“I walked towards the sound of something roaring in a day, the kind of day that is like darkness but lit up, on its forested, proximal verge by gorse, which is a bright yellow flower. Citron-yellow and a kind of tin or silver roofing with holes in it. The day. Like walking in a dreamed landscape drenched with the wrong rain. Monsoon. What kind of rain is this? I recognized the immensity but not the temperature. This was monstrous: the inability to assimilate, on the level of the senses, an ordinary experience of weather. Here is the tongue, for example, constantly darting out to feel the air: what is it? Is it summer? Is it a different season? It’s a different day. That’s okay. Damaged from her travels, in some sense unsettled, enormously anxious, a girl does it anyway: gets up and goes. It’s as if the day has a memory of her and not the other way around.”
“I saw this in a film starring George Clooney; no, Natalie Wood. The last scene is her, the gamine self, kicking off her shoes as the house explodes behind her. Perpetrating, she doesn’t flinch. Sips tea. Keeps walking. I wanted to write that. Continuance. As it related to loss. The secret pleasure of refusing to live like a normal person in a dress/with a sex drive and fingers/dreamy yet stabilized in the café of languages.”
“A beautiful hazard: to go and keep going.”
“I love you; please don’t die.”
“I want to have sex with what I want to become.”
“Sex is always monstrous. Blood appears in the air next to the body but nobody asks a question about the body. Please touch me there. More. Oh god.” For a hitchhiker, the problem of the boudoir is transferred to a makeshift, itchy, unsafe space on the verge of a New Mexico highway. It is often the sex of another era, in which the socks and dress shirt/blouse are not necessarily removed.
I hitchhiked in the beginning because it seemed glamorous to me, ultra-American, like a Christian with an entrenched migraine who resorts to brand-name anti-inflammatories when prayer does not do the trick. At first, my encounters on the thoroughfares of your country were quotidian; after all, it is not really hitchhiking to buy a Greyhound ticket three weeks in advance then have a going-away party in a dorm with a banner and balloons. Again, this is an example of departure in another time. As a foreign student on scholarship, it was an ordinary matter to file for an extension for the completion of a thesis on Salman Rushdie’s early works. Nevertheless: “How can we keep tabs on these J1 visa holders, who come over here and … the university, as an institution, really needs to be more accountable. We need a database and we need a system of checks and balances to make sure any change of address is verified by at least two pieces of information. They need to do their course work and then they need to go home.”
I didn’t want to go home. This is a boring sentence. Perhaps for you Oregon is a calming word, evoking images of blackberry pie, ocean vistas, and the capture of suspected felons. I had never heard the word Oregon before. Like the distance of Scotland from London, it seemed impossibly far. A beautiful hazard: to go and keep going. How can I put this? In England, nobody ever, ever, ever did this. I, who once drove straight to Glasgow with a thermos of instant coffee mixed with milk and sugar, in a dinged-up Datsun Cherry, was considered an anomaly. “Are you demented? Why do you want to drive in a car to bloody Scotland? It’s seven hours on the M1, man!” Though, outwardly, I was wan and somewhat reticent, I … no, I was. My sexual experience consisted of lying under an elm tree in Hyde Park at the age of seventeen and being told by an undergraduate student of the London School of Economics that my breasts in that position, from that angle, resembled two fried eggs. We were meeting in a park as per the era. I am sure contemporary Punjabi-British teenagers are fearless individuals, undaunted by the prospect of community censure. Back then we met by the iron-wrought gate on a park bench, on a path built for seventeenth-century promenades. It is always a century. In my century, sex was a field of restraint and intensity unsurpassed by anything except drinking coffee in a foreign country like Scotland or Wales and borrowing my father’s car forever. “Are you out of your bleeding head? Your dad’s going to skin you alive!”
In some sense, this (driving) is the opposite of hitchhiking, in which the interior of the car is always unfamiliar. The day was real in a different way back then, in the way that it sensitized me to risk, a kind of twin to permission. Two black swans: that day and this one, history and fiction, what I went for and what I really wanted, which I didn’t know until I got there by which time it was impossible to consider the long journey home as either practical or sensible, considering the trouble I was already in and the rain, which had started to come down in a series of reddish sheets; the streetlamps were pink.
