Singing Against Anti-Asian Sentiment in The East African Postcolony: Jagjit Sing’s “Portrait of an Asian As an East African”

Abstract

The 1972 expulsion of Asians from Uganda by the President of the time, General Idi Amin Dada, is one of the most traumatic events that Uganda has suffered. This article examines how this event is imagined in Jagjit Singh’s ‘Portrait of an Asian as an East African’ (1971). I am interested in three inter-related issues that the poet depicts in this work: the pain of being uprooted from a place one has known as home, only to be cast into a state of statelessness and refugeehood; the nature and character of the emergent postcolony that the poem speaks to; and the ability of poetry to give prescient insights, given the fact the poem was published a year before the expulsion was announced. In the close reading of the poem that I perform in this paper, I pay special attention to the poetic devices that the poet deploys to speak to the three issues that I have mentioned above, and the success with which he does this.