Measures of Expatriation Read online

  Vahni Capildeo was born and educated in Trinidad and holds a DPhil in Old Norse from Christ Church, Oxford. Landscape, language and memory inform her poetry and prose, notably those of Caribbean, Indian diaspora, Icelandic, Scottish and Northern cultures. She has worked in academia; for the Commonwealth Foundation; at the Oxford English Dictionary; and as a volunteer with Oxfam and Rape Crisis. As Judith E. Wilson Poetry Fellow 2014 at the University of Cambridge, she developed approaches to poetry through collaborative and immersive events. The Harper-Wood Studentship (2015) at St John’s College, Cambridge, will see her exploring similar collaborations abroad.

  Vahni Capildeo

  Measures of Expatriation

  Contents

  I

  Handfast

  Slaughterer

  Fire & Darkness: And Also / No Join / Like

  To Stand Before

  Mercy and Estrangement

  A Personal Dog

  Too Solid Flesh

  II

  The Prolongation of the Spine and the Stretched Neck Approximate the French Philosopher Only to His Own, and Airy, Beast

  Investigation of Past Shoes

  ‘I Love You’

  Chloe on the Jubilee

  Laptop Blue Screen Rationalization

  María Lloró / Blue Sky Tears

  Inhuman Triumphs

  III

  Neomarica Sky Jet

  Cities in Step

  ‘I Wish to Be Speaking to You until Death’

  IV

  Kassandra #memoryandtrauma #livingilionstyle

  The Book of Dreams / Livre de Cauchemars

  Louise Bourgeois: Insomnia Drawings

  V

  Far from Rome

  Marginal

  Snake in the Grass

  Disposal of a Weapon

  In 2190, Albion’s Civil Conflicts Finally Divided Along Norman-Saxon Lines

  To London

  Seven Nights in Transit

  VI

  Five Measures of Expatriation

  All Your Houses

  VII

  Syllable of Dolour

  Pobrecillo Tam

  Sycorax Whoops

  Un Furl

  Stalker

  Acknowledgements

  for Jeremy Noel-Tod

  Eadig bið se þe eaþmod leofaþ

  Measures of Expatriation — I

  Handfast

  for K. M. Grant

  She is away.

  The feathers in my eye spoke outwards.

  She is the accident that happens.

  The sun bursts hazel on my shoulders.

  She is the point of any sky.

  Come here, here, here:

  if it’s a tree you’d sulk in, I am pine;

  if earth, I’m risen terracotta;

  if it’s all to air you’d turn, turn to me.

  You are flying inside me.

  Seventy times her weight,

  I stand fast.

  My hand is blunt and steady.

  She is fierce and sure:

  lands, scores, punctures the gloveskin.

  And why I asked

  for spirals stitched where she might perch:

  fjord blue, holm green, scarlet, sand,

  like her bloodline, Iceland to Arabia:

  because her hooded world’s my hand –

  Slaughterer

  The tears curled from the cattle’s eyes, their horns curled back, their coats curled like frost-ferns on windshields or the hair on the heads of Sikandar’s soldiers. Two of my grandfather’s sons, when he knew he was dying, took him from his bed. They supported him out the doorway so he could say goodbye to his favourite cattle. The cattle wept. They knew him. They are not like cattle here. They live among the household and on the hills, which are very green, and they eat good food, the same food as the household, cut-up pieces of leftover chapatti.

  You do not get stories like that in books. I am telling you because you only have things to read. Whenever anybody tried to make me read a book or anything, I would fall asleep; my head would just drop.

  What is the use of reading books? What can you do after that but get an office job? Do my friends who stayed at school earn as much as me? They all have office jobs; could they do a job like mine? Could they slaughter for seventy hours without getting tired or needing to sleep?

  It was hard at first. I used to dream the cattle. They would come to me with big eyes, like mothers and sisters. After a few weeks, they stopped coming to me in dreams. After about five years, I stopped feeling tired: I do not need to sleep. We do three or four thousand a day in Birmingham, only a thousand a night in Lancaster.

  Tonight I am going to Lancaster. I will talk to you until Lancaster. Where are you from? You are lying on me. No, where are your parents from? Are you lying on me? I came here as a teenager, and at once they tried making me read. How old are you? Why do you only have things to read? I am sorry I am talking to you. You have brought things you want to read. Beautiful reader, what is your name?

  You can feel the quality of the meat in the animal when it is alive: the way its skin fits on its flesh. You can feel the quality of life in the meat. The cattle here are not good. They inject them. Their flesh is ahhh.

  Look, look how beautiful. I will show you pictures of the place. Look, it is very green.

  Fire & Darkness: And Also / No Join / Like

  O Love, that fire and darkness should be mix’d,

  Or to thy triumphs such strange torments fix’d!

  – John Donne, Elegy XIII

  A northern street: the temperature of the ungovernable. The proud hooded stride. The skill to add up stone: cold – outlasting. The wealth of the land: stone. Kindness: the harsh kind. For each question, a better question. For each better question, one answer. For each good question – that’ll do. Not fussed.

