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Literary Review
The politics of location
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Home is where you are. Or, is it? INDRAN AMIRTHANAYAGAM writes on the angst and the search of migrant poets.
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THE headline of this essay seems self-evident, that politics is inextricable from location, that the decisions we have made to relocate, move out, sidle in to the conversation in the New York apartment of exiles, hop, hop on one leg in a one-legged race outside the Ministry of Silly Walks to stamp our ticket of belonging, these are enough to give us peace, to help us sleep. But to whom do we belong, and what are we made of, and why do we still stumble, stutter, run, leap through our days and nights with a vague, sometimes howling, unquiet in hot pursuit?
Let us dissect the unquiet, de-limb the frog, put feet, eyes and mucous under the microscope. We may end up with literature. Or by another road, think of the unquiet as a storm, and literature as the drain or dyke. Think of the unquiet as a severed arm in search of its trunk. In films arm and torso will be united, love triumphant, location irrelevant, the peace that passeth beyond understanding come in the last still along with the letters, the end. In life, there is a constant negotiation to arrive at day's end in one piece, locate oneself again on the bed and speak in dreams, with a lover or child, to the blank page.
Let us reflect here about negotiations. After all, we are located under a banner that asks us to think about politics, which by another name is negotiation or its rupture. Of course, politics is rooted in polis or community. It is the activity of community members in the nation state or the immigrant quartier, or the refugee camp. Where more than one is gathered in His name, the mass may be said. What happens when the bread is broken in the New World? And of what consistency is the bread? And what local substitutes are required to make the loaves rise?
Let us look now at the politics of relocation, translation, crossing over in some poets, how they negotiated the passage, the rough passage in the words of Parthasarathy, the middle passage to evoke some earlier, forced migrations, and finally safe passage, to remember the farewell words of a British-educated and kind uncle come to see me off at the airport.
A.K. Ramanujan left behind over a hundred unpublished poems when he died on a Chicago operating table in 1993. He had arrived decades earlier (in 1962) in the "windy city" where he heard jungle hen, rumbling elephant and red-legged lizard, among other South Indian visitors blown into his study. He made them available to English readers in his The Interior Landscape: Love Poems from a Classical Tamil Anthology, which changed forever what Americans read when they study the literatures of India. Enough to say that there are many ironies in the poetry of migration. Ramanujan, the American arrival, makes of Chicago a kind of Athens for Tamil scholarship and literature. And in his own poems (as well as, curiously, in his translations of ancient texts), behind apparently casual masks, and with easy rhythms, he explores the embedded, underground quickening of one of the most complex and suffering hearts in modern lyric poetry. In "Second Sight" he asks:
`You are Hindoo, aren't you?
You must have second sight.'
I fumble in my nine
pockets like the night-blind
son-in-law groping
in every room for his wife,
and strike a light to regain
at once my first, and only,
sight.
I have been reading Ramanujan feverishly in recent weeks but only rarely does he give exactly what you seek, as in this harrowing image of marriage, its inadequacy and failure in creating the new world, the banns announced but the marriage a blind groping in the dark. Yet, at the end, the Hindu protagonist finds some peace as he manages to strike a light "and regain/at once my first, and only,/sight." Like Parthasarathy acknowledging "his tongue in English chains," Ramanujan has given us in a few verses a coda to understanding the dilemmas of migrants in an area even more essential than language, namely their sense of home, their location in domestic bliss or tragedy. In "On Not Learning from Animals", the poet writes:
...The baboon
has a harem but he is not tormented
by claims for equal time. But then
I forget how troubled I was when I saw,
at seventeen, after quarrelling
with my father about my mother's rights,
a female ape with a black striped snout
sort out patiently with her long hands, then
sniff, and lick lettuce leaves clean for her lord
and master while he growled all through.
I am now located in the realm of domestic politics or negotiations, between husband and wife, man and spiritual inheritance, human and animal nature, parents and child. There's always the basic dialectic in Ramanujan's poetry, between light and dark, innocence and experience; and I am essentially in love with opposites, delighting in poetry where lines are taut, razor-thin over the ravine, as the daredevil, yoking metaphors, walks confidently across. "It was you who broke the new wood/Now is the time for carving." Ramanujan, as well as his guardians and heirs, have knives and forks out and are carving Whitman, Yeats, even themselves in some post-modern aberration. Meanwhile, I suggest that as they carve, they are chatting about their love of opposites, celebrating internal inconsistencies. Whitman wrote that he contained multitudes. Ramanujan contained, Kannada, Tamil, English, all the human emotions, rough domesticity, irony. He used them to write and translate his own migrated poems, which set off in some cases from the anthology of Tamil love poetry the Kuruntokai, located somewhere during the first three centuries A.D.
