Anita Pati explores intergenerational damage
This Sunday, WE features British-born and raised poet Anita Pati, shortlisted for the 2023 Jhalak Prize (which celebrates books by British black, Asian and minority ethnic (BAME) writers) for her slim and commanding poetry collection Hiding to Nothing.
Pati tells me that Hiding to Nothing, a collection about “violence, in all its forms, over generations, to others, to ourselves”, was “gestating” within herself for years before she wrote it. “I’m of Indian heritage and see how the diaspora can carry violence descended from the brutal and extractive British Empire. When those diasporas came and came to the UK, how did we/they manifest intergenerational trauma and violence?
“The book’s form is jagged, layered, and cyclical. More stable poem forms bookend HtN, then the central body disintegrates into fragments - like a person holding it together.” Like all writers, in a thoroughly saturated literary market, Pati struggles with marketing her book, so vital for the modern writer to get their books into the hands of readers. “I’m not a natural self-marketer; it’s not a mainstream matter, and people couldn’t get hold of it... Then the Jhalak Prize was longlisted, then shortlisted - incredible! And suddenly, it had some visibility, and the prize’s partnerships meant bookshops started to stock it. I saw the peacock flash off its cover, hiding no more.”
Pati writes rarely and sporadically in bursts of energy, saying the profundity of daily life filters through ordinary days of “reading, thinking, scraping grime from tile grout, slicing an apple, the essential fallow moments.” Pati’s award-winning work is featured in an excerpt (beneath) with the kind permission of copyright holder Liverpool University Press.
EXCERPT
Dodo Provocateur
Europeans hunted you mercilessly, because you beakies wouldn’t be doves or albatross. Those whitish irises probably grotted and balled and seized, black undertail coverts jutting at strumpet-starved sailors, marooned on Mauritius, exotic, just not Bideford, Perth or Poole. Why gobble pebbles big as nutmegs to temper your guts, and prove fresh meat for rusky sailors, declaring you foul? ‘Belly and breast pleasant enough in flavour,’ they said. If only they’d waited a few decades later before they snuffed you forever, for being cloven-footed, turkey! You know, you and your bulging brethren could have been common as peacocks, not stuffed through your hooks in old Copenhagen or folded in sketchbooks. Mauritian Martha, who froze your fruity body in gin? Now of the Marthas exists only bitty skin, you pigeons.
Cycular
When the floods spate again through the flat’s front door and the toddler coughs, outside’s snuck in, sodden walls seeded, plaster blisters like cigarette burns on forgotten These are the rivers of the north: swollen Irwell Calder, Ouse, breaching an eschar where the gold fat glistens and the white blood foams in our plastic buckets. And the reek of a childhood seeps through these walls: rotgulley whip overflow fantail of milfoil, valleymist rainfall, triggering sirens. When the oozages foam in their ministrations but nobody listens – when they do, you’re a cipher or a pain or a duty but not love; where do you go now for succour or for someone to stop it? How to be counted when your voice is the bubble that your small child blows, when the sky’s drowning lungs burst into downpour? When it’s soaked into earth, only earth can listen, mainlining water in some stinking glory, sending it pulsing into sewagepiped lowrise because who cares for us? You go on, you go on.
Train Triolet (16.46 to Brighton)
I won’t blow you up because I’m brown, O twitchy woman who grassed up my shopping. I went to the loo not to twiddle my belt. I won’t blow you up because I’m brown. Terrorists don’t tend to buy Cath Kidston unless I am a cleanskin moron. Because I’m brown, I won’t blow you up, O native woman who grassed up my shopping. –From Hiding to Nothing (Pavilion Poetry, 2022) Copyright held and permission granted by Liverpool University Press.
Pati was commended in the Forward Prize, honouring fresh voices alongside internationally established names. Anita Pati’s first poetry pamphlet, Dodo Provocateur, won The Rialto Open Pamphlet Competition (2019) and was shortlisted for the Michael Marks Awards. She has been a winner of the Wasafiri New Writing Poetry Prize and a joint winner of the inaugural Women Poets’ Prize (2018/20). Pati has worked in journalism and libraries.
Ira Mathur is a Guardian columnist and the winner of the non-fiction OCM Bocas Prize for Literature 2023