'Expatriation: my having had a patria, a fatherland, to leave, did
not occur to me until I was forced to invent one. [...] This luxury
of inattention, invention, and final mismatch...a 'Trinidad' being
created that did not take my Trinidad away (my Trinidad takes
itself away, in reality, over time)...that is expatriation, no? An
exile, a migrant, a refugee, would have been in more of a hurry,
would have been more driven out or driven towards, would have been
seeking and finding not.'In Measures of Expatriation Vahni
Capildeo's poems and prose-poems speak of the complex alienation of
the expatriate, and address wider issues around identity in
contemporary Western society. Born in Trinidad and resident in the
UK, Capildeo rejects the easy depiction of a person as a neat,
coherent whole - 'pure is a strange word' -embracing instead a
pointilliste self, one grounded in complexity. In these texts sense
and syntax are disrupted; languages rub and intersect; dream
sequences, love poems, polylogues and borrowed words build into a
precarious self-assemblage.' Cliche', she writes, 'is spitting into
the sea', and in this book poetry is still a place where words and
names, with their power to bewitch and subjugate, may be disrupted,
reclaimed. The politics of the body, and cultures of sexual
objectification, gender inequality and casual racism, are the
borders across which Capildeo homes, seeking the modest luxury of
being 'looked at as if one is neutral ground'. In the end it is
language itself, the determination to speak, to which the poet
finds she belongs: 'Language is my home, I say; not one particular
language.' Measures of Expatriation is in the vanguard of
literature arising from the aftermath of Empire, with a fearless
and natural complexity. 'Expatriation: my having had a patria, a
fatherland, to leave, did not occur to me until I was forced to
invent one. [...] This luxury of inattention, invention, and final
mismatch...a 'Trinidad' being created that did not take my Trinidad
away (my Trinidad takes itself away, in reality, over time)...that
is expatriation, no? An exile, a migrant, a refugee, would have
been in more of a hurry, would have been more driven out or driven
towards, would have been seeking and finding not.'
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