Measures of Expatriation

by Vahni Capildeo

  The god of obstacles stayed quiet during some years in which young Schengen and I politely ignored each other. Though having caused my British citizen too much perplexity for our attachment to endure, I was myself a British resident and had a real job at Girton College, Cambridge: I was spoken for, on letter-headed paper. I could queen it over your lists.

  But the gods have a way of raising the game. This was in a year when, all my papers in order, I was about to leave Florence, independent and blithe. The young official who took my passport got a look of handsome stupidity. He scrutinized the flora and fauna that bedeck the Trinidad coat of arms. He burst out laughing, waving for a female colleague to come over. He pointed at my passport and muttered something to her. Now they both were laughing. (They looked so young.) It was half an hour before the plane was due to take off. No list of countries was in evidence.

  In Italian that was vestigial, nervous, overcourteous, I asked what was the matter. Oh do not raise the question of the role of the decorative arts in border control situations, or, never judge a passport by its cover! That was, however, veritably the question. The stupid, handsome face stopped laughing. Hands gambled the passport open on random pages. The Wielders of the Stamps could not let me out of Italy. Why? Because I had a Schengen visa, yes, they could see that (it spreadeagled across a page), but I had no visa for the UK.

  I gently moved the pages to show the permit that granted my right to residency in the UK. It did not cross my mind to try to explain the concept ‘Commonwealth’, though as a Commonwealth citizen I could anyway have entered the UK for a limited period without a visa. Two years’ university tutoring had taught me how to recognize pretend-reading pretty fast. These Wielders of the Stamps were just pretending to read the British residency permit.

  Alas, the words were all they had: the British permit consisted of a meanly inked text, with no translation into another European Union language. Confusingly, the wording referred to ‘leave’ rather than ‘permission’, and ‘indefinite’ rather than ‘permanent’. Leave? Go? Was this something saying I should stay away from the UK for a while? Tradition, not marketing, certainly not machine translatability, must have been the force governing the choice of words.

  Working in the airport of a major tourist destination not a million miles from Albion, the two young people appeared both unfamiliar with and utterly uncomprehending of this official sign. Worse yet, the stamp was lacking, was intrinsically unconvincing: it featured no coronet, no rolling waves, no rose, thistle, lion, unicorn, oak, beef, or albatross… I promptly affected dismay. What an ugly permit! How British, I cried disloyally; not a single picture! But do you mean you don’t know Trinidad? It is a beautiful island! You must visit! The beaches are brilliant, the sea is so blue! We are very friendly! We love visitors! Why have you never visited? But Italy is so beautiful too! Oh, I see I don’t know why there are no pictures for the permit but that is what the British have done!

  I continued my Ministry of Tourism spiel in between rendering the meanly inked text word for word as best I could, till the Wielders of the Stamps stopped me. I sprinted on to the plane.

  Did a deeper disloyalty reside in my touristification of Trinidad, which could make itself imaginable to my conversationalists only through me, or in my mock-criticism of my adoptive Britain, whose whitecliffed reputation could outface whatever I had to say?

  Expatriate, I had acquired the confidence to hurtle into having to start over. It was a way of going on.

  III. GOING NOWHERE, GETTING SOMEWHERE

  How was it that till questioned, till displaced in the attempt to answer, I had scarcely thought of myself as having a country, or indeed as having left a country? The answer lies peripherally in looming, in hinterland; primarily in the tongueless, palpitating interiority. Trinidad was. Trinidad is. In the same way, some confident speakers do not think of themselves as having an accent. They will say so: ‘I don’t have an accent! You have an accent!’ In those accentless voices compass points spin, ochre and ultramarine flagella fling themselves identifiably towards this that or the other region. It is a motile version of that luxury, solidity, non-reflectivity that is the assumption of patria. So different is the expat from the refugee, who has her country on her back, or the migrant, who has countries at his back.

