Then the poets read. A fascination was exercised through them. People came up to them, wanting something not human: sympathy untroubled by the need for explanation; the most secret imaginings anticipated; an answer to the terrible, purely internal manifestations of love, which had them walking about whole but gutted.
For a perfect reader, invulnerable to extravagances.
VI
The man next to me on the ten-hour flight has insomnia. His white clothing is in layers, and neat. He repacks his hand luggage, which is full of gifts. He was an athlete who represented his nation. Injury and necessity sent him to the factory near Croydon to make plastic cups. He is too big to ignore, even if he had not confided to me his fear of the losses that night shifts make in his mind. The art of memory becomes a topic of discussion. Will his family remember him? His trip is a secret. The plan is to take a taxi and stop part way up the road from the family business (a bar), stroll in, and ask to buy a drink... I wonder, I wonder. Recognition: can it happen? Can a family survive it?
The postcards that I sent to England from Trinidad may not arrive in England until after I have returned there myself. The hand-made shoe cupboard in the house formerly known as ‘home’ contains a pair of gold mules. Everyone disavows owning them. I wear them. My toes are empurpled.
Four thousand miles traversed and there is a workman in the neighbourhood. He talks, saying the same thing again and again. The hundred dollars – sixty dollars that ‘she’ would make him pay for food, because she does not like ‘black people’. He emits a soft wordless murmur in between the statements, seeking agreement from his invisible someone. He stops his complaint with a final murmur, grievance winding down. Closer to me than the place where he works and complains is the yard where a little frog makes round sounds at night.
An old woman should not have to stand outside any door, calling; stand there giving reasons why it is all right to talk through the door. – Didn’t you also spend the night lying miserably awake? – No, I grab sleep when I can.
VII
The wind is lifting and sinking in that preparatory way. The curtains closed, the iron-grilled windows glassed-in: yet the heaviness in the body registers the likelihood of a downpour. The door slams. I must make time. Apparently no-one is there. In the air-conditioned boudoir, the two older women continue their reminiscences. What was the real name of that man from their youth: and was he the man who killed someone and went to jail, or the one with one arm whose arm was bitten off?
The friends from the other side of the world visit in dreams. I dreamt her in a quite imaginary flat, ghastly-faced and looking more like Sylvia Plath than like herself. She told me that she had had nothing to eat but a bowl of soup for the last ten days, although she was pregnant. I know that city well on foot, unlike my ‘home’ town. But the dream broke up the streets: the supermarkets became small and far away, the takeaways reverted to their locations of one and two decades before. I could not work out what to choose from their menus that would make our loved ones agree to join us.
The two older women remembered the three-legged dog named ‘Tripod’; the man with arms different lengths, nicknamed ‘Clock’; the one-eyed man (bigger) who was ‘Polyphemus’ and the one-eyed bus conductor (smaller) who was ‘Cyclops’. – But the bus conductor, would he have known what he was being called? – Yes, that story was in the elementary school primer.
British (Scottish, Irish, French, Spanish (education)) was best. Time passes.
VIII
Sitting at lunch on the other side of the world that day, he refused to hear of the unkindness of poetry. – Sitting at the foot of a mountain, trying to describe by smartphone how precipitous it is, to a friend who has never left the valley, nor felt gradient’s drag inside toiling muscle-and-bone. – Being stranded on a desert island for six hours, knowing that it is only for six hours, but that during that time there is no recourse, you are truly stranded and can only look out at the sea, or do something such as can be done on the island. – Tell me about the fisherman who visits an aquarium on his day off?
‘Pig Devours Swineherd’. That was from the front page of this national paper, once. There are news stories that you remember as if they were dreamt. The details have passed into dream. Was it that the couple was sitting on the sofa in their living room, watching television, the night the truck careened off course, blundering through their garden wall, over the garden, into the wall of the house, and so ran them over while they were seated in their living room? Since then I like to say that it’s safer not to stay indoors. There have been other reasons for saying so.
The car overturned on the highway. The parents were safely inside. She, confused, went along and across the highway, seeking help. Hit by a car, she was run over by three others, none of which stopped, as her parents watched. I cannot picture this. As I hear of her, I see instead a troop of horses galloping and rising to jump over a human body so that it will not be trampled as they pound on their way. I seem to see this in midair from a narrow and shifting plane between the road and the rising hooves of the horses: bared herbivore teeth, red sand flying, and sweat on the blood bay and chestnut coats.
The thought of the thing has me in a lock, refusing to be thought; senselessly and as if throning in a place set for it, the image displaces the unthought.
IX
A thousand little ways of showing confused concern to the woman with no child and no paying job: I have seen and can chant the avatars of kindness. The idea of writing is triviality or madness. On the other side of the world, there is fierce competition for an academic post. – Literature. Well, I’m glad you like it. (Spoken weakly.) – Am I allowed to invent the term paraliterature? (For this is what so many work on, when all must be published.) Tea is the solution, here as there.
