Second Memory, Alycia Pirmohamed and Pratyusha
Baseline Press, 2021
Second Memory’s prose poems – or “diasporic epistles,” as noted in an opening nod to Sandeep Parmar’s Threads – frequently give form to perhaps one of the most enigmatic features of human experience, how the absence of something can feel just as tangible as something present. Take an early poem in the collaboration, one that offers a startling vision of poetic metaphor. The paradox of metaphor, how it neither affirms nor denies that which it describes, is deeply admired in this plain-spoken poem about one of poetry’s primary devices: “I love metaphor for its absence-presence. I love metaphor for its carcass, marked by love and love’s descendent, the latter of which must sustain the forty day journey. Too alike, two alike, they are the source of ritual, of concurrence.” Unlike a proposition which represents something as is or is not, poetic metaphor is an interplay between reality and a non-existent world composed of things related in unreal ways (the imagination). In this poem, there’s at the very least the suggestion this interplay is loved because it makes the supposed lifelessness of reality (“carcass”) available to sustain the imagination. And if the grammar is read to suggest that the imagination is a “descendent” of reality, then one is left to wonder if the role of the poet is to oversee a “ritual” in which the imagination consumes this carcass, the viscera of reality. Much of the poetry that describes metaphor-making as ravenous, feverish or even just passionate fails to flesh out imagery appropriate for these states of being. A vision of reality serving as the progenitor and corporeal sustenance for the imagination is strikingly original. It startles and crosses comfort boundaries, which is fitting given its subject is metaphor, the transference of meaning across conceptual boundaries.
The visibility of absence has direct bearing on the experiences that surround diaspora. One poem addressed to Pratyusha attests to the (dis)connection ensuing from having lived in a geographical area different from one’s ancestral homeland. Raised in Canada and educated in the United States and United Kingdom, Pirmohamed describes feeling alienated upon visiting Dar es Salaam in her ancestral Tanzania through organic language: “like fruit growing around the stone, language grew around my grotesquely Western body.” Here, the alienation of diaspora is two-fold: there’s the physical distance between oneself and one’s family origin and the added cultural gulf that imprints this distance on a person. The acute push and pull toward a place of familial significance is made particularly wrenching by the ineffability, the qualifications, and pleas to be understood characterizing Pirmohamed’s language. This excerpt is from the same poem:
P, I want to tell you exactly how he said it, the graveyard keeper, when he told my father that my grandmother’s grave fell into the river. I know this is a re-narrativisation, unreal and purified, a rearrangement of the dead and the living: an extravagance. I can’t retrieve the words now. Still, believe me, I tasted the river and its current, its taxonomy and tradition. We spent all afternoon looking for that plot of land. Her plot of land. It was once there, and then it was gone.
The figure of the ghost in the collaboration also resonates with the unique forms of distance characterizing diaspora. In one poem, a ghost is an ancestor preventing one from falling asleep, “plait[ing] my hair with her journey.” In another poem referring to that same nighttime visitation, the ghost of the ancestor paces the room, “heels wet with geography,” an affectively haunting image given additional intrigue by another poem’s statement that “A ghost is not an organism, nor is it fully light.” These lines vividly place the emotional immediacy of family within the contrasting frame of spatial distance. But what I really like about these lines is how they fan out and develop across Second Memory. The sense of internalized distance they initially impress upon the reader transforms into (or perhaps proves to have always been?) a precondition for the writing of poetry. Haunting becomes a creative inhabitation related to – though significantly different from – classical inspiration, that idea of “inhalation” as the intake of a spirit granting energy to poetic making. The poem marking this transformation is a late poem in the chapbook:
Forests grow silent, waiting for her presence again. I go to the riverbank, awaiting the haunting. You speak of a knife that slices cleanly at the root; remove the forest roots and you are left with only ghosts. Mātaṅgī governs the ghosts of the forest. She recognizes the ghosts in me. We enact worlds through words, we inhabit worlds through words. I think of my ancestors in blurred visions, but summon them through carefully chosen words, invoking Mātaṅgī, the goddess of word-expression.
