12. Real Places or How Sense Fragments: Thoughts on Ethnicity and the Writing of Poetry
What does it mean to carry one’s house on one’s back? I face myself squarely, wash my hands free of ink and think: the old notions of exile, that high estate, are gone; smashed underfoot in the transit lounges, the supermarkets, the video parlors of the world. The voice tricks itself. History is maquillage. No homeland here.
But another voice replies as if heedless of the full frontal, shoulders-squared-over bit: over and over again you fabricate a homeland, a sheltering space in the head. You can never escape into the ceaseless present that surrounds you. What you need, in Frank O’Hara’s words, is “Grace / to be born and live as variously as possible.”
In America you have to explain yourself, constantly. It’s the confessional thing. Who are you? Where are you from? What do you do? I try to reply.
As much as anything else I am a poet writing in America. But American poet? What sort? Surely not of the Robert Frost or Wallace Stevens variety? An Asian-American poet then? Clearly that sounds better. Poet tout court? Will that fit? No, not at all. There is very little I can be tout court in America except perhaps woman, mother. But even there, I wonder. Everything that comes to me is hyphenated. A woman poet, a woman poet of color, a South Indian woman poet who makes up lines in English, a postcolonial language, as she waits for the red lights to change on Broadway. A Third World woman poet, who takes as her right the inner city of Manhattan, making up poems about the hellhole of the subway line, the burnt-out blocks so close to home on the Upper West Side, finding there, news of the world.
News of the World
We must always return
to poems for news of the world
or perish for the lack
Strip it
block it with blood
the page is not enough
unless the sun rises in it
Old doctor Willi writes
crouched on a stoop
in Paterson, New Jersey.
I am torn by light
She cries into her own head.
The playing fields of death
are far from me. In Cambodia I carried
my mother’s head in a sack
and ran three days and nights
through a rice field
Now I pick up vegetables
from old sacking and straighten
them on crates: tomatoes
burning plums, cabbages hard
as bone. I work in Manhattan.
The subway corrupts me
with scents the robed Muslims sell
with white magazines
with spittle and gum
I get lost underground
By Yankee Stadium
I stumble out
hands loaded down
fists clenched into balls
muck on his shirt
his head, a battering ram
he knows who I am
I stall:
the tracks flash
with a thousand suns.
O confusions of the heart! O thicknesses of the soul, the borders we cross tattooing us all over! Is there any here beyond this skin-flicking thing where we can breathe and sing? Yet our song must also be a politics, a perilous thing, crying out for a world where the head is held high in sunlight. So that one is not a walking wound merely, a demilitarized zone, a raw sodden trench marked out with barbed wire.
Frantz Fanon, that great, tormented man whose work I have long loved—I read first in Khartoum, then in India, each time with a shock of recognition—speaks of the dividing lines, the barracks, the barbed wire that exist in a colonized state, of the “zone of occult instability” to which we must come in our art, our culture of decolonization.
In America the barbed wire is taken into the heart, and the art of an Asian American grapples with a disorder in society, a violence. In our writing we need to evoke a chaos, a power co-equal to the injustices that surround us. A new baptism. Else even without knowing that we are buying in, we are bought in, brought in, our images magnified, bartered in the high places of capitalist chic. I think of Bulosan’s powerful novel I am reading these days, America Is in the Heart.
Wallace Stevens is a poet I treasure. His lines often repeat for me in the mind’s privacy. Somewhere he speaks of the imagination as a violence from within that presses against the actual, the violence from without. But Stevens’s world is not mine. Aware of the symbolist aesthetic that nourished him, mindful too of the deadened eroticism, a big-built white man who works in a well-paid insurance job in Hartford, Connecticut, wearing “suitboot,” as we say in Indian-English, to work and at home, I turn to him and say: we acknowledge your power but turn your insight around. It is our bodies that press against the actual of America, against the barbed wires and internment camps and quotas and stereotypes of silent women with long black hair sticking flowers in neat vases. We need the truth of our bodies to reach what ethnicity means, what the imagination must work with. And to get to this real place we need the bodily self, we need a speech that acknowledges rage, a postcolonial utterance that will voice this great land.
But my pain persists, my difficulty. A line of poetry from Whitman’s “Song of Myself” keeps running through my head: “To be in any form, what is that?”
I keep up the imaginary conversation in a real cafe. My spirit resounds in vacant space. I touch the wiry bounding line of the imaginary.
“Suddenly as I sit here I feel the whole thing might shatter on my head.”
“Thing, what thing?”
“The whole bag of tricks, everything.”
My listener leans forward: “Tricks?”
“Sure.”
“I’m waiting!”
“Well. . .” I take a deep breath here. “Are you sure you want to hear?”
