Semiotics of Postcolonial Exile in Vijay Seshadri

Seshadri’s Postmodern Pastiche of Indian and European-American Literature

Despite his nostalgia towards his Indian literary legacy, Seshadri can only adopt the nostalgic distance of ironic pastiche. In his ‘Three Urdu Poems’, he parodies ancient Indian poets Mirza Ghalib and Momin. His Prufrock-like modern irony rewrites the rhapsodic lyricism of Urdu poetry. The inaccessible longing cast in the trope of Romantic love but sprinkled with postmodern humour and irony emblemises his relation to Indian culture: nostalgia and estrangement.

To list a few literary predecessors Seshadri parodies in the European-American tradition: Dante, Shakespeare, Milton, Whitman, Dickinson, Melville, Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop. From the title of his poems, such as ‘Hell’, ‘Purgatory, the Film’, ‘Heaven’ and the overall, suggestive title of the whole book, 3 Sections, it is quite obvious that 3 Sections hint at the divine trinity as much as Dante’s Paradiso, Inferno and Purgatory. In Seshadri’s ‘the Pacific Fish of Canada’, like in Melville’s Moby Dick, Seshardri’s ocean and shipmates reflect the panoramic social stratum, not unlike America itself. Seshadri’s estrangement and alienation as an immigrant allow him to take on a panoramic view of American society as only a distanced outsider can do. The diverse racial constituents and their quibbles mirror the racial tension of America itself. The poem ends with the poet’s experience of existential despair and littleness on the ocean – his heightened sense of insignificance and derealisation/simulacrum related to his racial identity as being an Indian in America:

I was pathetic, living someone else’s life because I didn’t have one of my own. In the gloom at the edge of the world, my recklessness became apparent to me, my foolish pursuit of extremes, my childish confusion of life and literature, my fabrication and fantasies – Jefferson democracy and salmon fishing, the Bering Sea, the Japanese! What would become of my poor immigrant parents if I drowned out here? (Seshadri, 2015: 54)

I said to myself, ‘I’m an Indian. What am I doing here?’ I said it over and over. It wasn’t exactly what I meant to say to myself. Despair tends to cloud insight, and makes thought imprecise. But, in fact, what I meant to say exactly I have yet to find words for. (Seshadri, 55)

3 Sections is also a parody of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Like Hamlet, The Speakers in 3 Sections are caught in self-soliloquy and constantly overhear themselves. Like Hamlet, Seshadri employs dramatic devices such as mise-en-abyme, dramatic monologue, and invents errant, dramatised characters. Self is presented as the scriptwriter, auteur, character and audience at once in its dramatic and cinematic performances and underscores at once Aestheticist and postmodern conception of self as a mask, as artistic performance and fictitious simulacrum, and struggling multi-personality in a postcolonial identity crisis. 3 Sections also evokes Milton’s Paradise Lost in poems such as “The Descent of Man”: the savages inside our civilised selves, not fully human.

Seshadri once claims his admiration for Walt Whitman with his boundlessness, but what he really adopts into his 3 Sections is Whitman’s boundless, multiplied self, only with a modern irony. 3 Sections is Seshadri’s The Song of Myself, the paradise, purgatory and inferno of self: the savage, fleshy self; the morbid, intellectual, effete self; self in experience and conceptual fabrication; on land (quotidian) and the sea (the imaginary other). Only these selves do not cohere as in Whitman, let alone being unified. Whitman’s democratic vision also splintered into Seshadri’s racial incongruity internalised into the tension among his multiple selves. Such splinter within self was magnified to a gnomic proportion, which explains the solipsist and claustrophobic nature of Seshadri’s crowded and quarrelling selves, as well as the sense of derealisation and simulacrum.

Emily Dickinson is also Seshadri’s favourite poet. He mentioned Dickinson poems as containing ‘infinity’ of a different kind from that of Whitman. Seshadri inherits Dickinson’s sense of self as a haunted house. In Dickinson, there is often a detached, observing self witnessing the experiencing, passionate self at some intense spiritual crisis, for example, she observes her own lapsing out in ‘There is a Funeral in the Brain’. So it is with Seshadri – such as in ‘A Dream I Never Had’, he watches himself being cut open on an autopsy table against the apparently tranquil setting of Chicago city.

