on Asian/Other: Life, Poems, and the Problem of Memoir by Vidyan Ravinthiran

1. I suppose I shouldn’t give away my secrets right from the off, but then I am trying to persuade you to read what follows. So, to that end:
2. You should know that when you see a piece of mine that is presented as a numbered list like this—a series of pensées, if I am feeling pretentious—it doesn’t mean that I haven’t thought about shaping it more formally and elegantly, to make the argument easier for you to follow.
3. Far from it. What it means is that I don’t really have a clue how to write something without betraying myself, hurting myself, hurting others.
4. And that I’m really not sure I should pay that sort of tariff . . . for a book review? Forgive me, Literature.
5. Let’s try another way in. When was the last time you looked at yourself in the mirror? I mean really looked? Stared so it became uncomfortable. Went beyond uncomfortable. Looked for the length of time that you claim to do so in front of a single work of art at a gallery, hoping for an encounter, but in reality you never ever do?
6. Me? Oh, I can’t get beyond thirty seconds before the hideousness all gets too much and I have to cast my eyes elsewhere.
7. Reading Asian/Other by Vidyan Ravinthiran has been akin to having that staring contest with myself. Over a very extended period. Except with the type of reflective surface changed.
8. Part carnival mirror. Part reflection in shards of broken glass. Part shiny bathroom tap. Part rearview mirror of a car.
9. All of which is to say: this has not been a fun reading experience. NB: I’m not saying that it should have been! But it has stirred up feelings. And who likes those?
10. Let’s ground ourselves in details, to at least get going. Ravinthiran is currently associate professor of English Literature at Harvard; born in Leeds in the north of England to a Sri Lankan Tamil family; educated at Oxford and Cambridge Universities. That rarest of beasts, a poet and a critic with interesting things to say in both mediums. He has been nominated for both the Forward and T. S. Eliot prizes for his poetry.
11. And on the book: ten chapters reflect—ha!—on, muse on, different episodes from Ravinthiran’s life: early childhood memories; a speech impediment; an early love affair with a woman twice his age; bringing up his son, who has an autistic spectrum disorder; moving to the U.S. during the pandemic.
12. We get a whisper of what a more conventional memoir might have foregrounded or stuck on the dust jacket to bring us in:
    

    
    I was eighteen when I tried to kill myself. In love with a woman (twice my age and with two children) whom I’d met online, I now refused, having played truant for years, even to attend university—as my parents wished—here in England. My mother rejected a transfer to the US. Lying on this very bed, tracing my hand over the wall’s ridged sky-blue paint, I swallowed my father’s heart medication. In the waiting room at the hospital, a friend asked my mother why she was there. She lied and said I had a fever—adding, after a pause, that I’d won a place at Oxford.
    

13. Beware if you think you are getting straightforward recounting of some of the episodes mentioned in point eleven. No no, no easy pleasures of narrative for you here, my friend! Instead, a recollection of an event is as likely to be followed—interrupted, more often than not—with a poem, and a critical digression into it, that illuminates not just the poem but Ravinthiran’s feelings on the episode.
14. Now, this is a methodology that I have not come across before when reading a memoir. It is unique, insightful, annoying. Why do it? Over to Ravinthiran:
    

    
    Let’s consider experiences of displacement—literal (geographic), psychological, aesthetic—that, troubling the borders of being, have the power to both, as John Berryman said of poetry, “terrify & comfort”. Moments when it is possible to imagine different ways to live, and have conversations previously impossible.

    I see poems as continuous with those moments . . . A poem is a tiny kingdom you can step into, anytime, and return from—readier to hold your own, no matter what comes.

15. And blimey it is great to be in the hands—the mind—of someone who can read a poem with such acuity that what he says about it hits you like a truck, such is the force of revelation. And not once, but again and again and again. His discussion of Andrew Marvell’s “Music’s Empire” blew my mind: “Marvell’s poem approaches, more than music, the wider realm of sound—including the power of words—through imagery of empire and colonization . . . An act of power is being reframed as a musical composition. One country takes over another, and this is pictured as the creation of harmony out of disharmony.”
16. I hugged my knees at this, so brilliant is his discussion of this poem. He is similarly limpid and lucid throughout with all the texts he uses, whether that’s Philip Larkin (an important artistic touchstone for him), Nikki Giovanni, or Virginia Woolf.
17. P.S. There is an essay waiting to be written about why some British poets of color [Okay, me and Ravinthiran] are drawn to Larkin, despite what we know about him as a man. Sample opinion from Alan Bennett’s review of Andrew Motion’s biography of Larkin in the London Review of Books: 
    

