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Sujata
Bhatt was born in Ahmedabad, raised in Poona and New Orleans,
university educated in Baltimore and Iowa, spent time writing in
British Columbia, married and settled in Bremen, Germany and
publishes her poetry in England. She has travelled as well to
Poland, Israel, Latvia, Ireland and won prizes in Holland and
Italy. All this moving across cultures makes her a more than fit
subject for analysis within the contemporary discussions of
globalisation and diasporic identity. Bhatt's first collection, Brunizem,
came out in 1988. Monkey Shadows appeared in 1991, The
Stinking Rose (a study in the many meanings of garlic across
history and geography) in 1995 and a selected poems, Point No
Point in 1997. Augatora (2000) continues the interest
in languages, and the latest collection, A Colour for Solitude
(2002) is a sequence of "readings" of paintings and
imagined conversations between the German painter, Paula Modersohn-Becker
and her sculptor friend, Clara Westhoff, both of them linked to
the poet Rilke. Her attempt to give voice to two women silenced in
history by the more famous male artist, reflects a quiet but
consistent interest in what might loosely be called
"feminist" issues. Primarily, Bhatt is a lyricist with
leanings towards the surreal (dreams appear repeatedly in her
work), but she also has a strong sense at times of history and the
postcolonial politics of culture. Addressing in turn the reader
and the Hindu goddess of Siva's Himalayas, she writes:
Do you know what it feels like
to pick green tea-leaves that grow
on the other side of the path from the guava trees –
Parvati
why did you let Twinings take everything?
Parvati
I must confess
I like Twinings the best.
….
Heathen.
Pagan.Hindu.
What does it mean, what is a pagan?
Someone who worships fire?
Someone who asks Parvati to account for
the Industrial Revolution. ("Parvati" Brunizem
43)
Similar themes are
explored in the sequence "History is a Broken Narrative"
(Augatora 40). As part of this general historical interest,
but also as a result of her own diasporic movements, Bhatt has a
continuing interest in etymology and problems of shifting across
languages and scripts. The title of her first collection, Brunizem,
takes the word for a soil type that runs across the northern
hemisphere, linking many of her countries of residence. Her title,
Augatora is an old High German word for 'window' and the
history and different associations of terms for the same object
are traced:
Today, unravelling the word
Augatora – and thinking of the
loss
of that word – imagining the days
of a thousand years ago when these languages collided
bitterly, bloodily –
Old English, Old Norse, Latin,
Old German - I turn
to your Danish grammar book – (“Augatora” 17-18)
Here languages are figured as a house, with the window being
simultaneously a hole opening to the world and a barrier
protecting one from the outside. At the end, children playing
indoors urge each other to "Look outside" (Augatora
16-17). "Language" (Augatora 55) is a meditation
on translation and the pleasure of closer contact with the text
and writer through access to the original, while "A Detail
from the Chandogya Upanishad" (Augatora 97) speaks of
the ability of Sanskrit to encapsulate several differing meanings –
the redness of sun, lotus and monkey's bottom –
within one line or sentence, suggesting that true wisdom and
worship will hold all three disparities in unison in the mind.
This is not to suggest that Bhatt favours a simple ideal of
harmony or uniformity based in fixed rules or phenomena. At times,
she does seem to suggest some essential fit between language and
experience that anchors identity: a memory of a child selling
water by the railway line can only occur in Gujarati ("Search
for my Tongue" Brunizem 65); a moment from childhood
in Poona is recalled in Marathi (Augatora 19).
But equally, many poems
point to meaning consisting in cadence (Augatora 106) or
silence or the gap between words, "the time between the
shadows,/in the sounds between/ the crows fighting in the guava
trees" (Augatora 103). In her most famous piece, there
is a physical contest enacted in the poet's body as well as a
textual competition between print types that admits of no easy
resolution:
I can't hold onto my tongue.
It's slippery like the lizard's tail
I try to grasp
But the lizard darts away.
…….
II
You ask me what I mean
by saying I have lost my tongue.
I ask you, what would you do
if you had two tongues in your mouth.
and lost the first one, the mother tongue,
and could not really know the other,
the foreign tongue.
You could not use them both together
even if you thought that way.
And if you lived in a place you had to
speak a foreign tongue,
your mother tongue would rot,
rot and die in your mouth
until you had to spit it out ("Search for my Tongue"
Brunizem 63-66)
But the poet still dreams in Gujarati and knows that
"sun" does not signify the same things as aakash
because of personal memories and different climatic zones where
the words are most used.
