Poetry Dialogues: An Inherited Fate

Sarah Howe: Oh, that’s beautiful, Vid. How funny: on my most recent read-through of Avidyā I was struck by ‘Every year’, your poem about the ‘panchāngam’, which is not exactly a calendar, more an almanac – in that it’s closer to the agricultural rhythms of Spenser’s Calender – and which offers inherited wisdom and auspicious dates for life events like weddings, becoming a sort of blueprint for living. In that poem, the panchāngam, beloved of the speaker’s parents, embodies a world-view that is able, or wants, to find meaning in random or trivial events, so even ‘a gecko falling from the ceiling onto your head’ becomes an omen. The fact that that poem ends with an invitation to ‘dance […] on the grave’ of that inherited wisdom is both shocking and wonderfully liberating.

I felt like ‘Every year’ and my ‘Calendar’ poem were in some ways in dialogue on ideas of recurrence and inheritance, and, for that matter, cliché, in the sense of truths worn out by repetition. They’re poems about outdated paradigms for understanding the world, tinted by the nostalgia of older generations – especially where the ‘old country’ is concerned – that no longer serve.

Personally, I got interested in rhyme as a figure for thinking about family resemblance, and the way we recognise sameness in difference: so, my mother’s face in an old black-and-white photo ‘rhymes with mine / at five, my daughter’s now’. Not in this poem, but elsewhere in your book, couplets sometimes feel like a baton exchange, a handing down of traits and echoes between generations. I’m thinking of those Don Juan rhymes in ‘Eelam’ that have the bright air of a comic libretto, but tinged with genuine panic:

If my parents were, are, nervy,
camouflaged – against carnivory;

if, at day’s end, their choice is
a belief in perpetual crisis […]

I guess the couplets of ‘Calendar’ have a false brightness to them too. I was nervous about opening the book with a poem that’s so bitterly ironic, but also at some level still clearly in thrall to the world of picture-postcard cliché. I had in mind Hannah Sullivan and Maggie Millner and their brand of off-kilter, imperfect pararhyme that fuzzes itself into indistinctness – though I don’t manage to be as cool as them! I kept thinking of those sucked sour sweets that have a tang of delicious wrongness to them. That’s how each of those couplets felt to me: a wrong note again and again, disappointment again and again.

But I think there’s also an interest in that poem, as you say, in Zeno’s paradoxes of endless travelling and never arriving. And I suppose it’s the first of a series of poems in the book that revolve around photographs – the partialness of their framing, their capturing of an instant. And is that instant part of time, or outside it? I wonder if the accumulation of the couplets is somehow about that as well – this continual gesture towards closure that never closes.

SH: I’d forgotten that! The grandmother and the child, and the almanac on the string. That’s the funny thing about almanacs: they’re the container for ancient wisdom, but wind up as toilet paper. Your poem, which is also a sestina, compares the previous generation’s arranged marriages to ‘our lives’ that ‘would be free verse’. So there’s the jostle between closed form and open form in thinking about the unfolding of a life and its choices.

SH: I mean, I dispute that! I find the signature of your unique mind-print working its way into that form. Reading Avidyā, I was magnetised to ‘Lasantha Wickrematunge’, which I’d read before when it was published in Poetry London. On re-encountering it in the book, I was struck by the ‘Gordian NOT’, as you wonderfully call it, as a device in his journalism: ‘Heavy fighting was not raging in northern Jaffna peninsula / and Tigers were not pounding Palaly’. That rhetorical figure of paralepsis, summoning things under a negative syntax – as if that ridiculously would let them slip through the censor’s net – seemed to speak to your own return to Sri Lanka, re-encountering repressed histories and buried violences from the civil war. Could you talk about the poems’ simultaneous evoking and cancelling of those memories of the genocide, as if under erasure?

SH: Well, I guess both of those poems of yours are spoken by the dead and obliterated, aren’t they? That’s one of the senses of prosopopoeia, isn’t it: giving voice to inanimate things but also to the dead, and conjuring a face, or mask – that’s the meaning of the Greek, prosopon – for them in the process. The tree in ‘Burnt Palmyra’ is given voice and animacy even as people are dehumanised and felled – like trees – around it. It’s given a voice in the poem to witness these horrors, but it’s not clear if it’s heard: that line about the ‘voiceless lingam’. And then there are the dried leaves in the Jaffna library, ‘used as paper by the ancient poets / whose works burned’: the tree also stands for memory and record-keeping, an archive that goes up in smoke.