In Seshadri, there is a great affinity with T.S. Eliot as well. Seshadri’s speaker in 3 Sections echoes profusely Eliot’s speaker in ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’, and manifests the modern malaise of dissociated sensibilities. Seshadri’s ‘A Dream I Didn’t Have’ even echoes the dramatic situation of the opening lines of ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’, ‘like a patient etherized upon a table’: ‘I woke up on the stainless-steel autopsy table./My chest was weighted down./Bodily fluids stained my paper hospital gown./My life readings were stable’ (Seshadri, 7).

Seshadri proclaimed that Elizabeth Bishop influenced him. The inheritance resides in their common juxtaposition of the quotidian and the apocalyptic. Poems such as Bishop’s ‘Man-moth’ and Seshadri’s poems of imprisoned zombies, savages and outlaw under police surveillance camera manifest the motif of self as alienated and dehumanised by American metropolitan life, such as that in New York where Seshadri lives.

Seshadri learned a great deal from the sophisticated, deflated humour of Bishop’s mentor – Marianne Moore as well: he learned Moore’s erudite, ironic use of allusions, pastiche of non-poetic material (newspaper reports, scientific treatise) and the traditional poetic materials in her postmodern collage.

In previous scholarship, there is only one article, ‘Disassociated Selves: Vijay Seshadri’s 3 Sections’ by Bhisham Bherwani, which deals with Seshadri’s dissociated selves. The author quotes Seshadri’s own talk of his apprentice with Bishop. According to him, Bishop’s ‘In the Waiting Room’ teaches him the depiction of dissociated selves (Bherwani, 2014: 31–33). However, the author did not relate such dissociation to Seshadri’s Indian-American background, nor did he reveal its postcolonial and postmodern nature that demonstrates a semiotics of exile.

In my view, such pastiche of numerous predecessors on Seshadri’s part is related to the dissociated self not only postmodern (related to Seshadri’s American life in New York as contrasted to his Indian background), but also postcolonial – as a tension between his English literary heritage and indigenous Indian literary heritage – Urdu love songs that celebrate unity, Buddhism and Hinduism that celebrate the unity of self and the cosmic Self. Seshadri never showed much sympathy with Tagore when interviewed. The archetypal Indian poet’s celebration of unity with cosmic self is out of line with Seshadri’s fractured self as simulacrum. As will be detailed in the next few sections, both Postmodernism and Postcolonialism are characterised by the semiotics of exile. The absent centre, floating signifiers, simulacrum, broken signification in Postmodernism coincide with the absence of home, floating/nomadic state and state of separation in the semiotics of exile. Postcolonialism, with its colonised subject caught between different cultures and in the hybrid identity, identity crisis and a derealised self, is also an expression of exile.

The Savage/Zombie Doubling in Seshadri and Said’s Orientalism

In Seshadri’s Dante-parodied Divine Comedy, paradise is the impossible other shore of imagination and often symbolically related to his immigration experience. In ‘Heaven’, it is ‘A thin silver sliver/ rises from an underground river’ that the mammals found after drought and ‘crawling down the desiccated rills’ (Seshadri, 15) It echoes Biblical ‘Exodus’, suggesting the immigrants’ migration from one land to another, and their thirst for finding a land of plenitude.

Purgatory is the imprisonment of self by self: zombie, outlaw, savage, chimera inside the civilised façade. Seshardri’s savages, outlaws, zombies and chimeras have both anthropological/evolutionary and postcolonial implication. In Orientalism, Edward Said points out that colonisers are prone to establish an “otherness” in the colonised to consolidate their own sense of superiority (Said, 1976). The principal characteristic of Orientalism is a subtle Eurocentric prejudice against Asian and Arab-Islamic peoples and their culture, which derives from Western images of what is Oriental (western cultural representations of the Orient) that reduce the Orient to a fictional essentialism. Such representations dominate the discourse of Western peoples about non-Western peoples. These cultural representations usually depict the ‘orient’ as primitive, irrational, violent, despotic, fanatic and essentially inferior to the westerners. According to such biased view, ‘enlightenment’ can only occur when ‘traditional’ and ‘reactionary’ values in the Orient are replaced by ‘contemporary’ and ‘progressive’ ideas that are either western or western-influenced.