Now, let me consider the poetry of another memorable migrant poet, Agha Shahid Ali. He can help us understand how the bread is buttered on the other side, and how it is made and who owns the bread. Or perhaps I should leave these questions to sociologists and journalists? They seem curiously unliterary and stem from a number of lean years watching the American Academy from a recent immigrant's distance. Better that I look in Shahid's poetry for just the themes that obsess him, which are common in the poetry of migration, and in its politics as well — themes that complement Ramanujan's wry observations about domestic unquiet and Hindu sight as we seek to reach enlightenment about the politics of location in the literatures of the Americas.
First, I should mention Shahid's book titles: The Country Without a Post Office, The Half-Inch Himalayas, A Nostalgist's Map of America, Bone Sculpture. These are observations about absence, death, what's been bleached, buried in the desert. The obsessions of Shahid's dreams did not change through the forty odd years he wrote poems. In "Bones" from his first book Bone Sculpture, he writes: "The years are dead. I'm twenty, /a mourner in the Muhurrum / Procession, mixing blood with mud, /memory with memory." He comments later in the poem: "Grandfather / still mocks me in my dream: Did / I light the oil lamp at his tomb?"
All poets in all diasporas have asked a similar question either in poems or conversation. It is a fundamental question, like do I dare to eat a peach? Part of Shahid's legacy is his ability to speak in poetry for migrants, make sculptures of their bones, give words to memories. However, I will not speculate on why he left Kashmir, studied in Delhi, went to America; why indeed he punctured holes in the pristine garden of memory, absences that needed to be stoppered with the poetry of remembrance. I wish I could have him sit with me at the keyboard, or on one of those silver-made sheets of stationery in which he cried "the world is full of paper/Write to me." The tragedy of his early death is only tempered by a legacy that will be modified in the guts of the living, forming part of the varied, many-hued, chaotic, rich landscape in which the migrant poets locate themselves. Here's "Beyond the Ash Rains" from A Nostalgist's Map of America:
When the desert refused my history,
refused to acknowledge that I had lived
there, with you, among a vanished tribe,
two, three thousand years ago, you parted
the dawn rain, its thickest monsoon curtains,
and beckoned me to the northern canyons.
There, among the red rocks, you lived alone.
I had still not learned the style of nomads:
to walk between the rain drops to keep dry.
Wet and cold, I spoke like a poor man,
without irony. You showed me the relics
of our former life, proof that we'd at last
found each other, but in your arms I felt
singled out for loss. When you lit the fire
and poured the wine, "I am going," I murmured,
repeatedly, "going where no one has been
and no one will be...Will you come with me?"
You took my hand, and we walked through the streets
of an emptied world, vulnerable
to our suddenly bare history in which I was,
but you said won't again be, singled
out for loss in your arms, won't ever again
be exiled, never again, from your arms.
Shahid says that "he had still not learned the style of nomads." The question of style, the poet's dress, both the cloth he puts on at a reading in New York, and the images he culls from dreams and memories, and why these images and this cloth and not some other — this is fertile territory for the researcher of the politics of location in migrant poetry. And beyond style, the researcher must look at the implications of "a suddenly bare history," and "wet and cold, I spoke like a poor man, without irony," and the repeated cry at the poem's end "in which I was,/ but you said won't again be, singled/ out for loss in your arms, won't ever again/be exiled, never again, from your arms." The search for union, the lover's wish to be whole again, the suddenly bare history, like seeing the naked mind of the lover before you on the sheets, the poor man's speech without irony, not Tiresias' witness with wrinkled dugs, but rather Pessoa's keeper of sheep, his heteronym Albert Caeiro, who wrote "I have no philosophy: I have senses.../ If I speak of Nature, it's not because I know what Nature is/ But because I love it, and that's why I love it/ For a lover never knows what he loves,/ Why he loves or what love is.../ Loving is eternal innocence,/ And the only innocence is not to think...."
Shahid read Pessoa, as he read Eliot, Neruda, Cavafy. He read widely because that is the demand on the poet, to know how it has been said before. But the matter is the same, light and dark, cleaving to the other, loss of home, the mine fields and the absences of love, the multiple selves dissolving into the one self, keeping the unquiet at bay for another day with another poem. Sylvia Plath wrote two or three every day towards the end of her short life in an English oven. A brilliant poet, also a migrant.
The writer is Consul for Public Affairs at the American Consulate General, Chennai. He is a poet who writes in English and Spanish. His third book, Ceylon R.I.P. has just been published in Sri Lanka.
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