Bhatt has been accused
of milking clichés of political correctness or programmatic
discussions of multiculturalism by at least one Indian critic
seemingly more interested in national identity (Mehrotra), but
from the perspective of global movements of peoples her work
constitutes an interesting take on how to find one's place in the
world. It is clear that Bhatt is interested in difference, but
most often this finds expression not in public polemic, but rather
in personal, solitary experience, registered at a fundamentally
physical level. Bhatt's verse is full of reference to body parts
and the feelings that go with them. A lot of eating goes on:
"a man like Orpheus/ scrapes artichoke leaves/ very slowly/
between his teeth," dancing is felt as pain in stretched
thighs ("The Multicultural Poem" Augatora 102-3)
and a polio victim is always struggling with her withered leg
("A Swimmer in New England Speaks" Augatora 26);
"the wired energy" of squirrels distracts the poet and
is recorded as a frenzy of lust and rage that scrapes everything
down to bones ("Squirrels" Augatora 12-13); the
scripts of different languages are felt "clotting together in
my mind,/raw, itchy – the way skin begins
to heal" ("History is a Broken narrative" Augatora
41). Jane speaks of her language and body being changed by her
relationship with Tarzan:
At first
I thought I should teach you
English – return to you
what you have lost.
But you have changed the sounds
I listen for,
…………….
Already you have changed my eyelids,
my ears, the nape of my neck –
The way I lift my head to listen. (Augatora 57)
Such a deep-level
registering of cultural and linguistic shifts as corporeal
transformation indicates not just a personalised, atomistic sense
of travelling experience. There is also an appeal here to
fundamental levels of apprehending the world that can allow
communication across differences. Bhatt seems to be interested in
the mystery of how some things affect us subconsciously and looks
to a place at the edge of or beyond language that is common to us
all (as in "The Undertow" Brunizem 89.) There is
a kind of residual Romanticism in this, perhaps, but Bhatt's word
is determinedly a-romantic, refusing the sublime in a set of
surface images and flat documentary. The personal lyric remains,
however, open to the possibility of community, and the basic
vehicle for this is expression of corporeal, affective experience.
We can understand
affect in this context as a pre-cognitive, pre-cultural
registering of sensory impressions that is simultaneously an
interface with cultural and linguistic systems codifying feeling
into emotions and shaping behaviour (Tomkins, Massumi). Affective
experience is both radically subjective and a way of connecting to
others despite difference. Memory is shaped by time, place and
culture, so that we will not all respond to Bhatt's recall via
thoughts in Marathi of Poona's sounds and heat and encountering
snakes in the house, but the affective response to thirst and a
child's seeking a drink at night can be a point of contact with
any reader ("A Memory from Marathi" Augatora 19).
If the diasporic person becomes separated from her mother tongue,
she may also be disconnected from memory and from continuity of
identity.
Sneja Gunew sees
"Food and Language as Corporeal Home for the Unhoused
Diasporic Body", citing Bhatt's fusion of language and
tongue. Gunew asserts that, "language shapes us and that
language is fundamentally grounded in the body itself" (94).
Writing in the voice of German artist Paula Modersohn-Becker,
about to break free of her marriage to paint in Paris, Bhatt
echoes this:
The mouth is preparing itself
To speak French again
See how my lips have changed
Their shape: fuller, softer –
Even my words
Are more resilient. ("Self-Portrait with a Necklace of
White Beads" A Colour for Solitude 51)
We have seen how in the earlier "Search for my Tongue"
she records the corporeal struggle of acquiring a second or third
language, rendering psychic torment as physical pain.
If identity rests in
affect and the body, Bhatt does not, however, essentialise the
migrant body as a solid site of identity grounded in authentic
personal experience, particular memory and specific cultural
practice. Diaspora opens up a doubling of meanings. To some
extent, the food/language/identity relationship is characterised
by traditional ethnically marked cuisine –
Gazpacho for Spain (Augatora 23); Wurst for Germany (SR
83); turmeric for India (Augatora/ Point No Point
133). Bhatt notes how Indian women in the US try to retain
identity in continuing to produce an authentic chutney
("Chutney" The Stinking Rose 29). However, the
travelling poet does not concern herself with such fixity.
Something as simple as garlic undergoes linguistic and cultural
transformation in The Stinking Rose, a global ethnography
of different words and meanings and practices that make of a
universal singularity a global plurality. Bhatt also sees writing
as a continuous process of exploration (validated by Swami Anand's
advice to the young poet in India: "Swami Anand" Brunizem
18) and memory and the body as a series of rooms that undergo
regular refits:
But I am the one
who always goes away.
