[Digital Poetics 4.11] retributions by Nat Raha
© Sutapa Biswas. All rights reserved, DACS 2024. Photo credit: Bradford Museums and Galleries
after Sutapa Biswas, Housewives with Steak Knives, 1985
for Nisha Ramaya
at the edge of the world I wait for the-travellers-who-will-not-come
- Aime Césaire, the miraculous weapons
the courtesies of order, of ruly forms
pursued from the heart of rage or terror or grief
defame the truth of every human crisis
- June Jordan, ‘Civil War’
prelude.
interpersonal fissures,, a new norm
dis/guarding sociality like enclosure
a daily practice witness to dust
piling / decimate
cobbles, exhumed
& neighbours muse
-umified, narratives unexcavated from dunes
. in
the prospect of absolute winter
, we itch at palms
/ fe
l
i
n
e
-s whirr
out fret
but either : ensconced in
frost or family, there’s
little boundedness, carries
an alarm
of blackbirds, tenor sax
, the next duets for rainfall.
fill these rooms against separability , against the stake of deaths ⎯
[ we politicise the relations
holding bodyminds together, w/out
together souls leak ⎯
utopia is what we fabricate between us
/ the now / here ;; the
whats-been lived; & the future-reparative ,
can leave your keys at home
sears ink even if the book
doesn’t come to print, plant it (w/)
willow / make it ritual ,,
like reading ,, make
the practice of bodying
root, plant our miraculous arms
or our poems in common(ing)
give forty years, claim the land from capital
/ tidelines / lips
buckled on the ice of the law
go ⎯ into the heart of the city,,
find⎯
seeds mixed mouths multiple
spat in the direction of
haters, bleached offices
of naval force
, administration
, promissories on sail to ‘new’ worlds,
, drained & undraining fens ,,
/ aromatics
giddy trace
on senses ⎯
intensive
feeding lines, winds-
wept, salt
ing nau
sea
, dé/rive
;
the craters under infrastructure
for sweat,
cum, aban
-doned feelings from the full force of bodies
in movement, dan-
cing where we were found
if there’s trust in a generation’s
length already, divine
glass cinderblocks fresh
concrete & steel, mussels
, ground oyster shells pearlescent
rays
crushed into them
*
i.
Sutapa proposes that the fight against fascism, imperialism,
ethnonationalism, colonialism,
fantasies
of owning land under the most dense military occupation
, mouths stapled, arrested intellectuals
&
emboldened rapists / extra
judicial demo
-litions ,, echoes encoded screamed into
walls, the divisions & stakes with which
a nation is reconstituted
claiming control of our bodies
to breed its vision of future
disintegrates small
talk as a swerve:
a continual burning of oxygen
/ would claim an island
, materialistic,, dig in for gold, con
-struct
a prison to strike fear, splintering voice,
political economic torpor
populate it with deportations
to keep palms from worldscheming
, from the essential sharing & joining
[ Sutapa proposes that the fight…]
begins in the home, domestic
goddess labour.
