Writing from a privileged position
Trinidadian-British poet Vahni Capildeo talks to Adilah Ismail
Vahni Capildeo’s poetry is dense. This sounds like a simplistic way of describing poetry but it’s the first word which comes to mind. The poems are thick with multiple cultural and literary references – Venus as a Bear(2018) alludes to everything from Icelandic singer-songwriterBjörk to 16th century French poetry. It pushes against familiar poetic conventions and there is a studied, concentrated engagement with language embedded in each poem. Measures of Expatriation (2016), which was awarded the Forward Prize in 2016 and nominated for the T.S. Eliot Prize, deals with the complexity of identity and place. WhileVenus as a Bear draws from ‘thinghood’ – animals, language, objects, places.
In Sri Lanka for the Fairway Galle Literary Festival recently, the Trinidadian-British poet spoke about poetry, language and influences. Below are edited excerpts from the conversation.
Why and how did you start writing poetry? There was an interview where your mother had said that “Vahni was making verses from the time she could hardly write”.
That’s true. I was very competitive as a child. I only had one sibling who was four years older than me and so I taught myself to write and read by the time I was two. Otherwise I would have been the only person in the house who couldn’t.
That’s quite precocious of you.
Well, everybody in the house could read and write. I didn’t want to be left out. And the other thing was my father was a poet. Trinidad had become independent and so the government was very keen on introducing a national literature rather than a British-based curriculum. So there was a lot of interest in trying to write the poetry of everyday life which is very much what my father did.
Did your family influence your poetry?
Yes, very much so. It’s quite hard to talk about because it’s political in strange ways. With my family, some of them went from India and others were brought from India. My great grandfather for example, was tricked onto a ship when he was going to study in Benares. And so, he had to become an indentured labourer. And he was of upper caste but was opposed to the caste system. And then another of my ancestors– we’re not sure how we came – but he was a Rajput and he brought his sword and his lance and we always wondered if he was involved in the mutinies because it’s a very strange thing to come with your sword and your lance, which I remember my grandfather had in his house.
So that gave me a sort of slant view on to how history was told and how history was made. It also gave me a privileged entry point which I’m just starting to unpick. Because although my family would technically have been declared illiterate in Trinidad because they were only literate in Hindustani and Sanskrit, they were still literate in something written. And that immediately gave us privileged access into switching into English when we could.
A lot of people were not in that position. A lot of people just had different languages stripped from them repeatedly in different places they were shipped from along the way. I actually feel quite guilty about having had easy access, comparatively, to reading and writing because even if we went with ancestral language loss, it also went with privileged entry.
In Measures of Expatriation, you write “Language is my home. It is alive other than in speech. It is beyond a thing to be carried with me. It is ineluctable, variegated and muscular.” That description was especially interesting.
That is in a long prose-poem sequence in Measures of Expatriation where the presence speaking is never identical of the author, so it was probably personas staging different attitudes to or approaches or immersions to language.
The other thing is I tend to think in pictures which often has metaphoric dimensions rather than thinking in logic. When I was thinking of what it was like to work with language, I always seem to have an aerial view of something in between a gigantic snake and sort of an ocean current. It has lots of scales and iridescences and a purposeful direction which I could participate in, but I couldn’t see the end and the beginning of. I tend to feel comfortable when things exceed me easily – I tend to feel alarmed if have the illusion of knowing the boundaries.
You worked as researcher at the Oxford English Dictionary. This may sound like a naïve question but did your work there have any effect on the kind of writing you do?
It’s interesting you ask that because I was thinking of a dictionary just now when I answered. The thing about the dictionary was it didn’t really directly feed into my poetry at all, but it provided a structured day because it was very, very accelerated and intensive work. You’d have to sign off on a certain number of entries and would be assigned on a small part of the entry to work, in a specialized area that you are trained for but then each entry would get passed through different teams – like etymology, science, socalled news for new words.
And what was interesting there was being inside something which exceeded me, again. I can’t remember how many million words there are – we know it’s never as many as they really are.