Some random thoughts on this poem En Route To Bangladesh etc

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/56919/en-route-to-bangladesh-another-crisis-of-faith?fbclid=IwAR1UUvMwMVXnjd141TvIDaKmSa1JAHZxXqWeRu_eqGl8wY0mUEzOm5KB4JA

Ampat Koshy I can link it with Dickinson and Henry James but the most interesting word here for me is star, suggesting that the crisis is this strange feeling that she has become a kind of a 'Jew,' as well as more fortunate, and going back is almost like going to a concentration camp, and the star also refers to the American flag, hence the title. The blood makes it feminine and the muscle is the background which is where there is a gender contrast. There is an identity crisis as well as faith crisis in the poem.


As regards gender her views are well put but typical. She is stared at and not surprised when she stares back to find the men do not drop their eyes but continue to stare back. She sees men as a dark, damp horde - meaning a threatening presence. This refers to them as predatory.

As regards race, she is caught in the presence of knowing she is taught to privilege the whites, blonde hair, but fighting against it, yet, finding herself unable any longer to be just body like others in the queue

Regarding identity she is torn apart between the ancient that has now become cliched of the Arabic past, the golden leaves, the blue perfume bottle etc., and also the American which is the Coke and the Lays. This is very Jamesian as Henry James compares the decadence of Europe against the innocence and naivete/foolishness of America as in the lady Isabel Archer in Portrait of a Lady and Chad in Ambassadors. But here it is more ambiguous. Also the refrain of because and the hyphens remind me, rightly or wrongly, of Dickinson's famous poem Because I could not stop for death, making the transit point like a carriage and Death being also like Tagore's Homecoming, a bit, a mystery in that it may be life in death, to put it in Coleridgean and Yeatsian terms.


Regarding faith, she is in a crisis and I already dealt with it. America has tried to deracinate her but affected her most in this matter of faith which is why this poem verges more on rebellious and blasphemous according to me than the faithful.

But the most interesting parts of the poem for me are not the questions of gender, identity, race, class and faith but of her ambivalent relationship to her own femininity or sexuality - shown by wanting a hair of the blonde woman, and the licking off of the fat and salt from her lips of chips, the cup near the seat, where thighs have sat, hers and hers and hers and body that is not like her body but unashamedly body - these and her ability to describe so beautifully make her poem a feat to admire than to analyze.




https://www.poesi.as/cv18020501.htm?fbclid=IwAR1chjwoWGG6TVqcOR23VXSeVIfHhOFdM4F7GsJVvjJIpQ2ATe6Z-Ltj5UA