Ravi Shankar and the World We Live In

Ravi Shankar, American poet (b. 1975)

Ravi Shankar is an associate professor of English at Central Connecticut State University. He is the founding editor of Drunken Boat, one of the earliest online literary journals, now entering its second decade. He is also the co-editor, with Tina Chang and Nathalie Handal, of the anthology Language For a New Century: Contemporary Poetry From the Middle East, Asia, and Beyond. I’ve had the pleasure of hosting Ravi at the Ordinary Evening Reading Series in New Haven, where he read poems from his book Instrumentality, and have also had the honor of publishing his masterful and hilarious long poem, “Mistranslated Glossary of Rodeo Lexicon,” in the latest issue of Tight.

On the weekend of July 10, driving home to Connecticut with his wife and daughter after attending a literary party in Chelsea, Ravi was pulled over by the New York City police. Asked to step out of the car to take a field sobriety test, which he passed, he was then arrested for ostensibly having a four-year-old unpaid speeding ticket. He spent the next 36 hours in jail. When he finally appeared in front of the judge, Ravi writes, “She stared down at me as the public defender reviewed my charge, noting that the warrant was for a 5-foot-10 white male.”

Ravi’s arrest was part of a round up, an exercise in quotas, and his treatment at the hands of the New York City justice system is what people will say is the cost of living in this “new world.” The world is not so new, and we could pretend to be shocked by this incident, were it not so common, pre- or post-9/11.

What is Ravi now to do? He has written an excellent column for the Hartford Courant detailing very matter-of-factly his treatment. There is also piece on NPR.

In 1951, the Trinidad-born writer C.L.R. James was imprisoned by the United States government on immigration charges. That he was, amongst other things, an outspoken socialist theorist might have had as much to do with his incarceration as his citizenship status. (He was also an expert on cricket, though I don’t think the Yankees—the baseball team, natch—had anything to fear on that count.)

While awaiting his fate on Ellis Island, James wrote Mariners, Renegades, & Castaways: Herman Melville and the World We Live In, an examination of Moby-Dick. James puts forth that the Pequod is a microcosm of our working America, with its Nantucketers, Native Americans, Africans, Pacific Islanders, Persians, and other motley types, and that Captain Ahab is a peculiarly American character, driven by a singular passion, a need to conquer and (not necessarily or) destroy all around him because of a personal vendetta, a character that the poet Robert Lowell described as “the fanatical idealist who brings the world down in ruin through some sort of simplicity of mind,” a trait which we can see enacted daily on any of our 24-hour cable news channels. That Ahab utilizes a merchant vessel for his mission—as opposed to, say, a military ship—is also representative.

One might think James would be bitter about the circumstances in which he wrote his bo0k, but Mariners, Renegades & Castways is a thoroughly empathetic vision of America, a complex vision, one that understands all that America is capable of—as a people and an idea—on both the positive and negative sides.

It’s been nearly 60 years since C.L.R. James was imprisoned. It’s not been two months since Ravi Shankar was. The world is not so new.