…..
Maybe the joy lies
in always being able to leave –
But I never left home.
I carried it away
with me – here in my darkness
In myself….
We weren't allowed
to take much
but I managed to hide
my home behind my heart.
……
with my home intact
but always changing
so the windows don't match
the doors anymore – the colours
clash in the garden –
And the ocean lives in the bedroom.
I am the one,
who always goes
away with my home
which can only stay inside
in my blood – my home which does
not fit
with any geography
….. ("The one who goes away" The Stinking Rose
3-4, Point No Point 105-6)
To quote Gunew again, "The touch of language may certainly be
described as a kind of skin" (100), and language and body
both operate as "skins" between the poet and her
world/s. Like the windows of "Augatora," skins are both
protective and permeable membranes (Augatora 16). Physical
sensations of love-making can send the lover into a memory of
smell and colour to suggest a mood that in turn influences
behaviour in the present of the poem's situation ("Sherdi"
Brunizem 17; "Lizards" Brunizem 29. The
colours and textures in the "skin" of Paula Modersohn-Becker's
paintings supply the contact that allows intuitions of sounds and
emotions in the figures and the artist's life (A Colour for
Solitude 12). The multi-lingual Indian and diasporic Western
poet is hyper-conscious of the vagaries of language and
difficulties of translation. One word, like shantih can
alter its meaning according to the context of its utterance: a
command to children to "be quiet" or a religiose
invocation of peace, and the prayer for peace will have different
resonance in a war-torn town where a child has lost a limb ("Shantih"
The Stinking Rose 78). One language can have different
words (jal, pani) with different associations for
the same phenomenon in its several aspects ("Water" The
Stinking Rose 111). Subtle shifts of meaning or mood are
consistently represented via sensory images.
Narayana Chandra
praises Bhatt's "sharply visual and tactile imagery"
(1994). It is this that gives her work its immediacy for the
reader, but while affective, body-located discourse has its
essentialising, universalising aspect, it is also an unstable mode
of experience and expression. Affective experience may be carried
over from one mental compartment to another via the memory of the
body. Sounds carry with them memories of smells ("A Gujarati
Patient Speaks" [Monkey Shadows] Point No Point
143); smells convey the tastes of food and situations surrounding
its preparation and consumption ("Wanting Agni" Brunizem
79-81). Synaesthesia is claimed as a characteristic of affect (Massumi)
and is very much a part of Bhatt's style and thematics.
Her objectivity of
narrating voice and material manifestation of feeling relates to
her imagist forebears and can lend an air of fixity and banality
to a poem when it fails to rise beyond private significance or
find some appropriate formal closure. (Chandra and Mehrotra both
fault her for this, respectively charging her with selecting
"batches of the irrelevant" or formulaic repetitions of
postcolonial topics.) So much of Bhatt's work is stripped of
technical and structural decoration that its content seems to
determine a poem's impact. However, this prosaic lack of artifice
must be set against the shifting qualities of synaesthetic
reference and is itself something of a textual strategy related to
the persona of a constant traveller, dis-placed from her own past
and from the present she inhabits with others.
In "Skinnydipping
in History" (The Stinking Rose 25) Bhatt rings the
changes on a poem by John Ashbery to suggest that the surface
(skin) is in fact the crucial site of meaning, the "visible
core." As such, it is a space of emergence and constant
alteration, not the basis of some kind of identity politics,
although in her memories of New Orleans and other poems such as
her meditation on the swastika – as in
"Deviben Pathak" (Monkey Shadows 46-7) –
Bhatt shows she is perfectly aware of the politics of race. The
skin is a place of constant alteration, of things surfacing and
things being absorbed. Many poems enact a voyage into memory,
dream, another person's world, followed by some return to the
surface of the recording persona or the writing of the poem
itself, usually with some hint of transformation of that surface.
Cecile Sandten notes how in Bhatt there is an awareness of "interhistorical
process" that disrupts stable identities and that "the
mythic is generated from within the poet and the poem" (1998,
57-8). In "Self-Portrait as Aubade", for example, the
first poem of A Colour for Solitude, the poet confronts the
painter's portrait of herself "open to the bone" before
a mirror. The painter's "quest" for self-knowledge is
also the quest for understanding between poet and subject,
mediated by surfaces that begin to bleed into each other, leading
to identification of painted image with artist with examining poet
and a sense of the potential in this forerunner of German
modernism:
Your green broken with black branches
enters the mirror – your green
invites
the aubade – gives fragrance to
your waiting –
… however dark this green,
still, there is the fragrance
of a cold spring morning.