On Prince Street, in Glasgow, I saw the sign for American style pizza and went down the steps to the basement café. The tables were coated with green plastic. There was hot tea, which the waitress slung down my gullet with a funnel as I focused my eye on a laminated print of a white, blocky rose with a pink dot at its center. “Charles Rennie Mackintosh,” the waitress, pronouncing “osh” so that it rhymed with horse. “Are you from India?” “Would you like some jam with that scone? I bet they don’t have scones in India, do they?” “More tea? I heard you have a lot of tea, over there, isn’t that right?”
Plan b: The extension of my throat. The euphoria of theft. Other countries with their sayings and beliefs. The original plan, formulated by my father during his morning commute across London: marrying a British-born Hindu Brahmin dentist with brown skin, but not too brown, and rosy cheeks. Note on the mantelpiece, tucked behind the marble figurine of Shiva: what is forthcoming under the original plan? Extraction? What kind of sex is possible on the dentist’s chair late at night for that girl, your girl, who nervously asks for a blanket? She has her socks on. She’s shivering. It is sometimes sex when you touch yourself beneath the proffered blanket clearly not washed between patients, but in this scene the limbs of the dentist’s young Asian bride are rigid and smell faintly of wintergreen-scented nail polish or mouthwash. Dad, “please don’t swallow.” Rinse then spit. Spit then swallow.
I could not go home and so, after a brief visit to the Hill House—Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s art deco home on the Firth of Clyde, where he painted geometric rosebuds forever in a kind of frenzy, as it seemed from the décor—I turned left and kept driving. I drove my car into the Atlantic and kept driving, my chest very tight beneath the surface. It was difficult to feel anything or really to see, and so I can only say that I went into a damaging ocean. This is going. Damaged, washed up on the mythical shores of New Jersey a few days later, my car failed to start. This is later, when the car stopped, and, looking up from my hands, white-knuckled on the steering wheel, I realized that I was okay.
Now I am here, in the future of color.* I’m sorry I do not have more to say about the period of submergence that preceded my arrival. I am not interested in it. I do not recall it. I … It was only when my car stopped that I realized what I had to do, on my own terms, with my own two legs: get going. Is that how you say it? Get up and go. The destiny of my body as separate from my childhood: I came here to hitchhike. I came here to complete a thing I began in another place. Removing wet pages from my rucksack, I lay them on the shore, securing them with beautiful shells and pebbles. When they dried, I folded them into squares and put them in my pocket, next to my body. Misshapen, exhilarated, I said get. I said go. Get up now and go. “Are you okay?” “Do you need a ride somewhere?” “Let me look in the trunk. I might have something in there. Here you go. You’re shivering! Do you need to go to the hospital? At least let me buy you a cup of coffee.”
FROM Humanimal, a Project for Future Children
Humanimal 2: A matrix of fluid digits. Images of children in the under-world. An alphabet to O, a kind of mouth.
1. The humanimal sky is copper like lids. Retrograde stars litter this intimate metallic curve above the jungle. Can you see it?
a. All the branches stir in their silver. Like a liquid metal—the jungle. For her, the girl—tentacu
lar. Does the skin crêpe, where her fingers are too wet, trailing in the river? This is what a child does, as in fairytales. This is walking. I want to. All branches fear life. It pushes and pushes: life. Out to the tips where the color is. Does this happen in Asian forests? Does this tree say yes, damaged by its yes, to phloem—the food to the lips? Of the branches where the leaves are and thus a leaf girl—leaping from branch to branch in her dream of being a girl and not this, this other disastrous thing?
2. Like automata, the trees rise up in rows, mechanically. Because it’s January, we don’t see scat or paw marks or tufts of blue hair caught in the low-lying branches. This is tracking but the wolves—wild black dogs with elongated torsos—are deeper in. The District Forest Officer lifts a luminous skin from a termite mound with the snout of his rifle and holds it up to show me. When I reach out to gather another section of the skin, he stops my hand with his. When I ask if snakes are active at this time of year, he says: “Oh no, no, madam, the Indian anaconda is not a problem at this time of year. Not at all. No problem!” Nevertheless, we return in short order to the jeep with footage, only, of a rudimentary perimeter in which giant insects have constructed conical temples from the moist, ochre earth beneath the trees. I want to stay, but the film-makers are stubbing out their cigarettes in the dirt. I didn’t know the jungle would be red.
b. I want to stand up but I can’t do that here. They would know I am a wolf by my sore hips, the look in my eyes. At the edge of the garden was a line of blue chalk. My mother was crouching there, waiting for me in her dark coat. In the dream, I walk towards her and she stands up. She opens up her coat like two wings and I step into her cloth heart, her cleft of matted fur.