    
    When Anthony Thwaite published the Selected Letters last year the balance of critical opinion was disposed to overlook—or at any rate excuse—his racist and reactionary sentiments as partly a joke, racism more pardonable these days in the backlash against political correctness. Besides it was plain that in his letters Larkin exaggerated; he wasn’t really like that. Motion’s book closes down this escape route. “You’ll be pleased to see the black folk go from the house over the way,” he says in a 1970 letter, and were it written to Amis or Conquest it might get by as irony, wit even, a voice put on. But he is writing to his mother for whom he did not put on a voice, or not that voice anyway. Did it come with the flimsiest of apologies it would help (“I’m sorry,” as I once heard someone say, “but I have a blind spot with black people”).

18. Also of note: the gobbets that surface on the aftermath of the Sri Lankan civil war between 1983 and 2009. The stories that Ravinthiran tells of how his family were touched by the chaos and the displacement, and what he encounters upon various visits, are singularly arresting and moving. A sample:
    

    
    A vociferous woman (her face stern, with protrusive cheekbones) handed me a sweat-stained sheet of A4. She’d Photoshopped together images of a family—father, mother, two children—and the effect was telling, as if these people never occupied the same space at the same time, but were always destined to be separate (the ink had run too, the blacks were green). All of them were likely dead: I saw it in her eyes. She wore a blue sari, tied her silver hair back in a hard bun, and announced: “We want our children returned to us in the same state they were in when they disappeared.” Which meant that she was at war not only with the government but time itself.

19. However: this is not a book of just literary criticism or reportage. As the subtitle has it, this book is about Life, Poems, and the Problem of Memoir.
20. Not that you get a clear statement of what the problems might be. The closest I found were two assertions. First, this early on: “I envy, even disbelieve, writers with perfect, pungent memories of their childhood. Mine’s a blur.”
21. Same here. But but but—and forgive such pettifogging, but envy and disbelieve? This is a bit loose, no? I parse that as: I want those perfect memories, but because I do not have them, therefore I doubt they really can exist for anyone. So: the whole concept of memoir is a bit bankrupt? Perhaps, but this really needs more unpacking than is provided.
22. And then later, toward the back of the book:
    

    
    Ours is the age of memoir and (mostly, it would seem, for white people) autofiction. If news in the UK and the US is often parochial, staying close to home, telling us about ourselves and not global others, this self-focus tallies with other anxieties. We worry about the very possibility, let alone the acceptability, of imagining ourselves into other people’s lives, as novelists have since the nineteenth century. Another way of looking at this—putting morality aside: how hard it seems, for many of us, to escape the face in the mirror! We seem, feel, mired in personal particularities and peculiarities. Perhaps previous generations actually could get outside their own heads, but we no longer can. We have become too present to ourselves.

