D.A. Prince reviews After all we have travelled by Sarala Estruch (Nine Arches Press, 2023)
If you read this title aloud, how does it sound? More than flat statement, I think; there’s emotional colour here but pinning it down is tricky. There’s partly a flourish of achievement (pride in having reached a goal): there’s also a note of struggle (the weariness after a long journey, the time it’s taken). And where does the stress fall? This ambiguity – yes, a small one but in poetry everything merits examination – is a pointer to the complexity within Sarala Estruch’s debut collection.
When I write ‘debut’ I feel I’m selling this collection short. It doesn’t read like a debut. The poems are considered and carefully crafted. While they are are ‘about’ Estruch’s family history and untangling the knots, they also have a range of form and register acknowledging their presence as poems, not merely vehicles for conveying information. They’ve grown, slowly, beyond the narrative detail; how her history is revealed has equal importance.
The collection is divided into four sections, with poems travelling through time, across continents, taking in different cultures and languages, and connecting generations and their emotional ties. It appears broadly chronological – until it isn’t: the past is unruly and various so I’ll jump straight to Section IV, the present, to where the mix of lives and backgrounds has arrived: today.
‘Return’ shows Estruch and her family arriving at Indira Gandhi International Airpot, eleven hours on from Heathrow, and virtually identical with it – “Grey-carpeted, white plastic walls / on all sides.” Tired, fumbling with papers, they negotiate Immigration:
Why do I suddenly feel like a fraud? He enunciates
my name the way Indians do, with a hard rolling ‘r’
I can’t replicate. ‘Yes. My father was Indian.’
He is incredulous. ‘And where is your husband from?’
‘Jamaica.’ The immigration man is half-amused,
half-bemused. ‘The children are very mixed,’ I grin.
‘They are universal,’ the officer says, handing us
our papers. The gate opens, and the room is shining,
sunlight scuttling off the white floor, walls, our broad smiles.
My husband takes our son’s hand, I take our daughter’s.
Read in isolation this conversational exchange could almost be prose. But the ‘r’ in ‘fraud – that underlying doubt when facing authority – is picked up when her name is spoken. It’s there again in “incredulous”, moves through “immigration” to arrive – triumphantly now, I think – in “grin”. The open sounds in “universal” have been earned, not only by this journey but by everything in the preceding poems. This poem also discards one version of the past – the poetic past and its flourishes, that is – in its opening: “No more stepping from the loins of the silver bird / into the hot breathy mouth of India.” Forget gorgeous imagery: a plane is a plane and this is the modern world. This family is “universal”.
When I write ‘debut’ I feel I’m selling this collection short. It doesn’t read like a debut
So, how did we get here? Estruch first explored her heritage and family in Say (flipped eye, 2021). Two-thirds of the poems in that pamphlet re-appear here, some substantially re-written to clarify the twists and tangles of her parents’ story. She introduces their lives in glimpses, letting the reader piece together the journeys (UK and India) and the timeline. The opening poem, ’A Love Story, or The English Dream – London, 1976’ – that alternative in the title ironically echoing period-piece romantic novels – undermines the idealised fiction:
in love / as we were
with a country / gleaned from school textbooks & / photographs
your mother kept / in the album of her childhood // gardens
with rose bushes & hedgerows /
This prose poem, using slashes to suggest line breaks, and first person viewpoint, effectively pulls the reader in, and very effectively. We can place these two young people:
me pale / skinned
in new flares / European features & / freshly bobbed hair / you
brown / skinned in polished oxfords / blazer & sleek side-parting
The innocent happiness is, however, undercut by reality: he’s skivvying in a restaurant kitchen despite being a graduate and “… in the country of your birth / you’d dined with nabobs.” England offers no welcomes, only “stares & / curses”.
These are poems of love and of disconnection; time isn’t a straight line nor is everything explained. His parents (Sikh, in India) forbid the marriage:
They said sever all ties. They said
forget her and the other him or her
that wasn’t a him or her yet.
(from ‘(Dis)Obedience’)
Those monosyllables fall like hammer blows. This “him or her” is the poet. The narrative is compelling and while teasing out the pattern it can be too easy to overlook the formal range of these poems and stylistic variation. Consecutive poems on dreams explore Estruch’s mother’s increasing disconnection: the long-line couplets of ‘My Mother’s Indian Wedding’ show her yearning, for “the house in Uttar Pradesh where it would take place” – that conditional “would” revealing that the shalwars, turbans, gold-threaded kurta, saffron-coloured scarf will have no existence, no reality. ‘Starting from a Dream, 1983’ is a prose poem weaving two poems – one in italics, one in regular font – with a storm (actual as well as emotional) connecting them. It’s inventive and effective, the form integral to the story.
