A Review of Vandana Khanna's Train to Agra

[stephenhongsohn.livejournal.com]

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A Review of Vandana Khanna’s Train to Agra

This collection was wonderful to read up against Vazirani’s World Hotel because both travel and traffic in similar geographies.  I’m most interested in speaking about Train to Agra as a collection invested in identity, migration, and tourism.  Many of the poems are concerned with the question of what it means to be a second generation South Asian American, specifically an Indian American and how that collides against certain expectations as one travels back to the “homeland.”  Khanna was awarded the Crab Orchard Series First Book poetry prize for Train to Agra and it was published in September of 2001.  One hopes though that Khanna will continue to publish in this medium as she has a clear penchant for exposing the nuances of place, space, and the politics of mobility. 

The question of “homeland” is immediately queried in the first poem, “Spell,” in which the lyric speaker admits:

We traveled the city like we didn’t belong, a place I should call home

but as foreign to me as to you.  And you?  Who can say why you cried?
two miles from the Taj in the city proper.  My aunt thought it was the heat.

Maybe it was roaming the cluttered streets, no face your own,
or that smell when we stepped off the plane (5). 

What is interesting is that there is a definite sense that the lyric speaker here is an Indian American traveling abroad to a location that she should have a particular ethnic affiliation to, but that the feeling that emerges is one rather of estrangement.  Interestingly, this affectual impulse is mirrored by the friend who has “no face” to call one’s “own,” a sense then that her physical difference marks her as always-already foreign.  The poem is a fascinating contemplation of the ways in which subjects find themselves Othered, but that this process of being de-familiarized is not always clear-cut nor direct.  The poem is thus a meditation of this process of alienation that the traveling subject may face.  Of course, there is always the larger question revolving around the politics of mobility.  The notion that the “smell” could function to cause someone discomfort suggests a certain kind of cosmopolitan class difference that strikes negatively upon the lyric speaker’s friend.  Regardless, the root of her tears cannot easily be found. 

Likewise, in “Dun” this sentiment of estrangement is focalized on a young child, who for the first time, sees India by plane:

I had seen pictures, imagined the green teardrop of a map
lined with blue veins.  Instead, everything looked flattened,
rubbed down by a rolling pin.  I thought, I can’t go; each rut
and curve would singe my feet.  Everything lacked green,
not at all like the glossy world my mother had shown us
in the atlas, trying to orient, to give a picture (11).
The ways in which imagination and mapping collide with the child’s visual field here is remarkable.  There is that sense of expectation that is shattered spectacularly when the fertility and vitality that she has accorded greens and blues is replaced with other more muted hues.  Further, the child’s sense that “each rut/and curve would singe my feet” emphasizes that sense that she will find the landscape inhospitable to her very body, where its potential aridity burns rather than nourishes.  The play on words with “trying to orient,” is useful here in that even as she attempts to situate her own location vis-à-vis the landscape, a kind of cognitive mapping if you will, she is traveling to Asia, what has been called the Orient. 

In contrast, the expectations that a lyric speaker has as an adult infiltrates other poems that follow.  The touristic gaze is once again invoked

The only thing we wanted we couldn’t have:
water—unbottled, unboiled-pure sweet,
American-tasting water.  With every sip,
a prayer to one of the gods: the god of good
health and an easy flight home, the god of
treasures hidden away in crowded street stalls.
There were other things, of course—trinkets
made of colored glass, hand-painted-boxes, raw
silk—anything to saw we had been there.  Something
to hang on the walls of our tiny apartments.  We were
looking for the gods, for the one thing
that shimmered more than silver, a pyramid
or temple, a country-something we couldn’t fit
into our pockets.  We wanted the India of postcards
with our faces on the front.  Under all that glitter,
we wanted the shards of something we can’t name (15).

I especially found this poem indicative of a kind of shift in the touristic gaze.  Whereas many poems focus on estrangement and alienation from the “homeland,” in this, there is that sense of something unfamiliar and uncomfortable, the inability to find “American-tasting water.”  At the same time, the inability to take back home with them the “India of postcards/with our faces on the front” contrasts in that it shows the desire on the part of the speaker to return with something more than tiny mementos that come to stand in for that experience.  One might read this desire for this “something more” not simply then as the desire for another object, but evidence of their presence underneath the postcards that would never contain their faces.  How does one preserve the incredibly picturesque locations AND the sense of personal experience all at one time the poem seems to ask?

One final poem that deals with this emphasis on mobility, consumption, and commodifed gazes appears in “Domes.”

We should have gone on the train, the way
for travelers, tourists, ones who don’t belong.

I wanted a map of Agra, you wanted India
for your postcards—all the colors, stories

to tell your friends back in Boston.
We were hungry for all of it: the city

pressing against the car doors, the story
of the Taj found its way into our dreams.

Whatever happened to all those hands taken
from the workers, from those who built the Taj

step by step, sealing slabs of marble together
with their sweat?  We were blinded when the sun

first shown on it just like in the postcards, blinded
like the architect who designed it, so he could

only see it once, ordered to never build again,
only his mind remembering the color of marble

like teeth (25). 

In this poem, tourism comes to be effectively dismantled by the unveiling of the commodity fetish.  The Taj cannot be seen simply as a beautiful structure, the labor too much be excavated.  Here then the lyric speaker understands an alternative history that is encrypted in the very walls of the beautiful structure.  These is always the sense then that the gaze much be complicated through particular social and historical contexts. 

I end this review with a brief discussion of “Dot Head.”  I reprint a portion here:

A dot head,
a sang nigger—one of them who never
freckled during recess, smelled of curry

and spices, ate their sandwiches rolled up
in brown bread, skin dark as almonds.
Except they got it wrong.  No matter how

many times they rode by, chasing us
with words, with rocks and broken bottles
spitting at our backs, they got it wrong.

It was a sign of being blessed after temple,
of celebration when women wore them, red-gold
to match silver-threaded saris, to match red and green

glass bangles that shivered up their forearms, my brother’s
jagged, glittering more than a pundit’s thumbprint,
more than a holy mark, glittering (51). 

The reversal in “Dot Head” is empowering, especially as a way in which to revisit racially charged moments of childhood.  Whereas there is the potential sense of a kind of ethnic shame, the conclusion of the poem problematizes any such retreat through a lyrical explanation.  Indeed, the “dot” symbolizes so much more than the racialized abject and rendered her in precise and luminous images, its beauty challenges the ways in which it is subjected under the racist gaze.  Train to Agra always reminds us of these glances, the politics in looking, the power in observational consumption and the challenges and intricacies in transnational mobility. 

Purchase the book here!
http://www.siu.edu/~siupress/titles/f01_titles/khanna_agra.htm