“Is it terrible to say that what I want most for my son, Frank, is a life of ordinary happiness? I ran so he could walk,” writes Vidyan Ravinthiran in one of the punctum moments in Asian/Other: Life, Poems, and the Problem of Memoir, a piercing book that grapples with the mixed blessing of patrimony — as a son and as a father; the failure of identity politics to account for many facets of human complexity; and his unbridled love affair, as the son of Sri Lankan Tamils, raised in Yorkshire, England, with English language and literature, an ardor that brims from the page.
This is a book for anyone smitten with the possibilities of language, as well as anyone who has felt caught in the delicate weir of a loving family, the crosshairs of seemingly contradictory passions, or by the narrow checklist of identity categories used to sort and group us all, as individuals, in our personal, vocational, and civic lives. In other words, it is a memoir for this moment, when ideological and political divisions seem to be estranging us from imagining stories unlike our own.
Asian/Other is also the gripping account of a high school truant — who largely homeschooled himself — and who emerged as an eminent literary critic, acclaimed poet, and Harvard English professor: Ravinthiran’s most recent collection of poems, The Million-Petalled Flower of Being Here, won a Northern Writers Award, a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, and was shortlisted for the Forward Prize, and his first landmark scholarly book, Elizabeth Bishop’s Prosaic, won the Warren-Brooks Award for Literary Criticism.
If his has been a remarkable path, it has been hard-won at every stage, navigating the shoals of family expectations, heightened by his parents’ escape from geocidal warfare, while locating the current and direction of his own talent. In a chapter entitled “Impediment,” he recounts intensive therapy for speech difficulties as a child, which trained him in the precise sonics of language, a skill set he continued to hone as an avid reader, acquiring the acrolect of the “Queen’s English,” and quietly studying the example of Oscar Wilde who, initially derided as a bumbling Irish boy with dirty fingernails, honed a drawing room wit to a stiletto point, converting his outsider’s perspective to his advantage.
So, too, Ravinthiran recounts excelling at school, despite caustic racist episodes with peers and the occasional teacher, including one who warns another boy not to sit next to him “in case the mud I’d clearly fallen in, flat on my face, stained his uniform.” At home, he reads through his parents’ bookshelves, stocked with English literary classics, and convinces his father to buy an expensive copy of the Oxford English Dictionary, adding to his arsenal:
“It came with a magnifying glass satisfyingly shaped like a gun — with a honey-yellow trigger for switching on and off a useless, tiny bulb. Even now, if I close my eyes and concentrate, I can remember the smell of my mother’s chicken-and-potato curry wafting up the stairs … and the feel of half-kneeling on my mattress with the dictionary open beside me, heavy as a person — a lover.”
Command of English literature becomes a route to Oxford University where, weathering racist slurs hurled from cars in his long walks to the library, he metrically scans the language of these verbal assaults, noting their assonance and caesuras, reducing them to patterns of stressed and unstressed syllables. What begins with disability and others’ attempts at dispossession is transformed into extraordinary facility: an ability to parse the finer nuances of poems and their expressive interiorities in revelatory ways, hearing music where others hear noise.
Indeed, one of the great pleasures of Asian/Other is Ravinthiran’s close readings of poems, embedded in his memoir’s storylines, which yield to us in surprising new ways. He ranges across centuries and continents, offering poems by Biswamit Dwibedy, Andrew Marvell, Solmaz Sharif, Philip Larkin, Sharon Olds, and Divya Victor, among others. He renders a particularly stirring take of John Keats’s sonnet “When I have fears that I may cease to be,” one of the literary works he credits with saving his life as a depressed teenager when little else reached him and a legitimate suicide attempt sent him to the hospital.
When I have fears that I may cease to be
Before my pen has gleaned my teeming brain,
Before high-pilèd books, in charactery,
Hold like rich garners the full ripened grain:
…
And when I feel, fair creature of an hour,
That I shall never look upon thee more,
Never have relish in the faery power
Of unreflecting love — then on the shore
Of the wide world I stand alone, and think
Till love and fame to nothingness do sink.
