Skin Can Hold

Vahni Capildeo

• Publisher: Carcanet Poetry
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781784107314
• eBook ISBN: 9781784107321
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Poetry
• Index: Literature

Longlisted for the 2020 BOCAS Prize for Caribbean Literature. A Telegraph Book of the Year 2019. Vahni Capildeo, author of Measures of Expatriation (Forward Prize, 2016), returns with a third Carcanet volume, Skin Can Hold. The collection marks an adventurous departure for a pen-and-paper poet. These texts are the fruit of collaborative experiments in theatre, dance and other performance, drawing on burlesque and mime as well as Capildeo's fascination with Caribbean masquerade. The poems are astir with voices and bodies usually kept 'between the lines' of poetry: a weeping poltergeist disrupting the decorum of a lyric; polyglot workmen along an ivory-towercity road. Novels are turned inside out to become dramas of sleaze and surveillance.

II

BLACKBOX CLEANOUT

FOUR ABLUTIONS

Texts to be included and/or discarded by performers preparing for actions

I

Standing at a great height in a black box rigged by chaos, take a stainless steel tankard. Dip it into the white washing-up bowl. You are not nude. Your hanging sleeves will get wet. You have to stoop. The white washing-up bowl is at your feet on the platform which was described as secure and is unstable. Your core and sacrum will find the necessary elegance. Balance is necessary, elegant. Pour, now, the contents of the stainless steel tankard (you could store your breast in it, if you were St Agatha (you are not nude)) over the edge. Below is another platform, also unstable, also secure. Pour into the middling-sized glass bowl. The water that you pour is full of flowers. You dip and orange ixora, yellow carnations, scarlet and white rose petals make the water thick and alarming. This is as sweet as blood. Clear on that. Limbed, glistening, repeated.

II

Lying blindfolded on the floor in a black box rigged by chaos, you are motionless at his feet. Motionless means breathing. You are not dead. You may be nude, or painted; underworn, or unitarded; clothed in some way as if sewn into your skin, or as if skin is sewn on, and as if then freshly unclothed from your skin, meaning born rather than flayed, skinned of your clothes (but this will be supposed to have happened before (you just lie there)), you are ignored by him and knowable to any others as vulnerability in situ, a heap of lines that cannot be crossed out, except deletion by delivery is what his voice does. He reads in a beautiful voice. The evil in the room wants it petty, sieved, meshed, strained, howled: the voice surrounded by surrogate sound, the rustle of unhung shutters. But it is a beautiful voice. He does not notice you. He does not look down. He steps over you; over and around. He pours sand over you, without looking. He wets the sand with plain water from his travelling cup. He pats down the sand. This is your body.

III

Raising your right hand in the air in a black box rigged by chaos, you raise a long-stemmed iris into the air. Yellow river irises are called flags. This one is purple. Staying an iris-length away, outline the man. Iris-length varies according to how you fold your arm and where you hold the stalk. Whipped and immaculate, the giant reader is tied to his microphone with shredded clingfilm, the dolphin-choking image of liaisons past. There is wet sand along the ground beside him. There is a disaccordioned platform and spillage of water and flowers behind him. He reads with the abstraction of a bichon frisé abandoned in the Hofgarten. You stoop, stretch, circle, segment, re-attach the relation of your body to the space around him. The iris is painterly. It brushes him into existence. The long Chinese scroll of himself acquires a mountain of characters. Is this a ritual of freeing or a ritual of realisation? In an alternative version of this performance, there were only two audience members. All the black plastic chairs facing the reader were empty. One audience member stood behind the reader’s right shoulder, in shadow, revolving slowly on the spot. The other stood at an angle to the reader’s left shoulder: a mannequin with a blonde wig placed on the neck, and no face. In the original version, there is no revolution and no pre-execution. There is sand, water, metal, glass and petals. The black plastic chairs may or may not be full. The task is to notice whether the rhythm of the outlining iris’s touch and the voice with its beautiful cadence form together a thing too harmonious for a black box: the conjuration of a field; conjuration on which a door can be shut, or opened.

IV

Shaken from the upper balcony...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Contents
• Epigraph
• I: PROLOGUE
• II: BLACKBOX CLEANOUT
• III: SPARKS
• IV: ASTRONOMER OF FREEDOM
• V: IN FLAMES
• VI: EPILOGUE
• Acknowledgements
• About the Author
• Also by Vahni Capildeo
• Copyright