My Dear Comrades

Civil rights attorney Sunu P. Chandy’s debut collection of poems, My Dear Comrades, is a work in solidarity with marginalized and minoritized populations: women, people of color, the working classes, indigenous peoples (particularly Palestinians). Chandy connects the experiences of her speaker to the oppressions of others in ways that highlight shared struggles. In one poem, the speaker recalls being sexually assaulted by a family friend, and then sitting down for breakfast together with him, as if nothing had happened. Addressing the offender, she says: “your palm came down fully onto my breast. / Plain and clear. Plain as day.” The incident continues to haunt the speaker: 

Ten years later I still remember you. Today, at a museum exhibit
about Native American tipis. To simply appreciate
the beauty of the acquired, the beadwork of the colonized,
without any mention of the violations, of reparations,
is like sitting at breakfast in Madras. 

Chandy’s longer poems include prose-like passages that often ring diaristic, as when the speaker reflects on her own struggle with infertility, before concluding:

I cannot forget the people dying in wars, soldiers and so many
civilians, or any of the world’s more worthwhile tragedies. The
poem feels self-indulgent and necessary, as I do not pretend,
even for one minute, that this is the worst tragedy I have heard
about this year, or even this month. But it is, most certainly,
mine.

Occasionally, poems are overburdened by exposition. The most memorable moment in one poem, the memory of a traffic light in Indiana that almost prevented the speaker from taking the LSAT—“on some days, I am still, / waiting at that 8:30 a.m. red light”—gets lost in the lead-up to the test: “The library opened at eight and for one month, / every morning in the two hours before class, I studied / for this test.” 

Not all of Chandy’s poems are heavy, however, and there are moments of levity throughout. When the speaker expresses concern about her daughter’s preference for playing kitchen, the child’s response reveals an intuitive grasp of gender as a social construct: “everyone knows: one fake helps, to fake open, the fake ketchup.”