Phenomenology of Passage

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correspondents at large

IN DICTEE THERESA CHA, A KOREAN AMERICAN WRITER WHO DIED meena alexander TRAGICALLY AT THE AGE OF THIRTY- ONE, SHOWS US HOW DWELLING in language can lead us to the truth of a radical instability. On the frst page, she sets blocks of text in French and En glish one above the other, spelling out the terms for spacing and punctuation that a child might not understand. Te En glish paragraph reads:

Open paragraph It was the frst day period She had come from a far period tonight at dinner comma the families would ask comma open quotation marks How was the frst day in- terrogation mark close quotation marks. . . . (1)

What are the hidden rules of a language, in particular the rules of a colonial language? What does it mean to live in language? Tese are questions with a deep resonance for those of us who search for meaning in our everyday acts of reading and writing. Cha’s predicament touched a nerve. “I’ll never be locked in a cage of script,” I wrote in my poem “Il- literate Heart,” evoking the way in which the child wanted to keep her mother tongue at the level of speech and sound, pure orality (67). Perhaps that is where the meaning lies, what the body gives us always somewhat beyond the reach of words. “Language bears the meaning of thought as a footprint signifes the movement and efort MEENA ALEXANDER , a poet and scholar, of a body,” writes Maurice Merleau- Ponty. He thinks of the writer as is distinguished professor of En glish at someone who is able to crystallize a “corporeal or vital situation in Hunter College and the Graduate Center, language” (82, 101). City University of New York. The author of In Dictee the narrator’s longing for her mother and, through the The Poetics of Dislocation (U of Michigan mother, for a mother tongue drives her to the harsh reality of ex- P, 2009), she has two books forthcoming ile, not just in her own life in New York City but also in the deeper in 2018: her eighth book of poetry, Atmo- past in the life of her mother, who lived in Korea in the era of Japa- spheric Embroidery (TriQuarterly Books / Northwestern UP), and the volume of nese colonialism and was sent away to Manchuria to make a living essays Name Me a Word: Indian Writers as a teacher. Distance, desire, and the impossibility of returning to Reﬂect on Writing (Yale UP), which she ed- a mother tongue can become part of a life lived in a postcolonial ited. She is working on poems and prose world, or rather worlds, for that is what we are born to now. on embodiment, migration, and memory.

