ASIAN/OTHER

A South Asian Harvard professor uses poetry to make sense of his life.

Born to Sri Lankan Tamil parents who moved to England to escape the Sri Lankan civil war, literature professor Ravinthiran is an autodidact who, despite missing years of schooling, achieved the grades necessary to get into Oxford and eventually receive a professorship at Harvard. In this book, the author explores how poetry and literature have allowed him to understand the nuances of his life. He writes, “This book is about how literature in general, and poetry in particular, provided me with a way out and a way in: with a place where the powers fomented in me (and I’ll always be grateful for that) could unfold in unworldly, surprising ways.” For example, Ravinthiran uses the poetry of Andrew Marvell to both analyze the racist slurs he encountered in his youth and explicate “the choices my parents made both in and out of Sri Lanka in response to British rule.” In examining his experience of moving to America with his autistic son and increasingly distant wife during the pandemic, he turns to the poetry of John Keats. Throughout the book, the author also turns to South Asian writers and thinkers like Bhanu Kapil, Rhik Samadder, and Rohini Mohan for insight into his family’s culture and history. Beautifully written and impeccably argued, this meandering story focuses more on themes than chronology. While Ravinthiran’s writing is often heartfelt, the book’s academic register and insistence on literary analysis can, at times, create a sense of narrative distance between the author and his own story, as well as between the author and the reader.

A gorgeous Sri Lankan British memoir.