The colonised are often depicted as savages – uncivilised and uncouth. At one level, Seshadri’s self-deprecatory humour borrowed the savage image in the colonial sense to suggest his incongruity in an English-speaking/ ‘colonising’ country, as an Indian whose motherland was colonised by England in the history. His multiple identities and self-mask, his self-censorship and repression are immigrants’ strategies for adaptation. The speaker in 3 Sections is constantly overhearing himself, his civilised self acting as the surveillance police of his savage self (‘Surveillance Report’) (Seshadri, 10). He is his own jailor (‘Purgatory, the Sequel’) (Seshadri, 14). ‘He is his own zombie./He haunts his own nights./Not in this life will he tear himself from the bank of the burning river’ (‘Script Meeting’) (Seshadri, 15) He imagines a world wholly populated with a simulacrum or replica of himself as a typical self-isolated solipsist: ‘How strange would it be if you met yourself in the street?/ . . .took yourself in your arms, married your own self,/propagated by techniques known only to you,/and then populated the world? Replicas of you are everywhere’ (‘Thought problems’) (Seshadri, 33). Seshadri’s solipsism and sense of claustrophobia are postcolonial multi-personality carried to the gnomic proportion. Simulacrum/Replica is important to postcolonial sensibility and bespeaks of the guise of the self as caught between cultures: the necessity of adaptation that alienates one from oneself, and the need to stage a performance/simulacrum to get by.

The hell is the putrid and unregenerative swamp within oneself with its despair and humiliation, a humiliation related to the immigration experience at certain level. It is the descent of man into the retrogressive ape (‘The Descent of Man’): the primordial, retrogressive creature in our civilised shell, not fully human. The evolutionary deposit in man traces ‘his aching sunrise, his moody, disappointed sunset’, fit for a ‘local museum’, ‘a picture in a book’, ‘the penciled-in figure on the painted-over mural of time’. ‘He affrights civilisation with his cry’ (Seshadri, 39). The collage of man and moth in Bishop was transformed into the grafting of man and zombies in Seshadri: the comic, cartoon version of zombies, savages and the incarcerated as found in the melodramatic mode of Hollywood film noir and action movies, self-consciously chic and unreal. Seshadri aptly adapts cinema and film script because of their intrinsic divorce of image and body, and its celluloid derealisation that fits into Seshadri’s anthropological, postmodern and postcolonial experience of self.

These discrepancies in self could be interpreted on a racial level: the primitivism and savagery of “the other” on a disadvantageous racial spectrum. Seshadri’s split in self functions at anthropological, psychoanalytical and racial level at once. In ‘Life of Savage’, the poet observes with grim amusement the shadowy replica of himself in his erratically-invented character ‘my friend Savage’, whose setbacks, despair and persistence mirror those of his own as an Indian-American immigrant: ‘I’ve been excited about him as an individual./ I’ve met him as a person, emerging from his own shadow./Indeed it is remarkable/Indeed it is to be remarked of my friend Savage that/The desolation of hope not merely deferred/but by impracticability brutalised/Little marred his genial spirits’ (Seshadri, 32). Throughout the book, besides the anthropological/evolutionary connotation, the imagery of primitivism and savagery has the undertone of racial disadvantage and self-mocked rhetoric of Orientalism. Seshadri internalises and phantomises Dante’s three passages into a descent into one’s fragmented, tortured self, which, to a great extent, tortuously reflects the conflicting cultures and experiences with his Indian-American background.