“Of course, why else would I ask?”
I try to recall Khartoum. These days it is broken down by disease and warfare, the three towns that span the Nile turned almost into a refugee camp. Food is incredibly expensive for ordinary people. Famine is endemic in large pockets of the country. I need to evoke Khartoum so that my own mind, my memory is not like the Aswan High Dam, covering up the landscape in tons of water. Perhaps in this great city by the Hudson River where the whole world swarms, I can map out a provisional self, speak to someone who lived there when I did, and, by virtue of this imagined speech, remember.
But is it memory I am talking about?
I am a little frightened, for if I do recall those years, where will I put it? It? Them? How silly to speak as if years, a life, a fragmented ethnicity might be arranged as blocks on a parquet floor, or a row of toothbrushes in a tidy Upper West Side bathroom.
I turn to my newfound friend. I move his teacup a little to the side. He watches my fingers. In speaking to him I must try and be as clear as I can. Set out the steps. After all, there is only so much of the unknown the mind can tolerate. I take a deep breath:
“It’s as if in all these years as a poet I had carried a simple shining geography around with me: a house with a courtyard where I grew up in Tiruvella. My mother’s ancestral house with its garden, a single street in front that runs all the way to the old Mar Thoma Church, palm trees, a few buffaloes ambling in the heat. And near the courtyard where the vine is, a well with clear water. And near the well a guava tree with rich freckled fruit. And always the cries of playing children, or women bending over to thresh the rice. And this picture was something I would pick up and turn to the light and pick up and set out for myself in times of trouble, as if to say, ah, there, there it all was.
“And because it was, I am whole and entire. I do not need to think in order to be. I was a child there, and here I am, and though I cannot find the river that brought me here, yet I am because that was. And this stubborn, shining thing persisted for me. It has done so for so many years. You know it’s in my poems too. In ‘Poem by the Wellside’ for instance. You’ve read that?”
He says nothing; asks:
“And now?”
“Now? How do you mean?”
“Well isn’t that what all our conversation is about? How something has happened to you now?”
I feel uneasy. Almost as if the air has become harder to breathe, ever so slightly hurtful to the delicate membranes of the nose, the soft fleshy places of the mouth. I would like to get up and walk around, but how can I? After all the tables are quite close to each other and this is a cafe, a civilized meeting place, not a rough field by the dog pen in the lower depths of Riverside Park. I make do by pushing my chair back so that the wooden legs scrape against the white painted wall.
The pot of Earl Grey with the thin thread dangling from the rim of the pot is almost empty. My companion is drinking coffee. I sense that he is waiting for me, though his eyes are turned towards the plate glass window. From where he sits he can see past the menu hung on the window, past the potted rubber plant and down through the metal bars that shoot up, preventing passersby from toppling into the subway. I do not think he can see the newspaper kiosk with a young woman from Saurashtra inside it, her hair neatly pulled back with a clip. I do not think he can see the cardboard shelter the old man has set up, but I suspect he knows it’s there.
“It was terrible. I got stuck once.” Without meaning to, I repeat myself:
“I got stuck. I can still feel it here.” I point at my chest, above the sari blouse I’m wearing.
“Right there, it caught me between the ribs. All the way down. One breast on each side.”
I smile in lopsided fashion, my hand trembling slightly on the teacup I have picked up. The cup is empty now.
“What are you saying?”
“I was stuck on the train once. I dangled there, right in the middle, one foot in, one out, bisected by the rubber-padded metal. The doors closed on me. Clamped shut.”
“I approach and then they close,” I murmur under my breath.
Four young Latino men pushed and shoved and poked me free. How strong they were, and excited with the task. It was an easy enough job for them, with just the right element of controlled danger. Wonderful strong arms. It hurt though, for days afterwards, right down the middle.
“I felt I was cut down the middle. Bisected where the heart is. Bisected! Is that the right word?”
I continue, needing to explain myself. I do not want to lose my newfound friend. I am fearful lest he think me a little off. Off what? Where is the center after all? But I am sometimes nervous of what people think of poets, creators of that small despised art. The mad fruits of bourgeois privacy: is that what he’ll think? He must hear me now. After all, this knowledge is for others too, all of us together. So I pick up a little of the torn fabric and try to lay it out. There are so many strands all running together in a bright snarl of life. I cannot unpick it, take it apart, strand by strand. That would lose the quick of things. My job is to evoke it all, altogether. For that is what my ethnicity requires, that is what America with its hotshot present tense compels me to.
