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I Belong to Nowhere: Poems of Hope and Resistance
The first English-language collection from one of India’s most hard-hitting writers, these poems brilliantly exemplify writing as an act of resistance. Militant, satirical, and biting, Kalyani Charal pulls no punches in eviscerating paternalistic—and patriarchal—bourgeois socialists who speak on behalf of others.
Writing from lived experience, Charal delineates the bourgeois values that fuel the social machinery of caste oppression, while drawing parallels with social and racial marginalisation around the world. Thus, in her poetry, the specificity of Dalit lives in Bengal, a region which prides itself on its Leftist history and enlightened culture, and whose partition into India and Bangladesh has left a legacy of communal tension, refugees, and statelessness, is at the same time the universality of precarity, marginality and dispossession. Finally, there is space for love—wistful and full-throated, with an attentiveness to the natural world that speaks to her claim that “all Dalit woman writers are eco feminists.”
This is how birds and people of colour become one and the same
An adjective blossoms, ‘migrants’.
Writing from lived experience, Charal delineates the bourgeois values that fuel the social machinery of caste oppression, while drawing parallels with social and racial marginalisation around the world. Thus, in her poetry, the specificity of Dalit lives in Bengal, a region which prides itself on its Leftist history and enlightened culture, and whose partition into India and Bangladesh has left a legacy of communal tension, refugees, and statelessness, is at the same time the universality of precarity, marginality and dispossession. Finally, there is space for love—wistful and full-throated, with an attentiveness to the natural world that speaks to her claim that “all Dalit woman writers are eco feminists.”
This is how birds and people of colour become one and the same
An adjective blossoms, ‘migrants’.
- GenresPoetry
112 pages, Paperback
Published March 30, 2023
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January 4, 2025
Political poetry is often deliberately blunt, a quality that can be blessing or curse. In Charal's collection, this quality is most assuredly a blessing, with her verse critiquing the caste system, discrimination against Dalits, and flawed responses to these injustices, with a clear-eyed fury.
This might take the form of a metaphorical parable, like the brief and cutting "Rice-Slaves", or direct comments on political controversies throughout India. Poems such as "Chandalini's Poetry 1" and "The Fat Cats Get The Cream, Always" are presented by Charal and her translators in innovative visual layouts, using these experimental elements to supplement her formidable poetic and political voice.
This might take the form of a metaphorical parable, like the brief and cutting "Rice-Slaves", or direct comments on political controversies throughout India. Poems such as "Chandalini's Poetry 1" and "The Fat Cats Get The Cream, Always" are presented by Charal and her translators in innovative visual layouts, using these experimental elements to supplement her formidable poetic and political voice.
Displaying 1 of 1 review