While Keats is sometimes pilloried as apolitical, Ravinthiran argues that his description of primitive fears — of dying in obscurity, of never seeing a beloved again, of failing to translate the products of one’s “teeming brain” to the page — provides us with a means of assaying the virtually unsayable and restoring, to our ailing spirits, some faith in art’s rendering of predicaments in which we find ourselves. It tracks, he argues, the motions of a mind in its despairing thoughts, slyly providing a map out of such cognitive tail-chasing: we look outward, with the speaker, from “the shore / Of the wide world” — toward an ocean or, perhaps, for tubercular Keats, toward the riverbank of Styx.
Although Keats’ poem indulges, initially, in the kind of rumination that he notes cognitive behavioral therapists (and their ilk) seek to curb, it does so prettily, endearingly, memorably — and it is the music of Keats — not a copy of Stop Thinking and Start Living — which brings Ravinthiran, as an adolescent, back from the brink. In a chapter that cheekily reverses that advice, “Start Thinking and Stop Living,” he relates that his mother, concerned that he is not attending school, brings him that self-help book with its saccharine rainbow-toned cover. Once she leaves the room, he promptly defenestrates the book out his bedroom window where it hangs in a tree, an image that makes us grateful for the author’s survival, his instinct to toss aside self-help hokum for something that offers him actual sustenance and healing. In one of the quiet miracles of literature, an 18th-century poet, dying of consumption, offers a 20th-century autodidact a path out of his bedroom and, within two decades, onto the dais of recognition as one of the best poet-critics of his generation.
And while Ravinthiran’s memoir is, in many ways, sui generis, it has precedents in books such as Cathy Hong Park’s Minor Feelings, Maggie Nelson’s Argonauts, Anthony Walton’s Mississippi, and Saeed Jones’ How We Fight for Our Lives: works that hybridize memoir with criticism; storylines with poems; public history with suppressed or untold stories; and narration with acute commentary about the limits of narrative. Using multiple registers of thought and expression, he renders a memoir in surround-sound and three dimensions.
He also makes use of a poet’s intuition: the logic of association. In linking poems to lived life, Ravinthiran shows us how they enable us to access the nuance, surplus sense, historically subsumed tales, and emotional complexities otherwise starved in the “internetification” of our lives. As he notes, “A poem is a tiny kingdom you can step into, anytime, and return from — readier to hold your own, no matter what comes”; poems, in this formulation, are portable bulwarks, portals out of the bewilderment in which we periodically find ourselves.
Dealing with intensifying racism and aggressively passive students in the U.K. in the lead-up to the Brexit referendum, he thinks of the “hallooing boy” in Robert Frost’s poem, “The Most of It,” whose desire to have the mountainous landscape respond to his own voice results in a lethal landslide. Later, having moved to the U.S. with his wife and infant son as the pandemic isolated almost all of us from other households, he reads Philip Larkin’s “Ambulances,” noting Larkin’s reflexive description of the “wild white face” of the patient, subsumed into the anonymous ambulance. While not excusing Larkin’s problematic racism (less visible here than in his letters), Ravinthiran also notes the poet’s valorization of the National Health Service, which serves all British citizens, and his tender description of those who see the ambulance, threading their streets, as a caution about their own transience and fragility.
Saturated in the autobiographical emphasis that has marked our literary culture for at least 60 years, readers of memoir — eager for human facticity in a technocratic modernity of deep fakes and virtual simulacra — also hunger for surprise and novelty in the genre’s typical deft turns around the circuit-of-selfhood. Ravinthiran’s story delivers, moving through the contemporary moment to include the trials of his own young family, newly emigrated to the U.S., and backward in time, to one of his first trips to this country, post 9/11, in which he was held for questioning at an Ohio airport and asked, point-blank, if he was a terrorist.
One of the book’s underlying questions is how, as a “hyperminoritized” south Asian writer who sees virtually no one like himself in Western popular culture and who often encounters poetry audiences expecting “minority poets to be ostentatiously empowered … to represent,” he can maintain a subjectivity immune from the stereotypy inflicted by both sides of the political spectrum. Here, it is gratifying — instead of reading strung-together causal events, punctuated by epiphanies or, in lieu of story, a regurgitation of liberal pieties — to be guided, instead, by the evolving consciousness of the author himself.