But there is a real problem for me. What parts of my past can I hold onto when I enter this life? Must I dump it all? Can I bear to? I cannot forget that reading Emerson as a young woman in India I was fascinated by his notion of a perpetual present. Of the centuries as conspirators against the freedom of the soul. Where I come from there was nothing that was not touched by hierarchy and authority and the great weight of the centuries. It was only after I got here that I read the bitter, fierce words of Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs, Toni Morrison and Audre Lorde, and stitched together that pain with the postcolonial heritage that is mine as an Indian woman, the sense of English I got from Sarojini Naidu in India in her struggle during the Nationalist years, or more recently Ngugi wa Thiong’o in Kenya.
There is a violence in the very language, American English, that we have to face, even as we work to make it ours, decolonize it so that it will express the truth of bodies beaten and banned. After all, for such as we are the territories are not free. The world is not open. That endless space, the emptiness of the American sublime is worse than a lie. It does ceaseless damage to the imagination. But it has taken me ten years in this country even to get to think it.
It was in America that I learnt all over again about the violence of racism and understood that a true poetry must be attentive to this. It must listen and hear. Our lines must be supple enough to figure out violence, vent it, and pass beyond.
The cafe is much hotter now. More cigarette smoke in the air, the lunchtime crowd arriving. My companion leans forward across the table. He is watching me closely. What I have written out I have not said to him. I think to myself: all he knows of me is the loss of the shining picture I began with. I track back to the subway line, the train doors slammed shut on my body.
“It had to be the F train I was stuck on. I was hurrying down after a book party at Gotham’s, trying to get to Hunter in time for a meeting. It was April 3, I remember. The whole furor about Salman Rushdie had broken loose, the ayatollah’s fatwah and all that. Rushdie had gone into hiding. We had arranged a meeting at Hunter that I was to chair. After the chitchat in the high room at Gotham’s, after the wine and the sweet talk of poetry surrounded by photos of the great ones, Faulkner, Hemingway, Beckett, and a single shot of Bette Davis with those stunned, dilated eyes, I had fifteen minutes left. Fifteen minutes in which to make it to 68th and Park. Hence the rush and the F train. I was trying to take the F train. Does that sound right?”
“Yes?”
My listener is courteous still, but hesitant. As for me, I hardly know how to go on. Pondering the F train in that crowded cafe, my mind slips. There are many sorts of death for a writer I think. Not just literal loss of life. Forgetfulness of the body can also be a death.
If I live here and write mellifluous lines, careful, obscure lines about the landscape by the Hudson, trees and clouds and all that and forget my bodily self, our bodily selves? Or if I write dazzling, brilliant lines filled with conjuring tricks, all the sortilege of postmodernism and forget the body, what would that be like? Didn’t Baldwin say somewhere that being a Negro was the gate he had to unlock before he could write about anything else? I think being an Asian American must be like that. Through that bodily gate the alphabets pour in. This is our life in letters.
We have been in the cafe for over half an hour. The woman from Eritrea—I reckon we are roughly the same age, she is part-time waitress, part-time student at Columbia—has come our way. She refills the cups. She sets down a fresh pot of hot water. I admire her delicacy, her business-like sense of the job at hand, taking orders, filling cups, all the while making sure that someone at a faraway table isn’t beckoning, or a glass of water about to topple over. Seeing her careful, methodical hands arrange the cups, bring fresh paper napkins, for mine is all moist and almost shredded, I take heart. After all I have come this far. And now I have to think it, spell it out. I have to become what I am—face the unbidden force of an ethnicity, here, now in America. I touch my fingers to the metal teapot. The heat, fierce though it is, consoles me.
“That picture I spoke of? It’s all shattered. Into tiny little bits. It doesn’t work anymore, not even as a backdrop. In any case what is there to drop back: inside/outside, mind/body, East/West, I don’t understand that stuff any more. What is, is all around. Here. Now.”
I throw out my left arm in slightly exaggerated fashion and narrowly miss the chair behind me. He listens hard, leans back in his chair. I press on.
“The awful bit is I’m not clear how to go on. I have to figure out a new way, a way that I share with lots of others here. Otherwise I may as well dump it all down the drain, rhymed syllables and all.”
I point to where the busboy is clearing away cups, slopping them in hasty fashion down the metal sink hidden behind the platters of delicacies, kiwi torte, Spanish confection, black cherry tarts, baklava. I persist:
“It worked for a while and quite beautifully. It was a usable past for me in poetry. It was a sure thing when it worked, an ethnicity evoked, a past that took the form of an ancestor, a grandmother figure as in all those poems in my book House of a Thousand Doors. She came to me in image after image, a female power allowing my mouth to open, allowing me to be in North America. But then—it was like getting stuck on the train and almost being cut down the middle—I realized with a brutal shock the real place I am in. I wanted to tear myself free from that past. It had sucked me back in a vortex I could no longer support.
