I Belong to Nowhere

The first English-language collection from one of India's most hard-hitting writers these poems brilliantly exemplify writing as an act of resistance. Militant satirical and biting Kalyani Charal pulls no punches in eviscerating paternalistic - and patriarchal - bourgeois socialists who speak on behalf of others. Writing from lived experience Charal delineates the bourgeois values that fuel the social machinery of caste oppression while drawing parallels with social and racial marginalisation around the world. Thus in her poetry the specificity of Dalit lives in Bengal a region which prides itself on its Leftist history and enlightened culture and whose partition into India and Bangladesh has left a legacy of communal tension refugees and statelessness is at the same time the universality of precarity marginality and dispossession. Finally there is space for love - wistful and full-throated with an attentiveness to the natural world that speaks to her claim that all Dalit woman writers are eco feminists.