Vahni Capildeo

- Trinidad and Tobago, United Kingdom, -

Vahni Capildeo’s multilingual, cross-genre writing is grounded in time experienced through place. Her DPhil in Old Norse literature and translation theory, her travels, and her Indian diaspora/Caribbean background deepen the voices in the landscapes which inspire her. Her poetry (six books and four pamphlets) includes Venus as Bear, which was the Poetry Book Society Summer Choice 2018, and Measures of Expatriation, awarded the Forward Best Collection Prize 2016. She has worked in academia; in culture for development, with Commonwealth Writers; as an Oxford English Dictionary lexicographer. Capildeo has held the Judith E. Wilson Poetry Fellowship and the Harper-Wood Studentship at Cambridge, and a Douglas Caster Cultural Fellowship at the University of Leeds.

Born in Trinidad and a long-time UK resident, Vahni Capildeo explores migration, expatriation and displacement with a self-styled pointilliste approach. In not so dissimilar a manner to this neo-impressionist technique of painting, albeit replacing crowded dots of pure colour with conscientious lyric, one that interrogates the notion of pure origin (“pure is a strange word”), Capildeo’s poetry crafts a complex portrait of the chaos and contradiction of identity. The memoiristic polylogues and prose-poems of Measures of Expatriation (Carcanet), which won the Forward Prize for Best Collection in 2016, tend to this task with the “luxury of inattention, invention, and final mismatch” (‘Five Measures of Expatriation’).

My having had a patria, a fatherland, to leave, did not occur to me until I was forced to invent one. This was the result of questions. The questions were linked to my status elsewhere. Transferring between elsewhere, I had to lay claim to a somewhere, sometimes a made-up-on-the-spot somewhere. (‘Five Measures of Expatriation’).

Exposing the performative illusion behind the perfectly coherent ideal, the lyrical peregrinations of Measures of Expatriation examine a phenomenon of exile from the self as much as from any set geographical location. Pitted against the proof-seeking backdrop of bureaucratic farce, the rigorous need for forward planning and the rustle of evidential documents, the poems disclose a décalage existential of sorts between the speaker’s bones and its business.

she is disconnected from her corporeal self. I am feeling
out of touch with my body: it feels like something I have been given to look
after. When I bathe I feel that I am washing it, not that I am bathing. She
likes that I speak of it as being a thing I take care of, like a costume of a
small animal (‘Too Solid Flesh’)

A curious fascination with the acquisition of weight is present: “Reading could fix me. It could be a way to acquire weight”, which is expressive of her poetic outlook more widely. “Might a description get me closer to making it mine, or at least an understanding of why I am at odds / with it?”. Ultimately, it is within the architecture of language that Capildeo makes her home. “Language is my home. It is alive other than in speech. It is beyond a thing to be carried with me. It is ineluctable, variegated and muscular.”

On every page, lurking behind the skin of the language, there is a subtle poetics of escape at play. Capildeo, herself, invokes comparison between the linguistic sentence and prison sentence in Venus as a Bear (Carcanet), her latest collection. “Moss induces words / in us because, grave & new, we sentence things; whereas / moss carpets, respires, pulls back, is.” (‘Moss for Maya’). Taking pointers from the sprawling phenomenon of moss, her poems strive to liberate the signifier from the signified, thus signalling liberation. “Whoever drew you also caged you”, Capildeo remarks after analysing the frictive glosses of gouache on paper in ‘The Last Night, A Nightingale’, a lamentation which informs her conception of language as cage-like. “How to ‘lose’ or ‘abandon’ a word? Put it in jail, throw away / the key?”, she asks in ‘Bullshit’. Embarking on this quest, Capildeo, formerly an OED lexicographer with an Oxford DPhil in Old Norse, plumbs the depths of a rich and roaming lexicon with passion. ‘The Chomsky Bequest: Towards a grammar from eighteenth-century glass’ (‘Through & Through’), offers the best glimpse into her wanderlust approach to words.

Diamond-point square afterthoughts quaff piratically.
Milky skippy vignettes land militantly.
Flammable wheeling sisters grave triumphantly.
Colourless green ideals double readily.

Capildeo’s vivid use of language, intrepid and intense, leads the tongue into unexpected territory – stumbling over concurrent possibilities, readers emerge ‘triumphantly’ with the treasure of strange new associations, as in the onomatopoeic adventures of ‘Brant Geese’.

open a bubble of babble

swagger and swallow a vowel

turd it turn it shine it slime it

give it wings stretch it – a gaggle

The prolixity, oftentimes quite a mouthful, emphasises the materiality of language, lending it a muscular rhythm. As a result, a unique concept of living language comes bounding into focus, “our pack of languages, fluid as hounds / all ready: bathed: riteful: already intending chase” (‘Sycorax Whoops’ in Measures of Expatriation). At the core of this thrilling chase, there is a willingness to be moulded and twisted into various forms in a way that resists definitive readings, complementing the poet’s rejection of reductive assumptions surrounding race and identity.

written by Jade Cuttle

More about the poet

Poetry

/ WINTER TO WINTER: FEBRUARY

I. Via Porta Romana

This is the thing I will remember forever,
she said – the moon above the European flag,
the flag above the chalk-pale palace,
the calcium-faced palace holding the street
half distant in an unequal embrace;
this is the thing I will remember forever,
walking towards the river into a past midwinter –
she said, forgetting fast.

