That Single Fleeting Moment*

I tumbled into poetry twice. Both times, dance and the dysfunctional body, mentioned in earlier posts, catalyzed the deep-dive. The first time was as a child and nascent reader; then again, years later, at a time when literature had receded from my quotidian, submerged in a relentless vortex of health insurance minutiae, work permits, the hunt for realtors undeterred by accent-stained potential tenants … (merely the lot of many newly-arrived immigrants in 21st-century France, as I realized while making the transition from foreign student to worker in 2001). 

Then, in 2004, I found a job as a line producer at a national dance center, all for the coveted permanent contract that would open the doors to a residency permit and durable, specialized healthcare. And there, poetry returned, through a blaze of performances intimately invested in many of the experiences and concerns engulfing my days and nights.

Nothing, I learned, was too broad nor too specific to be addressed through contemporary dance: whether the multigenerational trauma of colonialism, the might of borders, new caste hierarchies defined by the colors of passports, the clout wielded by majoritarian language(s), patriarchy’s interests in maintaining gender binaries, or  the private dreams of performers with Down’s syndrome. I had come home; a home where there was little unfamiliarity with any of my own manifest differences, onstage or off, be it my uncertain status as disabled immigrant, the volatility of RDEB inversa, or the lamentably unhardened ‘r’ rolling off my tongue! 

The stage lit the way to the page, to poetry, my space for “transmuting” movement. At first glance, few things could seem more incongruous. On the one hand, dance: three-dimensional, the most ephemeral of arts, which exists in the immediate now, akin to calligraphy on water—the ripples vanish in the very instant of execution, to mutate forever in memory.  Dance is an art that evolves with each rendition, no two will ever be identical. On the other hand, poetry: an art that invites contemplation; an art to return to, for solace, for unforgiving truth, for remembrance; an art that demands a certain intimate distancing, perhaps because it seems to stand at a remove from the body (both of the giver and the recipient). 

Yet, for me, both contemporary dance and poetry grew out of a bedrock of structure: composition, often embodied by form (quite literally, in the case of dance). It couldn’t be just happenstance, could it, that the French word for composition in dance is écriture, writing? Edward Hirsch describes poetry as “an inexplicable […] event in language”; the contemporary dance that entranced me easily fell into that category, albeit through kinetic idiolects Mr. Hirsch probably had not considered!

Either way, my early poems revolved around ekphrastic explorations of performance^[1] and personalized archives of the body, which I was learning to articulate from my choreographer colleagues. The former  were mainly riffs of dance pieces that made a deep impression and impelled a response. 

In dance, form and content can be so deeply, inextricably entwined (and, indeed, form can itself be content) that I was blissfully indifferent to the debates raging around these questions in literature, especially poetry. It felt emphatically right to employ a highly structured form like the villanelle while inventing a myth out of the kissing tango sequence in Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui’s Tempus Fugit, a sensuous, bittersweet duet that also hilariously tweaked the trope of the damsel in distress. The alternative repetitions of the first and third lines, which are separated across the first five tercets only to finally unite in the concluding quatrain, seemed to have been designed for dance, especially for this segment around mismatched lovers. The kissing tango’s idiosyncratic movement pattern—the bodies embracing then drawing apart, the lips unlocking like a curse, the droll fatal union—could also gather momentum on paper, through the rhyming second line across all six stanzas, hopefully echoing Time, elusive yet pervasive, in Larbi’s piece.

By the time I plunged into writing Until the Lions: Echoes from the Mahabharata, aimed at reworking the South Asian epic in nineteen voices, largely marginal and female, I had begun to explore the possibilities dance offered to create distinctive characters, even in verse. There were, I found, myriad ways of establishing the centrality of the body, of movement, in order to individualize many of the dramatis personae who could otherwise, as a fellow writer remarked, be reduced to “a lot of bereaved wives and mothers.” There was much to learn from the quiddity choreographers create for their dancers through rhythmic or gestural motifs, expressive quirks or the space delimited by the moving body.

Of course, Until the Lions references age-old forms like the sonnet, sestina, and rondeau from Europe; the tanka, padam, and ruba’i from the Global South—each form chosen to  convey a particular personality, tone, and/or tenor. For instance, the (Dante) canzone suited dowager queen Kunti, mother of the five Pandavas, whose obsessiveness and relentless pursuit to regain power for her sons drive the central narrative across the bulk of the epic. Its 65 lines comprising five stanzas of 12 lines and a final five-line envoi unfold in a rigorous mathematical pattern featuring the same six end-words that repeat in a strict order:

abaacaaddaee
eaeebeeccedd
deddaddbbdcc
cdcceccaacbb
bcbbdbbeebaa
abcde

With five words (son, own, light, move, name) to thrust the movement in one inexorable direction, the canzone could help create an insistent, obsessive cascade for Kunti’s terrifying rationale and retrace her meticulous blueprints for the lives of those around her.

Until the Lions was the “studio” where I first tried to refract, or adapt, the movement structure of dance pieces on the page. To state a truism, dance is movement across time and space: effect and affect are generated by a combination of both. Calligrams, which I had once naïvely considered more decorative than necessary, suddenly made sense. They could, I realized, provide bespoke mirrors to the body’s movement across the stage, enabling the page to bear the imprint of verbal choreography, as it were. 

Constancy IV (PDF), one in a series of choral voices of the anonymous lovers and spouses of soldiers, required something protean, something that would arrive at finality through movement, and provide a ledger of shared intimacy as well as an augury of the cataclysm ahead. It became a shape that would evoke a bell—complete with yoke, crown, waist, lip and clappe— and create the clarion call of impending loss, as well as a (Mughal) mausoleum to residual love. 

My poem Jeremiad for the Debris of Stars (second page of PDF), in the voice of Mohini, channels a story that exists only in one telling of the Mahabharata: a ninth-century epic poem from Tamil Nadu by Perunthevenar. In this subaltern version, the god Krishna transforms into a human—a woman—to wed Aravan, who is destined to sacrifice himself the next day to ensure victory for his father’s family, the Pandavas. Mohini/Krishna swears to love Aravan for one night, then mourn him as a widow. I needed to chart Mohini’s unbridled grief and rage after Aravan’s end, the rise and fall of their pulse, and their indictment of their former divine self now made mortal, suddenly prey to love and loss.. For the cadence of a grief-stricken cosmic heartbeat, I turned to Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, specifically the Pina Bausch dance adaptation, a sledge-hammer of a piece that’s dark and molten with desire and death, and  leaves me breathless yet invigorated, each time. I tried to graph the ostinato on the page, somewhat like a distorted electrocardiogram. 

Writer-friends think this intense reliance on dance is counter-intuitive, “because we associate dance with a functional rather than a dysfunctional body” (PDF), but my dancer/choreographer-kith do not. They know—intimately, painfully, thrillingly—how fragile a thing the body actually is. They coax their bodies, the most unpredictable and willful of instruments, into feats of incredible beauty and virtuosity, day after day. They understand how transcendental it is to see, sense, and imagine the body—for once—as repository of something other than pain or incapacity. That the page is where I, too, could dance.