On Monday night, Sarah Howe brilliantly confounded many expectations by winning the T.S. Eliot Prize for 2015 with her collection, Loop of Jade (Chatto and Windus, 2015). Not only was Howe the first Asian poet to win the prize, hers was also the first debut collection to do so, coming first among a shortlist of heavyweights including Don Paterson, Claudia Rankine, and Sean O’Brien.
Perhaps inevitably, Howe’s work was immediately described through the prism of her identity as a young British Asian woman. Speaking to the Guardian, the poet Pascale Petit – who chaired the panel of judges – praised Howe’s work for “exploring the situation of women in China”, and for speaking to “the status of women in the world”. Certainly, Howe’s writing was also rightly lauded for its stylistic strengths, for its richness and erudition. But there was no escaping the sense that here was a different, global author, one who had given voice to “a culture we are not used to seeing in British poetry.”
What does it mean to be an Asian, English-language writer in Britain? Till I moved here in 2013, I had never thought of myself as an Asian, even a Chinesewriter. I had come from a young country where contours of writing are made by a shape-shifting landscape, where writers grapple often with the shadow of the state, and where classroom debates on ‘Singaporean literature’ centre on what the term even means. Coming to Oxford, I began to hear my work described in the language of arrival: I was now a minority writer, visiting the cradle of empire, responding to a history I could not claim.
There is no single answer to that question. Howe has plumbed the depths of this particular identity, among a multitude of others, by working within a language too often seen as flatly ‘colonial’ – a language she gracefully, truthfully inhabits. Like me, Howe comes from a Chinese-majority island that, until recently, has been a British colony. But similarities only extend so far. Unlike me, Howe grew up in England, went to Cambridge, and now lives and works across the Atlantic. Her poetry not only reveals a grasp of Chinese languages and cultures, but also reaches with dexterity for Roethke, Classical mythology, and the Bible. One of my favourite pieces from the collection, Banderole, is a meditation on history and etymology that utterly transcends its European earth.
If we are to see our poets through the lens of their lives – and I believe there is a strong case for doing so – let us take it all in. Much more matters than just their colour, gender, class, or education, though these may stand out, in our place and time, as categories that we identify with and struggle for. Each poet inhabits a separate universe, expressed in totality through language, and this is precisely what enables poetry to speak with such intimacy across all the borders we could possibly imagine.