  What would I have called home, before I began creating home? Before I had to learn to ravel up longitude, latitude, population, oil rigs, mobile phone masts, prayer flags, legality of fireworks, likely use of firearms, density and disappearance of forests, scarlet ibis, other stripes of scarlet, into a by-listeners-unvisited, communicable, substantial image of ‘Trinidad’?

  Language is my home. It is alive other than in speech. It is beyond a thing to be carried with me. It is ineluctable, variegated and muscular. A flicker and drag emanates from the idea of it. Language seems capable of girding the oceanic earth, like the world-serpent of Norse legend. It is as if language places a shaping pressure upon our territories of habitation and voyage; thrashing, independent, threatening to rive our known world apart.

  Yet thought is not bounded by language. At least, my experience of thinking does not appear so bound.

  One day I lost the words wall and floor. There seemed no reason to conceive of a division. The skirting-board suddenly reduced itself to a nervous gentrification, a cover-up of some kind; nothing especially marked. The room was an inward-focused container. ‘Wall’, ‘floor’, even ‘ceiling’, ‘doorway’, ‘shutters’ started to flow smoothly, like a red ribbed tank top over a heaving ribcage. Room grew into quarter. Room became segment. Line yearned till it popped into curve. The imperfections of what had been built or installed: the ragged windowframe or peeling tile: had no power to reclaim human attention to ‘floor’ or ‘wall’ as such. Objects were tethered like astronauts and a timid fringe of disarrayed atmosphere was the immediate past that human activity kept restyling into present. The interiority of the room was in continuous flow. Wall, floor became usable words again in a sort of silence.

  I had the sense to shut up about the languageless perception. Procedure for living.

  Language is my home, I say; not one particular language.

  IV. WORD BY WORD

  Do you know that party or family game where each person says the first word that comes to mind, prompted by what the person before has just said? Outrages and banalities and brilliancy link up at high speed, a wedding dance of animated paperclips. I have not been able to play that game. It induces hesitation and something like a stammer. ‘Don’t think! You’re thinking!’ – a telling-off from the party dictator. Often the uttered word would summon up another word in a totally inappropriate register or language; more often, several words at once, in a kind of bee dance; most often, no word at all: sounds and images surged up, and I searched to find something to keep the game going. But this was not an expat phenomenon. This happened in Trinidad, too, before my move to the UK. Perhaps it was a hypersensitization to the fluidity and zigzagging of Trinidadian speech, where flowery translations of Sanskrit and the formality of the older Christian (mostly Catholic) liturgies naturally mix into the same track as the tricksy shrug and bread-and-curses everydayness of Spanish-French-Portuguese-Syrian-Chinese-Scottish-Irish-(English)? Was everyone else pretending to have one-word events in their brain, while secretly choosing from a retentissante horde?

  Expatriate.

  Exile.

  Migrant.

  Refugee.

  V. A RECORD OF ILLEGITIMATE REACTIONS

  A record of illegitimate reactions… If these words: expatriate, exile, migrant, refugee: turned up in the children’s game, what, on the instant, would be my wordless upsurge?

  Refugee. Severity of the olive green cover of the J. S. Bach Preludes & Fugues book that was my master such long hours of my teens. Flight and the intricacy of flight and a scrambling to be heard and but a coming together in the end. Refugio. A cavern. Mary and Joseph, straw in a rough box? Promise of a place. Higher up than a stable and more diffi
cult of access. A path to fall off, a lorry underside to grip to. The arrival another unpacking. The station, built or unbuilt, ever inadequate, dark and cavernous. People with fine features and ripped feet fetching water with difficulty to a place of non-recognition. Refugee should have been, in Trinidad, the Guyanese maids; the Asian East African doctors; the Sindhi shop-owners, plumped under the new sun but with an unspoken… fear?... a having-feared behind eyes browner than mine, working the sharp-edged wordbatch WAR to WARES. A too-late identification. For they were not refugee, not to the mind of the child in the wordgame. Refugee had flight in it and fleeing to a huddle of wrongness; a translation into a community of incommunicability. There is brown and mid-blue, blister-purple, love-scarlet and a great deal of black in this word. There is the insistence on losing and finding, finding and not having, a home.

