19. Home at the Edge of the World

Sometimes words flee from me. And I fall through a dark door, into a zone where consonants and vowels vanish, when syntax bends into broken hooks, like so many pieces of jagged metal.

I feel at such times as if I were walking in between the tracks of languages, much as one might walk between the rails of a train line and touch the stone beneath, bloody dirt over which the lines of transport are laid.

Sometimes I have felt that I was translating from a place of no words—translate in the early sense, of transporting across a border.

An art of negativity, translation seems to me akin to the labor of poetic composition in precisely this: it reaches beneath the hold of a given syntax, beneath the rocks and stones and trees of discernable place to make sense.

There is a zone of radical illiteracy out of which we translate our selves in order to appear, to be in place. A zone to which words do not attach, a realm syntax flees.

Zone that cannot recognise the moorings of place, sensuous densities of location, coordinates of compass and map.

I need to go there in order to make my poems.

I think of it as a dark doorway that lets me in: slides shut, then ruts open again.

I fell through that door as a child.

Returning to India from Khartoum, amma and I landed in Bombay Airport. My newfound Arabic vanished in the hot winds. Hindi, which I had known since earliest childhood, was ringing in my ears.

When I opened my mouth, no sounds came, nothing.

I could hear amma saying something to me in Malayalam, but all that came was the swirl of emotion, a sense that I was plunged into a space where words did not attach, where a mother’s hands could not rescue.

Zone of radical illiteracy out of which I write, translating myself through borders, recovering the chart of a given syntax, the palpable limits of place, to be rendered legible through poetry which fashions an immaterial dwelling yet leaves within itself traces of all that is nervous, stoic, edgy. The skin turned inside out.

Is this what Walter Benjamin evokes when he alludes to the “interior” as the “asylum of art”? In Arcades Project Benjamin muses: “To dwell means to leave traces. In the interior these are accentuated.”

The interior of the house of language, fitful, flashing.

And under the house of language, a fiery muteness, this zone of radical illiteracy.

Where we go when words cannot yet happen, where a terrible counter-memory wells up.

Home for me is bound up with a migrant’s memory and the way that poetry, even as it draws the shining threads of the imaginary through the crannies of everyday life, permits a dwelling at the edge of the world.

I use that last phrase since the sensuous density of location, the hold of a loved place can scarcely be taken for granted. The making up of home and, indeed, locality, given the shifting, multiple worlds we inhabit, might best be considered part and parcel of an art of negativity, praise songs for what remains when the taken-for-grantedness of things falls away.

And I speak as someone who even as she writes in English thinks through the rhythms of many other languages: Malayalam, Hindi, Arabic, French. So that the strut and play of words, the chiselled order of lines permits a sense crystallized through the seizures of dislocation.

I think of the poet in the twenty-first century as a woman standing in a dark doorway.

She is a homemaker, but an odd one.

She hovers in a dark doorway. She needs to be there at the threshold to find a balance, to maintain a home at the edge of the world.

She puts out both her hands. They will help her hold on, help her find her way.

She has to invent a language marked by many tongues.

As for the script in which she writes, it binds her into visibility, fronting public space, marking danger, marking desire.

Behind her in the darkness of her home and through her pour languages no one she knows will ever read or write.

They etch a corps perdu. Subtle, vital, unseizable body. Source of all translations.