Zone of Radical Illiteracy: Poem Out of Place

¹

I. Translating “Passion”

For me the question of home is bound up with a migrant 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 phrase “edge of the world” since the sensuous density of location, the hold of a loved place can scarcely be taken for granted and 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.

But what kind of shelter can we make with words?

In the conversation that follows, there is an attempt at an answer, however provisional, imprecise.

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Fahmida Riaz and I met on a cold snowy day in February, in Ithaca, New York. We were both participating in a symposium at Cornell University called “Cartographies of the Vernacular: Directions in Contemporary South Asian Literature.” I knew her as one of the foremost contemporary poets of Pakistan but we had never met. I was immediately struck by her vivacity, the way in which her words caught fire. After I read my poem “Passion” she told me she would like to render it into Urdu.

Her first email, dated Monday 13 March, 2000, was addressed to me in wonderfully idiosyncratic fashion:

Dear Meerakashi,

Reached Karachi, would love to have a copy of your collection of poetry. You promised to send me this poem you read at Cornell. Please send it to me by post as I want to translate into Urdu . . .

Our email correspondence, for a little over two weeks, was brief and intense, focusing in the main on the translation of this poem.

Date: Sunday, March 26, 2000

Subject: book

Dear Meena,

I got your book. Thanks and thanks again. I’ve already translated your poem, the first draft. What a wonderful description of a certain state which seemed indescribable! OK. When you say “No words for her, no bronzes” etc. Here, actually “bronzes” also mean prizes. Did you also mean that? Will write to you again, but do let me know about this point. I have written uske live na koi lafz, na kansi ke tamghe, na dawatname.

Yours,
Fahmida

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Date: Sunday, March 26, 2000

Dear Fahmida, sister poet,

So glad the book reached you. One never knows with packages somehow. Yes, with “no bronze, no summoning” I meant no plaques of commemoration, no high call, and not even words, for there, that place, unnameable. Just now I’m trying to write a poem having as its setting (or one bit of the setting) the border between India and Pakistan – a little poem about the pity of war. Shall send it to you when it’s done.

Affectionate regards,
Meena

In the email that follows the questions and answers are compacted together and I have kept that form, needing to give a sense of the flow of our back and forth. My responses that she has included in her email are in italics.

Date: Monday, March 27, 2000
Subject: Re: book
Dear Meena,

Thanks for your reply. About “Passion,” it has a number of meanings. It can’t be translated as “ishq” . . . is it best to translate as a kind of forceful feeling. What word [in] Hindi would you think of? I have written “bala khez.” We write “Ishq-e-balakhez” for passionate love.

The word “passion” I took really from the Passion of Christ who hung on the cross and died. So it does have a liturgical sense (of intense suffering) but also, for me, the passion – as in sexual passion – plays into it. I guess that place where all the elements meet when we overstep the borders. (Also Bergman has that movie I love called “The Passion of Anna”)

But here I’ve only used “bala khez.” Also, in the last two lines you have played on the English pronoun “I.” It can not be translated as it is. But I will try to convey the meaning through some other means. So what do you say to that?

Yes, I do think you have to play around with it, since the sound is supreme here. Ai – the Malayalam cry of pain, aaioueye – in English and of course “I” (self) also “aye” as in “yes” in English . . . how we are compacted here . . .

Please do send me your poem. Everything seems so bleak right now.

I will send you the border poem when I finish it, working on a few poems now as I seem to do, these things go in bursts.

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Date: Tuesday, March 28, 2000
Dear Fahmida:

It’s a cold, rainy day. Tight green buds on the leaves, a little fog. There is a gathering of South Asians to protest police brutality – an unarmed black man was shot 41 times, as he stood in his doorway. A dark doorway. I feel my soul is there. I said I would write a poem for the occasion and read it. So let the words come, in fire. One must hug the green tree as the words come, so the body is not burnt. I was very moved by your poem that you read about the adulterous couple being stoned and the man bending over the woman to protect her. Will you send it to me?²

Love,
Meena

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Date: Wednesday, April 5, 2000
My dear Fahmida,

I have never done this before, emailed a poem just the minute it was finished. But this poem I mentioned earlier. You wanted to see it and I feel it is the right thing to send it through this immaterial medium, across the borders.

As poets, we write in such loneliness and I wanted to share this with you. I think it has the sorrow and pity of war in it. Let me know what you think.

With love,
Meena

I was anxious about sending the new poem like that. Naked, through the Internet. No cover, no cribsheet. I hoped Fahmida would like it. Her reply came ten days later.

Date: Saturday, April 15, 2000
Dear Meena,

Got your poem. Liked it?

I wept when I was reading it

I’m writing a paper on “shared dreams and metaphors” that I will be reading in N. Delhi on the 27th of April in the SAARC writer’s conference. I hope you don’t mind that I’m beginning the paper with your peom. “Passion” has been translated into Urdu. A literary journal, AAJ is planning to bring out an issue on women. I want this poem to be published in it.

The very same day, April 27, 2000 at a meeting of Arts Initiative for South Asians, a gathering of young writers and artists at Smith College in Massachussets, I spoke a little of our lives lived across borders, my email conversations with Fahmida. Then I read out the poem with its long, prefatory title: “For a Friend whose Father was Killed on the Lahore Border, in the 1965 War Between India and Pakistan.”