A thousand little comforts on this side of the world, utterly lacking in the other: from the extra room for the gods to the high-speed broadband and the men who craft new kitchens from questionably garnered teak, I have benefited and wondered. – Why do the children keep playing jail? Small holes in the lawn are dug, not to meet a friend in China nor yet to create lakes, but as traps for bad men. The study door is slammed on imaginary people, who have been bad and must be kept in until they get good and can be let out. The getting good was the grown-up modification to the shooting game. Do we know anyone in jail? No, hardly even some of the people who might have put them there. That should not be so interesting.
Sunlight on the other side of the world brings the real citizens out in droves, pale blue and bumpy and too pleased for words. Unreal citizen: I find no surprises in sunlight, however rare its intensity. Sunlight taps in to a sense of the prolongation of time. It is not even a return to a norm. It is that there must be more of it. Now it has begun. Similarly, on this side of the world, enclosure. I overreact to small intervals of enclosure, as if the endlessness of what used to be home, with locks and standards and illness, could begin again.
What was the week like, earlier? I seem to be missing Thursday and can’t reconstruct it.
X
‘As idle as a painted ship upon a painted ocean’. A pleasure to be pressed between flat sea and flat sky into the two-dimensional glisten. A pleasure in the horizon as a lost line of pure waiting. The pleasure is not in the repetition; is it in the suspense? ‘O love, be fed with apples while you may’: May is itself a while. Apple-blossom time. – Do not speak my name in a beggar’s tone.
We went to the mangrove. I lack the heart to record the cheerful practical banter in the boat. ‘I could lend thee obscureness now, and say / Out of myself, there should be no more day, / Such is already my felt want of sight.’ The silky anteater was asleep, and they woke it. Being in its natural habitat, it was on show.
It was the child’s first visit to this cousin. Standing solemn on the red tiles, he said that the antique Chinese horses should have motors added to make them go. Then people could ride them. A bat got into the room. Someone went after it with a squash racket. I stood
by the swimming pool and chirruped. It found the way and flew off into the sunset.
To practise withholding, being here without being here, keeping people waiting and their love at arm’s length, is to be undeserving of written space. – She was pumping you! What do you know about her? – From the other side of the world: How is the trip, apart from the exotica? – To think up something to write to them; to be read by them; to have their words...
XI
My mother’s family comes from the East: from the East of Trinidad: Sangre Grande. The source of stories of fear and of pragmatism shifts the mind East. The second youngest girl recalls the praying mantis. The beads of its eyes clicked over and over. She was held in terror. She had gone to fetch a cardboard box for cricket-wicket and this thing was indoors wringing and locking and switching the ends of its forelegs, like the itch of restraint. In terror she hit out. It began to move its legs and wings as if to attack her. She went. The terror stayed. The youngest girl recalls the anaconda. As if casually, Trinidad, sedimentary, no coral spit, once broke off from Venezuela. Mainland-sized animals with nonstandardized names roam the island state. The houses were respectable and wore wooden lace, stepping high above their own yards. Chickens ran freely, but for one that was in the coils of an anaconda. My grandfather, a gentle bright-eyed man who could shoot seabirds out of the air, killed the snake with one shot. Before anyone could throw away the carcass of the bird, a woman came up. She said that there was nothing wrong with the fowl. She took it home and cooked it.
Why in a conversation with someone who is not well and asks me – Do you believe in God? do I say – No, not really, when at other times to other people I say and mean that I believe in gods?
Why does she look at me without much surprise while telling me that like all atheists I am on the path to the devil and that my name will be forgotten after I die?
Why does my name being forgotten make me think not of being prayed for but of literary records and the traces of their destruction?
Why when she told me how much time she spent praying for people, in detail, did I think – that must take very long?
Why did she bestow a social embrace on a damned person?
Why did I promise her to read the Bible?
Why did I think – it is context?
The grown-ups, not far away, are playing Scrabble. Three children under the age of five are on the sofa. I am sitting with the children. The television is on. The eldest asks – Why is the man on the road dead? Three pairs of similarly carved eyes turn their luminosity on me.
The second eldest says – I know what is die! It is going to the hospital and staying a long time.
Three pairs of eyes.
I say – No. It’s not always like that. It’s usually more like going to sleep. Everyone dies. Many people die when they are old.
The man on the road on the news may or may not have been one of the bandits who died in a shootout near the airport. They were shot after throwing a hand grenade through the window of a policeman’s car. The car went up in flames. The policeman, whose nickname was ‘Police’, died. He happened to be a friend of the family.
Three pairs of eyes resume their childishness, one stage further on.
To be looked at as if one is neutral ground. To identify with the narrative voice when one reads novels. To have no child in a house where the women are women together. What about the instantaneous alerts of kindness? What about belly dancing? Salmon strips of light in the sky? The saffron ceremony at night in the river? Is it true that the growth curve of fish never plateaus out? What would it mean to live with the flame turned low? What is the freedom of thought enshrined in the constitution if the evening constitutional is a few paces for the remote control? – Why do you want to live over there? – Because I can walk around at night on my own. – But why you want to walk around at night on your own?
