Tracking the Traffic of Glyphs across Oceans: A Dialogue with Divya Victor

Divya Victor’s writing, editing, and research focuses on 20th- and 21st-century poetry and poetics, with an emphasis on innovative and experimental forms and poets who undertake representations of trauma, both systemic and intersubjective. She is the author of Curb (Nightboat Books, winner of PEN America Open Book Award and the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award), Kith (Fence Books / Book*hug), Scheingleichheit: Drei Essays (Merve Verlag), Natural Subjects (Trembling Pillow, Winner of the Bob Kaufman Award), UNSUB (Insert Blanc), and Things to Do with Your Mouth (Les Figues). An associate professor of English and writing at Michigan State University, her work has been collected in numerous venues, including BOMB, the New Museum’s The Animated Reader, Crux: Journal of Conceptual Writing, The Best American Experimental Writing, Poetry, and boundary2.

The following discussion concerning Victor’s recently published book Curb took place between East Lansing, Michigan and Montréal, Québec, and has been adapted and edited so that the recorded live exchange could best appear in print.

Michael Nardone:
I first encountered Divya Victor’s work just over a decade ago through the Troll Thread publishing collective, of which she was then co-editor. I remember feeling thrilled by her work and wondering: who is this writer? I was interested in the conceptual rigor of Victor’s poetics, which worked outside the main lines of the discourse of conceptual writing of that era. I was interested to see work that made use of some of the dynamics present in that discourse toward interrogating cultural practices and processes, especially documents. Her work engaged information genres in which language is deployed to regulate and police and surveil and commit violence against bodies. I loved that Divya’s work was taking this on, engaging it from a periphery, from what was then a margin. I saw in Divya’s work a writer working from within the US empire on discourse centered in the US, but using her work to counter it and its rhetoric, while looking to establish dialogues with writers across several hemispheres.

To give a short introduction to my own reading of Curb, I remember confronting the title and being surprised by it, its referencing such an unpoetic and banal object. Then, in reading the work, I was struck by how Divya’s fiercely internationalist perspective put under scrutiny such a thing as a curb, how she observes and thinks with the quotidian edges of everyday living: lawns, sidewalks, front doors, sites where familiar interiors meet social exteriors.

It is lyric and documentary poetry, and I want to discuss both of these categories and their relation today. It’s multilingual, and multilingual within English, which is another point I want to discuss today, while also bringing into its textuality other languages such as Tamil, Hindi, Urdu, Sanskrit, and Latin. It is grammatical poetry. I admire the way in which it displays and troubles grammar, while opening up such seemingly minute issues to their larger social terrains.

I believe Divya has written an incredible and necessary book to be reading right now, and I also believe that it is one that clearly articulates a model for poetry, for poetic practice that she been developing over the last decade—in terms of its lyric work, its research, the documentary poetics, the personal engagement of the work, combined with grammatical and linguistic exploration. I believe it is a model that will resonate far and wide in the time ahead.

Thank you, Divya, for the gift of this book, and thank you so much for joining me today.

Divya Victor:
That was a disarming introduction. You did warn me, but I was not prepared. As a poet writing from the periphery, as you said, Michael, it has been a life-giving experience to have you keep me company in the periphery for a surprisingly long time. Kithship in and because of poetry.

We could wade into our discussion with Curb by highlighting what you observed in your introduction—writing from and within the periphery. The inscriptive practices emerging from globalization draw connections to the medieval, to the scribes responding to the texts that they are merely copying. Writing in the margins has been a way of resisting or responding to the dominant narrative. Writing on the edge is where inversion happens. That is important for Curb, which is a book that examines the edges of domestic and public spaces as battlefields. The edge, however clear-cut and sharp, is the most ambiguous space: on the body, at an ecological zone, in built environments.

In terms of urban planning, the street’s curb forms the margin, drawing a dividing line between the private and the public. The questions of why you are moving on the sidewalk, and the question of who you are when you are in the public during that act of movement are central to Curb.

There is a line from Curb that could be a working title for this dialogue: “tracking the traffic of glyphs across oceans.” This is a line from the poem called “Pavement,” in which I am reckoning with the death of Divyendu Sinha. The poem is written, in part, as a response to 8 minutes of footage of Sinha’s wife, Alka Sinha, who is in a courtroom in New Jersey during the sentencing hearing for the assailants who unfortunately led to the death of her husband. She is moving her hands delicately across the line of her script. How important it is to her that she doesn’t miss a word. How wonderous it is that she is maintaining this bodily practice that we sometimes retain from childhood when we are trying to learn a new language. It was important to me that we pay attention to this image of a woman reading in a juridical context. The preciousness of every single word in Alka’s testimony—I wanted that as my charge when I wrote Curb. So I am, in fact, “tracking the traffic of glyphs across oceans” as a poet belonging to English in some ways, but in my trafficking, I am then also betraying so many other languages. As a poet, I am ferrying language across the oceans. So, both of these things: both the periphery (the margin, the edge) and the labor of trafficking in glyphs are important ways for me to think about Curb.