  No, not that.

  Migrant. Migrant geese or some such was where first I heard the word so as to note it, the word migrant actually not alone at origin, part of a phrase with white wings, and it is driven it is thoughtless it is magnetically on course steered by stars and obsessed with diving for food and likely to have secreted in its braincoils a chart for the way home. A cyclical, undependable word – a trait prettifying itself when observed by the other species whose skies it occupies – Migrant is all the birds of the air and I lack the balance to set off on a flight with a due destination and a warm or frosted prompting back. Migrant is cerulean and khaki and it has a lot to say for itself once encamped temporarily by a river that will do. All movement, this word. Out at elbows or tensethighed: verbal. Absolute: adjectival. In the singular, it implies plurals: migrant isolate in so far as rising from or surrounded by settlers. The hunted, hunter, unconcerned.

  No, not that.

  Exile. Exile is Joseph. Exile is Moses. Exile is a boy or a man and sand and serpents. Exile is Sri Rāma. Exile is a pair of sandals on the throne for your brother will not rule in your place while you have been kept from your kingdom and have gone into the forest. Exile is an ancient song. Exile is melismatic. Exile is flattened in English. Exil in French is yet more clipped: exil is a short step from death; it is St-Ex, St-Exupéry crashed into the desert, or the pilot’s verray corporeal assumption into his beloved night, wind, sand and stars. Sable encore. Exile has a grain to it. Exilio, esilio is one to call from mountain tops. It is a maker of songs who can make vowels from objects, a ram’s horn, a conch shell; and I think he is male again, sinewy and unbathed for weeks on end without minding, expecting his songs to be transmitted, and when he arrives somewhere he will know how to make a fire and cook but someone else will bake the bread for him. Fire is in exile and the word burns me so I cannot use it; it is an hysterical word, I shall weep and do wrong to others in order to avenge somebody if I think hard enough about exile, a bed of scorched earth and somebody I was in love with in a dream. Exile, a constant series of disruptive transactions between resignation and prophecy. Exile is a Book of Books. Exile is a find by someone else and the bones chitter the story, so every interpretation, being late, is haunted and warped into footnotes around the song. Exile, renewer of membranes. A sweated blanket of footnotes and departed feet. I picked it up and its black and white pattern began bleeding most deeply into my appalled, osmotic hands.

  No, not that.

  Expatriate. Non dépaysée, sin saber por qué ni por qué sé yo, unhousèd free condition. I arrive at the theme, which surely is a citation. I am incited to pluck out the heart of the mystery. I am transported on the instant to another century. Patria sings an Italian tenor. No expiry, please.

  All Your Houses

  Notebook Including a Return

  for Andre Bagoo

  As if no thought beyond immediate transferral: mind to paper.

  I

  Next door there are workmen. The tenants have been disposed of; disappeared, perhaps, into the television sets that go on and stay on all along the road. Life has never so much resembled a drama of nothing. Men with special knocks introduce themselves, not by their names, in deep, uncertain voices. And nearly nightly, in just the one embarrassment of a house that knoweth not curtain tassels, is the blue, white and red 2 a.m. festival. ‘Honest, officer, I never would have done something like that.’ ‘I can chastize my daughter in any way I want.’

  Next door the workmen are converting the loft. So far they have punched five holes in our wall. Daylight was visible through one hole, now covered over with something like silver foil. Bricks in Trinidad were red to the core. These houses have grey bricks, grey on the inside, dust falling through grey.

