Even the good boys want to shake you down, want to come in your mouth and hair…
—Megan Fernandes
Review by Selma Carvalho
Megan Fernandes is an American poet published in the New Yorker (need we say anything more?) Her newly-released poetry collection is titled Good Boys (Tin House Books, 2020).
The poet Maya Angelou tells us American means white, ‘everybody else has to hyphenate’ or be explained in some way. So, Megan Fernandes is a South Asian-American poet. Only, Fernandes has a much more complex history because human beings by their very nature are complex beings and should not be hyphenated. It takes more than two words, perhaps a whole line or paragraph to explain Megan Fernandes. She is a daughter of the Indian ocean diaspora; she is of Goan origin; she is of East African Goan origin; she carries the rich ancestry of the twice-born; Goans who crossed the Indian ocean to settle in Africa, Tanzania in her family’s case, and then resettled in the west after the decolonisation of Africa. I find parts of her past looming in the autobiographical poem, ‘White people always want to tell me that they grew up poor.’
My daddy is a daddy from Africa
An Indian boy from Tanga
…he is a doctor
because
it was a way
to unbury
his dead
Tanga is a region in northerly Tanzania on the east coast of Africa. The settlement of Goans there dates back to the mid-19th century, and although not as numerous as in the burgeoning colonial metropolis of Dar es Salam, they formed a tight-knit community most of them petty traders, mechanics, tailors, the odd clerk employed by the British administration or farmers cultivating tracts of land while running the local post office and store. The decolonisation of Tanzania and the wave of hostility to Asians, which followed, displaced the Goan community. Megan’s father left for London to train as a doctor.
It is important to reiterate that Fernandes is distinctly American because the DNA of her poetry is American, woven in the weft of America’s literary traditions, carried forth by a young generation of contemporary poets and writers such as Ada Limon and Garth Greenwell. The writing is stripped back, unclouded by adjectives and allegory, something the rest of the Anglophone literary world still burdens itself with, particularly if their centripetal location is all things British. I sometimes wonder if Sylvia Plath was an American poet or a British one, the vivid imagery of her poetry which ran parallel to that of her husband Ted Hughes’ writings, is largely absent in American renderings but is still found in British poets such as Carol Ann Duffy.
The brevity of the lines I have quoted above should not lead one to think of Fernandes as cut in the Rupi Kaur mould. She brings nothing of Kaur’s epigrammatic style to her poetry—she is singular, strong-willed; her control over language formidable, and even though she does away with the rigours of meter for most of her poems (who needs a wearisome pentameter precision these days, anyway) her ear for consonance and assonance is not compromised. Take for instance these lines:
It really does work, the way his spirit skims octaves across the ocean.
From ‘Why we drink.’
When I don’t finish
the pho noodles
From ‘Belleville’
Note the pitch-perfect half-cadence in:
coasting past cemeteries and sand-swept
playgrounds, courts without nets, many trucks
From ‘It’s Getting Dark, It’s Going to Rain’
When Megan does adopt meter, she prefers monometer or dimeter or a mix of both, and so her metered verse is delicate, flitting and sensory.
In midsummer, in Los Angeles
the night is fractured
with mountains, grilling ink
into the blue thaw, I trail
We encounter Fernandes’ imagery like a ridgeline—recurring consistently in all its splendid beauty.
the myrtle trees pushing their arms
back into the ground, growing muscle bark,
the seas ossifying into stone
From ‘Silica’
The landscape, the cultural and physical topography of her poems is decidedly John Updike’s middle America—
Joan Baez, paralyzed in sunlight (‘Coloring Hour’)
In Arizona, all the Starbucks feel haunted (‘Sonora’)
Poetry in many ways is an unforgiving literary form; it refuses to resonate if it is not confessional. Novelists and short story writers can bleed ink borrowing other people’s lives, but the poet has to bare their own, make it available to us, the reader, and in this Fernandes excels; she is intimately accessible, her conversational style is not clouded by obscure references—what you see is her pain, and her need to locate herself within the space and sphere she occupies: that of being young, that of searching for love within its offerings of desire and possession, within its expressions of cruelty and self-discovery, within its sublimation and repression of the self.
Even the good boys
want to shake you down, want to come
in your mouth and hair…
From the title poem ‘Good Boys.’
The only place Fernandes falters is in her attempt to ‘self-other’ against a monolithic whiteness. This scraping away at whiteness erases the edge of a more blunt discussion about the inherited privilege of brown-ness which exhibits itself clumsily through its engagement with historical imperialism and contemporary politics.
About her father and his move to London, she writes:
the only
one…
to really get out
And climb towards
The lands
that enslaved him.
In Africa, Asians were complicit in European colonisation, Empire’s middle-men, colonialism’s junior partner who when opportunity presented, occupied land and wrested privilege away from indigenous Africans.
Or the lines:
Only white people
can imagine a past
that was better
than now.
Only white people get
to have
nostalgia
This is being tone-deaf to the peculiarities of her ethnicity. Not only are Goans consumed by that much appropriated Portuguese illness of saudosismo, a melancholic longing for the lost paradise of Goa Dourada, but East African Goans are entombed in nostalgia for an Africa they have elevated in their imagination to a sort of Shangri la. The Africa they yearn for is the Africa of British colonialism with its clean streets and hierarchical structures. In this way the brown person too can partake of the white person’s nostalgia.
So, I reiterate: Megan Fernandes is an American poet whatever that entails and perhaps a definition of America which embraces its vastness of experience has yet to form, but to speak for ‘another’ identity, one informed by race, would involve enduring its shame, not just the shame people of colour are subjected to but the shame of our own histories.
In ‘Running in the suburbs’ Megan’s mother tells her ‘Not everything is about race, Megan’.
She might be right, and in some part, Megan acknowledges this when she owns America, in all its frailty, in ‘Modern Nation-States.’
Except that my parents looked at a map and leapt and were received on some days and on others, not at all. Like everywhere.
Megan Fernandes is an American poet. Extraordinarily talented, and I can’t get enough of her poetry. I read her in the deep of night, when the fear of shallow graves comes calling, grateful that the daughters of the Indian diaspora have found the urgency of their voice. That, we Goans get to claim her as our own is just gravy.
