Divya Victor
CRITICAL INTRODUCTION
Written by Chloe Lim
Dated 8 June 2020
In a 2018 essay, Divya Victor tells the story of an overturned rickshaw, and a girl with a bloodied, split open lip “in 1990, our little township in India”. She writes,
Seeing this bloodied lip, my classmate’s mother ran to her kitchen and returned, her cotton sari swinging at her ankles, with a fist full of sugar. Sugar grown in plantations. Plantations from our land. Once owned by us. (Victor)
The mother packs sugar into the cut until it stops bleeding, the sugar drawing water and blood into itself, drying the wound, removing dead things from the site of puncture. This story troubles me – an unsettling paradox of sugar, that famed symbol of colonial exploitation, of black-and-brown slave deaths, somehow facilitating and precipitating healing.
The essay compares this gash to the traumatic wound that is the invasion of English into the colonised world. Victor recalls Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks, and the dismembering power of colonial “assimilation” where the “the language of the coloniser courses erratically through the body politic” (Victor), possessing the colonised person by robbing them of their language, a severing of “wild tongues” inciting what Gloria Anzaldúa might call a “tradition of silence”. (Anzaldúa)
Yet, English is Victor’s primary poetic language. Her poetry, criticism, and commentary are comfortable residents in the Anglophone literary institution just as she is. Victor lives and works in the United States, where she is Assistant Professor of Poetry and Writing at Michigan State University, following some four years as Assistant Professor at Nanyang Technological University’s English Literature department. English in her hands, however, works towards the mending of wounds, telling the stories of the racialised colonial subject and immigrant, stories that are intertwined with her doubly diasporic self, having been born in India before migrating first to Singapore, then to the United States. In Victor’s hands, the language returns to the site of its introduction, performing a restorative project by dissecting and articulating the trauma that occurs at the point of fracture.
English too, then, is a type of sugar. It is a vestige of empire now over-signified with the violence of dispossession and global narratives of economic expediency. Yet English is a language that we possess intimately, often at the cost of, or intertwined with, our other home languages. Singaporeans are familiar with this cultural alienation, populated by descendants of indentured labour and a modern transient workforce. English is our first language, and our mother tongues often are not our mothers’ tongues. Divya Victor’s concerns around immigration, global inequality, language, and its excesses or inadequacies therefore, are simultaneously familiar to the Anglo-American literary institution and highly relevant to a Singaporean audience.
There are four main collections in Victor’s body of work: THINGS TO DO WITH YOUR MOUTH (Les Figues, 2014), UNSUB (Insert Blanc, 2014), NATURAL SUBJECTS (Trembling Pillow, 2014) and KITH (Fench Books/Book*hug, 2017), with an artist’s book, CURB (The Press at Colorado College, 2019), being the latest addition.
THINGS TO DO WITH YOUR MOUTH is discomfiting conceptual poetry. “Poets do write for poets” as Victor writes in her acknowledgements, but even with this caveat, the collection is not for the faint-hearted. Part of Les Figues’ TrenchArt: Logistics Series which uses “the cut, and cutting, as an organising principle” (“TrenchArt: Logistics | Les Figues Press”) , THINGS deals with the bodily excesses of unruly women, from the eighteenth-century hysteric made to take “baths ten or twelve hours a day, for ten whole months” until her tissues begin to dissolve in Foucault’s The Birth of the Clinic, to the women of the Middle Ages “accused of witchcraft and of eating children”, and Freud’s notoriously recalcitrant Dora. The studied surveillance of bodies, psychoanalysis, and the written word collide in the text, as bodies are interrogated via the familiar, yet menacing discourse of the doctor’s office. The book opens:
what is the matter with you?
where does it hurt?
how are we feeling today
These questions asked in the second person are followed by imperatives throughout the collection, with instructions to “put flesh on a string”, calm a child, gag a partner, create a situation, or sever vocal cords. The reader however is given little space in the first person to declare much else except appropriated lines confining one to socially dictated practice, “1. I am of sound mind, / 2. I was born on ________ (date of birth) in _________ (country of birth), / 5. I was married on _________ (dd/mm/yy)”. The fill-in-the-blanks form-format already decides what will be said in application for some form of acceptance predicated on inclusion, citizenship, and marital status. The text re-enacts the experience of ever-limited and decreasing authority faced by the female hysteric, first as a patient subject to a medical professional’s questioning, then as the recipient of violent instructions. This violence, typically related in THINGS to gagging and silencing of partners, children, and the self, further multiplies the experience of the voiceless female. It applies for recognition and acceptance only via patriarchally sanctioned systems of nation, marriage, and other documentation.