the entropy of Artemesia
, Pritilata,
removing the fishhook
& facing the scorn
eventually
you’ve little option but to inaugurate a laboratory
,, to implode or diffuse the reaction
, & we of the line of abolitionists⎯
the duress of placement a consistent sonic quake
[Fred Moten] we find the kitchen is under
,
matter detunes imprecise
a
customed like walls
to fracture ⎯ in its
locus of patriarchal compression ⎯
such we sharing preservation (the word?),
regeneration (vegetables),
tinctures & arms of miraculous refusal
, generous placelessness
(the not/here & the dispossession of here)
with the lightning,
khadga, mundamala, an ultimate reality of our animate rage
, black illuminate flame ascend collective scream
as fullness of sky as absolute night ⎯
Kali could spare a body but no attitude
severs en/actment
-s patterned to service patriarchy,,
drives vipers into burning peace
turning fear to waste mort
-gage & mortar
/ , decimate
arteries
of reaction, hatred / drinking
the venom from the source
electric dripping red /
in yur so knowable violences
persons personifications beheaded garlanded
of crimes to service claims
on the earth, against
that consume the matter of us humanity, against ecologies,
to inanimacy, to physical ends
/ to a whirl in the voice
// to streets, elating in fires voices tongues
conchs streaming hairs
goddess radiant arms that
are her arms that are our arms are her arms
that are our arms that are her arms are our arm
our her arms,
a collective intimate retribution
, a riptide
a counter-narrative
, thunder alternate truths
amidst the becoming
chaotic shreds at freedom’s work
admonished / abject
what’s left by flesh:
sediment
trashed sense to skin / spine
leaden the weight like a nightmare /
wormhole potentia / ‘bad time travel’
craters trapping
verberate soundings harm’s simmer under skin, echo
radio
-active, half lifes aglow erupt
barking fibrous in densities disappeared, a
traumatic practice of embodied resistance
left to subsist on a gratitude for life
,
social body
the
rememory
witness
, scars
the worlds we forge atop to de/compose
iv
ffect e cres
a ts hayw
ambers: freedom & the marvellous , ire
ch like magma ,,
runs like our own blood
amass :: make life in defiant multiplicity
that their laws & disappearances
fail to extinguish
to wrest from structural violence
the possibilities of maintenance, of life
, towards a reparative practice
of the everyday /
*
interlude.
||: That is what she
used to say. It is
because she was capable
of living over here & there, in
several places at once, in several
times, yesterday, tomorrow [al coda]
, & so she was afraid
– Édouard Glissant
⎯ exchange presupposes
the system blowing open, ears
out to oceans’ depth
, ancestral
surroundings on peaks & ebbs
. by now,
the freeze of our hands, years
of bodyminds shielding breakwind
to recourt sound tide
, add months w/out touch
multiply for the increased
speed of the Earth’s rotation.
lost count of moons between meetings
,, pace of breathing
, tigers,
growth
of the mangle
*
ii.
& from the floor of the woods, awa
k
e / ar
bo
real interstices ,
a
lattice incarnate as coppice
of roots predating
enclosure, cromwell
,
the coming up in the legacy of war, clear cut
return of the repressed.
counters ahis- even deep recesses
storical perspectives on manage of peace here /
-ment from ending days shaped by violence
the forest bears histories of labour indentured migrant marginalised
gravitating tides , arms of million drawn into the whirl
denude / plantare / monocrop a land
-scape timber, rubber, Malaya
Myanmar, Sri Lanka, coconut ⎯ a
workers’ geography of debt
, root & bone
then called to this neck of the world, over
winter without coats
, drives
the chattering of teeth become anxious grind [Camara Taylor]
grounding the recuperation of an empire;
divisive frosts at black wrists
, a population
to a general strike,
fabricating a refusal of
the world in your image ,
to sing
the ashes & oaks, resonance
scale the energy, photo giving back to ground
-synthetic, joules in
light & labour caught & rooted here
bear turbulent breeze / recluded
to the carving burn,
(its hard to know the bliss of a canopy in
a meddling climate).
a drenching clarity
fill the offered , handed
wrong kind of silent summer late with
chant, words to stead dejection
*
iii.
throw⎯
tear the groove / present
-anticipatory for virgo’s moon, layered
in the return of night, the page
is copresence yet still
in trappings port, this island⎯
in the conjure of limbs, en-
flesh, commit
-ment to non-locality:
train an i to move pro/posing it,
& witness; body it (ever) open to free
like a warehouse or atelier exchange,
, dropping assumptions, energetics in transfer
logics, out of & into
abjection, & undoing
patterns unholding this world
logger /
rhymics that like to fly
ease yrself
down,
bodyminds un/remember,,
grow
spin
/dling
freaks, re
-fuse these
conditions of
de/stru
ction
fuchsia
emblaz
oned
like the reveal when the light comes up
, some verdant brownnesses
to femme. all that beauty
brought through the room is
a kind of love,
,, but the room subsides ⎯
fuck! ⎯ & we’re back
in the domestic
vox stretched over hearts these frequencies
lingering in us, in
lives proxim (me, Claude Cahun
& Gaynor, carrying bare paws
is it so ⎯ don’t
wanna let
you go-oh , never can say
goodbye b-ouy , oh no no – oo
[ crossfade to Frost, Glissant ⎤
Moten, still flapping :||
*
coda.