MN:
I remember coming across a question you wrote in a text related to Curb: “How can poetry be a space in which my family survives?” There is an arc in your poetry of the last decade in which you interrogate documents and the histories instantiated in them in order to locate kith across time and geographies.

Curb takes up the incredible work of addressing specific generations of kith—of wanting to enact them in and through poetry, protect them, allow them to be convivial in the face of depredation, and support their vital exchange for generations to come. I’m wondering if you might discuss the generations that are involved in this book and maybe describe, if you’re willing, your own experience of your family’s movements that are documented in this book?

DV:
Two political touchstones come to mind that could help us think about kithship, the importance of multi-generational or transgenerational documentation, and poetry as a kind of survival. The first: in 2021, we have a generation of people in their twenties who have been shaped entirely by post-9/11 events and policies. That is a whole generation of immigrants, Arabs, Middle Eastern folks, South Asian folks, children of immigrants who are defined by the acute suspicion that results from the exercise of post-9/11 freedoms for Christians and whites in the USA. The second: the conspiracy theory of “white replacement,” which is this idea that inclusive citizenship acts, immigration policies, foreign policy, voting reforms, and all of the work around empowering and enfranchising voters is related to the replacement of whites in this country. So, both of those are important conceptual anchors for me when I think about what a generation means and why a poem can be a kind of space where one can write for the protection and the survival of one’s kith.

I began to do the work “of” Curb in 2001 when I migrated to the US as an 18-year-old. I landed in the United States in April of 2001, and World Trade Center attacks happened when I was barely gaining my footing in the country. I suddenly found myself sobered in my view of the American dream. I felt rejected from my participation. As a writer, I see myself among those in that post-Patriot Act generation. That moment set up a new frame for how we relate to documents, how we relate to information and data, and how we relate to becoming information and data for the sake of the (supposed) security of others.

As a poet, the question I have is: “If my family and I have become information and data for the protection of those who have a dominant position in the United States, then how can my work offer a counterpoint to the use of bodies as data and information?” That helps me think about my relation to the documentary. The lyric offers a necessary dimension to understanding the document’s place in time just as a shadow applies to the body, just as a shadow allows the body to know where it is in relation to sky and the earth. I think of the lyric as the shadow of the document. This is where the document exists in space and time. The lyric shows you the shadow that is being created by that location.

MN:
The post-Patriot Act generation of writers you’re describing, this is something I’ve been attempting to articulate and describe over this last decade. This new relationship to documents, the new relationship of bodies to information and data, and the specter of security that you’re describing—this is what initially drew me toward the discourse of conceptual writing in its moment, in the hopes to take some of the tactics for composition discussed there toward a space of engaging such issues.

First, I know there is an extensive history of white self-deputization in the United States since its initial colonial settling. I think, though, white self-deputization takes on new forms after 9/11—in terms of the extent to which individuals permit themselves to regulate others’ lives according to white supremacist beliefs, and also on a structural level in terms of group organization, media support, and the mainstreaming of white supremacy within US party politics. This is a terrible and necessary terrain in which to explore language and its relation to bodies—one that I see as being a central consideration in Curb.

And second, I know this too has a much longer history, but for me and my coming into awareness as both a politicized being and a person engaged with literature, the post-9/11 landscape illustrated the impact of language on bodies to a monstrous degree. Here, I think to Iraq and the “weapons of mass destruction”—the way a ruling class with their array of journalists ready to partake in and give the greatest of amplitudes to their fabrications, the way in which corporations were lined up and ready to profit to a maximum on these fabrications, and how together this assemblage of individuals and entities deployed a succinct language to push through a narrative that was absolutely fictitious. I think every day of Donald Rumsfeld, the formidably monstrous rhetorician who looms at the threshold of the post-Patriot Act generation you describe.

DV:
Rumsfeld radically opened up the range of interpretation to which a human can be subjected as an object of information extraction. This, of course, is the foundation of the rational for torture. His statement: “There are known knowns…there are known unknowns”—that is an interpretive range. Any person can become a known known or a known unknown. He’s talking about the imagined “weapons of mass destruction.” In wake of 9/11, the brown, Arab, Sikh, Muslim other became deputized, rhetorically, as weapons of mass destruction in their singular human form, either as a known known or known unknown. Deputize: as in, ask someone to be responsible for someone else; to act in another’s stead; to become an embodied cipher.