To be looked at as if one is neutral ground...
XII
This the wrong reaction. When, in the country where I walk around alone, there is a night of men singing about Pakis, I do not feel that they are singing about me: my ancestors left South Asia before the partition of India. When the men, having passed my house, change their singing to a theme of detailed lust, singing about women, I do not feel that they are singing about me. One of the neighbours must be the woman: I have become the Paki. When the singing men stop and call out that they are not disturbing the peace, I wonder whether they are reassuring each other, or whether they have encountered someone walking around alone, perhaps from the direction of the park with understood gaps in the railings. This is the wrong reaction: instead of accepting the place of theme, to continue thinking like audience...
At the tortoise race, the tortoises are placed inside a ring of lettuce leaves. The winner makes its way first to the food. This was English summer, laced with strawberries and cream and Icelanders who had flown south, bearing gifts of a spatula and a pancake pan. Across the black water, on the whitepink coral sand, there are no winners in crab races, though a winner is picked. There is also no lettuce. Crabs run anyhow.
Who has no relatives? In Iceland there was a man who was known as the Night Stalker. He used to break into people’s houses at night. That was when for the first time people started keeping their balconies locked. Before they didn’t have to, even in Reykjavík. Mostly he just walked around people’s houses and flats in the night, looked at them sleeping and so on. Eventually they caught him. – The brother of a friend of a friend started going out with a girl. She introduced herself like this: – I am the sister of the Night Stalker. Apparently that had become the way she introduced herself.
Like you drop from the sky or what? Spoken word. Sped arrow. To speak to those who do not read you. To flee from the space that remains clear inside the head so long as writing is the continuity.
XIII
Half a crown of sonnets – Love is like religion – You – your real voice – You – the real you – Come – Obsession drives the mind. So its language bends to music. Laughter slips beneath the form that’s fixed. But it is a short form. Things that are long and twisting and compendious see the half a crown dropped by the wayside. Things that are monolithic from a distance and in detail uncontained are of the future. They have no place in the va-et-vient of this sequence, not belonging to the alternate staccato and legato here-and-now.
Blue lightning last week and this week the modem fizzled, the telephone line is dying and coming to life again, the fridge has stopped working and our food been transferred to a shared fridge a mile and a half away up an oak staircase with no lift, insomnia kicked in, a fourteenth-century man in black sits in green light under the city council hollies, the editor adds a final exclamation mark in distrust of the manuscript ardency of a lover out in the cold, the milk is delivered by a milk float and the milk bottles along the road are smashed till the gutters pearl with it, one friend is with child and cheerful on crutches with her pelvis coming apart, one has invested in hamsters that can be heard pedalling through the night, one lies on the gravel watching air balloons and talking ancient Greek and Brooklyn, one eats doughnuts at the fun fair in a pleased yet morose fashion, one reports snobbery about poetry vs. texts, one is forced at times to take supplements of praise for the small-but-perfectly-formed poems of yet another witty, erotic woman poet who literarily guts fish. – You have such a rich life over there, you know, you are privileged. Don’t worry about coming home. – Cannot gut fish.
And another friend like the loveliest kind of pencil, faintly scented with wood, inscribed with gilt, sharp yet giving. The rest of them told us that they were going to another party so we got up eagerly and went outside. None of them got up. They were comfortable in the pub. Sober and tired we stayed outdoors, waiting without looking in or looking up, and wondered why so many good rain poems were in French, when it was English weather. The English weather rained down on us until we realized that we were standing beneath the hanging baskets that had just been watered so that the
plants could have their evening drink without risk of evaporation.
The rule of silence. Flooding one’s friends. Small rain. Efficiency sufficient to effect happiness. Enforced rest.
XIV
For normality to be a record of tension. To wake every morning with clenched teeth. For sleep to be wearing teeth down. To be aware of the boundaries of your face from the ache and pressure of a jaw that has been gritted. For the undoing that lengthens. To have a clenched face and eyes shaded under and therefore to resemble these crowds.
The book by a man who had been in the revolution and who created an unlikeable character who tagged along after the revolutionaries with scraps of paper in his bag is now set for examinations. Other places not being a host of people in dust-coloured clothing, nor blue and orange fabric that was a bundle once tied with care, nor yet a woman with a burning face and a child on her shoulder, still not the trek over the mountain pass that perhaps for centuries had demarcated distance, border, that which must not be crossed lightly, the impassable, The End, why are there not better warnings when the mood descends, the failure of patience with poets who write after watching the news? This is not a stanza.
For a while after my father died, household tasks seemed easier and no quarrels were worth pursuing and it appeared pointless to discuss future dates, even in casual conversation, even those of small personal relevance, such as the Olympics. To restructure one’s consciousness so that precariousness tags everything... All lights and shapes change. Little is not held dear. The minimum that is good nature and the stupidity of ill nature: say this to a companion and you are uncompanionable. The answers will be delivered in the voice that educators develop for dealing with the bright-eyed slow and gradually extend to anyone however agreeable.
Measures of Expatriation Page 10