Yet violence in terms of graphic imagery are at turns introduced by sections such as the opening of ‘Touching Feeling’:
Julia Kristeva spits on my Achilles tendon while my Adam’s apple combs lice from Adrienne Rich’s wigs as she gossips about my Alcock’s canal when my artery of Adamkiewicz sidles up to Anne McClintock as she burrows into my Bachmann’s bundle while it curls up with Annette Kolodyny ...
This goes on for twelve more pages providing a loosely alphabetical name-list of theorists linked by verbs so that each theorist enacts some form of action on another. This majority-female catalogue of theorists are freed from formal academic context through verbs such as “spits”, “gossips”, “sidles”, and “borrows”, which imbue them with bodily intimacy with others but also personal agency. At the same time, the sequence is frequently interjected with the phrase “so hey”, a casual and joyful rejoinder amidst the grotesque violence that precedes and follows it. The reader does not need to know each of these theorists to notice that this sequence adds to the collection not just some respite, but also another possible narrative of womanhood – the serious academic theorist possessing a separate, bodily joy.
Ultimately, through the cataloguing of revulsive physiological reactions and unruly syntax, Victor performs a type of restitution in language. She makes the misbehaving female body alive to us. To survive this collection is to witness the linguistic overflow of hysteria into potent wordplay, where appropriated language and discourse types previously used to obscure the hysteric’s experience are subverted, opening up to reveal their bodily experiences. As Sueyuen Juliette Lee explains, there is pleasure in reading the work:
Many of the descriptions of dismembered body parts and fluids were troubling. Any pleasure seems to skirt on dangerous territory, the danger that we are again fetishising and making an abstract object out of women’s pain.
However
I found a new pleasure with the language itself. I also felt licensed to this pleasure at the root level of language because it was grounded in Victor’s efforts to liberate the hysteric from her previous prison of meaning. (Lee)
In Victor’s next collection however, the associative web of academic theorists, Freudian psychoanalysis, and academic discourse in THINGS gives way to a far more singular reference point. UNSUB, published in the same year, is an excellent example of the high potential of conceptual poetry, providing a concise interrogation of what it means to be “wanted” in a modern surveillance state, where a categorising impulse coupled with dangerous generalisations precipitate “a culture of terrorism, paranoia and surveillance” (“UNSUB by Divya Victor”). As Victor explains in Jacket2, conceptual poetry operates through repetition, appropriating and quoting from other texts, and recalling both the original text(-type) while estranging language from its familiar meanings (Place). This is demonstrated repeatedly in UNSUB where the title refers to a frequently used FBI portmanteau for “unknown subject”, or “the unapprehended and unidentified perpetrator of a crime”. Conceptual writing here lifts from the discourse of FBI documents to articulate questions around the validity of FBI surveillance on persons of certain characteristics and racial profiles, foregrounding the threats posed not only by the “unknown subject” but also the surveillance of manhunts and forensics.
Comprised of three parts, UNSUB opens with a preliminary map of the collection’s terrain—there will be victims and perpetrators, “high profile cases/low risk victims”, murdered bodies (one tells the story of its own decay in “prosopopeia”), and identifying features linked to “the development of the individual”. “part i” then goes on to feature multiple anonymous supposedly wanted persons, each with a reward of $100,000. Why they are desirable or menacing individuals is made clear throughout the section with descriptions as generic as “has reportedly made previous statements / may have plans to kill a police officer” or “speaks fluent Spanish”. Scrutiny of the “unsub” is both intense yet unfocused. The “unsub” is reduced to weak categorisations that are not helpful in identifying them. These generic specifications could increasingly refer anyone, to be captured for ever-growing amounts of reward money, placing more individuals under the threat of surveillance and capture. This escalates in “part ii” to involve suggestions of racial profiling as the reward money increases to “$5,000,000” and involves “alleged member(s)” of an unknown group. While descriptors become more specifically targeted towards racialised persons including one who “speaks with a Yemeni accent and drives taxis” and another who “has ties” (although of what kind we do not know), they are still not useful enough to identify any specific individual.
