Exile Without Geography: Diasporic Selfhood and the Poetics of Unbelonging in Suniti Namjoshi’s ‘To Be a Poet’ and ‘The Unicorn

Abstract

This article takes a fresh look at Suniti Namjoshi’s poems “To Be a Poet” and “The Unicorn” pushing the idea of diaspora way past its usual ties to moving from one place to another. People often read Namjoshi’s work through feminist or queer perspective, but not many talk about her poetry in terms of diaspora, how it feels to experience that disconnection not just in terms of physical boundary but also how it affects you mentally. Through this article I demonstrate that the voices in these poems show a different kind of diasporic identity. For them, being an outsider isn’t just limited to missing or leaving a homeland, it’s about never quite fitting into the boxes society sets up, it is always feeling a bit out of place and distant from people. If you dig deep into the poems themselves, you’ll see that both the poet in “To Be a Poet” and the unicorn in “The Unicorn” stand for this kind of in-between existence. They’re not at the centre of things, they live on the edges, almost invisible in the stories society tells about who matters and who doesn’t. In their worlds, poetry and fantasy aren’t just ways to escape. They are how these characters survive in crucial world, how they speak in favour of themselves, and how they make exile a choice instead of a punishment. By focusing on what it means to be in “exile without geography,” this article tries to shake up the notion how people think about diaspora. It is not just about moving from one country to another; it is also about the sense of unbelonging and the search for identity. The poems of Namjoshi offer us new ways of discussing these issues, especially in the framework of contemporary diasporic writing.