The Prodigal by Suneeta Peres da Costa
Giramondo Poetry, 2024
In Your Dreams by Šime Knežević
Giramondo Poetry, 2025
While I am hesitant to pathologise the diasporic experience (it is indeed a site of joy!), the effects of displacement often feel proximate to malady. I am always cautious to frame diaspora in such ways – it would not be genuine of me to pretend as if it were always a joyful experience, or something that I have never felt ashamed about. And there is guilt in that shame. Suneeta Peres da Costa’s The Prodigal (2024) and Šime Knežević’s In Your Dreams (2025) stoke the fever in my heart that aches and involuntarily turns to ugly feelings, pleated over and over as I make sense of my place in relation to contemporary Australia and my ancestral homelands. Theorists of the diasporic ‘condition,’ such as Homi Bhabha and Rey Chow, have rightfully oriented our discourses beyond the essentialist binaries of host and home, and illustrated how generative the hybrid sites and entangled scenes of cultural identity can be. From these interstices comes the diasporic poetics that makes sense of the in-between. Peres da Costa’s and Knežević’s collections probe at the seemingly unproductive and ugly feelings arising from the liminality of displacement. The diction of malaise connects these collections, speaking to the ugly affects held in the body. What of homesickness? What of the viscerality of guilt, longing, and displacement? Indeed, the difficulty of discussing the diasporic experience without the language of illness indicates some of the ways by which displacement is embodied.
Suneeta Peres da Costa’s The Prodigal is her debut poetry collection after a literary career writing award-winning novels and plays that engage with diasporic experience. She pays detailed attention to the abundance of voices that constitute a sense of place, and the surprising resonances between stories and symbols from her Goan heritage and suburban Sydney upbringing on Gadigal land, weaving these threads together into complex fabrics and scenes of diaspora. She brings this same attention to The Prodigal, with her beautifully tactile poetics that show scenes abundant in materials, diverse beings, and sites of encoded meaning, whether in architecture, rich vegetal landscapes, or harsh terrain.
In The Prodigal, Peres da Costa locates diaspora in corporeal experiences of place and the various entities that constitute it. The intensity of geographic and cultural distance manifests in the body, which holds its resonances and contradictions in anxious tension. The collection begins with a group of poems that draw on travel literature, Peres da Costa inventories affects across the Indian subcontinent. She later turns to suburban Sydney, and her poetic mobility exposes proliferating entanglements. I am cautious of reducing The Prodigal to diasporic sensation, particularly where Peres da Costa’s textural poetics tangles with a rich array of the “frighteningly tentacular” affects of love, friendship, and artistry (‘Soft-shelled,’ 34). Furthermore, she draws out the underspoken violence in the constellations of gender, caste, and class. With that said, read alongside Knežević’s collection, The Prodigal shines as a powerful evocation of the ugly uneasiness of displacement and return.
I loved most the group of poems beginning with ‘The Prodigal’ (1-2) through to ‘Going to the River’ (14-15), which depict a traveller returning to their ancestral homeland, making sense of identity, past, and present. Drawing on a Christian referent (and, doubly, on the Portuguese colonisation of Goa and its cultural legacies), the Parable of the Prodigal Son mobilises a suspicion of return just as it deconstructs the promise of a welcoming embrace in a home that has not remained static since departure.
For Peres da Costa, necessity and abundance are constantly under tension. Recalling the prodigal son who squanders his inheritance, the traveller in these poems lives a threadbare, itinerant life.
[…] Her sandals – loose from
the monsoon – had been repaired at mochī
twice over; and the clothes she had taken
quickly, in the dead of night, slipping by
undetected while the watchman slept –
yellowed, grown threadbare. Legs sore
from wandering, she quenched her thirst on
salt lassis in random pure-veg restaurants,
counting her cash and days
(‘The Prodigal,’ 1)
This is a life of uncertain wandering, its effect on the body produces illness and deterioration, with sore legs, vomiting dogs, and doctor’s offices.
Yet, Peres da Costa also paints an abundance of reciprocal relations through her travel poetry situated in dynamic and affecting spaces. Moving from the “temple stall in Tiruchirappalli” in Tamil Nadu to a brief romance in Rishikesh and through the “mountains, ranges – called Dhauladhar,” the speaker walks through rich scenes of the various voices and landscapes of the Indian subcontinent, encoded with cultural and historical meaning (1-2). Her use of tactile language emphasises the materiality of the landscape, and she reads materials and bodies as texts that mutually inscribe meanings upon the other.