[…]

V. Cherries Out of Season

It mimics fever. At first it dismays
the children of warm climates.
The cold
draws ropes through the fingers; the cold
calls for thermal pulses, makes
the hand aware of how it is made,
not of what it can do; the cold
has it searching for a sense.
In the cold
a sense of life comes to seem
like a triumph; less is enough.

The breath strikes the inward face.
It shivers against the sculpture of the skull.
It tingles with unfamiliarity upon the rim of the skull.
The flesh seems to have come loose.
Each inbreath brings glass
to scope and spike the linings of the skull.
Outbreaths shatter inside.
The skull
harbours sinuses, folds of softness,
delicate like asters, apt to be blackened.

The heart no longer believes
in its vertical labour.
It clamours to stop
this vertical labour.
It wants the relief
of a drop to all fours; to give
the spine and ribs a chance to curve
into a warm ball. The rest would follow.

As we walked
all thoughts were taken from us, except
    frost
frost frost
    frost
as we were walking;
and, over and above that,
s   n   o   w.

Kisses are cherries out of season.
The weather wants to be alone.
/ IN A DREAM

In what dream did I begin with you?
In what dream did I belong with you?
Every grey is edged with yellow,
this spit of narrow land is thrown
open between law and access,
the savage deliveries of sea.

One day I’ll sleep   and that will be for a long time
and while I’m in a dream   all will have dream status
and while all’s scheduled for dream   it will not matter
on the day of the longest dream   that you are part
in the dreaming   picking up where earlier glimpses
slipped painful perfections into which feet of sleep
walked   and as they walked   meadows began outspreading
slides of sleepscape   fourdimensional eyes of sleep
saw   and as they saw   you were there   more than spirit
easy   enduring   choosing our bodies’ company
all the while you sang a trivial lyrical song
rhyming treasure   leisure   pausing to kiss and breathe
breathing being less required
Spirited away
I’ll recall this sleep: reality. Like no dream
the years’ complicated origami of hurt
in a dream   falling away   a puckered swan’s fell
once blistered the maiden’s skin inside   since   freely
tender to know   not to be urged to take   the air
dreaming   the false detachment of mornings cracked through
in its paper-lipped crudity of graph and talon   vivid line
grasping for its own excesses
One day of sleep the longest sleep and in a dream
so much will be suddenly unnecessary
shoes   when we’re entering an ocean   obvious
for what has been obvious   our long-unseen dream
/ UTTER

First I tried to hide it from itself.
Then I tried to hide it from myself.
I tried quite hard to hide it from you,
even when we knew that was no use.
After all this hiding, no surprise
it’s like a thing in translation:
eggshell-shy. A thumb’s worth of glory,
nesting near the coastlines of your palm.
/ MERCY AND ESTRANGEMENT

His heart hurtling towards me
I not caring to catch it
it turns into a bird, turns:
a scavenger bird lightfoot
alights on foam, contests white
as silver tilts white, silver
as refuse seams silver, gawks,
jinks, is radiated by charts
charted inly: magnetic,
unhoming because transformed.
A rill and jitter brought me
—birdform, my heart—to the park
where state translators, laid off,
sat sad for their hospitals,
prisons and schools. Laws whistled
infixes between trained ears.
And at our conference,
so many equivalents
for gracias and Verfremdung,
easy change amongst false friends.
/ Going Nowhere, Getting Somewhere

How was it that till questioned, till displaced in the attempt to answer, I had scarcely thought of myself as having a country, or indeed as having left a country? The answer lies peripherally in looming, in hinterland; primarily in the tongueless, palpitating interiority. Trinidad was. Trinidad is. In the same way, some confident speakers do not think of themselves as having an accent. They will say so: “I don’t have an accent! You have an accent!” In those accentless voices compass points spin, ochre and ultramarine flagella fling themselves identifiably towards this that or the other region. It is a motile version of that luxury, solidity, non-reflectivity that is the assumption of patria. So different is the expat from the refugee, who has her country on her back, or the migrant, who has countries at his back.

What would I have called home, before I began creating home? Before I had to learn to ravel up longitude, latitude, population, oil rigs, mobile phone masts, prayer flags, legality of fireworks, likely use of firearms, density and disappearance of forests, scarlet ibis, other stripes of scarlet, into a by-listeners-unvisited, communicable, substantial image of ‘Trinidad’?