[ i ] would En glish be for us?” Her eloquence was not wasted on me. We make sense through a phenomenology of For the students in my undergraduate passage. seminar at Hunter College and the doctoral How to cobble together what we can, us- students in my class on postcolonial poetics ing fragments in our grasp, to dismantle il- at the City University of New York’s Gradu- licit taxonomies, the awkward grip of power? ate Center, bolstered as they were by the bulk I take inspiration from Ngũgĩ wa Tion- of the continental United States, the reality of g’o’s essential notion of globalectics—a web a country partitioned was harder to fathom. of literary meaning making unfurled from correspondentslarge at But as we continued our discussions, dis- diverse locations, shifting time and again crepant memories emerged and the stubborn with the “here” of the reader’s cultural pres- monolingualism of our En glish department ent. For Ngũgĩ the reading and writing self is peeled away to reveal the mottled complexi- powerfully bound to embodiment. He evokes ties of being in language. our passage in and through languages while Tere were students who claimed Spanish acknowledging the bruised entanglement as their own, others whose grandparents or of histories: “Globalectics, derived from the parents had come from the Middle East, East- shape of the globe, is the mutual containment ern Europe, Ireland, Africa, or Asia. After- of hereness and thereness in time and space, ward, stepping out onto Tirty- Fourth Street where time and space are also in each other. I heard so many voices, so many unknown It’s the Blakean vision of a world in a grain of tongues, blossoming in the afernoon air. sand and eternity in an hour” (60). I think back to a fateful September. I was teaching in a seminar room at the Graduate Teaching Dictee to master’s students at Center. The text was Sadat Hasan Manto’s Mahatma Gandhi University in Kerala, in the short story “Toba Tek Singh,” set in an insane South of India, I found myself facing a group asylum at the time of Partition. When asked of young people for whom the 1947 Partition if he chooses India or Pakistan—in Manto’s of India was something they knew from his- fabricated world, the inmates of the mad- tory books but had no personal connection to. house are given this choice—one man knows Unlike the students I had taught as a young neither country will do. Very simply, he says, lecturer in Delhi University, many of whose “I wish to live in this tree” (13). families had sufered as a result of Partition, He picks a tree and installs himself in its these students, in the southernmost state of the branches, limbs dangling, sensing in a green subcontinent, had no familial memories of the cage the only safety he will ever fnd. traumatic breakup of the country. Still, the idea Another mad creature, who speaks in a of Partition was not wholly unfamiliar, and babble that no one can follow, stands stock- they tried to extend themselves in imagina- still on his swollen legs, refusing to move, tion to another Asian country, tried to imagine until he falls, fesh on dirt, marking an un- what Korea had sufered by being split in two. touchable zone, a no- man’ s- land. “But of course the speaker lives in the Returning a week later to our class, we diaspora,” one of the students pointed out. knew our days and nights had forever al- “So many from Kerala have gone to the Gulf tered. Looking south down Fifh Avenue we and also gone westwards. Like our profes- could still make out plumes of smoke in the sor!” There was laughter as she pointed at distance; it seemed tiny bits of paper still fell me. “Tink of what Malayalam would sound through the air, and the scent of burning like then, afer all those crossings. And what clung to us. 131.5 ] Meena Alexander  correspondents at large correspondents [ ii ] Te language I use is a river into which many other sonorous streams flow, and as As I sit here writing in New York City I am such it has neither the scent nor the taste of mindful that it is well over half a century the monolingual. since Indian Independence. Sixty- eight It was 1955 when Richard Wright trav- years to be exact. The thought of fugitive eled to Bandung. In The Color Curtain: A sense making takes up residence in my Report on the Bandung Conference, he writes mind. I think of the struggle of writers in of the “strange logic” of race (572). He evokes India for free artistic expression, the sup- the shame felt by people of color, Asians and pression of Perumal Murugan’s work, the Africans, compelled to take up residence murder of the freethinking intellectual in spaces where colonial ontology enforces M. M. Kalburgi. a terrible psychic dislocation. Postcolonial It is sixty years since the Bandung Con- realities have shifed the burden but not an- ference, a historic meeting of nonaligned nulled it. nations that in many ways marked an era More than three decades later, in Britain, of decolonization. Shortly afer Bandung, as Salman Rushdie, in his explosive novel Te the result of an agreement between Jawa har- Satanic Verses (1988), highlighted the body of lal Nehru and Ismāʿīl al- Azharī, my father, a the migrant other metamorphosing into bes- meteorologist, was seconded from India to tial form under the gaze of the immigration Sudan. My young life altered dramatically. I police. Or disappearing, in the case of Mimi turned fve on the Indian Ocean. Mamoulian, an Armenian actress relegated I remember standing on deck, my back to to voice- overs, her alien body irksome in a the little party my mother had arranged, with white world. She argues, “When I become the a few crayons and brightly lit balloons. I just voice of a bottle of bubble bath, I am entering wanted to stare at the waves. Facing the glint- Flatland knowingly, understanding what I am ing mass of water, I sensed the world that was doing and why” (261). Afer such knowledge, mine had vanished. I was in an in- between one might ask, what forgiveness? space words could not easily reach. As a child born into postcolonial India, I I used to live and work in Hyderabad. grew up with several languages—Malayalam, At the university, whenever I could, I taught my mother tongue, the language of the south- William Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey.” It is ern state of Kerala, an ancient tongue with a a poem I love dearly. In slow, rhythmic fash- proud literary tradition; Hindi, the language ion it allows the reader into the convolutions of the North, where I was born, in many ways of memory, the intricate ways in which em- the language in which I lived and moved, bodied sensation draws us into the whorls of since it was spoken all around me; English, memory, into the longing for a lost place and which we sometimes spoke in bits and pieces an “I” one can never hope to be again. but which served as a kind of lingua franca It was a difcult season. A young Muslim though with holes torn into it, holes through woman had been gang- raped in a police sta- which we glimpsed the depths of longing for tion, and the culprits were none other than other tongues. the police themselves. Inside the classroom In Khartoum I studied French and we could hear waves of sound from the street, picked up spoken Arabic. I also learned to the cries of passersby. One student rushed in brood on the intimate violence of the En- to tell us the news: the incensed townspeople glish language I had made my own. Yet it was had set the police station on fre. It seemed mine; what else did I have? the better part of wisdom to shut our books,  Phenomenology of Passage [ PMLA

