Murmurations (I)

How to wash a heart:
Remove it.
                               –Bhanu Kapil

 

Then I felt his knocking 

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inside my chest.
                               –Solmaz Sharif

I can’t bring myself to think of disaster as a single, or even a handful, of fixed peaks on a graph. The graph wavers and caves into itself. Who gets to define disaster? Who writes and measures it? Elissa Washuta writes of disaster, in her essay “Apocalypse Logic,” as an ongoing state of settler coloniality: “Apocalypse has very little to do with the end of the world.” Disaster has long been a continuum through which racialized bodies move against, in spite of. This, however, doesn’t stop the graph’s peaks from blinking at me, like heartbeats on a monitor.

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I await heart monitor results in a state of panic, my heart now abiding by a rhythm I don’t recognize, a pace I can’t categorize. I don’t sleep for a month. I spend days walking to distract myself. I’ll walk anywhere—the seashore riddled with black tar balls, below the patchwork highway underpasses to the militarized port, one of San Diego’s many architecturally cold malls bloated with people—trying to match my footsteps to this new heartbeat. 

I listen to a lot of audio books while walking to drown out the drumming in my chest. One book is bell hooks’s All About Love. I walk with the word “heart” until it is not a metaphor:

We can let our hearts speak.

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Who has made // who keeps making // the heart into a metaphor? I avoid this question for a while. “The arrhythmia may be a temporary electrical malfunction triggered by trauma and stress,” say the doctors. In my attempts to regain my old rhythm, I scan the pages of poetry books for notes on surviving new cadences. My body longs for this ability to exist inside the altered, fragmented cardiographic line. 

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Following Tim Choy’s writings on breathing and “conspiring” (“breathing together rarely means breathing the same”), I think that in writing the heart, we must also remember the systemic conditions which make one’s heart beat as it does: the daily materialities of toxins, the disparate forms of capitalist labor, the continuing and ever-modified regimes of state violence, legacies of enslavement, Indigenous dispossession, and border regimes, all shaping and reshaping the nervous system in ways which differ for—and among—racialized people. To say “two hearts beat as one,” as Keats once did, has long been a disastrous, deadly poetic. 

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In my search for the poet’s non-metaphorical heart, I come first to Agha Shahid Ali’s poem “The Country Without a Post Office,” originally published as “Kashmir without a Post Office.” Ali writes about the 1990 Kashmiri protest and the subsequent massacre of Indigenous Kashmiris by the Indian state. Ali writes his heart in the midst of disaster, “I want to live forever. What else can I say? / It rains as I write this. Mad heart, be brave.” This heart is “mad” in its laboring against settler colonial violence. “Madness” evokes an increased heart rate, a response to the rate of violence. Mad with loss and perhaps also mad with hope, with the desire to live, to “be brave,” keep beating. Recalling Kashmir’s halted mail delivery in the aftermath of the massacre, the speaker of “The Country Without a Post Office” reads prisoners’ unsent letters addressed to their beloveds: “It’s Us! It’s Us! / whose letters are cries that break like bodies / in prisons.” Here the body is not a metaphor-—it is not only a metaphor.

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As oil was being mass-extracted by colonially-backed corporations in the Persian Gulf, it was also being used as a medicine for diphtheria, an infection caused by strains of bacteria that produce a toxin that causes heart rhythm problems. 

That is, oil was being used to treat the human heart until it became legible as “precious” for its ability to fuel high-speed movement across space-time. All the while, ground water and air pollution-borne illnesses affect those in proximity to oil fields and refineries. 

The colonial state’s disinterest (or curated interest) in the human heart is corporeal.

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My friend, the poet Vyxz Vasquez, has asked who has metaphorized our hearts? Vasquez and I send poems back and forth. Her work materializes the layered colonial attempts to unreal the body in the Philippines and in diaspora. She writes in fragments, “Dreamcatcher beside the sacred heart / The colonizer puns my breakfast.” Her uncapitalized “sacred heart” calls attention to the ways colonial grammar constructs the body. The heart is an aestheticized, gendered icon on the family home’s wall, and what feeds the heart is sold via capitalist humor. 

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Round two. I artifact my heart’s events, place the new monitor in its cardboard box and mail the “event journal” to a tech company in San Francisco.

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In Ante body, Marwa Helal writes of lost rhythms: 

if you lose your language you lose your

vibration

if you lose your vibration you lose your
rhythm if you lose your rhythm you lose
the plot

are we on the same frequency?

Rhythm can be lost to colonial erasure of language. Yet, enjambment, too, disrupts rhythm, troubling the predetermined line. A few pages later: “i have a heart // murmur / it tells me everything i need to know.” Here, Helal reframes the disabled heart—what often tends to be thought of as an individualistic (and gendered) set of decisions leading to heart disease is instead a “murmuring” of community knowledges. Helal’s poem simultaneously acknowledges the heart’s entanglement with institutional power and rewrites the heart as a place of collective transformation.

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One doctor says my nervous system was already wired before I was born—its tangled nerves, residues of the fear my mothers and grandmothers carried. But it is also a living map of ongoing resistance forged by all kinds of kin. Can this new rhythm grant me a space outside of the brutal spaces I know? 

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Something about being awoken by my own heartbeat moves me to make lists. I am constantly making lists now. There is one on my Notes App of what happens on the days my heart wears me out: 

-Man in Grocery Outlet, “You don’t need to wear a mask anymore” 

-P is hospitalized 

-The first thing we do when we wake up is check WhatsApp/Viber to make sure they are alive… 

-my hair falls out from the propranolol / no one believes me

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In The Blue Clerk, Dionne Brand writes of the heart as a spatial network. Even though the subway moves in all directions: “North like anxious electrocardiogram, there are invisible stations.” The electrocardiogram, which records the heart’s electrical activity on a voltage graph, becomes a private map to otherwise uncharted ground. Here, the record of the city falls short, so the body helps make the city with its “anxious” pulse. Translated as jagged lines, the heart moves us in space, it makes space. In the face of a humanist neoliberal geography, what does it mean to know with a geography produced by your own heart? Brand’s preceding verso reads: “you fall in love at Chester subway, it’s not a beautiful subway so your love makes it so.” Love too, as part of the heart’s physical language, can create place. 

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I make lists of things me-with-arrhythmia now believes in:

-ashwagandha 

-blue whale hearts

-murmuring 

-“my heart races when I see her” 

-electricity