Measures of Expatriation

by Vahni Capildeo

  which is black

  happened, changed texture

  happened, propulsive odour

  happened to invade

  hopes of building

  we were playing

  on the beach

  and found oil

  and looking at

  the map’s edge

  we’d often drawn

  in schoolroom pencil

  where, grown-up, we’d

  come to play

  suddenly the air

  filled with technologized

  wings, the sand

  spurted into wells,

  though that moment

  it was still

  we were alone

  nor been told

  to frack off

  step from there

  now dream of flowers, dream we are

  both girls, not people

  girls overwhelming cities

  crying out

  sweetening

  sleep

  ‘I Wish to Be Speaking to You until Death’

  for Jeremy Hardingham

  The types of dead hedges

  they plant here; choose

  to plant what will rustle,

  ornamental,

  unreassuring, cling

  death-in-life, rust-orange

  leaves – we must walk

  their lengths of deadness,

  marred plantings.

  The curse of barrenness

  is unmodern;

  so also a body

  able to bear

  its perambulations

  only as weight,

  touch being the kick

  into killing,

  unworded, internal.

  This kind of body

  has no smashed leg,

  mobility device,

  gold loping guide;

  has no current token

  to be exchanged

  for consideration.

  No self-publication.

  Only a smile

  to be relied upon.

  The second head,

  which is its real one, floats

  like a balloon

  reporting on the town:

  frightful riots

  in Body; Perspex shields

  advancing, so

  Body can be quelled, hosed,

  re-presented

  clothed, though contact

  zones of cloth

  and corpse need

  scorched-earth treatment;

  no love, no time.

  No, love.

  No time.

  You will be angry

  I am direct:

  even that night when

  you made incursions upon

  some body, all you did

  was floor my clothes;

  next day I picked up, sure

  sore somehow, in

  the chronic time delay

  where your being

  at all – let alone

  your

  anger – becomes

  a thing I ought to have

  remembered, ought

  to have been told, out of

  politeness; oh,

  to whom? Perhaps the lamp

  resembles my head,

  the door handle

  your

  penis;

  I might locate

  a radius

  in a vase of feathers

  or an ulna

  pacifying a pelvis

  in pleated blinds.

  Put them all in my skin,

  if you can; hear

  the roof-ripping wind sigh

  through left-over

  plum blossom – there it is,

  before you ask put where,

  put them back where?

  My skin the wind, it’s gone

  kiting; sew how

  it is unfit

  Measures of Expatriation — IV

  Kassandra #memoryandtrauma #livingilionstyle

  for Judy Raymond

  Terribly terribly sorry (not) it’s hard relating to this one: you know, the dead wench in another country, gifted but an attention-seeker? Your camera strikes from afar. Like snakes licking out K.’s ears, men of power seem caught up with her. More Twitter than other girls round her. Your camera strikes. K.’s screwing up her eyes in a boat – speaking for the sisterhood, but from that kind of family? Why listen? She’s privilege. Complication. Must be spoilt. K.’s voice flares victim to her high-explosive hair; her thoughts dismissable; cuntly, if you’re a man; peripheral.

  Take sixty seconds to re-read each of the lines above.

  That took ten minutes: half as long as my death by stoning.

  Athena, grey-eyed, justicer,

  they’ve brought me back

  as if each stone

  broken for their roads

  and the rare earths

  mined for their devices

  vocalized my far-flung blood,

  but I have questions

  for you, law-giver, spoiler;

  also, plans to find

  which women you move

  in these greater days

  of privilege and complication.

  Holding on to you

  was the safe zone

  but the hero entered

  held and raped me

  in your precincts, justicer.

  Why’d you let him do it? Why did you wait to strike him down? Was it, in a way I do not understand, due process?

  Does the burden of proof still fall on me, in modern courts? As people encouraged by helpful foreigners to cross a minefield may smile, stretchered, blinded or their legs blown off, so each of my memories, a living and willing witness, gets up to walk to you, to tell my story, but doesn’t make it. His camera strikes from afar. If you want it to add up, why give me the gift of prophecy? I split, spill truth like marrow from bones, gleaming on stone-strewn ground.

  The Book of Dreams / Livre de Cauchemars

  for JanaLee Cherneski

  I

  The women were helpful. The smart cut of their suiting would be elegance in England. In this country it meant that they did not work for themselves. They would be slashed and draped if they were independent. Their suiting bespoke an important, insecure job.

  The helpful women were to one side of me wherever we went: the semi-open corridors along the side of concrete quadrangles; the raw rooms with class-length chipboard trestle tables; the half-built, much-used places still to be crossed, topsoil red-orange from sand mixed into sea-reclaimed, or de-agriculturalized, earth.

  Something was wanted. I trusted there were good intentions.

  Through grilled walls the semi-pleased students were to be seen: standing; sitting; a bewilderment of orderliness and familial pride.

  Something was wanted. I would be agreeable.

  We were sitting down, with a few more of the women. How good some of what they said they did was!

  What did they stand for? I did not want to agree to something.