  I walk the hollow walk: loving more than loved; moved, scarce more than moving.

  and also

  In the south of this country, five times I have attended the celebrations that they hold in the dark of the year. Many centuries ago, there was a man whose name was Guy, or Guido. He practised a different, competing version of the national religion. He tried to explode an important government site. These buildings are still in use. You can visit the place, which is on the river. Some of the children who ask for money on British streets are simply trying to fund their construction of effigies of this hate figure, whose burning on public and domestic pyres on the so-called ‘Bonfire Night’ (5 November) has become a popular ritual. Fireworks are let off; it is legal to purchase them for your own festivities.

  no join

  A northern street, uphill. It branches, like – a Y, a peace sign, water coursing round an outcrop; like – part of the net of a tree; like – It branches in two. Upon the slope held between the branches stands a sooty church, now in use as a nightclub. This pale and brisk morning glances on the metal railings.

  Who is he?

  Nobody.

  Who is he, between the fence and lamp post?

  Nobody. A hat stuck on the railing, abandoned by a tidy drunk. A feeble visual joke. Nobody’s head, nobody’s, supports a hat drooped at that angle.

  It is a guy. A Guy Fawkes guy. The students left him there: lad for the burning: unreal, it has to be unreal. Check out this guy.

  I have to cross the road, so I do.

  The ordinary-looking foot is wedged between the base of the fence and the lamp post. The left arm, bent at the elbow, has been tucked deep into the jacket pocket, toneless. It is not a bad face. The eye is the pity of it: tender lids tightened into a crescent, as happens with mortally wounded birds; infolding, no longer able to yield, a turning inwards of the ability to light up.


  I put my hand into my pocket, for my phone.

  It is not necessary.

  Pale and brisk as this morning, the police car slides into my peripheral vision.

  and also

  A street in Trinidad: the soft, brown ‘ground doves’ have the same manners as the pedestrians. Unhurried, they traipse along in front of cars. Why did the ground dove cross the road? I don’t know, but it’s certainly taking its time.

  The exception came plummeting out of the recessive sky, into the back yard’s concrete rain gutter. Had a neighbourhood boy felled it inexpertly? Had the ecstatic efficiency of its heart thumped to a stop? It lay there, the softness, and would not, could not bestir itself.

  The child strewed it with yellow and scarlet wild lantana flowers, thinking of burial, accustomed to cremation; feeling a sudden fear. The parents took it all away.

  And when the dove was gone, another came plummeting the same way; the riddle repeated – to be moved, moving, and never to move. Love or some other force was identical in the equation.

  no join

  We brought few friends home who were not already part of at least a two-generation family circle. We brought few friends home. This time my brother had introduced a soft and brown and tallish young man in his early twenties, who weighed not much more than a hundred pounds. By historical pattern, not personal choice, in our secular Hindu household, this was the first Muslim friend our age.

  Perhaps it has changed; but non-Indo-Caribbeans used not to be aware that ‘Ali’ and ‘Mohammed’ are not ‘Indian’ names. And in that unawareness they are linguistically wrong, but more profoundly right: for our ancestors brought over a shared Indian village culture, over a century before the creation of Pakistan in the Indus area made such a difference. And in that Trinidad remote from Trinidad’s Trinidad, and nonetheless most mixed and Trinidadian, a lunatic reverberation was set up by the 1947 Partition – some third-generation immigrant families briefly fought according to the lines of what had not been a division. In lands far away, current events were indirectly regenerating or inventing this part of Trinidad’s past also. By 1990, we knew that there must be some difference.

  We sat on the nice imported sofa with the delicate novel unicorn visitant who looked just like us.

  All over the island, every evening just before seven, telephone calls were wound down, fires turned low beneath pots, and families converged on the television set to listen to the news headlines: a link with the greater world. Nothing was expected to happen.

  A square, reliable face showed up.

  ‘The liberation of Kuwait has begun.’

  The look of devastation and betrayal on our guest’s face was like nothing I could have imagined seeing. An outline seemed to be sitting in his place, while the person who had occupied that outline crumbled.

  Why? Televised missile fireworks were going off, white and purple. What had so upset him?

  I tried to see with his eyes. Brownskinned people with strong features and children of adorable gravity were being killed from the air; and en masse they looked more like us than anyone else on television, local or international, in those days. My insides flipped. People who looked like they could be family were being killed from the air.

  We are not evolved to cope with aerial threats. To witness the spectacle of bombing is to feel guilty and due to be wiped out; for all our gods inhabit the heavens, and to be safe our earliest kind might have taken to the trees, where only the gods could smite them. To be bombed is to be smitten by the wrath of a Deity not to be located and not in our image. To ascend into Heaven becomes profoundly and secretly inconceivable; for the borders of the heavens are guarded with fire.

  Was this what our friend was seeing? The starring roles in war, in our young memories, hitherto had been for people who did not look like us. Or was he seeing war upon his religion?

