ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the change in style in British poet Daljit Nagra’s recent collection, British Museum (2017). After the multilingual Punglish of the early collections, Look We Have Coming to Dover! (2007) and Tippoo Sutan’s Incredible White-Man-Eating Tiger Toy-Machine!!! (2011), the poet here adopts an English enriched by the previous polyphonic writing to produce a more muted hybridity, a “multi-monolingual” English which is a potent revealer of historical and cultural polysemy. This evolution is considered in the light of recent research into multilingual literary writing in the field of literary genetics, in terms of the creative process, and a parallel is drawn between the poet’s quest within language and the process of language learning in infancy. This change in style is shown to reflect a move towards an irenic yet ironic “we,” an embattled “shared voice.”