In chapters entitled “Victim and Accused,” “To be Frank,” “Tsunami,” “Love in the Bush Years,” and “Aerial Roots,” the reader encounters stories that double as conceptual stepping stones in the author’s construction of self as considerably more than what W. B. Yeats termed, in his own voluminous Autobiographies, as “the bundle of accident and incoherence that sits down to breakfast.” This is a self continually moving back-and-forth between present circumstance and literary analogue, broadening the circumference of experience.
Reckoning, for instance, with his son’s inexhaustible enthusiasm for elevators — Frank’s desire to ride in them for hours — Ravinthiran recalls Louis MacNeice’s “Mayfly” — “The mayfly flirting and posturing over the water / Goes up and down in the lift so many times for fun.” Others’ instinct for pleasure is observable, if idiosyncratic; when we are invited into another’s pleasure principle, we have an opportunity for empathic imagination (if also, perhaps, anti-nausea medication). Elevators (at the local train station) and the short-lived insects’ dance above bodies of water intermingle in Ravinthiran’s admiration of his son’s absorption, his “joyousness, with absorbed scrutiny.”
The author encourages us to join him in thinking of ordinary events analogically — to perform the casual work of metaphor, linking two otherwise unlike entities by virtue of one characteristic. There is, he suggests, a model for social politics in thinking associatively, poetically, seeking affinity across difference.
Ravinthiran’s comprehensive knowledge of poetry in English in the Western tradition and poetry from the Global South lends his perspective additional uniqueness. When he visits a razed graveyard in Sri Lanka with his father, once a resting place for members of the Tamil resistance, it is impossible to discern where the graves actually are: only remnants of smashed gravestones remain in a loose roadside cairn.
Here, as elsewhere, his mind moves in two directions, across traditions: he notes that the Tamil word for a grave, kallarai, translates as “stone room,” and that this ritual of building a room of stones above a loved one’s grave predates Christ, according to archaeologists, which might make us wonder about the human instinct to memorialize the dead with the most durable substances at hand.
He also recalls lines from Ian Hamilton’s “Memorial,” a poem about neglected gravestones from a Victorian asylum in England in which the speaker notes the “obliterated names” of “old lunatics,” the identities of the dead ceded to overgrowth and disinterest. There, as in the Tamil graveyard, only vestiges of the commemorative reflex — to honor and mark those departed from their lives — remain. Poems and the language we summon describe the sites — and souls — razed, if not forgotten, by history’s churn.
Ravinthiran’s final chapter, “Aerial Roots,” provides an analogy for selfhood as memorable and perhaps as apt, for our moment, as Benjamin Franklin’s “speckled axe” in his Autobiography. Franklin gently urged his readers to organize their lives according to pragmatic realpolitik instead religious scruple. He encouraged them, instead of scouring their souls for failings, to accept some of their flaws as the necessary “speckles” on an otherwise serviceable ax. In so doing, he suggested that an affiliative politics, one based on tolerance, was better than theocratic rule, and offered a new paradigm of selfhood, one that shaped the tenor of American autobiographies (and the do-it-yourself/self-help genres) for centuries, thereafter.
Ravinthiran offers us another metaphor of selfhood, and a new kind of autobiography, one for a late capitalist world in which we must think of global priorities and of selves that exceed national borders. As a poet, as a member of a south Asian diaspora who finds himself “belonging nowhere,” he hews close to the Polish-American writer Czesław Miłosz’s claim that “language is the only homeland.” He provides a model for being a citizen of global English, a linguistic network of ever-expanding richness and porous borders.
Concluding his book with the image of the banyan tree of Sri Lanka, he describes its roots which “grow down from the branches and, gradually, into the earth: tentative tryouts … eventually finding their way and becoming as immense as stone columns.” We too might find it useful to extend root systems wherever it is we find habitable soil, building connection and deriving sustenance. To live in a cosmopolitan world with rooted integrity, we might, like the banyan, need to assess our surroundings and grow somewhat more openly and provisionally, making a home that lives first in language. Ravinthiran evinces the possibilities of orienting ourselves to our selves (and to each other) in this way.
[Published by W. W. Norton on January 21, 2025, 272 pages, $18.99 paperback]
To read Lisa Russ Spaar’s review of Heather Treseler’s Auguries & Divinations (2024), click here.