3. The girl, I cannot retrieve even one foot from her small leg. A tendon. A nail. One eye. I saw her grave in a city where the edge had been. In your city, or where you grew up, was there an overgrown scrubland? Was there a tree? Imagine a dark tree, like a lemon tree, its fruit still green, studded with parrots. The edge of sal: lemon and banana plantings inter-mixed with the regular blue. It is blue leaves at night and brown, yellow or doubly green by day. But it was day. But blue. I put my hand on her grave and waited, until I could feel the rhythm, faintly, of breathing. Of a cardiac output.
c. Mist rose in cubes. With hard fingers, they tore strips from my spine. All blonde-black fur. All hair from a previous life.
4. Feral children are fatty, complex, and rigid. When you captured the two children, you had to brush the knots out of their hair then scrape the comb free of hard butter. Descent and serration. No. I don’t want to ask primal questions.
5. Kamala slips over the garden wall with her sister and runs, on all fours, towards the complex horizon between Midnapure and its surrounding belt of sal. The humanimal mode is one of pure anxiety attached to the presence of the body. Two panicked children strain against the gelatin envelope of the township, producing, through distension, a frightening shape. The animals see an opaque, milky membrane bulging with life and retreat, as you would, to the inner world. I am speaking for you in January. It is raining. Amniotic, compelled to emerge, the girls are nevertheless re-absorbed. I imagine them back in their cots illuminated by kerosene lanterns. I illuminate them in the colony—the cluster of residences, including the Home—around St. John’s. No. Though I’ve been there, it’s impossible for me to visualize retrieval. Chronologies only record the bad days, the attempted escapes.
d. I was almost to the gate. I was almost to the gate when a hand reached out and pulled me backwards by my hair, opening my mouth to an O. The next day, I woke up with a raw throat. The cook gave me salt in warm water. I waited until she was gone and then I bit it. I bit my own arm and ate it. Here is my belly, frosted with meat. Here are my eyes, bobbling in a tin.
6. It’s Palm Sunday and Kamala, with the other orphans in a dark, glittery crocodile, walks from Home to church. Her two arms extend stiffly from her body to train them, to extend. Unbound, her elbows and wrists would flex then supinate like two peeled claws. Wrapped, she is a swerve, a crooked yet regulated mark. This is corrective therapy; the fascia hardening over a lifetime then split in order to re-set it, educate the nerves.
e. The cook fed us meats of many kinds. I joined my belly to the belly of the next girl. It was pink and we opened our beaks for meat. It was wet and we licked the dictionary off each other’s faces.
FROM Schizophrene
3. A HEALING NARRATIVE
Fragments attract each other, a swarm of iron filings, black with golden flecks but without a soul. I stroke them with my finger so they scatter then relax.
In correspondence.
In the involuntary response to being touched.
On a plate.
Against the tree, a woman is pinned, upright and strung with lights or gunpowder flares and nodes. Who stuck her there?
Her body is covered with mud and at the same time it possesses the invisible force of an architectural element encountered in a post-war structure. Did I literally give her life?
I wrote about her body, the vertical grave she created in my mind and in the minds of anyone who heard about her, this anonymous and delicate “box.” This imprint. This metal animal. This veil of charcoal and vermillion powder, smudged to form a curtain of hair falling over the face. Like an animal almost in flight, but possessed, restricted to the band of earth that precedes the border or follows it, depending on which way you cross; the woman stares, focusing on a point. Someone else is staring too.
Can you smell her burning fur?
FROM Ban en Banlieue
8. Inversions for Ban
“To ban someone is to say that no-one may harm him.” Agamben.
A “monstrous hybrid of human and animal, divided between the forest and the city.” (Ban.) To be: “banned from the city” and thus: en banlieues: a part of the perimeter. In this sense, to study the place where the city dissolves is to study the wolf. Is this why some of my best friends have come from the peninsula of Long Island?