The narrative is compelling and while teasing out the pattern it can be too easy to overlook the formal range of these poems and stylistic variation
The ties, of course, are not severed, and the Indian side of the family maintain contact after the death of Estruch’s father, “claiming” her – a word Estruch explores in ‘Freight’, a three-section poem in short triplets. I’m aware how subtly the space around poems is used: to show division and internal conflict the page-opening has the first section left-adjusted while the second pushes at the right-hand margin:
If a part of me
believed I was white; another
knew I wasn’t.
Turn the page and the third section is centred: the poet is leaving her mother, to learn, as the following poem (‘Home/Home’) tells, what it’s like to struggle with a new language, what Hindi looks like.
It’s not just here that Estruch makes space integral to the poems. In ‘I research the origins of the modern rose & discover’ the poem is a list of twelve numbered points, beginning “1. she is a crossbreed” ending with rose translated into Mandarin, Hindi and French. Both Hindi and French belong in the poet’s heritage but the Mandarin jolted me: had I missed a crucial detail? In a stand-alone poem this wouldn’t be a problem but here it seems, for once, a step too far beyond the core of the collection.
Spatial innovation is taken even further in ‘Camera Lucida – After Roland Barthes’. Short units of text are framed as though in small boxes, there are two (intentionally) blank pages, while the three closing pages allow the print to fade as though dissolving into the page. Some knowledge of Barthes’ Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography helps – and I won’t attempt to summarise the Wikipedia entry – but the poem is an exploration of how photographs taken by her father affect the poet. In looking at his photographs she is seeing through his eyes. It’s intense, focussing on the last photograph he took: a rose, and what it might mean for both of them.
‘Ghazal: Say – After Will Harris’, the final poem, ends with a question:
The whispering grows louder, reverberates in my ear, my throat.
Father, and Poet. Tell me honestly. What are you – what am I – trying to say?
That’s every poet’s question but it’s particularly pertinent in this collection where different times and cultures are blending. Estruch’s extended Indian family now welcome her, as eager to explain their culture as she is to take part. In ‘Kesh (II)’, as a nineteen-year-old, she cuts her hair in preparation for her first visit – “They love it. My Indian family say my short crop/ makes me smart.” Her uncle is triumphant: “She looks just like the Modern Indian Woman.”
It would be simplistic to say these are poems about connection; they are born out of past conflicts, from the personal to the political, and their existence and trauma have to be recognised
This poem recalls ‘Kesh (I)’, the second poem in the collection. A Sikh man, turned down for every job, in a “damp-infested flat”, stares in the mirror, picks up a knife: the poem is edge-of-seat tense, driven by accumulating detail, until he cuts the long rope of his hair. A note has reminded us that uncut hair is one of the distinguishing signs of the Sikh Khalsa. Poems relating to photographs connect times and continents; poems about becoming a mother contrast and expand on poems about her own mother. This is a collection of echoes.
It would be simplistic to say these are poems about connection; they are born out of past conflicts, from the personal to the political, and their existence and trauma have to be recognised. This takes me to the title, and to ‘Grandfather Speaks (via Audio Recording)’ from which it comes. A family’s history is shaped by its country’s history; in India this means Partition. This poem begins in England, family life, but then moves to India and – significantly – what Grandfather doesn’t say:
Doesn’t mention
the other family home abandoned overnight
in that other country which had once been
the same country. Doesn’t say disjuncture
rupture severance. Doesn’t say:
trauma of body mind
heart. Doesn’t say Punjab.
After all we have travelled Grandfather doesn’t speak
of the things he believes he’s left behind and
I’ve inherited.
It is for Estruch to keep the voices of her past, all of them, alive in the present, and part of her own experience. This collection looks forward, with the next generation.The past generations have travelled far, literally and metaphorically, and the journey isn’t over. As a poet Sarala Estruch draws on formal craft and experimental technique to bring these elements together. In these particular lives the “universal” is a beacon.
D.A. Prince lives in Leicestershire and London. Her second collection, Common Ground (HappenStance, 2014), won the East Midlands Book Award 2015. A further collection, The Bigger Picture, also from HappenStance, was published in November 2022.