South Asians and Middle Eastern folks became embodiments of this awful Rumsfeldian interpretive range: on one hand, the model minority, the known knowns; on the other hand, the known unknowns, the monstrous other, the terrorist, or the various slurs that are used to identify us. The equivalence drawn between the bodies of my kith and the speculative void of the weapon of mass destruction was key in defining that generation’s self-knowing.

As a poet, Michael, I don’t want to perform as a “known known”—writing poems with all of the exotic tropes, writing to assuage American guilt or ignorance. You know this. It’s a horrific obligation. I’m refusing that. In Kith, I wrote about my refusal to italicize myself and what I know. So, I refuse this performance of being a “known known”—this kind of safe entity that can be brought into literary festivals to present an experience of South Asian identity. But I also want to be able to refuse being a “known unknown”: this kind of nebulous darkening at the horizon, this horde, an undefinable mass, this “dusky peril” swarming in. I think Curb is trying to refuse both of these formulations for our weaponized condition as brown immigrants.

MN:
One of the questions I want to discuss with you concerns not specifically the multilinguality of the book, which I want to get to, but also the variations of English, of Englishes that are present in the book. It’s something I sense as emerging out of your living amid a variety of Englishes.

DV:
Let’s talk about Englishes. Biographically, I am constantly losing and reacquiring Englishes. I had to lose Indian English when I migrated as an 11 year old; then I took up Singlish when I lived in Singapore on and off. I also code-switch into Tamil Indian English, which is different from what we think of as a dominant strain of globalized Indian English. I then gave up predominantly living in Singlish, attempted American English and kept code-switching between US English, Singlish, Tamil Indian English and a more generalized British postcolonial formation. And everything—lexicons, dictions, accents, intonations, pacings—all of these things are constantly being impacted in that kind of tender, sometimes bloody, place where my location and my articulation meet.

Curb and Kith are invested in refusing the idea of language as private property and refusing the idea of linguistic identity as something that can be owned by a nation or state. I want to go beyond what Kamau Brathwaite has helpfully theorized as nation-language. Folks like me, who were learning from Caribbean and Black poets, needed that—what Brathwaite identified as an English that is like a “howl, or a shout, or a machine-gun, or the wind, or a wave.” But, in a moment where globalization is, of course, killing us, we need to go beyond it. We need the language of the howl to also embody the silences, the various Englishes, the pit of silenced or erased voices of documents. I’ve appreciated Dora Ahmed’s term: “rotten English.” It is such a useful umbrella term for global Englishes. I especially enjoy the way it refers to ripeness gone over. It is language beyond its utility for profit. What do we do with rotten fruit? What do we do with the rottenness that is English, with something gone over, beyond ripeness? You don’t even need to pluck it. It’s fallen. Not even the animals will touch it.

MN:
I want to say how amazed I was by your incorporation of Hindi in “Estates: Last Offices Concerning the Curbs of the Body.” There’s the first poem in the sequence where you connect the “him” with the “hum”—in Hindi, “we,” the plural collective pronoun. Then you connect “beyond the sea” to “videshi” (foreign, or foreigner)—forming two words tied together, in meaning and in sound. You feel this connection deeply in your juxtaposition of them. And then the “sanse” (breath) with “sense,” one following the other. So, in “Locution/Location,” the prior poem in the book, we have this incredible lyric working and unworking, this movement through these various Englishes. Then, following this, in “Estates,” the reader encounters a lyric work that ties together different languages, different grammars, different scripts even.

DV:
I’m so glad we’re talking about “Estates.” To state the biographical fact: growing up in India, my supposed mother tongue, which is Tamil, was ousted or usurped by English, which was the medium of instruction for the school I went to. But then I had to reckon with the secondary problem of Hindi nationalism, which then tried to usurp Tamil from me and my family. As a result, I identify as an illiterate Tamil. It’s a horribly problematic position that I am trying to reclaim because, as I’ve said elsewhere, how can I be so articulate in the language of the colonizer? Which is also my language, and the gift I gave to the colonizer. But how could I be so ill-equipped in the language of my most immediate kin? Hindi becomes this bridge language for me to assimilate into my South Asianness more broadly because all of its connections to Urdu and Hindustani, and Farsi, right?

I think the comfort with a pluri-lingual environment, to use Caroline Bergvall’s term, is in one’s ability to switch as frequently as possible without being punished.

MN:
Then, in an earlier poem in the book, in “Pavement,” you perform an exceptional tying together of the poet and the subject of the poem through the conjunct letters—the vh and yh that is written in Devanagari. Here is an exceptional example of what I was alluding to earlier as the grammatical work that’s taking place in your poetry.