Neil Bowen on (Edited )
Beware the intolerant Daily Mail reader! Beware the grammatical pedant! This poem is going to make you feel quite queasy indeed… Daljit Nagra is an English poet from a Punjabi heritage who uses the unfamiliar Punjabi patois to animate the soundscapes of his poems. Thematically, he is sensitive to both the plurality and duality of his Englishness, where he highlights the struggle to reconcile concepts of England and India as well as inside and outside. Look we have coming to Dover! however rewinds time to when his parents and countless others sailed to England in hope of a life ‘so various, so beautiful, so new…’ to quote Nagra’s quotation of the Victorian poet, Matthew Arnold, author of Dover Beach. Unusually, for Nagra, this poem is not one that captures the dialectical colour of his Punjabi heritage (check out his reading of his poem Darling & Me! on his website).
At present as the UK agonises about migrants and refugees potentially draining the life force out of the country, this poem becomes even more relevant than when first published in 2004. The poem certainly will not ease such agonizing as it plays up to a certain view of economic migrants as projected by conservative, right wing politics. It is a curious poem that seems to simultaneously look inwards and outwards, not an easy feat to achieve.
What’s in a title? What’s in a subtitle?
A good way to dive into this poem is to fragment it into pieces. Group the most memorable descriptions of place; effective descriptions of reproduction and multiplication and descriptions of brazen conspicuous success. Put your class into groups and ask them to come up with a title based on the fragments they’ve been given. Then ask them for a subtitle. You could make it challenging for them by asking them to link it to another poem of their choice. If this was too much of a stretch you could furnish them with a few potential candidates! Maybe throw in Dover Beach for good measure. Now get them to look at the sets of fragments as one entire text and see what they come up with.
It is doubtful they will arrive at a title like Look we have coming to Dover! Typical of the duality of the poem, this title can be interpreted in two ways, resulting in quite divergent tones. Unsurprisingly, perspective is the key. If viewed through the eyes of a grammatical stickler then such an exclamation reveals ignorance and poor mastery of English. If viewed through the eyes of a migrant then such a grasp of the language allows clear communication. It may also reveal pride in the readiness for such a new life. For the reader, whom it can only be hoped is more neutral in perspective, it reveals an almost comic entry into the poem. There is something sweetly amusing about the grammatical fallings of this exciting glimpse of a new world. Regardless of perspective, what the title does is to privilege and prioritise the migrant voice. This is most definitely the voice of the outsider coming in. It is an enthused, innocent voice.
The subtitle’s intertextual allusion to Dover Beach has a complex effect. On one level it reveals the huge excitement of what awaits these migrants as Dover and all it symbolizes comes into view; hence providing thematic support for that first eager exclamation. However, this new voice is distinctly English, an educated voice that diverges from the initial migrant voice in its precise mastery of the English language. It is the upper middle class voice of the impressive and rather serious looking fellow in the picture, Matthew Arnold. Therefore, Nagra presents a clash of voices before the poem even really begins, which introduces subtly the duality at the heart of the poem. Furthermore, the quotation from Dover Beach has been twisted out of its original tonal context. It comes from the end of Arnold’s poem where he locates his existential pain in the discrepancy between the beauty of the world as it should be and its chaotic reality. Here Nagra suppresses the chaotic loneliness but keeps the wonder. In another way, this mimics the natural coping mechanism of any migrant travelling to a new, potentially unwelcoming place: stay positive, ignore any negatives!
Welcome to the new old familiar world: sensory overload
Nagra’s poem is a sensory barrage for migrant and reader. Unsurprisingly, the first two stanzas are the most sensually overwhelming, with visual, auditory, tactile as well as olfactory imagery. This overload is skilfully twisted to create a hostile physical environment; a development that undermines the chirpy naivety of the poem’s title. It is notable how the migrants ‘stowed’ away on board are confronted with the ‘lash of a diesel-breeze’. Here the aggressive onomatopoeia of ‘lash’ overwhelms the gentle connotations of ‘breeze’. Not only does this tactile image suggest hostility in the natural environment to their arrival it also creates uncomfortable connotations with whips, slaves and masters. Furthermore, Nagra uses sibilance that mimics the sound of the sea and the ‘lash’ of the wind: ‘stowed in the sea to invade / the alfresco lash.’ While Britain’s colonial past is summoned cleverly in this image, it also heightens the sensory assault through the olfactory queasiness of a ‘diesel-breeze’.
This queasiness is further developed through the ‘ratcheting speed into the tide’, where the physical movement of the boat through the sea is clearly not designed for migrant comfort. Furthermore, in a symbolic sequence the migrants are literally assailed by the ‘surf’. However, this tactile imagery is complicated by the language used. The migrants are besieged by ‘gobfuls of surf phlegmed’ by rich tourists ‘lording the ministered waves’. The position of these ‘cushy come-and-go’ types is predictably at the front of the boat. Nagra puns nicely on this by describing them as ‘prow’d’ allowing an unpleasant vanity to characterize these rich people. More worryingly, the conflation of the sea and the rich passengers suggests that the potential xenophobia the migrants might face on the mainland is widespread.