If UNSUB is firmly grounded in a nexus of meaning from the United States, NATURAL SUBJECTS and KITH provide more intimate, focused forays into vignettes of life for border-crossing, racialised subjects. Just as in UNSUB, the language of documentation and the policing of persons and borders feature in NATURAL SUBJECTS. The cover gives us a suggestion of what is to come – bloodied red meat underneath the title suggests the process of becoming part of another body politic, becoming ‘naturalised’. The United States’ Department of Homeland Security and its logo become subject to Victor’s careful eye. The power to exclude is here represented by “A white American / eagle”, holding both “an olive branch” and “13 arrows pointed outward”. The powers that be therefore have the ability to reach out to the immigrant with both the olive branch of peace or the threatening power of the arrow. The immigrant’s tussle with the bureaucracy of Homeland Security is a similarly dichotomous experience, divided between “accepted” and “rejected”, while true allegiances become increasingly complicated as “our faces cleave in four directions”. Victor refreshes familiar narratives of the immigrant journey through specific detailing of symbols, possessions, and experiences across time and space. These span women in nineteenth century Indian asylums and self-assembled furniture from Target, where women struggle to acquiesce to narratives of “sanity” and acceptable domestic life. These specifics tell a more universal story, however, of individuals subject to large faceless bureaucracy and the uneven vagaries of modern migration.
Much has been said by Felix Berenstein about the contributions that NATURAL SUBJECTS makes to post-conceptual poetry, while employing the lyric and familiar yet dissonant songs like nursery rhymes and folk tunes in the collection. However, most intriguing is the involvement of the poet-speaker ‘I’, which details distressing accounts of “passing attempts” to take the right passport photo, cross borders, assimilate into violent and uninviting places along with her grandmother and mother, and alongside “Eliza Doolittle”, “Fräulein Maria”, and “Hedda Gabler”. Each of these female characters, having been elsewhere represented in art at the hands of male authors and authorities, are here too owners of “passport photos”. Doolittle’s own attempt to pass in a new social strata take on additionally rich meanings when mapped onto the immigrant’s attempts to assimilate into U.S. society while remaining tethered to other homes and source cultures, as do the von Trapp’s own emigration to the United States and Gabler’s destructive ennui. The frustrated female presence in THINGS coheres with the jargon of surveillance and scrutiny in UNSUB to generate a portrait of the (female) immigrant’s tussle with becoming a ‘naturalised subject’ while remaining inconsolably tethered to homes left behind. This culminates in the section “This Natural Subject Requires Assembly” which features pieces of furniture bought at various large retailers like “IKEA” and “Target”. This accumulation of detritus in the process of home-making still is at odds, however, with the fracture of identity that occurs over the migration journey as the collection closes with “your body lies over the sea oh bring back your body to me”. The immigrant thus possesses a self divided over home and new home, an experience that is slowly unpacked throughout the collection as both historical, shared by other women in stories past, as well as uniquely modern in the performance of producing passport photos and participating in consumerist culture.
Then we arrive at KITH, which uses lived experiences, photographs, paintings, and historical events as starting points towards a ‘triangulation’ of kith, kin, and community. Victor explores and documents “how some people come to be perceived as Indian” through moments of the diaspora’s contact with empire, political upheaval, and the mundane affair of adjusting to life in new places. This is achieved through the detailing of the experiences of kith and kin, “practices of being at the site of belonging: how an ancestor batters an oily pomfret while wrapped in a cotton sarong, how an uncle’s hips sway while breathing the salt air of the Arabian sea” (Fitch). These vignettes of kin in places where they feel at home, or where familiar domestic practices continue to be enacted, stake claims to ownership and community that stand apart from and resist the violence of being colonised and named by the white other and other political powers.
