Poem of the week: Us by Zaffar Kunial

An only apparently informal riff on an only apparently straightforward concept of identity finds some sparky complications

Carol Rumens

Mon 2 Jul 2018 10.00 BST

by Zaffar Kunial

If you ask me, us takes in undulations –
each wave in the sea, all insides compressed –
as if, from one coast, you could reach out to

the next; and maybe it’s a Midlands thing
but when I was young, us equally meant me,says the one, ‘Oi, you, tell us where yer from’;

and the way supporters share the one fate –
I, being one, am Liverpool no less –
cresting the Mexican wave of we or us,

a shore-like state, two places at once, God
knows what’s in it; and, at opposite ends
my heart’s sunk at separations of us.

When it comes to us, colour me unsure.
Something in me, or it, has failed the course.
I’d love to think I could stretch to it – us –

but the waves therein are too wide for words.
I hope you get, here, where I’m coming from.
I hope you’re with me on this – between love

and loss – where I’d give myself away, stranded
as if the universe is a matter of one stress.
Us. I hope, from here on, I can say it

and though far-fetched, it won’t be too far wrong.

The relaxed vernacular of Zaffar Kunial’s newly published first collection, Us, may at first conceal the precision with which his poems search the vexations of identity. The reaches of the search are exposed most plainly in the knowingly titled Self-Portrait as Bottom. Like the title poem, the self-portrait references Tony Harrison’s 40-year-old sonnet diptych Them and [uz], in which the sneering literature teacher told the working-class pupil Harrison, “You’re one of those / Shakespeare gives the comic bits to: prose!”

Kunial’s speaker, unlike Harrison’s, doesn’t spit up furious “glottals”: more subtle and contemporary, he dispatches his gobs of spit “to a lab across the Irish sea” for the DNA ancestry test. The simply complex equation that he first announces, “50% Europe. / 50% Asia,” demands sub-divisions genetic and linguistic, leading to a surprising, tenuous ethnic link between the poet’s Kashmiri father and Midlands-born mother. Themes of disconnection are tacitly present in the title poem, this week’s choice.

“Waves” form a useful metaphor: the sea-like “undulations” of line one develop into the solidarity-asserting “Mexican wave” of stanza three. For the football supporter, such actions emphasise separation, too, “a shore-like state, two places at once” or a sense of solidarity cut in half: “… and, at opposite ends / my heart’s sunk at separations of us.”

“Us” means “me” in many English dialects: Kunial hears it in his native city, Birmingham, in the shout of mixed aggression and curiosity, “Oi you, tell us where yer from.” In Harrison’s Them and [uz], the pronoun symbolises attempts by the ruling “educated” class to exclude him, but it belongs to the future poet’s own dialect, and he’s able to seize the language back (“RIP RP”) with a mature, furious confidence not available to Kunial’s persona, whose sense of language rights is less clear-cut. All the same, a quietly intricate assertion of language possession has been set in motion, as modest little phrases like “the one” and innocent-looking prepositions such as “from” are slotted quietly into different facets of emphases.

Difference and familiarity deftly combine in the idiomatic, euphemistic “colour me unsure”. Now the waves, as hand signals or undulations, fail to breach distance: the water seems too wide. The speaker hasn’t given up, though: repetitions of “here” demonstrate Kunial’s delicate sense of nuance, as if “here” were no less complicated a verbal sign as “us”, as if it could be transformed into identity-grounding solidity. The rough-breathing alliteration of “hear” and “hope” gasps uncertainty without checking the smooth rhythmic flow. That image of two shores, two sides, rescues from unlocatable abstraction, the territory “between love and loss”. “Us” may be the uncertain location of coupledom as well as community, and here, too, the speaker may somehow be undone, given away like a missed goal, “stranded / as if the universe is a matter of one stress”.

Kunial’s puns are never mere play, and here the key word, “stress”, is cleverly chosen. “Us” as a concept creates stress for those who refuse or are refused belonging. That the single-syllable, two-letter English word could sum up and unite the universe is pressed on the speaker by some further excited vulnerability of doubt and desire (“I hope you’re with me on this”). A couple’s “us” seems to extend to the hope, at least, of a broader collective identity.

The pronoun has meanwhile shed its italics. Even that typographical shift lends it a more neighbourly look. The resolution gracing this poem turns out to be temporary: the sequence immediately following on from Us, Ys (the last poem in the collection), painfully searches paths through childhood experiences of disconnection and separation. Us provides the collection’s title but not Kunial’s last word: the grit that originates and animates his calm and assured-seeming poems is identity, which consists of interestingly twisted strands of connection and disconnection. The two-letter word is less a sea-girt island than an undulating, wavily glittering continent. There’s a hopefulness about its utterance, even so.

Us is published this week by Faber & Faber. Kunial is currently poet in residence at Ledbury poetry festival 2018 (29 June to 8 July).

THE GUARDIAN