as a rallying point for freedom and liberation, for acceptance and pride of francophone black racial identity. Negritude, thus represents a crucial advance in the conception of African diasporic identity and culture in the twentieth century. It also marks the distinctness of this kind of writing from English literary writing, signposting itself as 'new'. Seventy odd years later, it would perhaps not be entirely wrong to think that this 'new' poetry has been institutionalized through university curriculums, anthologies, commentaries and criticism. This ossification has in turn lent a certain canonicity to post-independence Indian poetry in English. To seek 'newness' here, therefore, one would have to look for socio-cultural markers similar to those that had once distinguished Nissim Ezekiel from Sarojini Naidu.
Subsequently, this paper turns its attention to newer tracts in South Asian poetry in English, especially poetry written by Diasporic writers from the South Asian region. The particular focus is on women diasporic poets as my intention is to foreground issues of gender, race, narration of the nation, and history writing. In order to understand the artistic literary space that these women poets write in, we must first trace the history of the South Asian region briefly. The term 'South Asia' is a geo-political referent. The region includes Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, the Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka. India occupies the largest land share in this region. Though the region has a rich diverse background of regional languages, culture, and history, there also exists a substantial body of writings in English which emerged with the British colonization of Asia after the fifteenth century. For the purposes of this paper, we shall be concerning ourselves with only South Asian literature in English. Many South Asian writers have made their mark on the global literary scene in the post-independence period, and their work offers a glimpse into the region's complex geo-political and cultural histories. Subsequently, a good number of these writers who write either from South Asia or abroad, have come to represent their country or region in the cultural and literary circles of the West, and have earned recognition through many international awards and prizes.

II. SOUTH ASIAN DIASPORA WRITING
Writers from South Asia whose writings have earned considerable global recognition include Bapsi Sidhwa, Amitav Ghosh, Meera Syal, Mohsin Hamid, Arundhati Roy, Michael Ondaatje, Salman Rushdie, among others. Dealing with momentous events in the history of the region such as the birth of nation states, the partition of India, political and armed struggles in postcolonial nations, these authors continue to act as representatives of the continually shifting dynamics of the nations in South Asia to a global audience since the 1970s. To illustrate this point, let us take for instance the celebrated novel Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie. The novel explores significant events in the history of the Indian sub-continent, including the war between India and Pakistan, the independence of Bangladesh and the Emergency under Indira Gandhi. Rushdie's deft positioning of Saleem as the unreliable narrator, his use of the tropes of the supernatural, or the fantastical, combined with more realist or naturalistic storytelling make Midnight's Children arguably one of the best novels to come out of South Asia.
Consequently, the novel has emerged as the representative literary form in the narration of the nation and in this case, South Asia. Although studies on poetry collections do occur, they are not given the same valence as criticism and commentary on novels. Arvind Krishna Mehrotra goes so far as to say that "the criticism of Indian poetry in English that has come out of our universities' English Departments is both voluminous and of inferior quality, and is best left alone." At the same time, critics such as Letitia Zecchini also praise South Asian poets who "refuse to be pigeonholed in neat national, linguistic, and cultural categories." In such a scenario then, there exists a considerable gap in this literary and critical academic discourse which this paper hopes to address. The choice of women poets in this regard is conscious and deliberate as will become evident.
For the purposes of this study, we shall look at the works of Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Faizullah Tarfia, and Vivek Shraya. Shraya often speaks about her own internalized shame and racism. Her poems then become sites of palimpsest of racist stereotypes, jokes which she rewrites through her self-realization. In her poem titled, "amiskwacîwâskahikan" she admits to her participation in the erasure of the indigenous people in Canada. Despite Canada's proclaimed commitment to multiculturalism, it is critiqued for its policies for the Aboriginal population which aids in the displacement and disempowerment of Faizullah's work has been presented at institutions and organizations worldwide, and has been featured at the Liberation War Museum of Bangladesh, the Library of Congress, the Smithsonian, and elsewhere. Her writing has been translated into Bengali, Persian, Chinese, and Tamil, and was included in the theater production Birangona: Women of War.
In 2010, the poet travelled to Dhaka, Bangladesh, to interview women survivors of the 1971 war. The 1971 Liberation War between Bangladesh and Pakistan, in which Bangladesh won independence from Pakistan, saw the adoption of rape as a military approach by the Pakistani army. Feminist and human rights advocates have elsewhere analysed the deep rooted cultural notions regarding female honour and shame and how this is used to dampen and rein in military opposition throughout the ancient and modern civilizations. Sean Carman notes how over the course of the year long conflict, "the Pakistani military raped or made sex slaves of between 200,000 and 400,000 Bangladeshi women." To honour these survivors, the Bangladeshi government has given the name birangona, a Bengali word that means "brave woman" but may also be translated as "war heroine." In Seam, the result of Faizullah's interviews with the birangona, she attempts to come to terms with her own heritage, identity, and experience as the child of immigrant parents and as a Muslim woman living in the west. The first verse in the collection is titled '1971' to mark the memory of that eventful year. The epilogue states that on March 26, 1971, West Pakistan launched a military operation in East Pakistan against Bengali civilians, students, intelligentsia, and armed personnel who were demanding separation of the East from the West. The war resulted in the secession of East Pakistan, which became the independent nation of Bangladesh.
Reviewer Trista Edwards notes that in the course of the armed conflict over two hundred thousand women were raped, and over 3 million people were killed. Faizullah writes on the stark dissonance of that moment experienced in simultaneously in America and Bangladesh :  ISSN: 2456-7620  https://dx.doi.org/10.22161/ijels.62.19 127 In west Texas, oil froths luxurious from hard ground while across Bangladesh, bayoneted women stain pond water blossom. Your mother, age eight, follows your grandmother down worn stone steps to the old pond, waits breathless for her to finish untwining from herself the simple cotton sari to wade alone into green water-the same color, your mother thinks, as a dress she'd like to twirl the world in. She knows the strange men joining them daily for meals mean her no harm-they look like her brothers do nights they jump back over the iron gate, drenched in the scents of elsewhere-only thinner. So thinin the distance, thunder, though the sky reflected in the water her mother floats in burns bright blue.

IV. CONCLUSION
The works surveyed here demonstrate how poets such as Faizullah, Shraya, and Nezhumuthathil draw inspiration and engage in a dialogic dialogue with the South Asian writing emerging from their native countries even as they negotiate their identities as second generation citizens in the West. Each of the poets whose works are reviewed and analysed here writes from their shared vantage points of being second generation naturalized citizens born of immigrant parents. They also reflect on their gendered experiences in their choice to revisit their ancestral countries. Whether it is the ten year old persona of Nezhukumatathil in her native village in Kerala trying to make sense of the sounds and sights of her father's birthplace, or Shraya meditating on the malleability and fluidity in the genders of Hindu gods and goddesses in order to find a safe place for her transgender self, or Tarfia Faizullah's return to Dhaka Bangladesh to reclaim a piece of her history by revisiting the site of gruesome violencethese women writing poetry from the margins of the category of South Asian writing compel critics, editors, publishers, and readers to re-imagine the reified contours of the body of writing that is referred to as 'South Asian literature'. By being placed in two worlds and by going beyond the geographical and socio-cultural positions of their 'outsiderness', these women poets share between them a rich tapestry of words, images, phrases which though contingent remain urgent.