FIGURE OF EIGHT
Before me on a wooden table are two portions of writing. One is a bound as a book, the other is a short stack of papers. They are a decade apart in the making. Lines by Emily Dickinson I first read in another country flicker and burn:
When that which is – and that which was –
Apart – intrinsic – stand –
When I was a child I would draw with a stick in the dirt. What did I draw? Rooms, seashores, even a pair of wings. After making the drawings I would run between them with my stick and join them in a ceaseless figure of eight. Then I would scuff it all up with my heels, or race through the markings to make them disappear. What I drew in the dirt, in the garden of my childhood survives only in memory. Now I draw on paper, syllables turned to words, lines, sentences. I need to make a figure of eight, stitch up the wound of time, close this book of days.
In 1998 as I was making the earliest notes for “Book of Childhood,” after a long and painful illness that consumed him, my father died. As before, this work is dedicated to him and to my mother. To my sisters Anna in Tiruvella and Elsa in Chennai, my cousin Verghis Koshy in San Jose, my husband David Lelyveld and our children, Adam and Svati, my love and gratitude. To Adella Wasserstein, thank you for listening to me. And dear friends who helped me survive my days and nights, I couldn’t have done it without you: Talal Asad, Gauri Viswanathan, Erika Duncan, Warren Neidich, Karen Malpede. And how can I forget my childhood friend Sarra Ibrahim Anis who on a hot day in June 2001, as we sat by the waters of the Potomac, drew a map of Khartoum for me, so I could learn to remember.
Thanks to students at the Graduate Center who, through our shared reflections on poetry, trauma and memory, have led me into new paths of reading and writing, especially Jennifer Griffiths, Sarah Claire Peacock Raymond, Ronaldo Wilson. And to my friends and colleagues Nancy Miller, Bella Brodzki, Louise DeSalvo.
At the Feminist Press my gratitude to Florence Howe, visionary editor and friend who more than a decade ago asked me to write the story of my life and then proceeded to guide me through the turbulent waves of memory. At the Feminist Press in its new incarnation, my thanks to Jean Casella, publisher, for her support of this project; and special thanks to Jocelyn Burrell, superb editor, unfazed by distances, who read my pages with care and understanding.
My thanks to the Centre for American Culture Studies at Columbia University where I was a writer in residence in 1988; to the PSC-CUNY Research Foundation for grants in 1989 and 1990. And closer in time, to the Fondation Ledig-Rowohlt for a 2001 residency at Château de Lavigny in Switzerland; to Hunter College for a 2002 Faculty Fellowship; to the Fulbright Foundation for a 2002–2003 senior scholar award allowing me to return to India; to Alastair Niven for his friendship and hospitality at Cumberland Lodge in the Great Park at Windsor, October 2002, where the last pages of this book were written.
Two chapters first appeared in somewhat different form in the following journals: “Home at the Edge of the World,” Connect, inaugural issue, Fall 2000; “Lyric in a Time of Violence,” The Little Magazine, 3:5–6, Winter 2002. The four short poems included in chapter 21 are an intrinsic portion of my book of poetry Raw Silk (Triquarterly Books/ Northwestern University Press, forthcoming 2004).
MA
New York City
July 4, 2003