23. This is ringing alarm bells for me. It’s not that the critique is wrong per se, but then it does make me ask: what the heck am I reading? Is it not memoir? If not, what is it then? Why am I starting to feel brought here under false pretenses? Who do I speak to in trading standards?
24. I jest. But this reluctance to be pinned down, to be elliptical when the straight line is available, is why I said “annoying” earlier. Yes, things are complex, yes, minoritized lives are complex, especially those who are minorities of minorities of minorities (or as Ravinthiran puts it: “I’m not Indian or Pakistani or Bangladeshi or even part of Sri Lanka’s Sinhala-Buddhist majority. I am a South Asian with little in common with other South Asians, let alone vast bureaucratic categories”).
25. And sure, not every anecdote can be wrapped up in a nice little bow to readers, with a big arrow saying, teachable moment here.
26. But my overwhelming feeling throughout much of the book was: man, would it hurt you to try a little?
27. Not least because it might have softened the various winces that I had throughout.
28. The winces of recognition. The winces from within the reflection.
29. For example, on the impact of verbal racial abuse, that it happens where you think it shouldn’t. Ravinthiran’s account of having “Go home, paki cunt!” shouted at him while studying at Oxford is unnervingly similar to mine: outside Keble College rather than the English Faculty Library, and late at night rather than during the day, but a “drive-by” too.
30. What he doesn’t talk about, though, is the immediate aftermath. A curious—deliberate?—absence? Whereas I can still give you chapter and verse on the flood of fear I had as I suddenly realized: it’s late at night, you’re on your own, you’re miles from home. What if they come back? Reader, I ran, I ran, I ran like I have never run before and since. And when I got back into college, I wept like I have only a few times since. The tang of those tears is still present for me nearly thirty years on.
31. If he has forgotten that fear, if he didn’t have it, I envy him.
32. There are lots of moments of recognition like that, not all as jarring. If I shared all the points in the book where I have scribbled YES! in the margin, or marked a paragraph !!! we would be here a very long time.
33. Here’s another: “The child raised overseas must redeem the extended sufferings of their extended family, justifying generations of striving. But (here’s the rub) it isn’t asked only that the child high-achieve, but that they be happy about it.”
34. This is bang on the money. Of course, there is no way out but through, and you do achieve. Unless you don’t, an insight gained in passing through an extended discussion of Dev Patel playing Gawain in 2021’s The Green Knight: “For every high-achieving South Asian child placed under that astounding pressure to succeed which transforms them into gems, another crumbles, drops out, gives up. Patel’s Gawain’s long hair marks him out.”
35. (Bit harsh, seeing as I only cut my post-pandemic bangs a while ago, and I don’t think I’ve dropped out. Yet.)
36. But as an Oxford-educated South Asian making a living from words poetic and otherwise, there were far too many moments where I saw myself—someone like myself—and felt uncomfortable.
37. (And yes, I know this is on me not the book!)
38. A moment that Ravinthiran anticipated: “What does difference do with difference? Meeting someone who isn’t me, do I try to enter their minds, or would that be violation, appropriation, conquest? Do I identify with the other person, or accept the impossibility of doing so as a precondition of respect? Issues of race, class, gender, nationality, of power and privilege, feverishly foreground these questions.”
39. I note that he doesn’t provide an answer.
40. Here’s another point where I was screaming for an attempt at an answer: “Imagine the scene. You’re talking to an acquaintance, not an outright stranger or friend, and the conversation takes a turn. The light in their eyes dwindles and your colleague, peer, ally, glances to one side and begins to imagine a future beyond this conversation with you . . . You feel abandoned, cast out, an outsider . . . How [then] to grope toward that other state of being . . . where experiences of alienation can be lived through humanely and grasped as the impetus for structural change?”
41. Is the answer “poems”? I hope the answer is more than “poems”? My structural change might need some effort toward community building, showing up, the boring work of holding space to speak and listen on Friday nights in dusty halls, where bonds are made, bonds that acknowledge we share commonalities even as hyper-minoritized individuals too, and the seeds of progress sown.
42. Oh, I should make clear my one outright point of disagreement with Ravinthiran. It’s when he says:
    

    I don’t like the pressure on minority poets to be ostentatiously empowered. But I also feel the pressure to represent with some kind of eloquence; this can fade, degrade, into an obligation to entertain; then you become a sort of minstrel figure.

    Absolutely not. Every poet—of whatever color—has an obligation to “entertain,” (by which I mean the grabbing and holding of attention), unless you believe all art must be duty? Here’s a thing: clowns tell truth too.
    

43. For all its strengths, this unwillingness to move toward, gesture toward, answers to some of the pertinent questions Ravinthiran implicitly and sometimes explicitly poses, is the thing that is preventing me from loving this book the way I want to, the way I feel I should.
44. The desire to hold so many things open, to live in uncertainty—I know it. I live it, and it is exhausting.
45. And to read about someone else doing so is exhausting too.
46. This is an uncharitable thought, I know. But I do feel that there is a certain responsibility being dodged here, in not telling these stories in full, or pulling away at a moment of climax.
47. That there was something even more urgent, canonically important, lurking, waiting, maybe even wanting, to be revealed through this book. That by intensifying the focus on the moments—distilling—there was—potentially—something that might have been passed from hand to hand between brown people with a whisper: “You must read this. He knows.”
48. Of belonging and not belonging. Being othered, unthinkingly or not.
49. For avoidance of doubt: this is a good book. At times it verges on the very good. But in the manner of parents we are both familiar with: I wanted more. I can see the more in here.
50. There I go again, though, wanting the thing that I cannot and will not have.

_____
Asian/Other: Life, Poems, and the Problem of Memoir. By Vidyan Ravinthiran. New York: Norton, 2025. 240 pp. $18.99.