  The workmen next door explained that they have not been careless. Walls are expected to be six to eight inches thick. These are four inches at best, built for Victorian replaceable grateful people. The thing that is constantly constricted in my head eases a little, now the house on one side shows up its shoddiness. It feels less stuck together; not sweated so thick with aspirational, windowgazing, briefly guttering lives. The imposition of this house feels more impersonal, like rain.

  The nervous chatter of minds not yet forming themselves into poems: not to inflict that on friends...

  II

  All winter the heating had been fixed. The college workmen came to the house and stuck the heating at ‘on’ with a screwdriver. April, and they were fixing it again.

  That character (whose?), that superstition: scissors snipping the air provokes or presages conflict. Air is likened to paper. Air and paper are full of voices.

  Always to drift off alone, in a house where another is already sleeping: how to take down the crazy scaffolding of words, arrive at ground level, and maintain the illusion of companionship into the alien land of sleep?

  The end of the page is where the line stays drawn for good.

  III

  This college is gutted. A road owned by another college passes through this college. Why are those buildings so blank a presence? They curve or slope about green space. Their solidity resembles refusal, perhaps the refusal to speak. Shapes cast in concrete from a French formal garden magnified a hundred times: at snail’s height I enter, without a sense of entrance; un-entranced. Leather and darkness inside spite the glass. So strange triumphs cover for the absence of beauty and age.

  Whereas in the moneylaundering banks on the other side of the ocean, where half-private waiting rooms are cousin to these teaching rooms, there were families who sat about while their heads went off into truly obscure interiors, here are first names and no heads and nowhere private to go. Conversation lounged around shared intentions: all these families would visit Disney World. Conversation lounges around shared ambitions: but I am not on the same page.

  Morning had trembled awake. The first similar shakiness moved a long cold finger down my left arm from shoulder to fingertips, stretching a nerve, taking years to pass off. I had lifted the box with the Christmas tree over the Convent gate. It would have been easy enough to walk around a little way, to another gate, not kept locked. It was inconvenient that this gate should be locked. I wanted it open. I wanted to lift.

  Shakiness is visible in cramping as I try to hold the pen; I do not trust myself with speech, though the inside of my head is somewhat recognizable.

  IV

  The basement is orange, pillarbox red, and poster paint blue. I was not conceived or thought of in the 1950s, though I have seen town houses painted in the 1990s, set aside by local councils in the south of England for well-meaning things to happen indoors in an underfunded way. This basement, however, is dedicated to the reading of poetry. Two blackboards make the wall loud behind the reader. Whoever reads whatever will have to stand in front of a cool message bullying people to be slower. I elasticate time.

  The Hercules complex: name and define it? The certainty of being strong and somehow at fault. The inability to cope with others’ performance of hurt. The existence as a marvellous witness who puts the seal on the confession that it is someone frailer who has full humanity.

  That book they are talking
about was written to give the feeling of thinking to people who fear the habit of reflection. It is very good. I do not think that it was good for me. The backs of chairs are rearranging themselves into arch wooden animals. Every fiction bends into the document of a writing experience. Every word appears as a proper name.

  No kindness to one’s own mind is possible in this process, which must not stop for theirs.

  V

  The workmen continue to hammer the walls next door. This is no call to start the day. Whether they do their job is quite separate from whether I do mine. The morality of pure disconnectedness makes the easy poetry of analogy impossible. My face is dirty and my black fleece is stained with tea and I am hopeless at knitting and sewing.

  There were his attempts to pull me back with hurt eyes and soft words from the ‘terrible distance between us’. There was her research on the Easter Vigil: in the dark, lightening, northern-hemisphere days leading up to the celebration, church bells were not rung or were rung with wooden clappers – dumb bells, during the ages when so little else rumbled the foundations, stirred the sky, discomposed the soundscape. There was another one talking of a rich eastern country, an architect father, and a building like a white sail with ripples in it. So I talked to yet another one, about my tulips and about his chickens; about his chickens eating his tulips; about his having an egg sandwich made from his chickens’ eggs; about his having no intention to eat his chickens.