How to Wash a Heart by Bhanu Kapil; Saffron Jack by Rishi Dastidar; The Atlas of Lost Beliefs by Ranjit Hoskote; and Shine, Darling by Ella Frears
Bhanu Kapil’s How to Wash a Heart (Pavilion, £9.99) responds with brilliant acuity to the prolonged stress of the immigrant experience. In an affectingly claustrophobic second-person address, the immigrant speaker talks to her white, middle-class, liberal host. Despite the host’s “contra-regime” politics and assurances that “What’s mine is yours”, the power dynamic is steeped in inequality; everything is done on the host’s terms, and “there’s no law / That requires / What you’re offering me to last”. In this house – or in the nation state in which the immigrant is forced into the role of constant guest – the speaker is subtly undermined, turned into a “pet” and her rights amended accordingly. The host interrupts the speaker, polices her interactions, finds and reads aloud her diary. Hospitality is conditional: the performance of generosity is hollow. In this series of precise, destabilising poems, Kapil skilfully amplifies the pressured immigrant heart, showing how precarious it is to exist in colour in a white space.
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