Measures of Expatriation

Vahni Capildeo

• Publisher: Carcanet Poetry
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781784101688
• eBook ISBN: 9781784101695
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Poetry
• Index: Literature

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.

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 anyway, 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 chip...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Contents
• I
• II
• III
• IV
• V
• VI
• VII
• Acknowledgements
• Copyright