The gaze in the mirror is steady
and the part in your hair is so straight –
the green surrounds your moonstone skin –
your memories of blanched almonds –
untouched and aching
to be touched
But you are the aubade
and do not know it – (A Colour for
Solitude 17-18)
The body is in movement, sense impressions come and go, movement
itself becomes a defining feature. Language is realised in change
and that change is associated with picking up languages wherever
you are ("History is a Broken Narrative" Augatora
40). A recurrent motif in all her books is metamorphosis (a
ceiling fan "dreams/ of becoming a spider lily" in
response to someone's intrusion into a room, a woman turns into a
mermaid in "At the Marketplace", "Metamorphoses II:
A Dream", Brunizem 87, 91, 92-3), though it is set
against the tendency to seek a dry witticism or ironic question
that will sum up things. (Emily Dickinson has been identified by
Mehrotra as the source of her dashes, and the poet does get one
mention from Bhatt in "A Poem Consisting Entirely of
Introductions" [Augatora 93], so perhaps there is a
touch of écriture feminine in the fluidity of her lines
and the sardonic notes here and there.) Art and the self appear
not as a stable core or a fixed end product but as an affective
"intensity" with which data are grasped (epigraph to A
Colour for Solitude). One means of conveying such an intensity
of perception is through synaesthetic imagery. This is part of the
technique of the symbolist aspect of early modernism and
consistent with the transformations effected in surrealism, both
expressive modes informing Bhatt's work. (She alludes to Yeats,
Lorca, Gertrude Stein, and Rilke, for example). Poems speak of
painting the sound of bells ("A Red Rose in November" A
Colour for Solitude 48), the smell of light ("For Paula
Modersohn-Becker" Brunizem 76), sound, colour and
smell combine to be felt in the soles of the feet ("Living
with Trains" Brunizem 55), sound suggests colour
("Poem for a Reader who was Born Blind" Augatora
98). But it is also more than mere symbolism.
Symbolism attempted to
capture the elusive quality of intangible mood via synaesthesia,
and there is something of this in Bhatt's poetry. She offers a
poem to Plato at one point (Brunizem 32) and there is often
a Platonic sense of what Sandten describes as "a form beyond
forms of which all phenomena are allegories" (Sandten 1998,
51). However, Bhatt's verse extends beyond an aesthetic program
into consideration of differences in modes of communication and
the difficulties of capturing truth in words (Augatora 50).
In "Poem for a reader who was born blind" Bhatt learns
that there are other ways of apprehending colour, and intuits
" a vast blueness", horses, a fox's movements, straining
throat muscles and snow from listening to a Mongolian shepherd's
song (Augatora 98).
Synaesthesia, then,
becomes a device to suggest not organic harmonies but differences
and shifting multiplicity. As Gunew points out, synaesthesia
"is a way of undoing the naturalized meanings and functions
associated with both food and language." (99), and by
extension, of the ethnically marked body too. So it is possible
that this open-ended sense of things celebrated in "The
multicultural poem" and enacted in synaesthetic images, the
dashes at the end of lines, and the unanswered questions of many
poems is the direct result of an awareness in the diasporic
subject of the unfixity of even something like the body, despite
and because of the many fixings that nations and cultures try to
impose on it. Home becomes a site of continual change and self is
defined by restless travels in dream and across time and space
("The Circle" Augatora 99). As "The
Multicultural Poem" says: "It has to do/ with
movement" (Augatora 100).
Sara Ahmed talks about
how different groups of people are labelled as 'emotional': within
narratives of the nation as strong and rational and patriarchal,
women and migrants are seen as weak, emotional, feminine, less
developed, undermining of the social fabric (3). What stands out
in any reading of Bhatt's work, as noted already, is its
consistently dispassionate voice. Despite her recourse to
affective language, the overall impression from Bhatt's work is of
a distanced affect-less observer adopting what Sundeep Sen calls
"a quietude of stance".