Postmodern Pastiche as Semiotics of Exile in Seshadri

Various aspects of postmodernism are conductive to the expression of exile. According to Jean Baudrillard, postmodernism, a product of mass production and commercialisation, is characterised by the proliferation of consumption over production, the signifier in excess of the signified. (Baudrillard, 1983: 57) Signifier is displaced from the signified, denoting the absence of reality, thus underscores absent centre. Floating signifiers displaced from signified become simulacrum. Absent centre, disparity/separation, displacement and simulacrum in postmodern signification coincide with the semiotics of exile, which also indicates loss of a centre (geographical or spiritual home), separation, displacement and imaginary reconstruction of the lost homeland, or multi-personality of the colonised subject in the form of simulacrum. Postmodernism is also associated with hybridity, which, together with simulacrum and absent centre, can convey postcolonial exile – hybrid identity, identity crisis and derealisation as the after effects of colonisation. Such hybrid identity of the colonised country often comes from the conflicting cultural influences of the colonisers and the colonised. To certain extent, the colonised country becomes simulacrum of the colonialist culture, thus suffers the loss of its own unique identity and underscores an identity crisis. Postmodern heteroglossia overthrows authority and highlights ambivalence, scepticism and uncertainty, thus can be conductive to the expression of cultural exile as unanchored in any unified value system. Postmodern marginalisation also makes itself ideal discourse for the marginalised and exiled group. Postmodern self-reflexivity, linked with the concept of simulacrum, underscores alienation effect and the distance between representation/imaginary and reality, thus also conductive to the discourse of exile. The various postmodern techniques Seshadri employs in 3 Sections thus manifest a semiotics of exile: his prevalent use of ironic pastiche of literary predecessors in both European-American and Indian tradition, multiplied doubling of self, self conceived as simulacrum, self-reflexivity of his dramatic and cinematic devices are all tortuous expressions of postcolonial exile. The self-split and derealisation, the otherness in self and the feeling of being under the surveillance of one’s own self are all internalisation of the conflicting cultural influences of immigration, the dramatised dialogue between the colonialist and colonised discourses. In ‘Family Happiness’, Seshadri confessed the acute experience of self-split and self-entrapment:

I’m a man trapped in a body of a man.

I clutch the smooth walls and see through his eyes

the oil fire and containment units

the huge clawed gnatries strung out on the twilit polar horizon.

Through his alloyed ears, I hear

The object of his score, his compassion, his hatred, his love

Crying out and crying out.

Half my arms are his arms.

Half my face is welded to his face.

The other half mouths his clumsy ironies.

‘Life is war’, he says.

‘Tragic’, he says. ‘Tragic.’

The simulacra are marching everywhere,

And deep in the caves the chimeras are breathing. (Seshadri, 26)

Sometimes, Seshadri’s estrangement from his motherland and his old self on that land takes the elegiac tone of mourning a dead self. In ‘Elegy’, he wrote in a split personality denoted by ‘I’, ‘He’ and ‘you’:

I’ve been asked to instruct you about the town you’ve gone to,

Where I’ve never been.

……

The population numbers one fugitive

Who slips into the shadow and haunts the belfries.

His half eater meals are cold on the empty café tables.

His page of unsolved equations is blowing down the cobblestones.

His death was so unjust that he can’t forgive himself.

……

He is you and you and you.

You will look to him for your expiation,

Face him in the revolving door, sit with him in the plaza

And soothe his fears and sympathize with his story

And accustom him to the overwhelming sun

Until his death becomes your death.

You will restore his confiscated minutes to him one by one.

The same narrative strategy of split personality and elegiac tone are very much duplicated in his poem, ‘Three Persons’:

That slow person you left behind when, finally,

You mastered the world, and scaled the heights you now command,

Where is he

……

He feels you as his atmosphere. When your sun shines,

he chortles. …..

He huddles under the overpass and writes me long letters with

The stubby little pencils he steals from the public library.

He asks me to look out for you. (Seshadri, 38)

