The Art of Cloying
A book can be loved to death and not die.
Look at how this one refuses to close. Place the weight
of the world on it and it may stop demanding attention.
And if you choose to settle within it – this book
I once read, but isn’t mine – with the same intimacy
as seeing the painless birth of sunrise for the first time,
you’ll find the smudge of fingertips where a cryptic word
struck a chord and grew familiar. Pen lines preserve
inspirations not to be forgotten. That’s telling of love:
what was spotless became a kneaded bed of the curious.
If the cover is missing, then it has shaken its burden;
it’s dearer than gold. It’s known the caress of eyes
and wants more. Suppose you, not knowing this,
were to tape it back and suffocate the perceived disgrace?
Isn’t love tousled in the word novel?
My sisters used to wrap their books in decorative paper
recycled from bygone weddings. Inside were curated
words of warning, warding off eyes behind the filigree.
I tore in with my shoes on and drew morbid faces.
I loved every page as they did – but a little differently.
The first book I ever knew and kissed was a Quran.
I peered at the words, but could not seize them,
so I untied the embroidered cloth with my clean hands;
the dizzying calligraphy lay under my eyes – bold –
like the gates of Jannah prohibiting girls who don’t listen…
My tongue wrestled to weave sense amid my shattered selves;
my instincts grappled with Estella, Miss Sharp, Miss Eyre,
when I’d rummage their pages with laughter, tears, prayer.
ZR Ghani’s pamphlet, In the Name of Red, is a collection of 19 poems that variously explore and riff on a colour whose symbolism is central to many cultures and religions. Red can represent positive and negative qualities: rage, joy, fire, fertility, lust. For Ghani, who grew up in Mauritius, “red” has both literary and feminist connotations and is informed, as we’ll discover, by three particular English Victorian novels.
The word “cloying” in the poem’s title, and a certain ambivalence in the opening lines, evoke a book that has been “loved to death” but which hasn’t died and “refuses to close” because “the weight of the world” has been placed on it. This suggests the book as a colonial imposition, swollen with its own cultural privilege. The poet doesn’t disown it: she has written it a love poem, in fact, but her expanding experience has changed her reading over time and imprinted it with further meaning.
The qualification in describing the book (“… once read but isn’t mine”) could suggest this cultural imposition, but also that the speaker is someone who herself wants to write books. This is part of the intensity and “intimacy” of her response. There might be a play on “read” here with the colour which signifies the first sighting of “the painless birth of sunrise” – “red”.
Ghani’s diction is fresh and unpredictable, the statement-making bold, as she describes the significance of her marginalia and underlinings: “Pen lines preserve / inspirations not to be forgotten. That’s telling of love: / what was spotless became a kneaded bed of the curious.” I find oddly attractive Ghani’s combination of familiar everyday metaphor such as “struck a chord” with the more original adventures in wordplay that produce “a kneaded bed of the curious” (suggesting the erotic aspects of reading and writing). You can almost see in Ghani’s word choices the process of someone learning her art, and how to push beyond the obvious turn of phrase to the newly worded personal encounter.
The erotic theme is pursued a little further, in verse three, where the book, stripped of its cover, “wants more” of “the caress of eyes”. And, as a result, our eyes “caress” the word “novel” when Ghani challenges, “Isn’t love tousled in the word novel?
In the next verse, Ghani looks more closely at the difference between her response and that of her siblings. Their books have been covered up, with “decorative paper / recycled from bygone weddings” and contain “curated / words of warning”. She refuses to behave conventionally even if the book is sacred: “I tore in with my shoes on and drew morbid faces.” The sacred and carnal may be indistinguishable to the intensely book-hungry: “The first book I knew and ever kissed was the Quran.” This “book” too must be disrobed, although reverently, in the beautiful statement: “I untied the embroidered cloth with my clean hands”. The “dizzying calligraphy” then revealed reminds her of “the gates of Jannah” (paradise), entry being refused to “girls who don’t listen”.
Ghani, reading silently, listens deeply, and finds her own feminist sacred text in a hybrid of three novels, and a concept of gathering her “shattered selves” through the characters, “Estella, Miss Sharp, Miss Eyre”. Red’s different shades of colour-symbolism might be applied to each of these women. Estella, in Great Expectations, has been forged in the fire of Miss Havisham’s vengeful rage. Becky Sharp, the high-spirited, energetic and entirely amoral anti-heroine of Thackeray’s Vanity Fair has been imagined in various red costumes by the Indian film-maker Mira Nair. For the protagonist of Jane Eyre, there is the entrapment of the “red room”. It was after reading Jane Eyre at the age of 16 that Ghani felt impelled to become a writer.
There’s no easy acceptance of an ideal in this writer’s reading: Ghani’s “instincts grappled with” the literary heroines, even as she’d “rummage their pages with laughter, tears, prayer”. Fiction and poetry teach you to ask questions and sometimes to live those questions. Ghani’s work in this vivid and unusual pamphlet is proof that the cloying effects of “the canon” have been left behind: the writer has taken what she needed and is navigating her own fiery, energetic and visionary world.
