Amitava Kumar's poems

After Jan’s talk about analyzing poetry last Thursday, I wanted to try to analyze some of the poems that we read for Tuesday. There were a couple of poems that I was trying to sort out. The first was “History” and the second was “Iraqi Restaurants”, both of which were written Amitava Kumar. I don’t have any overall thesis regarding the overall message of each of the poems. The following is simply my musings on different components of the poem.

“History,” as the title would indicate, is about history and how it is formed or conceived. I felt as if this poem discussed the way in which colonialism bastardizes certain elements of the colonized culture. The poem begins with the word “They”—indicative of many people, as opposed to the singular peasant. This creates the image that the peasant was outnumbered and the people referred to as “they” could easily overcome the peasant by pure force. I think that it is fairly obvious, but I think that the “they” refers to the colonizers or imperialists.

A common theme that has been brought up on several occasions this semester is the concept of silence, which re-emerges in this poem. The captors gagged the peasant before they removed his nose. The one thing that confused me about this poem was the significance of the nose. In addition, “the dark road” created an ominous and secretive tone to this stanza. It is as if the people who caught the peasant did not want anyone to know what they were doing.

Upon some online research on Wikipedia, I found the idiom “cutting off the nose to spite the face,” which refers to overreacting in order by self-mutilation as opposed to harming your enemy. While I’m still not sure if this connects directly to this usage of cutting off the nose, it was still interesting!

Finally, taking the nose to the museum seems symbolic of putting the nose/a piece of culture on display. By attaching it to the statue that is missing a nose shows that they are fulfilling something that is missing. But then, it almost seems as if they are trying to pass it off on their own. This is also seen in the last few lines “Thus was born the history/that is taught in schools.” Pieces of history of colonized cultures have been integrated into the dominant culture and passed off as “truth” and completeness.

Similarly, I thought that the poem “Iraqi Restaurants” also addressed the issue of tokenization and adoption of other cultural aspects. In the first stanza, the Americans were in Iraq. The statement that the Americans created ovens suggests that the Americans created a situation that would incubate and build heat. This is not a positive image—it made me think that the actions of the Americans build resentment and pressure in the Baghdad homes. The first stanza then ends with the word “waited,” which is mirrored by the break in the poem. It is as if the reader is waiting along with the Americans to see what would happen.

Finally, the second stanza talks about Iraqi cooks in the United States. I took the cooks to symbolize tokenized people. In many of the other stories we have read, food and cooking has been strongly correlated with culture. In “Out on Main Street,” the narrator talked about how she made herself learn how to cook Indian food because that is what she thought was expected of her. In this poem, it is as if the Iraqi cooks are responsible for representing all Iraqis and their culture in America. However, reference to “the Vietnamese before them” made me think of refugees of war and I was not sure what type of analysis this idea would inform.

So those were my random thoughts about the poems. I am a little rusty on my poetry analysis skills, so I hope at least a few things actually made sense!