Postcolonial Exile of Seshadri Seen Through the Lens of Homi Bhabha

The fragmented, multiplied selves in Seshadri’s poems and his pastiche of both European-American literature and Indian literature have considerable affinity with Homi Bhabha’s various concepts in Postcolonial criticism, such as ‘hybridity’, ‘ambivalence’, ‘mimicry’. Hybridity, according to Bhabha, describes the emergence of new cultural forms from multiculturalism. Instead of seeing colonialism as something locked in the past, Bhabha shows how its histories and cultures constantly intrude on the present. Seshadri’s 3 Sections displays such belated influence of colonialism that lives in the immigrants beyond colonial era. Bhabha contends that hybridity ‘has established its salience in a wide range of discourses relevant to the aesthetics of cultural difference and the politics of minorities’ (Webner, 2015: 29). For immigrants, this ambivalent space may ‘operate as a space of difference celebrated by challenging binaristic notion of assimilation versus rejection which essentializes immigrants’ experiences in terms of sameness, wholeness, and homogeneity’ (Pindi, 21–31)/ In 3 Sections, Seshadri exhibits the tension between European-American literature and Indian literature, but he doesn’t essentialise them as opposites. Rather, he works them into a marvellous syncretism through his unifying method of ironic pastiche. These poems evoke the original traditions, but only ironically, in other words, as a ‘mimicry’ (Gloria, 2018). Like Bhabha’s concept of hybridity, mimicry appears when members of a colonised society imitate and take on the culture of the colonisers. Lacan asserts, ‘The effect of mimicry is camouflage . . . it is not a question of harmonizing with the background, but against a mottled background’ (Lacan, 99). ‘Colonial mimicry comes from the colonist's desire for a reformed, recognizable Other, as a subject of a difference that is almost the same, but not quite’ (Bhabha, 122). According to Bhabha, mimicry is the sign of ‘a difference or recalcitrance which coheres the dominant strategic function of colonial power, intensifies surveillance, and poses an imminent threat to both 'normalized' knowledges and disciplinary powers’ (Bhabha, 1994: 122–123). Bhabha sees mimicry as a ‘double vision which in disclosing the ambivalence of colonial discourse also disrupts its authority’ (Bhabha, 126; Jacques, 1998). It is a double vision represented by the figures of doubling prevalent in Seshadri’s 3 Sections, which effects the reinforcement as well as disruption of the colonial power and a self-split in the colonised subject. The confrontation between the coloniser and the colonised is internalised into the subjectivity of the colonised himself. He is both himself and the other. In 3 Sections, in poems such as ‘Surveillance Report’, and ‘Secret Police’ – the prevalent imagery of the self’s surveillance over the other – the zombies and primitives incarcerated in one’s own self, plays out such self-split in the colonised consciousness. It is a surveillance incorporated into daily ritual of living, its secret devise hidden in the most mundane and natural setting:

The omni-directional mike and the video camera, both tiny

hidden in the bonsai cypress

are picking up my sunrise self-help talk show,

in the makeshift kitchen studio in a bathrobe and bunny slippers.

First the opening monologue,

Then the body banters with the mind, then queue up the callers. (Seshadri,10)

Bhabha’s idea of ambivalence sees culture as consisting of opposing perceptions and dimensions, a duality that performs a split in the identity of the colonised other. It creates beings who are a hybrid of their own cultural identity and the coloniser's cultural identity. Seshadri’s collaged pastiche of both European-American literary predecessors and Indian literary predecessors manifests such hybrid identity and syncretistic productivity in the poet. Accordingly, the colonial presence remains ambivalent, split between its appearance as original and authoritative and its articulation as repetition and difference. According to Bhabha, this opens up the two dimensions of colonial discourse: that which is characterised by invention and mastery and that of displacement and fantasy. Such duality is manifested fully in the fantastic playfulness, flamboyant invention, and dark humour of displacement and alienation in Seshadri’s poems. Such sense of displacement is summed up in the ending poem of 3 Sections, in the time difference which unsynchronised one’s mind:

It’s just five, but it’s light like six.

It’s lighter than we think.

Mind and day are out of sync.

The dog is restless.

The dog’s owner is sleeping and dreaming of Elvis.

The treetops should be dark purple,

but they are pink. (Seshadri, 72)

Anachronism underscores the immigrants’ mental confusion of shuttling between cultures – between the primitive/ premodern, and the modern/ postmodern, between ancient tradition of their native land and the cosmopolitism of the new country, and the sense of unsettledness and derealisation resulting thereof.

Now in the dog owner’s dream,

the dog replaces Elvis and grows bigger

than that big tower

The unsettledness and derealisation in the immigrants could also be the dream of big dreams, the American dream of fulfilling inception. However, such momentary delusion of grandeur is broken at the end of the poem,

[the dog]keeps on growing until

he arrives at a size

with which only the planets can empathise.

He sprints down the ecliptic’s plane,

chased by his owner Jane. . .

who yells at him

to come back and synchronise.

The fantastic nature of the ending poem brings us to the imaginary nature of the first poem in 3 Sections:

Imaginary Number

The mountain that remains when the universe is destroyed

Is not big and is not small.

Big and small are

Comparative categories, and to what

Could the mountain that remains when the universe is destroyed

Be compared?

Consciousness observes and is appeased.

The soul scrambles across the screes.

The soul.

