Sometimes I post something short online about how I feel about my writing practice, but I want to say more. I guess that’s what ‘this’ is. The more. The excessive, leaky articulations. The long, drawn out thoughts that can feel like they belong nowhere except in the hazy split second before sleep. Marginalia and residue. The often de-centred and self-conscious. The space where I can care a little less ∙ the unfiltered ∙ the I am not perfect. Everything left out, everything fragmentary, everything peripheral. A digital archive of elsewheres.
I’m thinking of entre-ban, Bhanu Kapil’s chapbook which holds the notes and deletions from Ban en Banlieue.
Prose work: a pamphlet, a way to transcribe the notes I took for Ban in so many notebooks but did not include. Everything we left out. The publisher and I. No, it was me, on a terrible domestic day in Faridabad, the Gandhi colony, to be precise. Delete, delete, click. At the end of that awful day, which I have described elsewhere and can describe to you if you contact me directly, I deleted fifty or sixty pages of Ban. I deleted two hundred pages with a simple click, wondering if anybody would notice. They did not! The publisher went ahead without a murmur, as did I.
So here is my place to keep things, a place to house all the adjacent thoughts, notes, dreams, reflections, and whatever else doesn’t seem to fit. A space for things to bleed out—the things I read, the things I love, the things I want to save, somewhere, for some reason that might not be clear to me yet.
If you’re reading this, I should let you know these letters will only ever hold together loosely. They won’t be linear or continuous. They definitely won’t be polished. They are meditations on life and the mundane; a way to clear the throat; a way to dislodge whatever builds up in the body. I want this to be a space where I can lose the pressure and turn away from eyes that are expecting something brilliant or epiphanic. I want to shake off the gatekeeping, the ongoing machine of production that is fracturing my sense of self, the way I have slipped into commodifying my art.
These letters will hopefully mean something (to me, to you, to future me). They are, after all, a kind of field note. A discontinuous document of my life. Here you can expect to find, for example, discursive thoughts after a morning walk up Calton Hill. Or, photographs of a freshly hatched lime hawk-moth drying its wings. And, I can’t promise that I won’t write an entire paragraph about the wind.
Then there’s the body. I’ve been told before that I write too much about the body, and a different, past, version of myself revised the body away. God, isn’t that painful? Both because of what was lost in the process, but also because of all the accompanying shame. Sometimes, I feel so much shame across so many intersections. It’s unbearable and it makes me want to retreat. What are the implications of telling a queer woman of colour that she writes too much about the body? What is the [narrative] framework, the assumption, that builds around me with every new thing I make and tentatively let exist out of my control? So yes, the body too. All of its stiff cartilage. All of the parts I wish I loved better. All the versions of the self I wish I had been kinder to.
I find myself returning to these lines from a poem in progress:
If I could walk through time I would visit the other rains
that touched my other bodies.
I would treat my other bodies with more kindness.
A poem is, in a way, a viewfinder. It has the potential to crystallise the thing we spend our lives orbiting. It also has the potential to focus in on the thing we want people to perceive, cropping out everything else. And I oscillate constantly between all of this, the craft of frame and focus. But, like Kapil’s entre-ban, I am interested in what exists outside the frame. ‘Delete, delete, click.’ In the poem, I tell you that I would treat my other bodies with more kindness. In the margins, in the elsewheres, I admit that I haven’t been kind to this self, all her contours and realities, for months.
But of course, there is the complexity of the unsaid, how revealing something is also a particular kind of craft. Like Dionne Brand writes in The Blue Clerk, the “left-handed pages have already created their own left-handed pages.” And at the end of it all, I know I am still a writer and this is all somewhat pretense too. You know that I am reflecting in an affected voice. A methodology of beauty. A lyric mode.
Anyway, welcome to this porous space. I think I’ll end with the photograph of that very pretty lime hawk-moth.