  A ringbound notebook was given to me. A notebook as large as a music book was given to me. A large notebook with a laminated cover was given to me. A shiny green notebook was given to me, recalling the carapace of an insect seldom seen these days.

  Inside were rough photocopies, cut-and-paste jobs, blurry, some photocopied from typescripts bad in the original. Verse extracts featured, with space beside and in between the stanzas.

  Was that extract Tennyson? Here I could not recognize Tennyson. Were his lines so complex and so long, or had they undergone development in the process of copying?

  The women’s looks were anxious. The women’s mouths scraped an expression. The women’s focus was as neat as thimbles.

  I would live in the barracks. I would update the verse. I would make it relevant. I would employ dialects. Then I would use the verse as a basis of teaching. There were lambsfuls of students to be taught.

  II

  The land was flat and round. A river, as if it would have been blue anywa
y, reflected the sky. It was hard to discern it as river. It ran in loops. There was no way of crossing directly to where we were going. Nor was the destination in view. The distance was amethyst mist. People zigzagged for miles ahead. This had the appearance of leisure.

  The people might be struggling across the tussocked mud of the vast, but they did not have to crowd.

  The national power grid had gone out. It was said that water reserves would be hit next. That was why we had been put on the move. The town across from us had a considerable water reservoir.

  Walking towards it, as yet we could see nothing. People did not know about the water. They were supposed to know about the electricity. Those of us who knew about both should help to keep people moving, without saying. There was no alarm.

  Nice ladies expected to go home soon. They sauntered like daytime, greying hair deliberate in its yellowing, orange linen skirts ethically traded, blue flowered dresses having cost a pound and a crown. They brandished folk chic baskets, having taken few things. They chatted through strong teeth.

  I would not normally have been on a walk with such nice ladies. They would go to church where they lived. They would book into the restaurants where I lived. They had children, with related activities out of town, requiring the car. Now they were most concerned that school might be disrupted. Assessment tests had been scheduled.

  Their children must not lose pace.

  Losing pace, place, face, without children, having nothing to join, I walked without saying: aspirins, spectacles, flour, there will be none of these things. The factories, and the mills of God, alike will stop grinding.

  None of these things entered their vision.

  Fine, lagging, sauntering.

  I tried to maintain a sense of direction.

  In the distance was water. At our backs, the town, on which darkness had fallen. Day persisted, eggshell and semiprecious. I could not see with whom, but we had to keep up.

  III

  Night in another place. Again the having to keep walking. I know this road. It runs south to the next town, which over a thousand years ago was the greater, and accessed by river. I stick to the western side of this road. It is a broken way, not meant for pedestrians. The pavements give way to grass verges that dip into the straggle of nothing. They are in the dark but in daylight diffuse anyhow, returning to hedgerow and hostility at the least opportunity: sports grounds, a parking lot, lower middle-class terraced housing latterly subdivided if not subsidized for the less poor, fish and chips, a shop of middle-price reclaimed pine, and the stretches of nothing.

  It was on this road in one of the great floods of the early twenty-first century that the young mother saw the man wading throw up his arms with a strange jerk and fall: electrocuted, as she learned later. But she had to keep wading. He was closer to town than I.

  Still the having to keep walking.

  I think a house owned by my parents may have been somewhere further to the west and south, almost in the woods, the occasional deer startling the infrequent transport. Black and damp around the edges as any wood, on the way that could be the way there, tonight. The cars few, the street lights more and more spaced out, the road south the road to nothing.

  I begin to decide to turn, feeling the widening and flattening underfoot that meant imminent crossroads. Two friends almost bump into me. Who are they? The one I know better was a curled darling, palefaced like a dollmaker’s temps perdu. The other I know less. Both so pleased to see me! Their faces bob, charge, glimmering up, losing themselves and returning: let’s go for a drink! Night is ocean in a barrel.

  Yet we keep walking down the dark road. The places that sell drink are at our backs, some distance in the other direction, except for one, unpleasant at the best of times, to the left across the road that widens to a savagery of raggedness. We stop.

  On our side of the crossroads, from the right, a girl in a short mossy green velvet dress. She hangs back slightly from the pool of streetlight. She must have made her way from the place that was almost woods, where (I think) is a house once owned by my parents. Her smile announces her as another friend. Hadn’t we met twice or so? She can join us for a drink! Perhaps it is an effect of the hour, of the light. Perhaps it is too much effort to have legs. But hers taper away to a wisp of shadow like the tail of a fish glimpsed submerged. Look! she laughs. The grass lifts like a lid. It’s fun! In a blink she is tucked in to the curling-space. The lid of grass does not have to be closed or re-opened. In a blink she is out through the hinge of it. She stands on the pavement where she was before. Try it! She encourages me more than the others. I can see that anyone would get in. I doubt that I can manage her trick of getting out. I let myself into the space. The lid of grass ripples and shrugs. It is shutting over me, as it did not shut over her. I push the human way, with hands. You see, I couldn’t do it like you.

  She sulks, seeming to recede on the spot towards the woods, with no more legs than before.