Like the square root of minus 1.

is an impossibility that has its uses.(Seshadri, 3)

In this poem, the catalyst change that immigrants underwent is compared to the void after universe is destroyed, imaged in ‘screes’, rubbles of the destroyed universe both natural and man-constructed. In such rubble all reference is lot, all traditional anchors of values are set afloat. Derealisation is the immediate after effect of such change. Such derealisation is potentially destructive, but might also be potentially liberating and inspiring. The kind of imagination born out of the immigrants’ unsettled mind and displacement has its use – it gives rise to Seshadri’s poetic creativity – his expression of dissociated selves, his ironic pastiche of diverse traditions in fantastically inventive imagery and language, and a uniquely formed semiotics of postmodern and postcolonial exile. Seshadri’s ironical pastiche is not necessarily negative, instead, it manifests the creative potentiality of Bhabha’s ‘mimicry’.

‘Trailing Clouds of Glory’ is one of Seshadri’s poems dealing most directly with the experience of immigration.

Even though I’m an immigrant,

the angel with the flaming sword seems fine with me.

He unhooks the velvet rope.

He ushers me into the club.

The entrance into America – the symbolic Garden of Eden guarded by angel Michael with flaming sword – is cast in theatrical terms, playing on the idea of theatrical simulacrum and stage guise of self on the part of immigrants for the purpose of adaptation. The poet’s ostentatious and grudging compliments of the good will of the new country yields to his recognition of division, border and subtle and fluid rules of exclusion exerted on the immigrants:

so why the angel with the flaming sword

bringing in the sheep and waving away the goats,

and the men with the binoculars

elbows resting on the roll bars of jeeps, peering into the desert?

There is a border, but it is not fixed, it wavers, it shimmies, it rises

and plunges into the unimaginable seventh dimension.

The poet projects his inception in America into a Guatemalan family, especially into their enigmatically nonchalant three-year-old son:

I recognized the scowl on his face,

the retrospective, maskless rage of inception.

He looks just like my son when my son came out of his mother

after thirty hours of labor – the head squashed,

the lips swollen, the skin empurpled and hideous

with blood and afterbirth. Out of the inflamed tunnel

and into the room of harsh sounds.

He looked right at me with his bleared eyes.

He had a voice like Richard Burton’s.

He had impressive command of the major English texts.

I will do such things what they are yet I know not,

but they shall be the terms of the earth, he said.

The child, he said, is the father of the man.

The poet’s inception in America as an immigrant is symbolised in terms of a difficult birth, leaving the flaming tunnel of motherland and entering ‘the room of harsh sounds’ – the harsh condition of immigrants in a new country. In this poem, the child with Richard Burton’s sonorous voice and impressive command of English texts is the mirror image of Seshadri himself, who tries to overcome his racial disadvantage and exclusion by mastering his colonisers’ tongue – English and English literature, as he so marvellously does as a means of rising to power. His way of mastering English and its literature, however, is not merely repetition, but repetition with a difference, a ‘mimicry’ as defined by Homi Bhabha, that is both complicit with and disruptive of the colonial power, a symptom of his racial disadvantage as much as a resource for rising to power.

In terms of doubling, as my extension of Homi Bhabha’s concept of ‘hybridity’, ‘mimicry’ and ‘ambivalence’, female doubling is a symbol and semiotics of postcolonial exile that Seshadri employs repeatedly in 3 Sections. Doubling indicates the separation within selfhood. The proliferation of doubling image in modern literature and film is linked with the fragmentation and longing for companionship concurrent with the technological development of mechanical duplication and people’s increasing isolation accompanying the advancement of modernity. Since in the colonial discourse, the disempowered colonised is often feminised, female doubling emblemises the split allegiance and complex identity of the colonised, thus figures colonial and postcolonial exile. On the one hand, female doubling is a ‘mimicry’, and is complicit with and submissive to colonial power and discourse. On the other hand, as defined by Bhabha’s ‘mimicry’, it represents a difference and is disruptive of the colonial power. The split, ambivalent subjectivity of the colonised other, with both its suggestion of racial disadvantage and complicity and its subterranean disruption is projected into the symbol of female doubling figured as a semiotics of postcolonial exile. In ‘Purgatory, the Film’, Seshadri voyeuristically dreams of his wife’s vicious, seductive, fictitious twin. ‘Always it was the other/ the firstborn, the bad twin, the runaway, he imagined.’ In ‘Family Happiness’, he confessed his identification with femininity in himself, his female doubling – ‘I was a lesbian trapped in the body of a man.’ The disruptive, prohibited female doubling recurring in 3 Sections suggests the colonised on the disadvantageous racial spectrum, and their superficially complicit but subliminally rebellious relationship with the colonial discourse.

