Singing Against Anti-Asian Sentiment in The East African Postcolony: Jagjit Sing’s “Portrait of an Asian As an East African”

Abstract

La expulsión de la población asiática de Uganda perpetrada por el presidente del momento, el General Idi Amin Dada, es uno de los episodios más traumáticos que Uganda ha sufrido. Este artículo examina cómo el poema de Jagjit Singh, “Portrait of an Asian as an East African” (1971) imagina este episodio. Mi interés radica en analizar tres aspectos interrelacionados del poema: el dolor del desarraigo y la condición apátrida del refugiado; la naturaleza y carácter de la poscolonia emergente a la cual el poema se dirige; y la capacidad de la poesía para formular premoniciones sobre el futuro, dado que el poema en cuestión se publicó un año después de la proclama de la expulsión. En la interpretación del poema que realizo, destaco los mecanismos poéticos que el autor utiliza para tratar los tres temas antes mencionados y el éxito con que los lleva a cabo.

The 1972 expulsion of Asians from Uganda by the President of the time, General Idi Amin Dada, is one of the most traumatic events that Uganda has suffered. This article examines how this event is imagined in Jagjit Singh’s ‘Portrait of an Asian as an East African’ (1971). I am interested in three inter-related issues that the poet depicts in this work: the pain of being uprooted from a place one has known as home, only to be cast into a state of statelessness and refugeehood; the nature and character of the emergent postcolony that the poem speaks to; and the ability of poetry to give prescient insights, given the fact the poem was published a year before the expulsion was announced. In the close reading of the poem that I perform in this paper, I pay special attention to the poetic devices that the poet deploys to speak to the three issues that I have mentioned above, and the success with which he does this.