Essay Questions

What is the title character referring to when he describes poems as being written by a “bunch of Gunga Dins” in ““Kabba Questions the Ontology of Representation, the Catch 22 for ‘Black’ Writers.”

Kabba is haranguing the teacher of his son over the use of a literature textbook which separates white British poets from the “Poems from Udder Cultures and Traditions” written by brown-skinned foreigners in exotic former colonies of the Empire. The term “Gunga Din” refers to the title character in a poem by one of the more egregiously colonialist poets in British history, Rudyard Kipling. Kipling is the author of the notoriously racist poem “White Man’s Burden” which encourages imperialist domination of entire populations of dark-skinned natives of foreign lands for their own good even though it places a burden upon the white invaders.

Some point to “Gunga Din” as a kind of offset to the direct racism of that poem because it portrays the titular Indian water-carrier who sacrifices his life to save British soldiers who had humiliated as a hero. More contemporary interpretations, however, argue that “Gunga Din” is just as racist as “White Man’s Burden” but couches it within the hero-worship of the Indian character. The underlying message, in this interpretation, is that he is a hero only as a result of saving an Englishman. The point of Nagra’s poem is that his son has taken on the characteristics of a Gunga Din himself by respecting British culture laughing at his father as a stereotype of foreign culture.

How does the bride’s activities in stanza 4 of “Singh Song!” become a powerful demonstration of the subjectivity of literary interpretation?

“Singh Song!” is a poem much analyzed across the web by a vast cross-section of people ranging from well-educated academicians to high school students who published their poetry analysis assignment on a a person blog. The result of all this published criticism reveals what seems to be a split within two equally divided camps composed of readers with two distinctly different interpretations of what exactly is going on in stanza 4. What is known for sure from the text is this: the wife is upstairs tapping a high heel shoe loud enough for the speaker to hear it on the floor below while seated at her computer which is logged into a site for Sikh lovers.

One very popular interpretation reads these irrefutable facts in a way that to indicate that the heel-tapping is a sign of impatience at how much time her husband spends running the store which has blossomed into an act of infidelity in which she is herself searching for a lover on the web site. This reading completely ignores the more oblique references to “netting two cats” that she “books” for an overvalued cost. This imagery is couched in language that is not as clear as the stated facts, however, and thus requires connections and an application of critical logic to arrive at the interpretation that what is going on is not the bride revealing any signs of betrayal of her husband, but is sniping away at ever more conservative traditions expected of Sikh women by running a dating web site matching Sikhs with partners of their choice rather than arranged choices.

The setting “Look We Have Coming to Dover!” is filled with suggestive meaning for British readers, but what symbolic significance is most immediately established for those less familiar?

The poem is preceded by a quote from a very famous poem by Matthew Arnold, “Dover Beach” which carries with it an abundance of suggestive context which can be applied to Nagra’s decision to place the opening scene of his poem there. Outside the U.K., however, Dover is unquestionably famous for just one thing: those towering white cliffs made famous in the popular World War II anthem, “There’ll be Bluebirds Over) The White Cliffs of Dover” which looked forward to a future when the fascist threat would be defeated and things would return back to normal for England. Normalcy is the key word here as normalcy in England is usually associated with very pale and reserved people. The whiteness of the cliffs of Dover makes this connection immediate as the juxtaposition of brown-skinned immigrants entering illegally by stealthy means is indicative of a disruption in normalcy.