"Look We Have Coming to Dover!" and Other Poems Literary Elements

The narrator of most of the poet’s verse is an outsider addressing the reader in the first-person whose monologue is often peppered with the slang of Indian-British dialect.

Nagra composes primarily free verse narrative poetry with no standard meter and eschewing rhyme.

A typical outsider speaker in “The Man Who Would Be English” commences the poem by relating how he quickly fell into the good graces of native Brits using a familiar simile: “I shouldered the bulk as they broadened like brick houses to broadly take me in”

“Look We Have Coming to Dover!” presents a mouthful of alliterative “k” sounds. Typically, this sound is connotative of humor, but in this case the harsh quality of the sound is used to bring to life the difficulty of traveling over sea: “Seagull and shoal life / Vexin their blarnies upon our huddled / camouflage past the vast crumble of scummed / cliffs, scramming on mulch”

Irony drips throughout the entirety of “Kabba Questions the Ontology of Representation, the Catch 22 for `Black’ Writers…” from the overly academic title to the placement of Third World poets in the curriculum’s world literature book: “For Part 2, us / as a bunch of Gunga Dins ju group, `Poems ‘ / from Udder Cultures and Traditions.’ `Udder is all / vee are to yoo, to dis country”

Dramatic Monologue

England in the late 20th/early 21st century in locations where Indian immigrants and their first generation Indian-British children interact with traditional British culture.

The tone of most of these poems are lightly humorous with an undercurrent of an angry irony.

Protagonist: The protagonist is almost always a male of Indian ancestry living in England as an outsider. The antagonist of the poet’s work taken as a whole is a commingling of racism, xenophobia, religious intolerance and willful ignorance.

Two major conflicts permeate the poet’s body of work, sometimes running parallel to each other and sometimes intersection. The most obvious conflict is the immigrant experience versus British resistance. The second major conflict exists entirely within the immigrant experience as the verse often pits the young assimilated culture against their parents and older relatives who cling more stubbornly to their traditional native culture.

The climax of “Look We Have Coming to Dover!” is an appropriately encompassing one which speaks to the underlying theme of assimilation found throughout the poet’s work as the tone and mood suddenly switches to a fantasy vision of enjoying the good life of a typical British couple.

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“Look We Have Coming to Dover!” is in totality an allusion to Matthew Arnold’s poem “Dover Beach” beginning with Nagra’s title and working its way through the full text.

According to a glossary of terms included at the back of his first collection of poetry, “gora” is Indian-British slang for a white English male. It is used as a metonym that covers the population rather than any specific individual, however.

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The concluding fantasy of “Look We Have Coming to Dover!” is a hyperbolic portrait of what life is like for the average British native: “Imagine my love and I, / our sundry others, Blair’d in the cash / of our beeswax’d cars, our crash clothes, free”

From “The Man Who Would be English!” comes this example: “I was one of us, at ease, so long as I passed / my voice into theirs — I didn’t bud-bud ding-ding / on myself for dropping the asylum side to sign up.”