Poetry

Poetry Yoonmee Chang Poetry and Prose Chair: Yoonmee Chang Committee members: Karen Chow, Sejal Sha Winner: Blue Boy, by Rakesh Satyal We select Rakesh Satyal's Blue Boy as the winner of the poetry and prose book award. We were struck by the novel's subject material and impressed with the author's storytelling. An innovative spin on the ethnic American bildungsroman, Blue Boy interweaves the usual crises of adolescence with the unusual coping strategies of a queer, Hindu Indian boy, Kiran, growing up in suburban Ohio. Caught playing with his mother's makeup, Kiran defends that he has smeared sparkly blue eye shadow all over his face because he wants to transform himself into Krishna. Though she can discern otherwise, Kiran's mother accepts her son's clever assertion of sexual, cultural, and religious orthodoxy. The reader is given her cue: this novel will lead us through many more difficult confrontations and the fictions we need to endure them. [End Page 439] We admired Satyal's treatment of the young protagonist's negotiations of his sexuality. Though the queer is a central theme of the novel, it is situated among Kiran's many coming-of-age issues, so that the text does present the queer as pedantic or an issue of mere identity. Rather, the queer is a natural part of the landscape of adolescent sexuality; one moment Kiran is fantasizing about the drag-fabulous costume he will wear for the school talent show, but at others he is reflecting on the fine distinctions of breast presentation in Playboy and Hustler. At the same time, Satyal does not universalize the queer. The queer does not devolve into a humanistic concern of the everyman: though its heartaches can speak plangently to normative sensibilities, the plot twists of Satyal's novel show us that there are indignities and violence reserved for those who live differently. Satyal refuses other moral platitudes, too. In this landscape of white and Indian, haves and have-nots, bullies and victims, the ethical demarcations are blurry. The chain of spectacles that end the novel show that victims can become perpetrators, perpetrators are not always punished, and there are no easy solutions when you are brown. We enjoyed this book and are honored to be able to choose it for the AAAS award. Copyright © 2011 The Johns Hopkins University Press

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