Measures of Expatriation
"Expatriation: my having had a patria, a fatherland, to leave, did not occur to me until I was forced to invent one. [...] This luxury of inattention, invention, and final mismatch... a "Trinidad" being created that did not take my Trinidad away (my Trinidad takes itself away, in reality, over time)... that is expatriation, no? An exile, a migrant, a refugee, would have been in more of a hurry, would have been more driven out or driven towards, would have been seeking and finding not".
In "Measures of Expatriation" Vahni Capildeo's poems and prose-poems speak of the complex alienation of the expatriate, and address wider issues around identity in contemporary Western society. Born in Trinidad and resident in the UK, Capildeo rejects the easy depiction of a person as a neat, coherent whole – "pure is a strange word" – embracing instead a pointilliste self, one grounded in complexity. In these texts sense and syntax are disrupted; languages rub and intersect; dream sequences, love poems, polylogues and borrowed words build into a precarious self-assemblage. "Cliche", she writes, "is spitting into the sea", and in this book poetry is still a place where words and names, with their power to bewitch and subjugate, may be disrupted, reclaimed. The politics of the body, and cultures of sexual objectification, gender inequality and casual racism, are the borders across which Capildeo homes, seeking the modest luxury of being "looked at as if one is neutral ground". In the end it is language itself, the determination to speak, to which the poet finds she belongs: "Language is my home, I say; not one particular language". "Measures of Expatriation" is in the vanguard of literature arising from the aftermath of Empire, with a fearless and natural complexity. "Expatriation: my having had a patria, a fatherland, to leave, did not occur to me until I was forced to invent one. [...] This luxury of inattention, invention, and final mismatch... a "Trinidad" being created that did not take my Trinidad away (my Trinidad takes itself away, in reality, over time)... that is expatriation, no? An exile, a migrant, a refugee, would have been in more of a hurry, would have been more driven out or driven towards, would have been seeking and finding not".
About the Author
Born in Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago, Vahni Capildeo has lived in the UK since 1991, where she has published four poetry collections including "Undraining Sea" (2009), "Dark and Unaccustomed Words" (2012) – longlisted for the 2013 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature – and "Utter" (2013). She read English at Christ Church, Oxford and subsequently became a Rhodes Scholar there, studying Old Norse and translation theory, before undertaking a Research Fellowship at Girton College, Cambridge. It was there that she completed her first two books, "No Traveller Returns" (2003) and "Person Animal Figure" (2005). A long-time contributing editor to the Caribbean Review of Books, she is also contributing advisor to Black Box Manifold. In addition to poetry she also writes prose; excerpts from her book-length work One Skattered Skeleton have been published in various places, including Ian Sinclair's "London: City of Disappearances" (2006).
Reviews
"So much of the world has been rendered familiar by the industries of interpretation (including the literary) that it takes a genius to recover its real intransigence. It is like being brought up hard against an unmoveable rock amidst all the torrents of counterfeited poetry when you catch hold of any poem by Capildeo" – Rod Mengham