Said’s Three Stages of Exile in Seshadri

When interviewed about his reaction to his winning of Pulitzer Poetry Prize, Seshadri acknowledged candidly the enormous importance of that recognition for a minority poet. Without saying, it eases in a way his identity anxiety and sense of derealisation related to his ethnic background. In his penultimate last poem in 3 Sections, his long poem ‘Personal Essay’, he has already started to walk out of the solipsism of his suffering and related sense of derealisation and simulacrum as a minority poet, who is both nourished by and resistant to the dominant language and literary tradition he parodies, and to embrace the common suffering of mankind irrespective of ethnic differences:

Polynesian faces or Swedish faces,

Canary Island, Swiss, Ugandan, or Chinese.

But their identity is not the point,

This is not a nocturnal Family of Man, it’s-a-small-world-after-all-video. . .

Then he talks about the reality of human suffering, the incognito status of others’ mind, the inadequacy of explaining it, so that they are outside the poet’s projection:

Who are these people, really,

And how could I have taken them for granted?

…

the place it lives, or at least tries to live.

The things – the cars, the trees, the brick house fronts, the garbage cans –

Are glowing not by natural light, reflected from the sun,

Which seems a little distracted today,

But of their own beings

Not from without but from within –

Such awareness of existence outside his mind allows him to go out of the projection of his mind and to get rid of the claustrophobia of mental simulacrum – his multiplied selves related to his ethnic complex: ‘they don’t, though, resolve into their constituent geometric parts/ they don’t abstract./ Instead, they transmute into other faces unknown to me’ (Seshadri, 69). The individual humanity merges into one humanity, enveloped in one halo of vitality, of the travail of living, which is the task of the poet to envision and to re-create:

They might be expressing pain in the way they look, suffering even,

Or for that matter pleasure, ecstasy, cunning, bliss. But these aren’t

things that make us afraid, they’re just

elaboration of their vitality which has pressure, power, immediacy,

and glows. Old and young alike, as they say.

…

on the verge of some other sleep, I will be sitting at a meeting,

or on the subway,

or in the Greek coffee shop around the corner where I sometimes eat breakfast,

and someone will give me a look, and I will look back

at his or her face and think, Didn’t I see that in a trance?

And I did, I did, I did see it in a trance.

It is the ultimate blend of reality and imagination in poetic creation. It is no longer the fantasy enclosed in the multiplied selves of the colonised. The poet, ultimately, should be one that transcends ethnic differences, who becomes a visionary witness and spokesman for the agony and ecstasy of living in all humanity. His poetry should enrich the impoverished and miserable lives, like the mist veiling the sun, making the harsh glare of reality bearable, as Seshadri so beautifully describes:

The fog and mist always blow there in the early morning,

and when the sun rises it rises

behind a billowing, shimmering, diaphanous, upward falling

veil of water particles hat

filters the electromagnetic storm of the sun, so that the sun appears

not blinding and burning to the eyes, but as

a pure white disk the exact size of the moon,

into which you can stare and stare.

To look straight into the sun risen behind the mist

Is the point of the exercise,

And it is the experience, also, endless and absorbing of the faces.

They’re bright, vivid, alert, and are their own anthems. (Seshadri, 70)

Exile, geographical or metaphorical, has been one of the most important sources of creative inspiration during the twentieth century. In Reflections on Exile and Other Essays, Edward Said quoted the three stages of exile: in the first stage, the exile longs for the geographical home from which he is estranged, which he feels as the sweetest place on the earth; in the second stage, the exile’s expansive humanitarian spirit learns to regard the whole world as home; in the third stage, the exile comes to regard the whole world as a foreign place. Only then did he achieve the critical detachment necessary for the uniqueness of creative vision. (Said, 2002: 366) Seshadri’s spiritual journey in 3 Sections demonstrates such cognitive path of the exile: from his nostalgia for Indian literature, to his syncretistic, postmodern and postcolonial pastiche of both European-American and Indian literary tradition, from initial solipsism and claustrophobia of a minority poet to his final affirmation and enlarged horizon embracing all humanity as one. His characteristic detachment and irony makes him always an outsider, no matter to the culture of his own or to that of the immigrant country – America, but an outsider who has finally achieved a sympathetic communion with all humanity, and a consummated blend between poetic imagination and reality.