Reeds stuck to her unwashed hair
and her cheek was bruised from sleeping
on the long string of tulasī beads she’d
bought at a temple stall in Tiruchirappalli.
Unbeknown to her they would tattoo
her skin in the night, writing their faint,
inscrutable calligraphy.
(1)
Through relations of reciprocity, these many meanings accumulate. ‘The Prodigal’ ends on this note of abundance:
[…] It hardly mattered
she could not identify them by name, for their
choruses swelled in her, soon grew unmistakable.
(2)
At the same time, the meanings derived from these encounters of bodies and materialities are not neutral, and Peres da Costa paints haunted scenes with unsettling implications. Gendered and caste violence are present, such as on the doctor’s door that states “[s]ex determination of foetus not performed here” (2). Not limited to these more overt forms, Peres da Costa’s poem ‘In My Father’s House’ (3-4) sketches out how domestic space is also haunted and scarred by history. The imagery and aurality of this poem is arresting. In the father’s house (which is not understood as home), empty dark rooms are unhomely and kenophobic. The scars of memory in this space are unparsable, but undeniable. Where “[g]raffiti of old wounds cover the walls” and “limestone is pocked and shell-shocked,” all is liquid and senseless: “Teacups brim / with water and madness,” made of “Macau china” that draws out Portuguese cross-colonial connections (3). Memory lingers in ineffable but simultaneously concrete ways, the speaker’s grandmother “shout[s] obscenities at / invisible soldiers,” and her brothers are stuck in “habits they learnt early and / cannot break” (3). The unhomely house as a site of memory becomes a site of madness and malady as the speaker’s father wallows in a deep fever. Where space (especially that of the domestic) grounds the construction of identity, Peres da Costa reminds us that the space of memory is fraught, the haunted miasma of histories unspoken.
Poor banished children, I shout, my voice echoing
through the empty rooms and into the night,
shattering the nacre of ancient windowpanes.
Saibini! I call, but the Goddess does not answer,
the Goddess goes on smiling, silent in her shrine.
(4)
Beyond these first poems, the latter portions of Peres da Costa’s collection are relocated to suburban Sydney. I am drawn especially to the poem ‘Roses’ (25-26), which connects in generative ways to the earlier poems. Peres da Costa’s visceral and vibrant diction paints an Australian school-girlhood through the lens of diaspora. A hyperawareness of the signifiers of cultural difference is connected to the anxiety of a burgeoning womanhood, expressed through a menstrual poetics. “Embarrassed” about how her mother wraps a bouquet of roses with “reused butcher’s paper […] stained with lamb’s blood,” the speaker is pricked by the thorns and seeks to hide the bloodstains on her uniform (25).
I took them from her careful hands;
kissing her quickly, worried about
missing the bus, about being late, being
noticed – but also longing to be seen.
(25)
The enjambment emphasises the anxiety of being perceived as different. This resonates with my own experience of an Australian girlhood embarrassed by its own hybridity, again manifest in Peres da Costa’s “mortification of cucumber, cheese and / chutney” (25). Uneasy, also, about the burden of “hips, buds, petals, anthers, / ovaries – stigmata of her blighted gift to me,” Peres da Costa examines the ugly, fearful affects of girlhood and cultural difference (26). These are made alike, as bloody stains that seep out from shame, a wound situated in the body.
Returning to the travel poems to explore this shame further, I note that in my first time reading The Prodigal I was immediately drawn to certain expressions of guilt. A sense of guilt emerges when searching for cultural meaning in psychic attachments to the space of a past home. Yet, attempting to assuage this guilt – by returning to the embodied, living, and evolving physical space – results in a disjunction of expectation.
The buffalo rakhno salutes you with a hearty
dev borem korum; whereas you want to talk
buffalo he wants to know whether you’re married
yet and whether your salary exceeds US 50K?
(‘Going to the River,’ 15)
The father of the prodigal son may await his son with a feast, but our ancestral lands do not wait for us. The mismatched expectations in this intercultural exchange ground an uneasy sense of difference from the ancestral homeland. Cultural referents are fleeting and partial, such as the “ceremony whose name eludes you” and the terrain “encrypted” with meanings that you have not accumulated in your absence (15). Similarly, the poem ‘Shimla Street Cobbler’ (5-6) compares a broken bag strap in need of repair with the speaker’s awareness of her broken linguistic ability: “suddenly aware / I had no word for ‘mend’ in Hindī” (5). There is a liminality in the speaker’s sense of self, a sudden self-consciousness of difference upon return. I am drawn to how Peres da Costa explores the complications of repair together with the shame of diasporic partial knowledges.
Photo by Cato Lein