Critics working with
notions of originary national identity might find evidence that
despite the losses of diasporic exile, Bhatt has preserved her
South Asian cultural origins and writes meditative verse that
works towards the thought-free mind: "Montauk Garden with
Stones and Water", "Equilibrium" (Augatora
95, 96). She does make reference, it is true, to the Ramayana, the
Bhagavad Gita, the Buddha and the Upanishads, but she also shows
how tradition of the religious mythic kind is not adequate to
sustain one against the ravages of colonial economics or
anti-female violence, or globalising warfare. The poet also has
recourse to Western existentialism, citing Kierkegaard
("Baltimore" Brunizem 57) and Samuel Beckett
(epigraph to The Stinking Rose). Moreover, she locates her
persona in the role of perpetual traveller, the one who goes away,
who stands ironically commenting on the good luck rituals of her
mother culture as she leaves India's shores. As "the one who
goes away" she is displaced, detached (not pushed away, not
actively rejecting home, just one involved in a defining but
neutral process of continual change). She becomes the automatic
"tape-recorder" dictated to by the chant of "the
pure voice" ("Water" The Stinking Rose 111).
Is this a result of geographical and linguistic uprooting and
nomadism? Or is it (or is it also) a resistance, following Ahmed's
theory, to being positioned as a 'shrill' postcolonial diasporic
racial minority female?
And yet, Bhatt's poetry
is essentially a lyric oeuvre. Her encounters with other objects
and bodies locate her but seem to confirm her persona as a private
being, an empty presence whose feelings emerge from the
intensification of a mood in interaction with an object or
situation and in the act of giving voice to that encounter from a
private, reflective position. An art of deflection and
indirectness: encounter leads to movement away into dream or
memory or dispassionate commentary, followed by reflection on
this, attachment to an echoing image that suggests a mood, a
stance in relation to something – a
hesitant engagement that is in the moment of the poem/of the
encounter and will not admit to more significance than that. How
emotions operate is of relevance to considering diasporic writing,
since the idea of movement is inherent in the meaning of the word
'emotion':
What moves us,
what makes us feel is also that which holds us in place, or
gives us a dwelling place. Hence movement does not cut the body
off from the 'where' of its inhabitance, but connects bodies to
other bodies: attachment takes place through movement, through
being moved by the proximity of others. (Ahmed 11)
Ahmed inspects how, once affect becomes externalised, emotions
circulate and 'stick' to objects; how objects are produced through
the contact between somatic sensation, experience, bodily
response, social codes. In the case of Bhatt's poetry, if we
accept that there is a refusal of the affect-laden object self of
diasporic/migrant, then two things seem to follow: one, that the
subject self is an observing presence ("I am the one who
watches" (Augatora 18), distanced and dispassionate,
that holds affect very much to heart –
locates feelings "behind the heart" as a strictly
personal thing; two, that affective encounters with others are
mediated by objects onto which emotions are 'stuck'.
Bhatt registers affect
through mediated screens, sticking emotions to objects: food
(garlic), art (paintings by Emily Carr, Edvard Munch, Picasso,
Georgia O'Keefe, Frida Kahlo and Modesohn-Becker); photographs (Brunizem
45); love-making (bodily surfaces); news reports (Afghanistan, the
anti-Sikh riots of 1984). One might simply say that this is the
detached uprooted uncommitted nature of the cosmopolitan
globetrotter. But again, Ahmed's discussion of the ethics of
responding / the ethical demand to respond to what we cannot
experience ourselves (31) raises the possibility of a more complex
reading of Bhatt's position. In this light, we can see in her
writing a quiet engagement that refuses to possess the other's
suffering as sentimentality or egocentric
assimilation/universalism.
"Go to Ahmedabad"
at once describes the heat, tropical disease and hunger of a
'Third World' setting and refuses to tell the reader about it. The
poem shows the humanity and community of local life surviving
despite adversity, and uses the personal memory and experience of
the now unhoused poet to challenge the Anglophone reader
(privileged either by class or foreignness) to go there and
experience the suffering directly (Brunizem 100-2). A
similarly ironic play of reticence and representation is found in
"Frauenjournal" (The Stinking Rose 113-14). Here
the poet records watching a graphic documentary on female
circumcision and notes the twin dangers of averting one's gaze and
voyeurism. In a working example of postcolonial theory crossing
with feminism, she wonders how she can speak for a woman who is
proud of having killed her daughter in the process of enacting a
different cultural tradition, and what one can do by recording the
fact in words:
Is this being judgmental?
