excerpts from Broomrider's book of the dead

by Mukta Sambrani

When I write I break into two and then three. I write because I like to think of the press clamoring to meet me. I am likely not to be understood here in the east and there in the west. I like my work to have two headings as far as possible. Like having two heads. Writing about the self in the third person is a gift Ishmail doesn't care about. When I write I have voice. Voices find themselves in me. The line is punctuated like the pauses between waves hitting rock. I have memories and books Ishmail sends me.

Anna and the literary leach

(when Ishmail thought Anna's book had promise, he made some phone calls)

I write because I know no other way.

...the politics of purposefulness implied in the work is hardly less satisfactory...enhances what the writer calls ``non-existent mysteriousness''... Non-ness implies the existence of the thing.

I don't write about culture or identity.

...immense talent for negation

English is my first language.

Great gift for irony and great talent for a language not her own. ...more of the purposefulness of politics in the measured use of words replaces the missing possibility of the multitude of expression possible in the mother language.

I don't write from myths. They find themselves in my work.

magical transformations...

My life before this has nothing to do with what I am writing now.

...humility which can only come from the east and a gentle shyness... charming readers everywhere

I write as a tribute to the life before. I also write to mingle my life with the life before this language, the life before Christ, the life before this narrative and phonology. Anna Albuquar is the point of intersection. She has been received with degrees of misgiving and criticism about technique and politics. My protagonist and I come from the same place in words. I am told that she is not I, is something I merely like to believe. So I have allowed her to rest for a year and discovered her language is where it always was, raw and luminous. Mine is uncertain and evolving.

Anna's poetics

(after a number of inconsequential interviews, they asked her to write)

It is not without trepidation that I approach the subject. I have always believed that after writing a poetics statement, one dies. That is the reward. I don't write for rewards, literary or otherwise.

I am suspicious of writing my own poetics statement. Here is what I do best: I invoke the muse. I close my eyes and have a supernatural experience and imagine trauma and poetry on the same page.

I am suspicious of my relationship with the written word. I am suspicious of my relationship with writers. I am suspicious of my relationships. I am suspicious. I shudder to think what if I am not.

In the life before this language, I imagine extremes of opulence and depravity. In the life before Christ I imagine other conquests. I imagine sailing east and west between the cape and the peninsula. I imagine languages walking across many mountains. Knowing for many years that talking to animals is no myth. Knowing that imagination about beings from outer space is the same as cultural gaze and the fear of the unknown.

I fear that if not in this life, I will leave things unfulfilled. Someone will have to find my notebooks then.

In the life after I have come to believe that if not in this language, then in nothing else and if not in this life then nowhere else. I must learn suspicion from Anna and know that no one will find notebooks after the recycling plant. It is Anna who likes to use the word I more than twenty seven times in three quarters of a page as I shirk responsibility. Neurosis, affliction, anguish, desire, conflict, successful and unsuccessful writing.

Not saying

this or have been well

he or words

can't say whether

schizoid or twin or someone else

all is

not

violating the grass on the other side

stained water

The lee side of the mountain faces away from the first door to the heart. Which is your favorite place? They are all my favorite. Above the door hang hand-embroidered decorations. There is a small circular mirror in the middle of each clover. Every clover has a large flower around it. Each large flower hangs from a hexagon sealed carefully with tiny buttonhole stitches. The windward side faces downward from the heart. When the organ on the other side was swollen, much care was called for. The swollen organ sustained no long-term damage but people went without sweets and fried food that holiday season. Sipping on his bowl of over-cooked vegetable stew, father writes a letter about the small body in pain that is mostly home bound this winter. When the sun comes out, the druid and his large stainless steel dish arrive. After a small meal of raisins and dates the child sits, hands and feet in the deep water dish. The druid recites in whispers washing the yellowness out of the child. The rest of the house is mostly quiet. It metabolizes the sun and the absence of restless feet on the porch tiles.

Now that she thinks of it, Anna would be happier calling the druid, “Jadibootiwala” or root and herb man. Druid sounds too foreign to the sense of the man who wore a dusty white dhoti and tiger's teeth, or so he said in the amulet around his throat. Anna wants this poem to appear in small font because this is a memory and memories when revisited have the strangest way of shrinking the places they were set in. And the poem is about being small.

of bricolage

when the unrested and fierce decline

and when unrested the fierce decline

and when fierce the unrested decline

all point to cohesion

with the poem ends purpose

who says that of words

elephant swings

his trunk is sheet metal music

or black gold swings elephant

hidden from the rest of the world

the rest of the world hidden from

from the rest of the world hidden intention

speak to my mother tongue

to speak mother my tongue clipped

to my mother speak tongue

what word for language in language

in what language word for language speak

for language word in what language