To ban, to sentence.
To abandon is thus to write prose. “Already dead.” Nude. A “wolfe’s head” upon a form. The form is the body—in the most generic way I could possibly use that word. The nude body spills color. Blue nude, green nude. The nudes of pre-history in a pool of chalk in an Ajanta cave. Agamben’s thought familiar to me, already, from the exchange of Arjun and Krishan on the battlefield. The idea that you’re already dead. I should stop writing now.
What do the wolf and the schizophrenic have in common?
Here, extreme snow. I mean fire. The extreme snow makes me neutral about the strangeness of this first intact fragment. Of Ban. A novel of the race riot, “Ban.” Nude studies/charcoal marks: wired to the mouth of a pig. A boar. Some of the work is set in the outlying, wooded regions of Greater London, where King Henry VIII had his hunting grounds. As a girl, I would lie down in my coat and trousers in the snow upon an embankment of earth: engineered, centuries before, to keep the meat in.
I wanted to write a book that was like lying down.
That took some time to write, that kept forgetting something, that took a diversion: from which it never returned.
I wanted to write a book on a butcher’s table in New Delhi: the shop-front open to the street, a bare light bulb swinging above the table and next to it a hook.
Swinging from that hook in the window, I wanted to write a book. Inverted, corrupted, exposed to view: a person writes a book in their free time, calling that time what they want to call it.
I wanted to write a book about England.
I wanted to write a book about lying on the floor of England. I wanted to return to England. I went to England. I was born in England. I lived in a house in England until I was thirty years old. My parents were English. I was English. After 1984, we all shared the same nationality, but by 2006 or 7, this was no longer true. Between September 2010 and late December 2012, I studied a piece of the earth, no longer or wider than a girl’s body prone upon it. The asphalt. As d
usk fell: violet/amber—and filled—with the reflected lights coming from the discs, the tiny mirrors, positioned in the ivy as she “slept.”
POETICS STATEMENT
1 To take the posture, for example, of the bodily life you are trying to describe. Do we know each other? To what extent is our kinship or community relationship a precarious one? One that won’t survive the moment one or other of us speaks up about the aggression circulating within our group, with the proviso that your work, and mine, are about: nothing but this. We write about violence, we teach in programs dedicated to social justice and creative writing aims. Yet everything falls apart so rapidly, so completely, at the lightest touch.
2 On the border of Southall and Hayes in Greater London, immigrant or industrial London, on April 23, 1979, Blair Peach, a teacher from New Zealand, an anti-racism protester—died—during a protest: of the National Front: to hold their annual meeting in the town hall of a non-white community: Jamaicans, Indians, Pakistanis. As a child, I attended the Peach memorial at the Dominion Cinema, clinging to my father’s hand as he wept. Was I a child? The parts of immigrant life that are harder to write about—sexual trauma, physical violence, gender violence towards women—take up a different block of narrative time. I remember the bright pink and black turbans of the Punjabi mourners, the smell of 8,000 men in one place. Stale coconut oil; the smell, that is, of the scalp. In 2010, the Metropolitan Police publicly acknowledged that Blair Peach had died as the result of police brutality, the use of an “unauthorized weapon” by a member of the SPG; a rubber hose, for example, that was filled with lead shot. Eleven witnesses saw him: struck. Peach died in Ealing Hospital, later that night or the next morning.
3 I began to write Ban in 2009, a year before these findings became public, as a way to recollect the day of the riot, which took place in my neighborhood and which happened, for me, as the sound of breaking glass, the doppler loop of muffled sounds. To continue or extend: the worlding of Schizophrene: a pre-thinking about the nonverbal, chronic or durational effects of racism upon the mental and physical health of immigrant populations in Western Europe. What was happening beneath the riot, below it, along-side: running next to it, like a rivulet of diesel oil, blood cells, hair and rain: at the same time? What is this other body of the girl: deflected, erased before it appears in the document of the event? What is girlhood? What is Englishness? What happens at the end of both these things, or between them? What is the axial space between domestic, non-apparent modes of violence and public gestures, murderous gestures, that cannot be revoked?
American Poets in the 21st Century Page 31