Or is this how one bears witness
With words? (The Stinking Rose 113)
Such a resistance to
easy reprocessing of the pain of others comes from an awareness of
her own distance from those around her and the impossibility of an
harmonious 'third space' of translation/organic synthesis. In
"The Stare", for example ([Monkey Shadows]
Point No Point 62), a young monkey and a small child make
eye-contact with each other, but their mutual curiosity does not
permit any shared understanding. In "Search for my
Tongue", the three-level rendering of language estranges
things for both English and Gujarati speakers, and for bilingual
speakers – who do not need the Romanised
transliteration, which is no help to the Anglophone reader either.
The text remains a zone of unresolved struggle/ dissonance that
nonetheless points to the necessary ongoing process of
translation. Cecile Sandten has noted Bhatt's "intense
awareness of antagonistic forces: (2000, 115); and in this
rejection of organic unity the muse itself becomes problematic:
I used to think there was
only one voice.
I used to wait patiently for that one voice to return
to begin its dictation.
I was wrong
I can never finish counting them now. ("The
Voices" The Stinking Rose 103)
But this pluralising of voices does not absolve the writer of
responsibility to "bear witness" and she does, quietly,
non-committally but tellingly in relation to girl abortions in
India ("Voice of the Unwanted Girl" Augatora 38),
to the long history of deaths at sea in the Baltic ('The Hole in
the Wind" Augatora 63-74), to the almost casual
domestic and public violence of North America ("Walking
Across Brooklyn Bridge, July 1990" [Monkey Shadows] Point
No Point 91).
M.S. Pandey reads
Bhatt's work in the old mode of diaspora's exile and loss, but I
do not find the kind of nostalgia for lost origins in the memories
of India that this approach suggests. Indeed, Cecile Sandten
quotes the poet as herself rejecting definitions in terms of
postcolonial resistance or diasporic suffering. She sees herself
as "Indian in the world" (2000, 102). However, Pandey
makes the useful observation that "While the loss is real, in
terms of spatial and temporal distance from the motherland, the
recovery can only be imaginary – or at
best aesthetic." (233). This picks up on the modernist
impulse behind much of Bhatt's work, but it also calls attention
to her particular position in global diasporas. Bhatt is the child
of a university professional, herself raised through the global
network of university fellowships and writers' conferences. In her
early collections especially, we can sense the pressure and
contrivance of the creative writing class. It is this world that
she inhabits; it is words that provide her with a home or at least
a role that can be transported from one place to another. In
Sandten's words, "Home is ... the inner self of the lyrical
persona." (2000, 105); home is in the poem, in the writing,
and the writing, as Swami Anand pointed out early in her
development, is an endless process (Brunizem 18-19).
It is hard to make
definitive pronouncements on a poet's development from looking
through her published books, since most poets keep aside material
for further work and later publication, hence simple chronological
sequences are blurred. Some of the work in the 2002 collection A Colour
for Solitude, for example, dates back to 1979 and appeared in
both Brunizem (1993) and The Stinking Rose (1995).
Nonetheless, in terms of self-presentation through published
collections, we can generalise to note a progressive shift from
memories of India, family and childhood through dream-like
displacements of erotic moments with a lover and later personal
mentions of miscarriages and childbirth. Such autobiographical
material begins to be taken over by poetic responses to art and
verse by others, with occasions of historical reflection and
social critique of either a feminist or postcolonial nature.
Cecile Sandten has categorised Bhatt's work as "organic
poetry" along the lines of Denise Levertov and densely
intertextual verse (Sandten 1998). In the end, engagement with
other artwork and artists forms the whole of the latest book and
spans Bhatt's entire writing career. Bhatt comments in her
introduction to The Colour of Solitude that her imagined
relationship to Becker, Westhoff and Rilke via readings of their
work may have been a way "for [her] mind to enter and try to
understand a totally alien culture and country" (13). Where
she is now at home in Bremen, she still presents herself as
"the ultimate foreigner," but as with much of her other
work, she claims belonging in her role as artist, and performs her
diasporic identity as a negotiator of gaps and dissonant edges
across several languages. There is a hint always of some place
beyond language where some ideal home or community may be found,
and this is registered in her work via bodily-based affect and
surrealist technique, but in this world Bhatt clearly finds her
being as part of a literary and artistic community (and perhaps
part of an artistic sisterhood as well) that seems to carry her
across limitations of language and nation and time, and which
provides a subtly changing "home behind the heart" and
adequate identity for the unsettled traveller.
Bibliography:
Sara
Ahmed, The Cultural Politics
of Emotion, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004.
Sujata
Bhatt, Brunizem,
[Manchester: Carcanet: 1988]; New Delhi: Penguin Books India,
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