Key Quote
“"my name has been mauled by English mouths"”
Raman Mundair · Name Journeys
Focus: “mauled”
The violent verb 'mauled' transforms mispronunciation from a minor inconvenience into a physical attack — the name (and the identity it carries) is savaged by the dominant culture.
Technique 1 — EXTENDED METAPHOR — NAME AS JOURNEY
Mundair constructs an extended metaphor in which the speaker's name is a living entity that travels, suffers, and transforms through migration. The name does not merely accompany the speaker — it undertakes its own parallel journey, accumulating damage along the way. This personification of the name makes the abstract concept of cultural identity tangible: we can see, feel, and mourn its degradation (decline in quality).
The semantic field of violence — 'mauled', 'mangled' — suggests that the distortion of a name is not accidental but an act of cultural aggression. Each mispronunciation strips away a layer of heritage, history, and family connection. Mundair implies that names carry encoded meaning: they contain religious, familial, and cultural information that is destroyed when Anglicised. The name 'Raman' alludes to the Hindu deity Rama; to mangle it is to erase a spiritual lineage.
Key Words
RAD — REGRESS
The poem traces a clear regression: the speaker's name (and by extension, their identity) is progressively diminished through the process of migration. What began as a name rich with cultural, religious, and familial meaning is reduced to an unrecognisable approximation. This is not a single act of damage but a cumulative erosion — each new English speaker, each new mispronunciation, chips away at the name's integrity. Mundair suggests that assimilation into a dominant culture always involves a diminishment of the migrant's original identity.
Key Words
Technique 2 — GHAZAL FORM AS CULTURAL STATEMENT
Mundair writes in the ghazal form — a traditional South Asian and Arabic poetic structure consisting of rhyming couplets with a refrain. The choice of form is itself a political act: by using a non-Western poetic tradition, Mundair refuses to surrender her cultural identity to English literary conventions. The ghazal becomes a vessel for the very heritage that the poem describes being eroded, preserving it through the act of writing.
The ghazal traditionally ends with a maqta — a couplet in which the poet names themselves. This convention is profoundly resonant in a poem about the destruction of names: by inscribing her own name into the poem's structure, Mundair performs an act of reclamation. The poem simultaneously documents the damage done to her name and restores it to its proper form, creating a literary space where the name exists intact, uncorrupted by 'English mouths'.
Key Words
Context (AO3)
MIGRATION & CULTURAL DISPLACEMENT
Raman Mundair was born in India and moved to England aged 5. The poem draws on the experience of diasporic (scattered from homeland) communities who must navigate between two cultures. For many immigrants, the mispronunciation of their name is one of the first and most persistent forms of cultural erasure — a daily reminder that they do not 'fit' into the dominant culture's linguistic framework.
THE RAMAYANA & HINDU MYTHOLOGY
The name 'Raman' alludes to Rama, the hero of the Ramayana — one of the great epics of Hindu literature. The Ramayana tells the story of Rama and Sita, embodying ideals of duty, loyalty, and righteousness. By connecting her name to this mythological tradition, Mundair shows that a name is never 'just a name' — it is a palimpsest (a text layered over earlier texts) carrying centuries of cultural meaning that is obliterated by careless Anglicisation.
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WOW — DERRIDA'S DIFFÉRANCE & THE UNTRANSLATABLE NAME
Mundair's poem enacts what Jacques Derrida called différance — the idea that meaning is always deferred, never fully present. The 'true' pronunciation of the speaker's name exists in a language and cultural context that English cannot replicate; every attempt at translation produces only an approximation, a trace of the original that highlights what has been lost. Derrida argued that all language operates through difference — we understand 'cat' because it is not 'bat' — but Mundair shows that for migrants, this difference becomes a form of violence. The name exists in a permanent state of slippage: neither fully Indian nor fully English, hovering between two linguistic systems, belonging completely to neither. The poem becomes a meditation on the impossibility of perfect cultural translation.
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