Unnamed (Illegal) Immigrant
The speaker in “Look We Have Coming to Dover!” is undeniably an immigrant coming to England. Although he does not explicitly state he come into the country illegally, imagery and word choice definitely point strongly toward that conclusion. The opening line speaks of being stowed away. As the poem progresses, however, it is clear that this person is hard-working rather than being a drain on the country’s system. Despite this, however, he and his fellow immigrants to subjected mainly to either abuse or neglect.
Singh
The speaker in “Singh Song!” is a young Sikh who works twelve-hour shifts running of his father’s stores. He’s a bit immature and irresponsible as he admits to breaking his father’s rule against taking a break by locking the door when nobody is in the store to sneak upstairs with a little romantic fun with the wife he’s just recently married. When he’s not upstairs, she’s working at the computer on a dating site exclusively for Sikhs. (Although some interpret stanza 4 much differently: that his bride is using the website to look for lovers for herself, but this seems the less likely reading.) The poem progresses to reveal the tensions between the newlyweds and the speaker’s parents, especially charged by the speaker’s wife rebelling against the conservative values of his parents. The portrait ultimately of two young lovers deeply in love.
Kabba
The title character of yet another of the Nagra’s inventive and playful monologues, “Kabba Questions the Ontology of Representation, the Catch 22 for ‘Black’ Writers,” is addressing a specific person rather than the reader as in the first two examples here. The object of Kabba’s ire is his son’s English teacher generally speaking, though the specific cause of his outrage is the content of the GCSE Anthology which presents white British poets in a much more positive light than the darker-skinned “Gunga Dins” that the textbook groups together and presents in a negative light by way of comparison.
Mugoo and Gugoo
“The Love Song of Mugoo and Gugoo” differs substantially from the other three poems by virtue of narrated by a third-person speaker as well as English being the dominant language. While the insertion of dialect and hybrid-language slang is one of the most characteristic features of the three previous poems and most of Nagra’s work, in this more straightforward narrative tale, the English is only sparingly interrupted. It is a peculiarly Indian story of star-crossed lovers: while both title characters occupy runs on the country’s caste system near the bottom, it is significant that Gugoo belongs to an ever so slightly higher caste than Mugoo: in the grand scheme of Indian class division, he is the floor and she is the foot that walks on. Barely separated though the bootmaker girl and sweeper boy may be, however, it is this social distinction which prevents their love from being legally certified.
