Measures of Expatriation

Measures of Expatriation

by Vahni Capildeo
Measures of Expatriation

Measures of Expatriation

by Vahni Capildeo

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Overview

Winner of the Forward Prize for Best Collection and Shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize (2016).

In Measures of Expatriation Vahni Capildeo's poems and prose-poems speak of the complex alienation of the expatriate, and address wider issues around identity in contemporary Western society. Born in Trinidad and resident in the UK, Capildeo rejects the easy depiction of a person as a neat, coherent whole - 'pure is a strange word' - embracing instead a pointilliste self, one grounded in complexity. In these texts sense and syntax are disrupted; languages rub and intersect; dream sequences, love poems, polylogues and borrowed words build into a precarious self-assemblage. 'Cliché', she writes, 'is spitting into the sea', and in this book poetry is still a place where words and names, with their power to bewitch and subjugate, may be disrupted, reclaimed. The politics of the body, and cultures of sexual objectification, gender inequality and casual racism, are the borders across which Capildeo homes, seeking the modest luxury of being 'looked at as if one is neutral ground'. In the end it is language itself, the determination to speak, to which the poet finds she belongs: 'Language is my home, I say; not one particular language.' Measures of Expatriation is in the vanguard of literature arising from the aftermath of Empire, with a fearless and natural complexity.


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781784101695
Publisher: Carcanet Press, Limited
Publication date: 01/01/2017
Sold by: Barnes & Noble
Format: eBook
Pages: 128
File size: 593 KB

About the Author

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 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.

Read an Excerpt

Measures of Expatriation


By Vahni Capildeo

Carcanet Press Ltd

Copyright © 2016 Carcanet Press Ltd
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-78410-169-5



CHAPTER 1

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 hurtling 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

for Anu Lakhan

Cross the road and you can walk south into an urban space that looks immemorial. Aston's Eyot is the site of a nineteenth-century midden; an old dump. The refuse heated up underground. Apple cores and pear seeds and walnut kernels matured into a wilderness too hybridized for names. Sprays of blackberries and rosehips arch red and black; sloes add notes of steely blue; a willow grows askant a brook. Other walkers are seldom met or heard. There are trodden paths but also many turnings.

She four-thousand-miles-away-across-the-ocean hasn't been herself lately. She hermits more and more. She would have liked the walk. Now I am home for another Saturday night ...

'My thoughts have turned to green leaves.'

'Well, that's better than sorrow. I'm so tired of living in this nameless sadness, even I am bored by myself.'

'Do you keep a diary? A document of marvellous and total self-obsession?'

She feels like an invalid of centuries past, to be rolled out into the sun. Who would push the chair? A lithe and grateful illiterate youth?

'A brilliant lavender and lace parasol-carrying creature with an air of reckless innocence ...'


She four-thousand-miles-away-across-the-ocean has often felt, as have many others, that she is disconnected from her corporeal self. I am feeling out of touch with my body: it feels like something I have been given to look after. When I bathe I feel that I am washing it, not that I am bathing. She likes that I speak of it as being a thing I take care of, like a costume or a small animal.

How do I take care of it? Why is it not mine? Might a description get me closer to making it mine, or at least an understanding of why I am at odds with it?

She-who-hermits-more-and-more offers a description: leaning over a claw-footed tub, body costume in hand, I may gently soap and groom it ... bathe it in milk and rose petals ... take delicate brushes to it ... do I? For it needs to understand not what it doesn't have but what it needs.

She desires me to immerse myself in the hows and whys.


The howls and wiles!

It wants things.

It is an idiot child.

It understandeth not that there is no store of warmth.

It has forgotten thirst.

A reminder to myself: water, at least every three hours. A reminder from myself: nudity, between clothing it at least twice a day. A reminder of myself: carefulness, up and down the steep expressionist stairs.

It wakes expectant. The look of ceiling meets its eye, or the look of curtain. Expectancy is worst.

A reminder, not to expect?

No. Clinging helplessly to its capabilities, ever hopeful of change, it issues reminders that are first cousin to cravings.


For her, in the sun perhaps; certainly elsewhere; like me, insufficiently solid; for her, this description, a near-total avoidance of the one with which I was tasked.

Because I am superstitious, I am stringing a series of lights between this and anything else that happens.


(Continues...)

Excerpted from Measures of Expatriation by Vahni Capildeo. Copyright © 2016 Carcanet Press Ltd. Excerpted by permission of Carcanet Press Ltd.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

Table of Contents

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,

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