Lantana Strangling Ixora

The Global Organization of People of Indian Origin (GOPIO) is an influential organisation that helps shape  the Indian Government’s policies on the Indian Diaspora. It has presence all over the world and has a special significance for the Indian Diaspora, more so in North America.

Its e-newsletter is a much-awaited monthly bulletin that gives a roundup of activities of the Indian Diaspora across the world; preoccupied with policy matters, it doesn't usually have any significant mention about culture, and almost never about poetry.

However, the December e-newsletter that I got earlier this week surprised me.

It had a whole paragraph on my friend Sasenarine Persaud (Sase).

“Guyanese born PIO Dr. Sasenarine Persaud has released his most recent collection of poems titled Lantana Strangling Ixora. The poems provide a ready metaphor for the consciousness of the Americas overcoming that of India in the Americas – the main streaming and divesting of yoga from its Hindu origins being the most visible manifestation. This collection ranges widely in its geographical and historical concerns, from Canada to Guyana to India and places in between, exploring the contradictions in our lives: familial influences, terrorism, literature, politics, race, and the power of language and representation.”

I met Sase in the strangest of circumstances. He was attending the Festival of South Asian Literature and the Arts (FSALA-11) and I was to pick him up from the airport.

But a misreading of flight schedules resulted in two participants reaching Toronto almost simultaneously from different places and at different terminals.

I couldn’t go to pick him, but met him a day later at the festival and we turned friends instantly.

Sase has an easy charm and wears his creativity quite lightly.

His collection of poems Lantana Strangling Ixora (published by TSAR) was released during the festival, and he read a few poems from his new collection.

I particularly liked this one:

Marco Polo at Rama-Sethu.

Silken threads known

before his journey

to the Emperor’s court

recording on that passage

Rama’s bridge across the ocean

from Tamil Nadu to Lanka

Raghu’s vanaar army – how inebriated

can you be if monkeys talk

in an underwater crocodile wife’s

yearning for monkey-liver soup

to cure an ailment: man shooting

too much breeze with another

must be curbed – building a stone

causeway to confront Ravana –

You do not negotiate with terrorists.

Lantana Strangling Ixora – the poem that gives the collection its name has stunning imagery.

Lantana is a South American flower and Ixora is an Asian flower; Sase is a Guyanese of Indian descent.

Lantana Strangling Ixora

There were times in the morning

we questioned the bloom

of the previous evening, watering

cana lilies, clearing the live oak

acorns from our white wrought-iron bench

How do ripe plantains smell?

Like ripe bananas. You could laugh

until after dinner. I will hold

Radhakrishnan’s interpretations of the Upanishads

until you snap on the ceiling fan

And we swirl on the sheets of a different seeking

scented like lilacs in a north-of-Toronto park

or in the Arnold Arboretum. If you conjure

a dead British poet with the same last name

would you be wrong? American literature

Or flowers in a Florida garden

are all we need to know except

if “papa” is hunting in the “Green Hills of Africa”

or Buck is observing Chinese. You drift

off into a naked sleep where snores sing

And a mouth that has taught us Kali’s secrets

falls open to accommodate blocked passages

or water the definition of a flower cluster

or the naming of a southern plant: datura

as prickly as that morning when the alarm

failed to startle sexed sleep and you are hurried

For a meeting and we barely have time

to glance at the golden marigolds—left foot

right foot brake and accelerate through amber

lights impatient with ancient drivers gaping

At dew on the St. Augustine grass and the aroused

ficus leaves, a replica of Rama’s arrow tips, and

we barely have time to see lantana strangling ixora

Image: TSAR Books