I commend the authors for the craftmanship required to perform this conceptual lifting in such simple, crystalline language. Mātaṅgī, a Hindu goddess here represented as a patron of word-expression, assists in the summoning of the poet’s ancestors. Haunting the poet’s consciousness, ancestors are subsequently ushered into what might be called “clarity,” a reoccurring term in Second Memory associated with promises of love and the reflective qualities of water.
One quickly notices when reading Second Memory’s epistles the presence of speculative and theoretical texts. Whatever their manner of integration, the quoted material stands forth distinctly as reflective, something akin to the role of an active listener. In the poem about metaphor noted above, the inclusion of another’s work doesn’t conclude the poem with an evocative flair so much as subtly echo its insight about the constitution of metaphor and resonate with diaspora. The quote in question is from Billy-Ray Belcourt’s NDN Coping Mechanisms: “It is there, in the neighbourhood of experience, that my childhood home is nowhere to be found.” In another poem, a quote from Donna Haraway pointing to the distinction between humans and machines being “leaky” clears ground for a lush poem that enigmatically describes the eye as “a machine that blurs the tracing of a name.” Another quotes from Sandra Cisneros’s Woman Hollering Creek and then integrates that spotlighted language in the ensuing poem. One could go on at length about the polyvocality of Second Memory. Perhaps what Roland Barthes (incidentally one of the many referenced authors) says in the introduction to A Lover’s Discourse about the inclusion of others in his text best describes the spirit in which quotations signify in Second Memory (including his speculative parenthetical): “The references supplied in this fashion are not authoritative but amical: I am not invoking guarantees, merely recalling, by a kind of salute given in passing, what has seduced, convinced, or what has momentarily given the delight of understanding (of being understood?).”[ii]
If there is a challenge to how absence and presence manifests and affects readers, it ensues from Second Memory’s organization. The chapbook’s diasporic epistles are not presented in a chronological manner, nor is the voice of each poem consistently identified. In a chapbook composed of less than twenty pages of poetry this might be a minor issue, if not one that could be partially justified as reflecting nonlinear conceptions of time or how memory often unfolds non-sequentially. The matter of voice could also be explained away as a technical decision meant to signal a reluctance to take ownership of voice in such a polyvocal collaboration. Nevertheless, when these things work together, they often diminish the emotional intensity of the poems. A reader goes from one poem to the next unsure of whether it belongs to the same voice. She also wonders whether the next poem replies in the spirit of a letter or acts as a wedge between the first poem and a later response. When she does encounter a poem clearly responding to an earlier one, what was elicited is relived as a diminished echo rather than as a restoked fire due to the distance. In short, questions over who is speaking and to what larger dialogic purpose make a seamless reading of Second Memory difficult.
But in this difficulty is something of Second Memory’s power as a collaboration. If it is taken for granted that poetry clears a space for truth and that a change of perspective about the self is possible, it is left to be asked whether poetry can facilitate that change in self-understanding. Most readers, I assume, would reply with an emphatic yes to this proposal. That I do not know if a change in self-understanding occurred for Pirmohamed and Pratyusha takes some of the rhetorical oomph from my point but makes it no less tenable. Second Memory dramatizes the transformative potential of being in creative proximity to another, in making poetry alongside another making poetry – and serves as a reminder by its example. The creativity enabled by ancestors, ostensibly revealed by one poet, reverberates so strongly with all the poems in Second Memory that it stands to reason that it deeply affected the other poet, lending clarity to an idea of self and family. The other images that reverberate through the voices across the collection lead me to the same conclusion. Being unable to determine who is responsible for this interplay or how exactly it is plotted becomes less important when one is hears the reverberations. In its synergy, in how its individual details create patterns of larger significance, Second Memory is like a vivid constellation. Ultimately, it is the diligence and patience of the reader that determines whether the view is obstructed, whether the night sky is cloudless.