pour mes aurores boréalis mes sources mes bonnes amies
pour mon amie ma femme mon otarie
[Aimé. Césaire]
[…] dare to dream of a peaceful life. Peaceful, here, does not mean passification or appeasing, but a politics and a practice of solidarity, love, and self-defence [Françoise Vergès]
dilate eyes on galaxies , autumn heat
unbelieving carceral nights ,
we
recolour the cities with visions of love, dusks,
truths in harm , warm
flesh after its weaponisation
can sacred image
sound so loud to quell
the violence that would follow us a
hundred orbits of the earth?
or does the power we envision as living
stop you in fear ,
to question why you come to
be scared of our blesséd power?
⎯ ritualise the beckoning winter
, hours loss for a lack of national preparedness
,,
practice the negation of hunger , a fire
dyed already in our own blood
for this endless night ⎯
danced against prohibitions,,
spun & thrown into the fire
there will be days when survival stops all work
when flesh fissures on the absorption of lava
when our admission of pleasure moves us
on the floors of the world
⎯ not only will we also live ⎯
hand the scissors for their hair
our sorrows, pain an eighth ocean
forth voices on high tide, a source
how/ever
of evenings turbulent , emptied
air, insects break
like catastrophic economies
uncertain
of stooping nations / hung like a garlanded lunar half face
⎯ of what are you afraid?
houses will not hold for themselves.
re-
narrating
the black machete
fells for survival on anointed
earth
for life to return to ground
hold out your tongue ⎯
*
‘retributions’ was written August – September 2022 ⎯ composed between Galloway, Scotland and Cambridgeshire, England, a draft of the text was completed on residency at Wysing Arts Centre. Thanks to Hannah Wallis, Sarah Hayden, and the Wysing team for their hospitality.
The poem was first published in print in Troi, Trosi, ed. Dylan Huw, Spring 2023.
*
Dr Nat Raha is a poet and activist-scholar, and Lecturer in Fine Art Critical Studies at the Glasgow School of Art. Her work is of an experimental queer lyric, attending to the everyday of marginalised lives, hirstories of struggle and resistance to racial capitalism, of humans and the more-than-human. She works through de/re/materialising sound, form and syntax, on the page and in performance.
Her books of poetry include of sirens, body & faultlines (Boiler House Press, 2018), countersonnets (Contraband Books, 2013) and apparitions (nines) (Winner of the Nightboat Books Poetry Prize, forthcoming 2024). Nat’s work is anthologised in 100 Queer Poems (Vintage 2022), We Want It All: An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetics (Nightboat, 2020), Liberating the Canon: An Anthology of Innovative Literature (Dostoyevsky Wannabe, 2018). Her poetry has been translated in numerous languages. Recent performances include epistolary (on carceral islands), co-commissioned by Edinburgh Art Festival, Scotland and TULCA Festival of Visual Arts, Galway, Ireland, 2023. Recent critical writing appears in Queer Print in Europe (Bloomsbury, 2022), Transgender Marxism (Pluto Press, 2021), New Feminist Literary Studies (CUP, 2020) and Third Text (‘Imagining Queer Europe then and now’, 2021). With Mijke van der Drift, Nat co-edits Radical Transfeminism zine, and is currently co-authoring a book Trans Femme Futures: An Abolitionist Ethics for Transfeminist Worlds (forthcoming, 2024).