  IV

  The facelessness. The friendliness. These professionals. Are they dressed for indoors or outdoors? The colours of their fabrics are determined on irresolution: beige into khaki, grey into grey, via amethyst, heather, forest, mist, taupe, steel, sea blue, seal pelt. This is the expensive version of washable. They are dressed to be ironproof, rollsafe, rucksackworthy; casual, smart. I cannot tell.

  We left town where town had given up on being town. The roads led out big and broad like hope in a school-syllabus anthem. Their surfaces maintained an impressive evenness while what was around them changed. Arcades and parking lots thinned out. Here and there was an ornamental shrub specially planted next to a specially placed single bench next to the round base of an upturned litter bin recumbent on the mown razor grass where nobody sat with sandwiches. Cars ran past. There were no vendors walking between the traffic and no stalls along the road. Nobody would have stopped. With no sense of having left the car or whose car had driven me I have been walking for a long time. Brown shoes, not mine, stand up to being scuffed as they keep going. The dust I kick up is cousin to orange pine ice cream. Tree roots smell fresh, like the gutters at an open-air butcher’s. That means snakes.

  The quiet surge of grey and brown is my friends behind me, moving like sea in a documentary viewed with the sound off.

  The leaves, green and yellow, invite a holiday mood. Herded into dappled shade, I go willingly.

  The sound begins, in the form of questions.

  – What about V. S. Naipaul? – I had twenty-three first cousins, until one (not him) died. And he is not even one of those. – Is he your uncle? – My father’s first cousin. I don’t know how many first cousins my father had. He is dead too. – You have read V. S. Naipaul. What about V. S. Naipaul in the fifties and sixties? Was he in England then? – I was born in Trinidad, in 1973. – What about possible Soviet connexions for V. S. Naipaul? – That is absurd, I thought people said he wanted to be British. – Many Caribbean writers had Soviet connexions in the fifties and sixties; Andrew Salkey wrote Havana Journal. Or did they? – I was born in Trinidad, in 1973. – What about possible radical feminist and pro-abortion connexions for V. S. Naipaul? – That is absurd, I thought people suspected him of misogyny. – What about the practice of abortion in the Hindu community using traditional methods of massage or the insertion of bamboo sticks? Abortion is in most cases illegal in Trinidad. Is there no coded reference to that in any of Naipaul’s writings? – I have not read all of Naipaul’s writings. I very much doubt it. – What about possible animal rights connexions for V. S. Naipaul? Doesn’t he promote vegetarianism? – But almost nobody in that family is a true vegetarian, myself included. I remember seeing my grandfather splitting a stewed fish skull and picking out the white brains with a fishbone, to eat them. I was only little. He let me have some brains and I enjoyed them.– How did V. S. Naipaul get his writing promoted? – I don’t know anything about getting writing promoted. I thought V. S. Naipaul did his best to record his precise vision of things. – Is V. S. Naipaul
a Trinidadian writer, a British writer, or an Indian writer? – Wasn’t V. S. Naipaul born British anyway? People in Trinidad were all British before Independence. Not everybody automatically changed. – What about possible – They would not let it go. We were well into the woods.

  V

  It was not a holiday but we were going to this house by the beach. Just my mother, and a friend who had escaped from her family for half a day. There were no tourist facilities and the house did not belong to a village. It had a roof but no ceiling. The main room, hall-like, peaked at around twenty feet. The trestle table inside was cheap wood but covered with a white cloth. The metal folding chairs were stackable and chipped, oxblood paint under the gun-grey paint. A few were set around the table. The house belonged to a man who was tall. His curly hair, full of sea salt, almost made dreads. I did not like the way that my mother and my friend both knew him and smiled at him. I had not expected him or even the presence of his house in this place. Now it was clear that if all went well perhaps I would marry him.

  The dirt where anything could grow ran out abruptly. The rough tussocks of lawn became skimpier and interspersed with bone-white sand. A graceful curve of coconut trees huddled up to the house as if marking a garden boundary. I had never seen coconut trees planted this way before. Their normality was the wind’s wild punctuation. Planned planting belonged to inshore mansions, tulip trees and (if there was room) cassia.

  Still he was smiling at me and in his cutoff trousers he half-danced his way into the very turquoise sea. Three-foot waves chopped up the tideline. He turned around with his back to the horizon. The curls waved. His eyes were bright.

  I like the sea. I started walking into it.

  He laughed and started walking backwards. Then the sea chopped at me and laid rope after rope around my calves and ankles. I staggered on the spot.

  He laughed and continued walking backwards. I felt drawn towards where the sun sinks.

  Anyone who has been knocked down by a wave in such clear Atlantic water and kept their eyes open (accustomed from young to the salt) will have seen the epitome of nothing. The force of the wave’s crash raises a sandstorm beneath the sea. As the wave retreats, the undertow pulling the felled bather with it, clouds of sand silently roar in changing formations. The desert sandstorm advances as the wave retreats. The open-eyed bather feels all her limbs being dragged under, some of the water chill with the chill of deep sea, while her eyes are confounded by the utter and absolute darkness beneath the stirring sand. It is a lightlessness like no other.