Habitus
Radna Fabias’s Habitus, translated from the Dutch by David Colmer, astonishes with a measured unruliness. The reader is energetically flung through space by the irregular stanza breaks, enjambment, and narrative trajectories that feel fresh and unpredictable. Yet even with the zigzagging through time and space, Fabias’s authoritative voice steers us through critiques of the nation-state’s ongoing violence, showing us how such violence disguises itself as white generosity.
In the poem “incarnation,” the speaker’s early childhood trauma is made into “two minutes of excellent television” where a “balding provincial forty-something” shoots “useless banknotes” at her ass while a blond woman screams, “her fury, metropolitan and delphic.” Fabias conveys the circus of a 21st century colonial savior complex that is garish, brightly lit, and in desperate need of credit and forgiveness, with a steady and fierce didacticism. We are led and directed. We are given guidelines for revenge and (great) grandmotherly advice. We are offered multiple travel guides where one is told that they can dive “if they are not afraid of depth” or where “the juiciest lie is splendor.”
Colmer’s thoughtful (and sometimes humorous) translator’s note offers insight into the collaborative process of translating with Fabias as well as some helpful contextualization regarding the history of Fabias’s birthplace, Curaçao, a Caribbean island north of the Venezuelan coast, colonized first by the Spanish, then by the Dutch.
Habitus is about what it is to be “raised” and “to raise,” as in, what does it mean to elevate what is deliberately kept low and underfoot? In the poem “scum,” the speaker “lifted” a high-rise of “436 turks” and the metal benches occupied by the homeless and the crack pipes and “everything stuck together with body fluids.” In another poem, “exorcism,” the speaker holds tight to the feet of a lover to “drive out/ the suicidal tendencies with my breasts my cracks I am / his hollow” and later, “when he’s asleep,” “nestles into his torso so he no longer misses his rib.” Everything lonely and broken is raised by Fabias not into some utopian vision but into humanness. Readers will be humbled by the revelations of such a surreal and turbulent intelligence.