What makes KITH so much more accessible and welcoming to the general reading public compared to the earlier works is possibly its lack of interest in addressing and including the university and its ramblings on Freudian psychoanalysis or post-conceptual poetry. Separately, non-white, Asian, and specifically readers from the Indian diaspora may find themselves more closely connecting with KITH. As Victor herself states:
KITH is an oxbow in the stream of my poetics. A deviation made from the same water body moving over a tilt in the landscape. This tilting happened because I left the US for Singapore—where much of this book was written...
Away from white poetry communities in which I so often live, I felt and believed I had the authority to write the book that didn’t need to explain anything in order to exist. I didn’t feel as obliged as I typically do to address ‘the field’ or to intervene into what I felt was a trigger happy, critically asymmetrical, really unsatisfying conversation about race and intersectional difference here in the US.
Free from the burdens of self-justification to academia, and written in our own once-colony, KITH brings together seemingly disparate items such as pictures of family, marine biology, the 1919 British massacre of at least 400 persons in Jallianwala Bagh, and a 1998 cyclone that kills salt-plain workers in Gujarat to form a composite picture of ‘Indianness’. Even what initially appears to be a loose end in an extended prose exploration of how a black man came to appear in John Singleton Copley’s 1778 panting, Watson and the Shark, connects to the whole via an investigation of what it might mean to be closely tethered to water bodies, being made to cross them, and thereafter being subject to the whimsy of white narratives of race and acceptability. The racialised, working and middle class body continues to tussle today with systems of power, such as large corporations selling dreams of success in the final section, “Family Portraits”. Yet amidst all this pain – the “shriek frightful” of the subjects of the Empire, racialised abuse, and the invasion of whiteness into the psyches of the community – KITH is deeply tender towards a community that transcends borders and nationalistic definitions of ‘Indian’. It is filled with family photos, and descriptions of family members and ‘Indianness’, inclusions that can be read as resistance or remedy to potential self-loathing that colonial contact produces.
While Victor’s work may be replete with historical depictions of violence, the collections are filled with deep sympathy and affection for and in families, as well as communities of womanhood and the Indian diaspora. A split lip and the guttural scream of a traumatised individual are still here met with “a fist full of sugar”, a sympathetic mother, sister, or friend running to attempt some healing. Divya Victor’s project of documentation and restitution comes accompanied with careful exploration of language overflowing as both sword and salve, reacting to historical and modern systems of power.
Works cited
Anzaldúa, Gloria. “How to Tame A Wild Tongue”. Everett Public Schools. n.d. https://www.everettsd.org/cms/lib07/WA01920133/Centricity/Domain/965/Anzaldua-Wild-Tongue.pdf
Bernstein, Felix. “Expression Concrète: A review of Divya Victor's 'Natural Subjects'”. Jacket2. June 30, 2015. https://jacket2.org/reviews/victor-bernstein
Fitch, Andy. “A Home in My Ears: Talking to Divya Victor”. Los Angeles Review of Books. February 15, 2019. https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/interviews/home-ears-talking-divya-victor/
Lee, Sueyuen Juliette. “Things to Do With Your Mouth — Constant Critic”. Constant Critic. May 3, 2014. https://constantcritic.com/sueyeun_juliette_lee/things-to-do-with-your-mouth/
n.a. “TrenchArt: Logistics | Les Figues Press”. Les Figues Press. 2019. http://lesfigues.com/book/trenchart-logistics/
Place, Vanessa. “Conceptualist Autopoiesis: A dialogue between Divya Victor (United States/India/Singapore), Swantje Lichtenstein (Germany), and Riccardo Boglione (Italy/Uruguay)”. Jacket2. 20 April 2013. https://jacket2.org/commentary/conceptualist-autopoiesis-dialogue-between-divya-victor-united-statesindiasingapore-swant
Victor, Divya. KITH. Albany, NY: Fence Books, 2017.
— NATURAL SUBJECTS. New Orleans: Trembling Pillow Press, 2014.
— THINGS TO DO WITH YOUR MOUTH. Los Angeles: Les Figues Press, 2014.
— UNSUB. Los Angeles: Insert Blanc, 2014.
— “Sugar on the Gash”. Asian American Writers’ Workshop. July 12, 2018. https://aaww.org/sugar-on-the-gash/
