Duniya Mikhail, via Amitav Ghosh, and Wislawa Szymborska
"—And where is the earth?/ —In her handbag."
- Calvin and Hobbes, Bill Watterson
There is a passage in Amitav Ghosh’s Shadow Lines that came back to me, suddenly, out of nowhere, as I read lines from I was in a Hurry by the Iraqi American poet, Duniya Mikhail.
“For instance, one evening when we were sitting out in the garden she wanted to know whether she would be able to see the border between India and East Pakistan from the plane. When my father laughed and said, why, did she really think the border was a long black line with green on one side and scarlet on the other, like it was in a school atlas, she was not so much offended as puzzled.
No, that wasn’t what I meant, she said. Of course not. But surely there’s something – trenches perhaps, or soldiers, or guns pointing at each other, or even just barren strips of land. Don’t they call it no-man’s land?…
…But if there aren’t any trenches or anything, how are people to know? I mean, where’s the difference then? And if there’s no difference, both sides will be the same; it’ll be just like it used to be before, when we used to catch a train in Dhaka and get off in Calcutta the next day without anybody stopping us. What was it all for then – Partition and all the killing and everything – if there isn’t something in between?”
Ghosh’s iconic novel questions the idea of borders as markers of identity, but also the illusory nature of places and the attachments we form with them. In this conception, a place is invented twice - first, in the eye, and then in the mind. It is recreated with details, that are uniquely our own, and the shifting of those elements causes an unsettled feeling that is existential (for eg. when we revisit a place that lives in our memory and find things changed). The character of the grandmother in the novel feels it strongly - the pain, and the confusion of partition, and how the city of her birth is different from the city she would have to fill up in a form in the airport.
The question of belonging is not an easy one to negotiate. Where does my nation lie? In what corner of memory do I plant the flag of my identity? Is it even a flag? So mysterious are the paths of our formations of association with a place, that the pumped up lust of masochist nationalism is ridiculous before it, like a polythene bag flying aimlessly in an ancient tomb.
Oh, the leaky boundaries of man-made states!
How many clouds float past them with impunity;
how much desert sand shifts from one land to another; how many mountain pebbles tumble onto foreign soil in provocative hops!-From Psalm, Wislawa Szymborska
Mikhail deals with this question in a way that makes you feel her pain of loss. She looks for her country as if it is a pair of spectacles that she lost in the morning, and can’t seem to locate.
The fragments of imagination and memory that connote a place called home for the poet defy easy categorisation. You feel her deep association with a space from which she is barred. The cloying trauma of this displacement is made doubly significant by the contrast of the simple but answerable questions that she poses. A ‘lottery ticket’ lives in the same breath as ‘Ali Baba’s jar’ and ‘a blanket of emigrants’. The ‘yesterday’ is prolonged - it is simply a time that is not the present, and one is searching for it, forever, because it lives only in the persona’s imagination.
In an interview, Mikhail speaks about how her poetry changed because of censorship: “In Iraq, there was a department of censorship with actual employees whose job was to watch ‘public morals’ and decide what you should read and write. Every writer needed approval first before publishing. That’s why I used a lot of metaphors and layers of meanings. This was probably good for my poetry but, still, you do not want to use such figures of speech just to hide meanings. Here, in America, a word does not usually cost a poet her life. However, speech is sometimes limited to what is acceptable according to public norms. So, in Iraq, text precedes censorship. In America, censorship precedes the text.”
I had visited the question of censorship and its effects on poetry, even birthing entire movements in form, with the post on Bei Dao. But for me what is interesting in Mikhail’s poetry is the subjectivity of innocence, that lays bare the overwhelming spectre of conflict, and the incomprehensible mesh of predatory ideologies. Another brilliant example of this, a poem that reminded me of Wislawa’s Psalm, is shared below.
It is uncanny is it not, this paradox? - that a child can untether the very foundations of entire infrastructures of greed, the need for possession and othering, with a kindness that is both creative, and comfort seeking, and an imagination that is unruffled, yet, by the systemic corruption of multiple social institutions. I love how this poem tears apart the enforced charade of adult complexity (without even a glimmer of darkness), the masks we wear, and the things we hold to be sacred. When we put a suit on the world it doesn’t lose its rolling greens, its unruly sky, that refuses to be fettered within our cartography. The act of nomenclature does not imply control. I connected with this poem deeply, and when I listen, hereafter, to accounts of atrocities, continuously, of how entire military-industrial complexes are trained at individuals, I am going to imagine the artist child’s drawn circle - a button that turns off the lights.
Note: The poem ‘I was in a hurry’ has been translated from the Arabic by Elizabeth Winslow.
Also. Grateful to A because of whom I was able to reach the poetry of Duniya Mikhail.
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