Anuja Varghese Reviews Nisha Patel’s Coconut: A Review in Conversations
Coconut. Nisha Patel. NeWest Press. $19.95, 108pp., ISBN: 978-177439-023-8
“I’m reading a poetry book,” I tell the high school group chat. “It’s by a brown woman writing about…” Colonization, exoticism, eroticism, sacrifice, sexuality, grief… “Being brown. It’s called Coconut.”
“Coconut lol! Like you!”
Yes, like me. In high school, this was a clever thing to say and something I said often – brown on the outside, white on the inside. It’s only the part you throw away that’s different. The part that matters is just like you. Then and now, I remain the only non-white person in this group of old friends from a small town.
I respond with a row of coconut emojis, loathe to make the chat confessional, confrontational, or political. I’m still not sure if I am the architect of this joke or the punchline.
Coconut is Nisha Patel’s debut book of poetry. It is unapologetically confessional, confrontational, and political. The collection opens with a poem called “fat girl tweets about pussy” that draws the reader into a space for sharing secrets, a space for screaming what is true:
fat girl tweets about pussy because she has to
because sometimes, she reaches beneath her skirt
and comes up empty handed
because if you put her pussy in a box and ask her to walk it home alone
she is not sure if she will end up dead or asking for it
The reality of being a fat, queer, brown-skinned woman demanding joy and justice in equal measure, in a predominantly white, heterosexual, patriarchal and often fat-phobic culture, is made concrete in these poems. Patel is herself a spoken word poet, and perhaps it is this background that lends such momentum to her stanzas. These are poems that beg to be read out loud. They want to be heard, to be witnessed. So, I read “fat girl tweets about pussy” to a friend, a fellow queer, brown woman.
“There’s a lot going on there,” she says.
“Yes,” I agree. “I think it’s brave.”
I read it again and we sit with it. “Is it bravery though?” my friend asks. “Or is it desperation?”
I think of the whispered confessions between queer, brown women – the way we quietly alert each other to abusive men, racist colleagues, and false allies. I say, “I think they might be the same thing.”
There exists a popular conception of poetry as something esoteric and elite – literary acrobatics spaced out strangely on the page. Patel’s work pushes back against these notions, combining striking sensory imagery with mainstream pop culture references. From social media and Starbucks to Priyanka Chopra and The West Wing, Patel uses familiar names, faces, and places to ground her words in the everyday, while at the same time, confronting how everyday experiences of misogyny, racism, and homophobia, and the intersections between them, continue to grind queer women of colour down. In the poem “white queer opens a gofundme,” we see parallel stories of queer experience:
white queer takes up yoga, orders his chai cold
the woman wants to taste something more than her
husband’s cock
We see the “white queer” kissing in public, getting married, getting a good job, buying a new car. Then:
the woman goes missing until she is not,
breathing until her body is found
hung from the branches of an amli treewhite queer opens a gofundme for her funeral
These are not meditative poems – the speaker is angry and irreverent, confrontational in a way that may provoke discomfort. I send this poem to an ex-boyfriend, himself a white queer. “It’s a bit dramatic,” he says dryly when we later discuss the book. “I mean, I get it. But it’s not like things are so great for the gays either.” He lists for me the hate crimes committed against young gay men, all the ways in which white queers have fought for equality over the years. “We’re all part of the same community,” he says. “We have to support each other, not attack each other.” He assures me again that he likes it. He gets it. I diffuse his defensiveness and remember why we broke up.
Poetry has a long history of being political, and slam poetry in particular often takes a no-punches-pulled approach to interrogating systems of oppression and the people who perpetuate them. Coconut exemplifies this through poems like “dear jason kenney” and “when mark connolly asks me why the revolution has to be violent” that craft nuanced critiques of our current political climate and do not hesitate to call out white men in positions of power by name.
I read a poem called “justin trudeau has nothing to wear on diversity day” to my mother and my mother, staunchly Liberal for 35 years, sniffs and says, “What’s wrong with Trudeau? He’s good for us.” I’m not sure to which us she is referring (Women? Immigrants? Brown people? Canadians in general?) and I don’t ask. “I like him,” she says.
I have been in a crowd as our charismatic prime minister, who wore brownface makeup to a gala at the age of 30, has walked through it. I shared in that breathless rush of excitement, that starstruck awe of good looks and privilege personified. I sigh and admit, “I like him too.”
Coconut is a book of conversation-starters. It prompts questions we didn’t realize we needed to ask and challenges those answers we thought we knew best. Here,readers will find a collection that is by turn tongue-in-cheek, full of rage and longing, contradictory, defiant, and bold. Patel invites us to embrace all these things, these confessions and confrontations alike, to engage with the political and the poetic, recognizing that in her hands, they are one and the same.
Anuja Varghese is a Pushcart-nominated writer whose work appears in Hobart, The Malahat Review, The Humber Literary Review, THIS Magazine, Plenitude Magazine, and others. She recently completed a collection of short stories and is at work on a debut novel while pursuing a Creative Writing Certificate from the University of Toronto. Find Anuja on Twitter (@Anuja_V), Instagram (@anuja_v) or through her website www.anujavarghese.com. Anuja lives in Hamilton with her partner, two kids, and two cats.