Brooklyn, NY: Hanging Loose Press, 2020. 96 pages. $18.00.
The Migrant States enacts an immigrant’s experience of America in the twenty-first century. The cover is red, white, and blue: Texas in red, with hands around it, gathering the various states together as they drift apart. Amirthanayagam’s book, like Leaves of Grass, passes through optimism and lands on something else: “I became a citizen / and learned later / from Whitman / that America // contains a / contradictory / brimming multitude.” Amirthanayagam laments President Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric: “Our eyes are dry. Our breath needs washing. What next? You are putting up / a wall on your Southern flank? What an irony. The country that accepts refugees / does not want us.” Certainly 2020, with the recent Black Lives Matter protests and Trump’s militaristic response, has seen the “contradictory / brimming multitude” in full swing.
Amirthanayagam provides a valuable insider-outsider perspective. Born in Sri Lanka, he moved to London, England, at eight, and then as a teenager to the United States: Honolulu, Manhattan, and now Rockville, Maryland. He’s worked for the US Foreign Service for years, stationed in Haiti, Peru, Mexico, and many other countries. It’s natural, then, that his book reaches beyond the US: “We have been running for so long. We are tired. We want to rest. We don’t want / to wake up tomorrow and pack our bags. We have gone 10,000 miles. We have / boarded a row boat, tug boat, bus, freight train. We have a cell phone and some bread.” This voice, “running for so long,” could be a Syrian running from Bashar al-Assad, a North Korean crossing the DMZ, or a person from Mexico fleeing ICE in Texas.
Amirthanayagam seems cautiously hopeful about the American Dream, compared to other recent poets who speak to the immigrant experience. Javier Zamora’s Unaccompanied, for example, tells the story of a nine-year-old boy on a harrowing journey alone from El Salvador to the Texas border: “And there, not the promised land but barbwire and barbwire // with nothing growing under it . . .” The Migrant States does not deny the existence of war and injustice: journalists are killed, villagers step on mines, and even the speaker suffers from depression (“I carry a peculiar strain // of melancholy that pierces all activity / and must in the end be endured”). But Amirthanayagam seems to firmly believe that good exists everywhere.
“I realize,” Amirthanayagam admits, “my lines are not lyrical. They have no surprising leaps, / or rhythmic epiphanies. They are flat, a body shot on the street / visited by paramedics, wailing, young, men and women.” Yet I don’t think this is exactly fair. Amirthanayagam’s work is rife with gestures, voices, and insights gleaned from a full life of travel, characters, color, and music. They are free verse, confessional lyric poems, with surprising twists, turns, and digressions. The voice is romantic but dark. Sanguine but trustworthy.
The Migrant States knits together places and people and ideas which you wouldn’t think fit together, but somehow do. “The Golden Poem” moves, with restless energy, from a plaza in Puerto Maldonado to a New York subway, to the “fringes of the Amazon” to the Andes. Elsewhere, powerful moments flash by so quickly that we’d miss them if we didn’t pay attention:
I used to taste
marmite on my tongue, jellied eels, kippers, mash,but I am not returning to England this Christmas,
the journey longer and deeper, up the coast,
to Jaffna, where Pappa had wanted to go
on foot after the stroke, pottering about
the house in Colombo, and we held him back.
The speaker shifts from image to image—marmite, England, Jaffna, the father—with purpose, but keeps that purpose to himself. Similarly, “Morning Mass, Halloween (for Lola)” describes a woman collapsing in a church, then moves to the speaker’s father, and to his daughter:
Hushed tones. Place of worship. Early morning. A woman kneeling
in the pew could not get up. The priest brought her communion; then
another parishioner called for an ambulance. The fireman, a friend
of the ambulance driver, arrived in his fire truck. They work together
naturally. What to do now? Walk to the font, dip fingers in holy water,
then go out to my car. Paramedics will lay her on a stretcher, pump
her heart, wheel her away to the hospital. Life is coming to its end:
a repeat. In my dad’s case his heart stopped while he kneeled at a pew.
Nobody could revive it. He would have loved to see my daughter,
smiling as she guards the witch’s cauldron this Halloween, sweets in hand.
The focus begins on the “woman kneeling / in the pew,” taken to a hospital. We’re introduced, with sympathy, to each of the people who help: priest, parishioner, fireman, ambulance driver, paramedics. The speaker feels pathos for the woman, for “Life is coming to its end.” We realize, in the last lines, that the speaker, while watching this woman, is actually thinking about his dead father, whose “heart stopped while he kneeled at a pew.”
“Morning Mass” links dissimilar things together: the dying woman, the people who transport her, the father, the daughter, and so on. While reading The Migrant States, I kept picturing the poet as a Jesus bug, one of those insects skimming an entire lake, touching every inch of it, drawing it all together. Amirthanayagam is not interested in dwelling on one image, or drilling down into an image to find some archetype or root; he’d rather link many things together. There is epiphany, but it’s not emptily dramatic; there is emotion, but it’s mature, fully earned. James Joyce, I think, is similar. In Ulysses, Joyce uses stream of consciousness to reveal Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus’s constant interior monologues, free-flowing for 700 pages.
A spider, perhaps, is a more apt analogy than a Jesus bug. Amirthanayagam’s inclusive poetic spirit is like the “Noiseless Patient Spider” in Whitman’s famous poem, which “launch’d forth filament, filament, filament, out of itself,” vigorously “unreeling” the web “to explore the vacant vast surrounding.” Whitman compares the spider to his own soul: “Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing, seeking the spheres to connect them. . . .” Similarly, Amirthanayagam’s poems link disparate ideas, scenes, countries and people together. The field of the poem is a spiraling web, fastening together, with glue-like commas, all that they touch: the subjects of his poems, the many poets he’s read, the places he’s visited. And Amirthanayagam’s “web” stretches across the world.
The Migrant States is innocently humanistic, asserting that we are all equal, no matter how poor we are, where we come from, or the color of our skin:
we are
all browned
by the same Sun,rained upon
from clouds, seeded
or left to capture
naturally whatoceans evaporate,
we are guided
by politicians and
priests . . .
The “Migrant” of the title refers both to the shifting states of mind enacted by these poems, and to the poet’s own firsthand experience of being an immigrant. Amirthanayagam gently stretches the word until it seems to refer to the migration of love between humans, mediated by simple pleasures like food:
This minced meat, keema
mixed with rice and peas
and a cup of milk tea, Pakistanbrought home with raita
and good company
at Shant Cottage, Kent . . .
Amirthanayagam—like Whitman, the “most // expansive American” and guiding spirit of The Migrant States—adopts a world-encompassing voice, taking on the dual role of poet and village elder, helping (noiselessly, patiently) to connect us where we didn’t know we needed connecting. Breaking down the divisions between us. Amirthanayagam asks, “So what does the Migrant state?” and, elsewhere, answers, “We need open borders everywhere.”