“It’s all exploded now into little bits: house, courtyard, well, guava tree, bowl, pitcher. Just words really like subway track, newspaper, bread, water. And as for courtyard, it’s the bricked-in square at the back of the apartment building with ‘Death Razor’ scrawled on in bright red ink. The super’s teenage son did it one hot summer night filled with impossible longings for Florida. And the letters won’t wash off. As for me, what do I have? An ethnicity but no past? Kaput. Finito. Katham. End of her story!”
At this point I’m fit to weep. And perhaps he senses it. Because he doesn’t say anything about my picture having been a lie, or sheer flimflam or anything like that. What does he say? What can he say?
I want to turn to him and ask, am I American now I have lost my shining picture? Now I have no home in the old way? Is America this terrible multiplicity at the heart? Having broken from the old quick step, the old one-two, is there nothing but this dazzling quickness, this perpetually shifting space shot through as silk is with iron in ancient forms of torture, innumerate, multiple anchorages, breathless exhilaration, the only home we have at the tail end of this century?
I sit here asking all these questions as my listener vanishes and I keep repeating onto paper, writing in electronic letters, a dazzling, unreal marginality in praise of the only territory I can find in an island city filled with brilliant towers and burnt-out blocks, Häagen Dazs and Frusen Gladje and vomit in the subway stops where the poor still sleep.
But as my shining past fractures, never to be reassembled, ethnicity enters. And with it a different sort of priority. Perhaps one that is more fitting. So I wear it as I descend the underground steps and feel this too is mine, this purgatory, this presence.
My ethnicity as an Indian American or, in broader terms, an Asian American, the gateway it seems to me now to a life in letters, depends upon, indeed requires, a resolute fracturing of sense: a splintering of older ways of being, ways of holding that might have made the mind think itself, intact, innocent, without presumption. Now it may well be, indeed it probably is the case that talk of wholeness and innocence and all that really doesn’t make sense, or if it does only as a trope for the mind that casts back wherever it is and whenever for a beforeness that is integral in precisely the ways that only a past can be. After all it is in the very nature of a present time to invade, to confront, to seize. It is the present that bodies forth otherness.
But does this mean that faced with the multiple anchorages that ethnicity provides, learning from Japanese Americans, Chinese Americans, Filippino Americans, Mexican Americans, Jewish Americans, African Americans, Native Americans, and, yes, Indian Americans, I can juggle and toss and shift and slide, words, thoughts, actions, symbols, much as a poor conjurer I once saw in the half darkness of the Columbus Circle subway stop? Can I become just what I want? So is this the land of opportunity, the America of dreams?
I can make myself up and this is the enticement, the exhilaration, the compulsive energy of America. But only up to a point. And the point, the sticking point, is my dark female body. I may try the voice-over bit, the words-over bit, the textual pyrotechnic bit, but my body is here, now, and cannot be shed. No more than any other human being can shed her or his body and still live.
And this brings me to the next point about ethnicity in America. While indeed at times it comes into being as a fracturing of sense and a play of surfaces, valuable, viable, for after all the old nostalgias have gone, and a vivid multiplicity prevails, there is something else that underlies, gives the lie to the sortilege theory incipient in the American sense of the present: that each thing counts as much as anything else, that you pull off your sari and put on your jeans, paint your eyelashes at Bergdorf’s and that’s that. That’s not that.
Ethnicity for such as I am comes into being as a pressure, a violence from within that resists such fracturing. It is and is not fictive. It rests on the unknown that seizes you from behind, in darkness. In place of the hierarchy and authority and decorum that I learnt as an Indian woman, in place of purity and pollution, right hand for this, left hand for that, we have an ethnicity that breeds in the perpetual present, that will never be wholly spelt out.
So that the deliberate play of poetry, the metamorphosis of images that we prize, throwing things up in the air and changing them, a dove out of an empty cup, cabbage from bootsoles, a comb out of a throat, charged images that discolor against the plainness of our daily lives, is only one small part of the story, a once shining truth all broken up and its bits and pieces turned into sequins on a conjurer’s sleeve.
The bigger hunk of what needs to be told, where the bleeding footsoles are, where the body is, comes with rage, with the overt acknowledgment of the nature of injustice. The struggle for social justice, for human dignity, is for each of us. Like ethnicity, like the labor of poetry, it is larger than any single person, or any single voice. It transcends individualism. It is shaped by forces that well up out of us, chaotic, immensely powerful forces that disorder the brittle boundary lines we create, turn us towards a light, a truth, whose immensity, far from being mystical—in the sense of a pure thing far away, a distance shining—casts all our actions into relief, etches our lines into art.