Language is my home. It is alive other than in speech. It is beyond a thing to be carried with me. It is ineluctable, variegated and muscular. A flicker and drag emanates from the idea of it. Language seems capable of girding the oceanic earth, like the world-serpent of Norse legend. It is as if language places a shaping pressure upon our territories of habitation and voyage; thrashing, independent, threatening to rive our known world apart.

Yet thought is not bounded by language. At least, my experience of thinking does not appear so bound.

One day I lost the words wall and floor. There seemed no reason to conceive of a division. The skirting-board suddenly reduced itself to a nervous gentrification, a cover-up of some kind; nothing especially marked. The room was an inward-focused container. ‘Wall’, ‘floor’, even ‘ceiling’, ‘doorway’, ‘shutters’ started to flow smoothly, like a red ribbed tank top over a heaving ribcage. Room grew into quarter. Room became segment. Line yearned till it popped into curve. The imperfections of what had been built or installed: the ragged windowframe or peeling tile: had no power to reclaim human attention to ‘floor’ or ‘wall’ as such. Objects were tethered like astronauts and a timid fringe of disarrayed atmosphere was the immediate past that human activity kept restyling into present. The interiority of the room was in continuous flow. Wall, floor became usable words again in a sort of silence.

I had the sense to shut up about the languageless perception. Procedure for living.

Language is my home, I say; not one particular language.
/ STALKER

For K.M. Grant

He waits. Without knowing me,
he waits. The tips of branches,
edible and winey, bring
spring by suggestion to him
who in autumn dawn, eager,
with wet knees, disregards me,
being drawn by me. He waits
and in me he waits. I branch,
the form is branching, it bounds
like sight from dark to bright, back
again. The form is from me:
it is him, poem, stag, first sight
and most known. In him I wait:
(when he falls) needs must (hot heap),
nothing left over (treelike
no longer) nor forlorn: we're
totalled.
/ INISHBOFIN: I

For Rebecca Barr

A stranger bringing water to a stranger.
One unlocked house among all unlocked houses.
A line of stone along a line of clover.
Beyond a road with stone and clover edges
A looked-for line between wet sky and water
Seams non-existence: large and swift, headed out,
Disappeared in a tilting and a pouring.
How have I been so stupid and not known this?
Heaven most probably is underwater,
Sounding with ease, increasing pressure on us.
Too light for many stars. Too soon for most birds.
Crex crex: a hidden and unvarnished corncrake.
Some way ahead, Rebecca in the pink.
/ INISHBOFIN: II

For Deirdre Ní Chonghaile

You do just have to listen to the boatman.
Let the boatman make the decision.
/ INISHBOFIN: III

For Bernard O’Donoghue

The road goes two ways: right and left,
obvious, the bright white dust;
sure as last year and yesterday,
the harbour where friends disembark
without confusion for the climb
towards the hall on the small hill.
Nothing is interchangeable:
shop, slope, feelproof bone called sand,
variant seaweed, boundary stones.
Dark-sailed and unmistakable.
This man walking from inside light
to outside. Fierce, eventful brain.
Leader through telescopic fields.
Yet if kindness walked with flags,
he’d still be taller.
Like a child
old age is not, and he is not –
He has stopped. And here it starts:
“I very easily get lost.”
A voice of great sweetness and trust.
Nothing is interchangeable.
This exercise that hurts the heart.
Red-hulled and unmistakable.
/ INISHBOFIN: IV

sea for a bit
lovingly lifting it off
this felted skin
this roof needing resurfaced
/ FIELD POSTCARD: RONDEAU-STYLE TEXT

Nothing is to be written on this side
except the date and signature of the sender.
Sentences not required may be erased.
If anything else is added the postcard will be destroyed.

So carry marigolds, show sorrow: hide
July war in flowers at home; their code is tender.
Nothing is to be written on this side
except the date and signature of the sender.

April he fell in flames; lilies of the valley implied
humility, poppies oblivion; tender
your papers – no letter lately wounded, no parcel well erased,
apple blossom admitted, rose follows, iris destroyed.

Nothing is to be written on this side
except the date and signature of the sender.
Sentences not required may be erased.
If anything else is added the postcard will be destroyed.

Vahni Capildeo

- Trinidad and Tobago, United Kingdom, -

Poetry

/ WINTER TO WINTER: FEBRUARY

/ IN A DREAM

/ UTTER

/ MERCY AND ESTRANGEMENT

/ Going Nowhere, Getting Somewhere

/ STALKER

/ INISHBOFIN: I

/ INISHBOFIN: II

/ INISHBOFIN: III

/ INISHBOFIN: IV

/ FIELD POSTCARD: RONDEAU-STYLE TEXT