  From now on, anyway, in the world’s play of representations of the living, we would look more like the killed. We would resemble – like it or not – anti-advertisements for flourishing societies; which is perhaps why people on the street in the south of England have told me that they have no money, or have offered me money, when I have said nothing or when I was about to ask for directions and certainly have not had a guy to burn.

  Our soft brown young man sat, and sat, until he could get himself home.

  no join

  no join

  no join

  and also

  like

  like

  like

  To Stand Before

  Speech ~ ~ ~ Silence

  It is easier to touch a shape of air than to speak to you.

  Here they call it thinking too much. Thought has nothing to do with it. The moment of encounter between myself and another; the encounter-before-crossing; the moment of encounter-about-to-become event (long scratch of glass on glass, mutual crystal transfer): too much.

  How too much? The instantaneousness with which a world opens within me and I am sightless, tremulous, rooted to the spot before whomsoever-it-must-be-and-you-alone:

  Another sky, washing out and out, filled with birds creating and obeying a summons, an arc: the percussive seagull crying an ocean somewhere; the golden hardwood doors of eagle wings slamming a warning to walkers to flatten their path away from the nest at the peak; the unsettling flock of smaller birds intimating the existence of a gable, a tower, spare masonry: caught up in the sense of habitual, never-accustomed flight (yours, mine) I am silent before you (everything) and the adorable mispronunciations of names.

  The creation of this inner world (that expands into the outer, carries all before it) destroys the instant of encounter, making an almost immeasurably small but acutely perceptible interval; the neat rip of an abyss in which eyes wander or are dropped, voices falter or rise headlong, and the body rearranges itself into a perhaps less than social attitude:

  Desert heat pushes you back, even before the metallic etiquette of polite words applies itself and seals up your tender tentative of speech; green and moist blossoming begins to crack up the arch stonework of greeting and the unique transformation of love lays out a courtyard for friendship that perhaps wanted a lesser space, perhaps wanted only a bench in the shade, perhaps has become an exile beyond welcome who turns away bewildered by plenitude.

  But what do they see?

  Here in my adult life I have stood outside a community doorway, a decade ago, having knocked and about to exit, dressed in martial arts white, and been asked by a woman very little my senior with a voice of blankets, Who do you belong to?, for she saw a foreign child. Here in my family life I have sat within a commercial doorway, in the decade previous, ensconced with my shopping bags in the waiting area, wearing purple silk and expecting my mother’s arrival, and been told by a bob-haired woman with a voice of posters, I’m sorry, I haven’t got anything, for she saw a beggar.

  It is easier to touch a shape of air than to speak to you.

  I have seen the eyes of a woman fill entirely with black (cornea and iris), not the eyeholes of a mask but the active blackness of a surge in the universe inimical to the development of life.

  I have seen the eyes of a man fill entirely with blue (cornea and iris), not a lake into which to step but lapis lazuli, the animate statue of a jackal elevated to Egyptian godhood bringing in judgment on the human soul before him.

  I have seen the eyes of a boy whirl like a Chinese dragon’s and on another occasion seen the woman who fostered a strenuous, undeclared love of him make articulate conversation in his absence about something not-him while she herself seemed to be dissolving dissolving dissolving like a round of pearls dropped one by one into a cup of expensive, acidic drink.

  It is easier to touch a shape of air than to speak to you ~ ~ ~ snail balanced on a box hedge reaching for a pink rose petal shed by force of rain and barely at any distance from the singing nerves, the brown thorns.

  Here you are.

  Mercy and Estrangement

  His heart h
urtling towards me

  I not caring to catch it

  it turns into a bird, turns:

  a scavenger bird lightfoot

  alights on foam, contests white

  as silver tilts white, silver

  as refuse seams silver, gawks,

  jinks, is radiated by charts

  charted inly: magnetic,

  unhoming because transformed.

  A rill and jitter brought me

  – birdform, my heart – to the park

  where state translators, laid off,

  sat sad for their hospitals,

  prisons and schools. Laws whistled

  infixes between trained ears.

  And at our conference,

  so many equivalents

  for gracias and Verfremdung,

  easy change amongst false friends.

  A Personal Dog

  for Vivek Narayanan

  it isn’t matter

  isn’t doesn’t matter

  does it compared

  with what shan’t

  have known your

  lines are all

  lines of approach

  this dog’s eyelids

  this delhi dog’s

  intentional eyelids, this

  doorway dog, this

  dog fellating beggars

  delhi exuding matter

  nictitation cannot extrude

  America to england

  the third nictitating

  poetry is over

  eyelid cannot eject

  America to england

  large foreign bodies

  poetry is over

  over and out

  surgery rarely happens

  over and ours

  dogs aren’t loved

  over here, here!

  sufficiently foreign bodies

  remain requiring incision

  mind yourself it

  happened before you

  as you go

  you’re nothing cold

  sunshine practised apprehension

  Too Solid Flesh