enter the streets. Elsewhere I have written of rolled in the streets. And it seemed to us that this (N am pally Road 54). the voices in the play were close, all too close. Elsewhere I have taught Wordsworth’s They spoke in the tongues of men and poem. But I cannot think of the lines “Five of angels and in the untranslated tongues of years have passed; five summers with the those who had gone through hell. length / Of five long winters!” without the Some years later, back in India, teach- scent of neem leaves and dry earth returning ing Soyinka’s play, I found that the students to me, and the feeling of dust raised by our feet had an instinctive grasp of what the voices as we raced into Nampally Road (lines 1–2). of ancestors might sound like, what it might

correspondentslarge at An awareness was instilled in me early— mean to have a conclave of the living and that the walls of the university were of the the dead. flimsiest sort, that literature, while con- Neither the machinations of vote buying ceived in dream and molten privacy, could nor the slippery tongues of public officials not exist without the shared world and its was alien. The gods who might rectify our public spaces. lives were not far away, and some even lurked In my childhood I traveled back and forth in the banana grove. across the Indian Ocean. I grew up both in Su- dan and in India, and I received my BA, with honors, from Khartoum University, where I had entered as a student at the tender age WORKS CITED of thirteen. The university had just stopped granting London University degrees and Alexander, Meena. “Illiterate Heart.” Illiterate Heart, was minting its own graduates. A civil war Northwestern UP, 2002, pp. 63–68. ———. Nampally Road. Mercury House, 1991. was raging in the south of the country and Cha, Teresa Hak Kyung. Dictee. U of California P, 2001. the students wanted to debate the “Southern Manto, Sadat Hasan. “Toba Tek Singh.” “Kingdom’s End” Question” and the possibility of democratic and Other Stories, translated by Khalid Hasan, Pen- governance for the whole of the country. Tere guin, 1989, pp. 11–18. was a great deal of hope and excitement that Merleau- Ponty, Maurice. “Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence.” The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics the military dictator who was in power could Reader: Philosophy and Painting, edited by Galen A. be removed. Te students’ union decided to Johnson, translation edited by Michael B. Smith, stage Wole Soyinka’s play A Dance of the For- Northwestern UP, 1993, pp. 76–120 . ests. I had a small part behind the scenes, help- Ngũgĩ wa Tiong’o. Globalectics: Teory and the Politics of Knowing ing to carry in cut branches of neem and palm . Columbia UP, 2012. Rushdie, Salman. Te Satanic Verses. Viking, 1988. for use in the play. As I sat in the front row a Soyinka, Wole. A Dance of the Forests. Collected Plays, voice echoed in my ears: “My father said, and vol. 1, Oxford UP, 1973, pp. 1–77. his great father / Before him, if you find no Wordsworth, William. “Lines Written a Few Miles above rest, go home / And they will know you” (61). Tintern Abbey, on Revisiting the Banks of the Wye Poems What and where is home? Te question during a Tour, July 13, 1798.” , edited by Ste- phen Gill, Oxford UP, 1984, pp. 131–35. remains with me. Wright, Richard. Te Color Curtain: A Report on the Ban- Aferward, there was a large demonstra- dung Conference. Black Power: Tree Books from Exile , tion in Khartoum, students were shot, tanks Harper Perennial, 2008, pp. 435–609.