advisory: slight chances of silence
Writing
Garima
“The music you travel with helps you to create your own internal weather.” ~ Teju Cole
Home, tonight
My words have deserted me
now I weep: Sappho,
you were right.
time is, indeed, a bitch
tonight:
the will-s morph into am-s morph into was-es.
the room packed un-packed and packed un-packed
cloth upon cloth upon cloth
pat pat pat
cloth upon cloth upon cloth
stomp stomp stomp
the corridors are the quiet
between
an embrace and a chokehold
tonight.
my mother’s radio in absentia, peeking
through: decade-old Mukhtiyar Ali
my private mehfil now every night and
tonight.
(“Which green do you like?”)
I’m sick on foreign soil, and
home smells like 2-Minute Maggi with
strains of Urdu on my phone,
tonight.
in my free country,
on the midnight of her freedom,
my umbrella the blare of security risk:
the memory of a foreign soil
is the yearning for home,
tonight.
with snippets from Sappho and hints of Agha Shahid Ali
with thanks to Blaizy
**
Of Wanting and that
upon learning that the Armenian word for tree – ծառ – is pronounced zad like in Marathi. and that kaayalankaara in Tamil would mean ornaments for vegetables. and that there is a German verb naschen for eating sweet things. and that chumma in the South does not mean the chumma in the North. I think:
somewhere along the expansive stretch of the sound of Seri, okay on a Münich-bound train,
I will get off on some
yellow-boarded station, wander
around, sit at some
tea kadai in the evening
shade, do nothing
walk, look, talk
excepting. and then
only deep into the night
quiet, get back.
I want this. and that. and that. and that
**
Choreography
The echoes of dhol in Egmore Museum –
dha-dhi-na dha-ti-na. like Dadra.
or of Keherwa: dha-ge-na-ti na-ka-dhi-na.
on the tar chamdi drags
a blue aproned woman
a green wheelbarrow.
Concept Note
In these three poems, brought together under the unified title of “advisory: slight chances of silence”, the soundscape is integrated with imagery and memory. I have tried to explore here the ways in which soundscape is integrated into the everyday and the imaginations of the everyday. The poems are individually titled as follows:
● Home, tonight
● Of Wanting and that
● Choreography
In the first poem, "Home, tonight", I have tried to explore the soundscape of movement (in time, space), of nostalgia, of silences and the haunting quietude. In the second poem, "Of Wanting and that", sounds in the form of words open up a world of possibilities, of the possibility of inadvertently catching familiar sounds and entering new worlds through them. The third poem titled "Choreography" explores the musicality (or, the musical possibility) of the everyday, the mundane.
The three poems thread together a landscape of everyday sounds, and the imaginative turns that they can lead us to. They also explore the silences and the sound of emotive thoughts peeking through these silences; the ways in which we try to fill up sounds in silences even as we yearn for quietude. I have also tried to incorporate in the poetic space, as can be seen through the shape of the poems, reflections on the movement of the sound and quiet moments within and without. These poems rest heavily on enjambment in an attempt to look at the possibilities of different rhythmic continuities.
Artist Bio
Garima is currently based in Chennai. She is broadly interested in the areas of urban studies, queer studies, and literary studies. Her current research focuses more specifically on the spatiality of public transport. Apart from this, she enjoys reading poetry and fiction, and walking around.