Amirthanayagam’s most recent collections, The Migrant States and Ten Thousand Steps Against the Tyrant, restring the classical instrument of poetry with the language of modern policy discourse and dig in: A U.S. State Department officer and a widely-traveled immigrant, he provides exquisite insight into America’s identity-reckoning. Together, the books offer a comprehensive chronology of turn-of-the-decade distress and optimism, walking the reader through a curated gallery of doomscroll moments and out the back exit to breathe.
The Migrant States, in fact, literally and literately takes the reader walking: In a set of epistles-in-verse to Walt Whitman that trace a full poetic ancestry (Allen Ginsberg, Federico Garcia Lorca, Langston Hughes, “all the poets who gave birth to you and to those / you have sired in return”), Amirthanayagam invokes the anxiety of walking toward or from a vision of homeland and homefront. In one of the book’s first poems, “Whitman 200,” the subject (born just before Shelley’s two-century-old declaration)...
…is in your mind, Mr. President, even if you cannot
smother or scratch or squeeze him out. He is gloriously spirit, gadfly, rabbit
and sloth. He nurses our democratic wounds. He knows how to write
history from the pebble’s view, the side glance of the wren, the snake
hanging in the tree. He is black and white and all shades of grey. He is
our friend and guide and he will elect us every time we fall down
The balance of the book brings Whitman and the author into conversation with various geographies and generations of refugees, detainees, unwilling travelers, victims of war and upheaval. Buried under the shallow, sifting silt of these poems lies a question about America, about how much the sociocultural pH of a nation’s soil can change before it is unfamiliar and uncultivable, even to its citizens. In “The Song Today,” Amirthanayagam makes visible (audible, intelligible) those who move between unsafety and unsafety, homes drowned in (economic) tides, flattened by (political) winds:
I hear you singing. I know your song. You waded
into a dinghy, jumped into a rowboat. You climbed
aboard the freighter. You carry a cell phone and a picture,
a name and a number written in the phone. You will call
on arrival. You will cross desert. You will bypass
the wall. You will pray to God. You will not turn back.
“Underground 2019,” which immediately follows, begins with a Whitman epigraph and offers an almost-prayer for the sojourners, inviting them to an aspirational haven of Amirthanayagam’s imagining, “a country of my own, where siblings / would run the Electricity Board, the Katcheri, police force, tax department / and most important the deeds office. Come all ye survivors of war. / I have deeds for you to reclaim, and the corresponding lands.” Here, and variously in the book, the author addresses the colonial legacy of Ceylon, his birth nation removed from the geopolitical map when it became Sri Lanka; for him, the notion that you can’t go home again is personal, non-metaphorical, confounding, clarifying, and a source of Shellian righteousness.
Ten Thousand Steps Against the Tyrant, notwithstanding the title and its publication at an even darker moment in American history, is the more hopeful and forward-looking of the two collections. We’re still on our walk, but with a more assured gait, more confident of the destination, and the strangers with whom we’re surrounded have become comrades and family.
The opening poem, “Migrant Song,” cinches the first collection to the second and, synching to a modern political poetry lineage, does a call-and-response to “On the Pulse of Morning,” Maya Angelou’s occasional poem for Bill Clinton’s first presidential inauguration. As Angelou summoned a body politic (“The Catholic, the Muslim, the French, the Greek / the Irish, the Rabbi, the Priest, the Sheik,” and many more) to what she hoped would be a culminating moment of national grace, so too does Amirthanayagam invite us to enter his work
danc[ing] the song of Siva, the song of Roland,
the Song of Songs… We are Tamils and
Armenians, Jews and Palestinians. We are
all people who have moved, who are moving
now through these migrant states. We write
poems for our tribes, making one tribe.
These poems also introduce us to Amirthanayagam’s blood family, with particular and poignant attention paid to the ailing mother in his care, a vessel for his doting and worry. In a recent conversation, Amirthanayagam noted that “we love our mothers, but we don’t love ‘Mothers of,’” referencing the somewhat menacing titles of the book’s two chapters “(The Mother of) Elections” and “(The Mother of) Pandemics.” Yet the poems consciously collapse the spaces between mothers, motherlands, and motherlodes, confounding what we adore, hold allegiance to, and assume accountability for. In “Voting Song,” we choke at the first stanza break that precedes a cacophony of double-meanings:
I’m going to take
Mother to the polling
station. This may be
her last chance to vote
for the right path from
the burning bush,
sinking ship,
road kill, victims
of the raging virus…
Later, in “Soul Rising,” the author remarks that he is “attending to mother” but begins by exclaiming, “I miss you something fierce” before willing himself to “slide / out to walk abroad again / through these United States,” a close observer of Americaness in the alien land of America. Here, what he misses is multivariate, but home can be simultaneously foreign and domestic, and can be redeemed.
In these poems that speak the names of George Floyd and John Lewis alongside those of Bob Dylan and Joan Baez, we are reminded that the possibility of our dearest outcomes depend on whether we sing, and also that we are always somehow singing. So, when we read the cascade of appreciation in “My Love, I’m Voting” (“Thank you kindness to strangers, what you taught me Mum and Dad. Thank you poets… / Thank you diplomats”), we too are in receipt of this gratitude, assured that Amirthanayagam is speaking across two tomes to every(legislative)body, stateside and abroad, all of us.