I have begun with this correspondence between Fahmida and myself because it reveals how one can touch, move across, borders, indeed fraught national borders, linguistic boundaries. In this case, using as a raft the material corpus of a poem.

A poem that is being translated from English (should I say Indian English?) into Urdu. And this brief correspondence between two women poets, more than a half century after the Partition of India, is made possible by a cyber-geography, the seemingly instantaneous back and forth of words, zipping through ether.

There is a curious fit here, for me, with what it means to translate.

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

II. The Zone of Radical Illiteracy

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

A zone that cannot recognize 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 of five.

Returning to India from Khartoum, my mother and I landed in a Bombay airport and I found my newfound Arabic vanishing in the hot wind of Bombay Airport and Hindi which I had known since earliest childhood ringing in my ears.

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

I could hear my mother 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.

My very first poems were composed in French, but that experiment only lasted a few short months.

At fourteen and fifteen I was writing poems in English. My first publications appeared in the local Khartoum newspaper, translated into Arabic, a language I love and that I used to speak as a child but have now have forgotten. A language in which poems were read out to me, but a language that I myself could never read or write.

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, in order 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. Perhaps what Benjamin evokes when he alludes to the “interior” as the “asylum of art . . .” Benjamin muses, “To dwell means to leave traces. In the interior these are accentuated.”³

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

I wrote a poem called “House,” another called “Civil Strife,” both part of a cycle of poems called “Notebook,” which late last year Jonas Ellerstrom translated into Swedish.

Then I was in Sweden reading poems, and at a symposium at the Bildmuseet spoke of “a zone of radical illiteracy,” a space that underlies syntax, where we need to go to, in order to make art.

I was taken aback when a friend whose opinion I respect greatly, who believes in art as intrinsic portion of a labor of resistance, of hybrid sense-making, felt I was advocating illiteracy, the inability to read and write, precisely all that cuts away agency. I realized then that I had not thought through and therefore had been unable to express clearly enough what I needed to say: that it was a fiery muteness I was speaking of, this zone of radical illiteracy, where we go when words cannot yet happen, where a terrible counter-memory wells up. And for me it is close to what Frantz Fanon evoked: “a zone of occult instability” through which a culture of decolonization emerges.⁴

A zone anterior to place, and to syntax, so that the molten core of what we are might be refigured, and the forms of language cast afresh.

Several years ago, when I composed the poem “Passion,” I felt I was evoking a condition where words did not easily attach. A state I had read no poems about. I wrote it in Manhattan, seeing what I could out of my high window.⁵

Yet I was translating into the landscape of the small town in Kerala where I come from, and out again, into the space of the page, using the concrete and palpable present as an invisible frame.

And perhaps in the act of translation the emotion that underpins the words of the poem on the page structures another consciousness, another language even as discrete lines slip away. The emotion released by the images keeps, the emotion stays.

A figure of eight, the strip of silk turned wrong side up, then swirled back again to the smooth gleam: what the composition of poetry takes for granted, translation renders explicit, sense crystallized through the seizures of dislocation.

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I have just finished a poem about the death of Amadou Diallo, an innocent young African immigrant, who was brutally shot to death by the police as he was standing in his own doorway.

I have called the poem “The Color of Home.” Making the poem I had to absorb the young man’s traveling, from Guinea on the West Coast of Africa, to the far East where his father was a trader in gemstones and Amadou studied English, all the way to the north, to Manhattan where the 22-year-old met his death. I tried to brood on a world in which a new immigrant must live without a palpable history, where all one is turns into a dark silhouette in a doorway.

I read out a draft of the poem standing on a flatbed truck, on a street in Jackson Heights, Queens at a meeting organized by a group of young South Asians: Indians, Pakistanis, Bangladeshis, Sri Lankans, Desis for Diallo.

There were policemen on the sidewalks, a few on the rooftops across the way, and something I had never seen: a police helicopter circling overhead. Twice it looped around, in the blue air in the cold wind.

That gathering, organized by young people who in the main had grown up in America, was an important event for many of us, immigrants in a world where we must invent a history, fabricate a dwelling in shared space.

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A few words to end with:

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.

But behind her – in the darkness of her home – and through her poor languages no one she knows will ever read or write.

They etch a corps perdu. Subtle, vital, unseizable body.⁶

Source of all translations.

First Published in Connect, Arts International, New York: Inaugural issue on Translation. December 2000.

1. Some of these reflections first emerged as part of my presentation “Civil Strife: Home at the Edge of the World” at the Symposium “What and Where is Home in the Twenty-First Century?” , Haus der Kulturen der Welt Berlin, June 3, 2000. [↩]
2. Fahmida Riaz: “Stoning,” in We Sinful Women, Contemporary Urdu Feminist Poetry, edited by Rukhsana Ahmed. (London: Womens Press, 1991). [↩]
3. Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, translated by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999). [↩]
4. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, translated Constance Farrington. (New York: Grove Press, 1991). [↩]
5. “Passion” can be found in Meena Alexander, The Shock of Arrival: Reflections on Postcolonial Experience (Boston: Southend Press, 1996). This was the book I posted Fahmida Riaz. [↩]
6. I borrow the phrase from Aime Cesaire, turn it to my own use. See his Lost Body, translated by Clayton Eshelman and Annette Smith, illustrations by Pablo Picasso (New York: George Braziller, 1986). “Corps Perdu” is the title of this book and also of a poem within it. [↩]