With the poems in the voices of the Chinese ceramics, I suppose I was thinking of the literary lineage of that genre Dr Johnson would have called the ‘little life’: there was a vogue for it in the eighteenth century, just as porcelain and tea had their own crazes. They were stories narrating the ‘autobiography’ of small or humble things, like the adventures of a louse or a shilling. Sometimes they were commodities that travelled across the globe, like tobacco. But having settled on that device, I guess I found myself rather uncomfortable with it: the idea of using these chirpy objects to tell stories that rapidly became proxies for the experiences of human migrants. I worried that ramping up the animacy of one meant reducing the agency of the other. The project came out a commission from a museum in Liverpool. I was very conscious that Liverpool’s Chinatown is the oldest in Europe, but also how the city’s history was bound up with slavery: all the ships that sailed from there to transport Africans to Caribbean plantations, to die there in huge numbers.

That’s why I rewrote the second poem in the sequence just before the book came out. It now speaks in the voice of this psychopathic tea caddy, itself transported along the Silk Road, that turns to challenge the reader: ‘Human beings are, / were always, things. You don’t want to see?’ I’d just been to the Silk Roads exhibition at the British Museum, which had on display slave contracts for the transportation of people along those routes: you don’t often hear about that part of the Silk Road history, which is still hugely romanticised. I had another poem in the book, that begins with a line by a Chinese poet, Xu Lizhi, who committed suicide whilst working in a Foxconn factory in Guangzhou, where he assembled iPhones on the factory line. Global trade is still turning people into things.

You write about the same trip you took with your parents to Sri Lanka in 2017 in quite a different way in Asian/Other, a hybrid memoir you also published this year, which blends autobiography with close readings of poems that have been important to you. You drew a contrast just now between poetry and reporting: what was the difference, for you, between doing justice to those experiences in poetry and in prose? I’m interested in how long it took you to write about the 2017 visit: you published another poetry book in the meantime. Were you already working on the poems at the time, or was it something you put aside, then looped back to?

SH: You know, I hadn’t even noticed the resonance between those two surgeries and scars. How funny, that happens so often. For the longest time whilst I was working on this book, I didn’t believe these poems belonged together. I had this self-flagellating intention to start again and write a coherent ‘project book’. Many of the poems I wrote in the first half of the decade it took to make Foretokens were commissions I accepted because I couldn’t otherwise bring myself to write.

Though I accept I’m not recognising my own agency in this: I’m talking about it as if I was waiting for the command of the Muse, rather than something inside me. On some level, I must have known I wanted to write a set of poems about Chinese ceramics, or a set of poems about DNA – in fact, those were already preoccupations of mine. I’d made a research visit, years before, to the main porcelain-making centre in China, Jingdezhen, whilst tracing the route of some seventeenth-century European missionaries. There’s a poem in Loop of Jade about genetics and miscegenation and wondering what our future children would look like: it gradually dawned on me that that was the leaping-off point for this new collection.

I had the very strange experience of it all slotting into place when I wrote the last quarter of the book – those poems are literally stuck at the end, the more narrative ones writing towards my adoptive grandmother – at the eleventh hour when the final manuscript was almost due. That final poem, ‘An Error, a Ghost’, became a kind of saviour that would create a ring structure to the whole book, and make my random spewing about DNA and quantum physics and whatever all make sense together.

SH: Whilst we’re thinking about long poems in sections, can I also ask you about ‘Karna’, which fascinates me because of the way that it intercuts between three generations of males: you, your father, and Frank, your son. And it’s also thinking about ideal male behaviour as transmitted through myth and notions of heroism and how one might need to rewrite or question them: that reminds me of Wickrematunge’s courage, which from another angle might look like recklessness, a death-wish.

By extension, can I ask you to think about metaphors of inheritance and fate in this book? The idea in ‘Mourning’, that the speaker’s parents, who survived the genocide, even in diaspora, ‘could not purge that terror / passed down like a gene’ to the generation – or generations – below. It sort of invokes ideas about epigenetics and trauma whilst holding them at arm’s length. I find that simile, ‘like a gene’, very interesting, and not just because I’ve been trying to write about the metaphorics of DNA myself. It’s very careful, that ‘like,’ and the distance it inserts: a repudiation of fate or inevitability, even?

SH: For me, Foretokens is very much about trying to break out of the loop of traumatic repetition (though that sounds like therapy-speak), in much the same spirit as your almanac poem. Because of that, Parisa, my editor, and I did discuss whether there should be a loop structure to the book at all. For a long time, I had it ending on the title poem, which looks towards the future, so you’re not stuck in this endless recursive cycle, pointing back to the beginning again à la Battlestar Galactica.

SH: Well, the message I take from both the ‘laundry poem’ (as I think of it in my head) and the motif of hoarding in the book is that if you think you’re making progress, you’re probably not travelling as far from the pattern as you imagine. My mum might be compulsive about the laundry, but I have a compulsion to write about her.