British Subjects

📖 The Scoop

Home is 'always elsewhere' for Fred D'Aguiar: born in Britain, brought up in Guyana, and now living in London and America. In his previous two books, Mama Dot and Airy Hall, he caught up with his past by writing about his upbringing in Guyana. Now his focus is Britain: being and feeling British, feeling at home but not being made to feel at home. Confronted by the Customs men at Heathrow, his passport stamp 'British Citizen not bold enough for my liking and too much for theirs'.Fred D'Aguiar maps out new poetic territory in British Subjects, re-discovering a sense of belonging in poems charting landmarks in his life: the return to Guyana with exiled writer Wilson Harris; finding the grave of an unknown African slave in Bristol; an unsettling visit to Germany; living by the Thames at Greenwich, and then by the sea at Whitley Bay. Always searching, always on edge, D'Aguiar can only lose himself when all the barriers come down, as in poems celebrating love, the body, and the fusing spirit of Notting Hill Carnival. Behind all these poems is his personal talisman, the River Thames, the Sweet Thames of his recent film, a great watery snake entering his dreams like a fertility god, transplanted from Britain to the rainforest of Guyana.

Genre: Poetry / General (fancy, right?)