no more mangoes

or; how to write about diaspora when diaspora writing is so obnoxious

May 23, 2022

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

diaspora child:
the blood that runs through your veins
spills upon the ground 
still as red, even generations later
crushed petals from a thousand poppies 
you never chose to plant.

in the mehndi laced across your wrist
(you would rather not wear it)
some may see scars, some just a pattern
but not me
i see a story, told in a script without words
the story of a people, of a land we never knew 
and yet know all too well.

The lines you just read are an excerpt from a poem I wrote in the fall semester of my freshman year of college, to which I gave the shocking and entirely unexpected title of “diaspora child” and published in GW’s campus literary magazine.

If you’re a white person, maybe you read those lines and thought to yourself, “Hey, that’s not half bad.” If, however, you are like me a second-generation South Asian American with a healthy disdain for the more masturbatory elements of our community’s penchant for self-expression, you probably read that excerpt and groaned, because you recognized it for what it is: the scourge on our community that is mango diaspora poetry.

I won’t go into too much detail about what exactly constitutes “mango diaspora poetry”—for insightful and nuanced analysis of this phenomenon, I’ll instead direct you to these essays by Kiran Misra and Urvi Kumbhat—but suffice it to say, if you’ve ever read an overwrought, self-indulgent poem about immigrant identity that mentions mangoes or the hands of the author’s grandmother (perhaps, though not exclusively, by Rupi Kaur, and most likely posted on Instagram), you’ve had the unique misfortune of encountering diaspora poetry at its absolute worst.

The defining characteristic of mango diaspora poetry is its “exploration” of South Asian trauma, culture, and identity, filtered through the lens of a second-generation immigrant, and almost always entirely devoid of any substantive politics. Even the infrequent poems within this genre that do engage with political critique rarely, if ever, extend their critique beyond “chai tea liberalism”, or the set of uncontroversial issues that privileged Desi kids often take up as their pet causes to prove their activist bona fides—think cultural appropriation, being told by classmates that the lunch you brought to school smelled weird, and, of course, the eponymous and incalculable trauma of white people referring to chai as “chai tea”.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with using poetry or any other literary medium to engage with themes of national identity, immigrant/diasporic existence, generational trauma, and so on—on the contrary, not only is engaging with these themes a valuable exercise, but doing so is in fact absolutely crucial to both understanding and asserting ourselves as members of a diaspora. The problem arises when we try and engage with these themes without appropriate critical or political analysis, using empty metaphors such as the ubiquitous mango to project a flattened narrative of “Desi” identity, rooted in caste and class privilege that all too often goes unaddressed. This problem is exacerbated further when such uncritical writing is widely disseminated and its authors held up as the voices of our community, reinforcing the monolithic image, so dominant in the American cultural imagination, of the South Asian community as a homogenized “model minority”.

When I wrote “diaspora child” in the fall of 2018, I was very much a self-styled Desi radical, convinced that my Indian pride, avowed commitment to socialism, and disdain for centrist politics made me the second coming of Bhagat Singh himself (although, to be entirely honest, I’m not even sure that I knew who Bhagat Singh was at the time). Clearly, however, I was still in the early stages of my political development, clinging naively to the false impression that being a racial minority meant that “brownness”, in the same sense as Blackness or Indigeneity, was a clearly-defined, marginalized political identity. I was only just beginning to wrap my head around the rise of Hindutva and its implications for vulnerable communities in my home country, and was still nowhere near beginning to wrestle with the difficult questions of caste that further complicate the notion of a single “Desi” identity.

That poem, along with two others that I penned around the same time, still lives in a password-protected folder in my Notes app. In the three and a half years since I wrote it, my relationship to and understanding of what it means to be part of the South Asian diaspora—specifically, what it means to claim Indian identity, and South Asian diasporic identity more broadly, as a class-privileged Hindu American from a Brahmin family—has evolved considerably, leaving me with an ever-expanding array of questions where I once thought I had all the answers.

Uncomfortable though it may be at times, I nevertheless remain convinced that this uncertainty is unequivocally a good thing—being uncertain about the nature of identity and feeling overwhelmed at its dizzying complexity is, after all, at the heart of the diasporic experience, especially for those of us who who constitute the second generation of our immigrant communities. It is precisely from this uncertainty that I believe we have the capacity to forge new diasporic identities and even new national identities altogether, shedding (though not ignoring) the divisive and oppressive aspects of our backgrounds and instead committing ourselves to the cause of collective liberation, bound together in love and community by our shared roots in a place located on the other side of the world.

As South Asian Americans, the art we produce—whether poetry, prose, music, or anything else—can and must be a reflection of that commitment. We have a responsibility to move beyond the hackneyed, liberalism-plagued tropes that for too long have defined our creative contributions, and instead envision ways to express ourselves and explore our identities without reinforcing harmful narratives of unqualified victimhood and nonexistent homogeneity.

No more mangoes. Let’s find another seed to plant.

no more mangoes is a blog by Pranay Somayajula, a D.C.-based fiction writer and essayist. If you liked this post, click the button below to subscribe for free and receive new posts in your inbox: