- Letteratura
Eleonora Chiavetta
-
- PLACES
OF MEMORY, MEMORIES OF PLACE:
- THE
POETRY OF MIMI KHALVATI1
-
-
- Mimi Khalvati has a dual
cultural heritage as she lives in Britain, but she was
born in Teheran in 1944, a country she left when she
was a six-year-old child to come to England to be
educated. She then went back to Iran when she was 17,
returning to England at 25. Her native language is
Farsi, but she admits to having forgotten her mother
tongue during her childhood and adolescent years spent
in Britain. She decided to learn Farsi again when she
was working in Iran with Iranian actors and only
recently has she begun to read Persian. Her poems are
written in English, even if Farsi words appear now and
then in her lines, as a memento of her cultural
background. Her latest publication is Selected
Poems (2000)2,
where we find poems from her previous collections,
In White Ink (1991), Mirrorwork (1995)
and Entries on Light (1997).
- Mimi Khalvati's first
collection of poems In White Ink takes its title from
a sentence in The Laugh of the Medusa by
Hélène Cixous, "A woman is never far
from 'mother' (...).There is always within her at
least a little of that good mother's milk. She writes
in white ink." (Khalvati : 1991). Both the quotation
and the title of the collection hint at the central
position of the relationship between the poet and the
figure of her mother. It is a relationship that the
poet has no wish to sever; on the contrary, she wants
to maintain it, considering it fundamental to her
poetic vision. The link between mother and daughter is
not simply a biological one or the expression of a
sentimental, affective dependence. The mother figure
plays, in fact, an important part as a character in
the poems themselves and her role is always to
preserve the connection between her daughter, who has
been living in England since her childhood, and her
roots, the habits, the customs and the language used
in Iran. She becomes a reservoir of memories from
which her daughter can draw. The image of a nursing
mother is central in the poem "The Woman in the Wall",
where a woman is walled up and dying, reduced to dust,
almost a ghost, but still manages to feed her child -
a girl - who suckles the milk flowing from the wall
until she is weaned and ready to grow up. As this
story is set centuries ago, the image of the
imprisoned mother becomes mythical and a metaphor for
the ceaseless, nurturing bond between past and
present.
- The role of the mother is to
create a chain of memories which are handed down not
only to her daughter, but to her daughter's children.
The chain involves three generations and regards a
past in Iran - still alive in the memory of the woman
- a present in England - mainly represented by the
poet - and a future, which has vague connotations
about the place where it will be lived. The connecting
link between past and future is therefore the poet,
who lives in between two realms, one which is
physically present - her house, her garden, her
streets, London - and one which is mainly imagined,
not only through the stories and lives of other women,
but also through the poet's personal memories, which
derive from the time she spent in Iran as a young
woman, and through objects, which may inspire the
poet's visions.
- Khalvati's memories as they
arise in her verses are often linked to places, both
British and Iranian, which are sometimes described,
but more often evoked through the sensations they
provoked and left behind. Perceptions usually derive
from lights, smells, and sounds. Khalvati's poems have
a special lyrical quality when light and colours are
involved. She is attentive to nuances, shades, the
play of light and darkness, the range from brightness
- usually associated with her birthplace - to dimness
- often associated with Britain. It has been noted
that "light and being alive" in Khalvati's poems are
nearly synonymous (Costantine: 2000, 22) and we can
certainly say that light in her poems has a vivifying
effect while exalting objects and landscapes, and
motivating feelings, suggestions and memories. Her
poems proceed, then, "by means of the accumulation of
a series of articulated perceptions, to explore what
one might call 'feeling-fields'" (Killick:1995,
12).
- In light and shadow, places,
then, play an important part in creating the necessary
conditions for the memory to work. They are both the
subject of memories and the tool of memory. The poet
is often portrayed inside a place - a house, a taxi -
while her mind's eye leads her outside, to an open
country landscape. Indoor places are generally the
ones where recollection is possible, while the outdoor
places become the subject of her meditations. The
limit between indoors and outdoors is often a window,
out of which the poet can observe the immediately
visible surroundings that in due time, through sensory
associations, will bring her to the distant places of
her imagination, which always coincide with the land
of her ancestors. The window is then a metaphor for
the threshold between inside and outside, reality and
dreams, present and past, English and Persian culture.
A threshold the poet is always willing to trespass. In
this way "the suburban, the domestic become a border
zone between this life and some other possible world"
(Greening : 2000, 24). The ease she shows in moving
from one space to another, and from one time zone to
another, and the flexibility she shows in her free
roaming through spaces, indicate a spiritual journey
from which the poet returns with a deeper knowledge of
herself, her place in society and her role as an
artist.
- The Persian past is often
depicted as countryside and memory indulges in the
images of a warm sun, of plants, fruits - "ladies'
fingers, cucumbers curled in the sun" (Khalvati :1991,
16). When portraying herself as a child, in the memory
of her childhood, when "pathways of desire" rose "like
lost balloons ever / higher, higher" and "on an
ottoman of cloud/ were no Gods, Kings, Olympians, but
old men" (Khalvati : 1995, 17), she places herself
among the surrounding trees and she finds her own
space within nature. The wide countryside seems to
express feelings of freedom, of a land without
barriers, of courage and patience, of old knowledge
and of skills the world of today may judge irrelevant.
The work of memory consists in translating one reality
into another, in connecting the world of the past with
the world she lives in, as in the poem "Rubaiyat",
where the contrast between past and present is in the
memory of the grandmother - whose tools the poet has
inherited. The grandmother's skill in chipping sugar
blocks is useless today, when sugar can easily be
found in every supermarket beside the till in neat
sugar boxes. The tools and the recollection of the
gestures, of the rituals of the woman of the past, her
patience in the work she carried out, her gentleness,
seem out of place in a world that does not care "to
tend what fades so soon" (Khalvati: 1991, 51). The
loss of domestic rituals may coincide with a loss of
values which the poet tries to regain. It is not
surprising then, that memories bring out the mother
tongue, as the presence of words in Farsi reinforces
the need to connect one's present to one's
past.
- The house is represented as
the place of family ties. This is true for the house
in England, where three generations live together and
are joined and for the house portrayed in the series
of verses "Interiors", dedicated to childhood memories
connected with the figures of her mother and
grandmother. With an explicit reference to a visual
artist, Eduard Vuillard, and to the art of painting,
"Interiors" describes the rooms where Khalvati's
mother and grandmother worked as dressmakers and is
explicitly meant as a tribute to the 'art' of these
women. Their work is part of the inheritance the poet
has received from her family and it has a religious
quality as we notice in lines such as
-
- (...) And
now,
- when prayers
we never knew were prayers
- in the guise
of silver bobbins,
- machines we
never mastered,
- are once
again in currency
- in the hands
of daughters making light
- of the
partnering, unpartnering of threads;
- (Khalvati:
1995, 37).
-
- or in lines such as "What
sacrament can we find but these/ poor leavings of a
memory/ of a home, a time, a place?" (Khalvati : 1995,
37). The four "Interiors" are designed as paintings,
and carry us through the various rooms of a house
which is felt as a home - the parlour, the workroom,
the studio, the bedroom. Together with these poems, we
also find preparatory, untitled sketches, as happens
to painters when they prepare their canvases. Each
room cannot be constrained to a single poem; as there
are too many memories connected with each of them,
they overflow, filling other verses. The verses,
though, convey an equal feeling of safety, solidity
and saintliness in the virtues they exalt - the
virtues of work, family union, company, as opposed to
loneliness, disgregation. It is a small intimate world
which protects the poet and at the same time makes her
future possible.
- It seems, however, that the
poet's appreciation of the 'rooms' of her past, with
what they contain, is an outcome of adulthood. A poem
such as "Writing Home", for example, stresses the
distance between the little child in the new world of
the girls' school in England, where she studies, and
the far-away home which at this stage is only "an
empty place/ I sent words to" (Khalvati: 2000, 30).
The child's need is to identify herself with the host
reality, and its culture (represented by brownies,
hockey matches, films, picnics) more than to cling to
the dream reality of the world she has left behind. To
admit a sort of betrayal towards her past life is only
possible today, when the poet has finally found a
balance between her two heritages.
- The poet's long search for a
place to call her own is hinted at in lines such
as
-
- (...) like
the bric-à-brac of homes
- that took me
in but were not mine
- though I knew
as well as they where biscuits,
- string or
dog-lead lived and could be
- seen by
strangers walking past at a
- dresser,
drawer, brutally at home in
- the world as
any back view in a window
- or frontal
view of cherry, dogged as a
- greeting card
with yet another Eden,
- yet another
plot of fruit, cat, bird
- (Khalvati:
2000, 30).
-
- which indicate the poet's
process of becoming acquainted with the host country,
of finding her own space within it and her efforts to
mediate her life between the two cultures. The house
is seen as a home, the reassuring space of family
bonds, the place one belongs to and it appears in many
poems with such a cosy connotation. It is the safest
place to start one's spiritual and imaginative
journey. From the house the poet may go out towards
the surrounding world - London - or may become engaged
in a more distant journey, an imaginary one, towards
Iran, or old Persia. Sometimes there is little need
for her to move physically as the landscape, the
country with its geographical and natural features,
its customs, its story, is so vividly recalled that it
enters her home in London and occupies a space within
the English house. In such a way, still within the
reassuring reality of her own sphere and still a
citizen of our time, the poet can create visions of a
place far off in time and space, which become
protagonists of her imagination and
verses.
- This process is quite evident
in the long poem "The Bowl". Khalvati's memory is
often triggered by everyday objects, such as the blue
bowl in the eponymous poem. She stresses the ancient
quality and value of the blue bowl "where clay has
long since crusted, /under the dust and loam" and
where "leaf forms lie/ fossilized" (Khalvati: 2000,
17) and describes the appearance of the object, which
becomes alive as if a "womb of air revolves" inside it
(Khalvati: 2000, 17). The poet is mesmerized by the
bowl which brings to the house its own value as a
witness of a lost age, of the Persian heritage. The
initial description of the bowl stresses the poet's
curiosity about it and its story. The poet's
imagination leads her to ask questions about its
origin and to form hypotheses about the history it
represents. The image of the camels in the desert in
the final lines of Part I leads to Part II where the
poet's imagination is finally kindled and starts
visualizing people and events of the past. Memories
spring out of the bowl, memories of a past the poet
has never known - tribal women, Ali's horse. As the
bowl has broken the boundaries of place and time, we
notice how the poet is transformed by her encounter
with the domestic object. This becomes the threshold
between her life in London, today, and the life of her
ancestors in another country. Imagination is like a
trap and she allows herself to be pulled towards the
land of her past, mixing her own recollections of the
countryside with descriptions she may have taken from
other sources, perhaps literary, perhaps oral. Her
relationship with the world she is evoking is physical
as the figurative language she uses seems to
stress:
-
- My bowl has
cauled my memories. My bowl
- has buried
me. Hoofprints where Ali's horse
- baulked at
the glint of cutlasses have thummed
- against my
eyelids. Caves where tribal women
- stooped to
place tin sconces, their tapers lit,
- have
scaffolded my skin.(...) (Khalvati: 2000,
17).
-
- Natural elements are named,
trees and plants delineate and fill the space of the
lost country - harebell, hawthorn, jasmine, catkin,
chenar (that is, plane tree), dwarf-oak, hazel, pine,
quince, pomegranates, hollyhocks, campanulas,
wheatfields, to underline the richness and
fruitfulness of her place of origin. Sounds join the
image: the scene stops being voiceless and becomes
resonant with the echoes of the past. We hear the
hawkers' cries, the bleating of goats, the sound of a
cascade.
- The language is strongly
metaphorical, to underline the poet's total immersion
in the places whose memory the bowl has evoked - she
becomes the geographic place, as ageless as the
bowl itself and the landscape she is describing. The
bowl is what evokes the past and the space of the
past, but there is a transfer from the bowl, a simple
representation of place and history, to the poet
herself, whose body becomes the place memory recalls:
"My backbone is an alley, / a one-way runnelled alley,
cobblestoned / with hawkers' cries, a saddlebag of
ribs" (Khalvati: 2000, 18). Her imagination evokes a
country inhabited by her ancestors, more than by the
people of today: the quilt man, velvet-weavers,
hamman-keepers represent trades which date back
centuries and underline a pride in the traditions of
her cultural roots. The past she evokes is also shown
with the marks of desolation and ruin: "the white
rooms of the house we glimpsed through pine, / quince
and pomegranate are derelict" (Khalvati: 2000, 18) and
the aim of her recollections seems to be that of
giving life to what would be considered already dead.
Therefore, the reference to her ancestors connects her
with her forefathers, showing that the past history
and the geography of her country is a tie she does not
want to renounce or dismiss. She recognizes her own
position within the history of her ancestors and
accepts it, even if she is a descendant who no longer
lives on those plains or on those mountains. The
impact with the past and the memory of her forebears
lead her to an identification with them and an
awareness of the role she plays in the chain of
history:
-
- I too will
leave my bowl and leave these
wheatfields
- speckled with
hollyhocks, campanulas,
- the
threshing-floors on roofs of sundried
clay
- (Khalvati:
2000, 19).
-
- No longer squatted in front
of the bowl which gave origin to her fantasies, the
poet starts her own journey to the land of her
ancestors completely alone, except for the company of
the memory of her nearest female relatives embodied by
her grandmother. The landscape is filled with strong
colours, red, gold, grey, rose, peacock-blue,
peacock-green : England is completely forgotten and
the beauty of the rediscovered country illuminates the
verses and the poet's life. It is also significant
that at this point Farsi joins the use of English and
the names of places such as Mt White Breast are given
in the mother tongue, together with other expressions
the author sometimes translates, sometimes leaves
untranslated.
- Evoking the past, recreating
it and describing it in verses has the double aim of
keeping the past alive, and at the same time of giving
meaning to the present. Memories are not a form of
escapism; rather, they help the poet to face and
understand her own life. The only way to preserve
balance is to find connections between one's roots and
the land where one has been transplanted. Like a
plant, the poet needs time, silence and light. Playing
with memory needs solitude, being detached from the
surrounding world, concentrating only on the object or
sight which starts the process of
transformation.
- Any object, any sight may
kindle her memory, because of a nostalgic wish to find
what seemed lost, but is not, as long as it is stored
in the mind's eye and in verses. Khalvati's poems
celebrate not only the importance of memory, but the
need and wish for memories, as the only elements that
can oppose destruction, oblivion, death. Her role is,
therefore, to be open to all the sights, smells and
sounds surrounding her, which might convey a sense of
other sights, other smells, other sounds. The images
she is so ready to capture of her present life in
England have a value as the counterpart of other
images of a lost life in Iran - one is the shadow of
the other, but it only depends on the perspective, as
the shadow may become the real thing. In the end, as
in the poem "Vine-leaves", the combination of the two
parts - the real one and its shadow, the object and
what it evokes - creates a different object, a
different reality altogether, richer and more
beautiful for its being born out of two components,
even if they do not fit perfectly. The double
identity, the two sides of the poet might also be seen
in the image of the vine-leaves, the real leaf/ self,
(the English one?) and its shadow (the Iranian one?)
seem like two leaves, and each may look like the real
one, depending on the play of light on it. What
matters is that the added layer, the extra layer
coming from another culture adds meaning and depth to
a human being, a woman, an artist.
- When an English landscape is
portrayed it is recorded as rainy, grey, silent, but
"The harder grey falls/ the brighter grows the dream
of/ light(...)" (Khalvati: 1995, 24). Poems which take
place in London have mostly an urban background, but
even here, in an urban setting, places are connected
with natural elements. Plants and trees belonging to
the local landscape are named, like the willow-tree of
England or the cherry-tree of Highgate. The latter is
in contrast with the mirror-tree artificially created
in the mural that celebrates the Silver Jubilee of
1977, and is an evident reference to British culture
and more precisely to the Monarchy. The mirror-tree
has the same action as the bowl, as it leads the poet
to personal meditations involving herself, her family,
her present life in England, her childhood dreams.
Mirrorwork belongs to an old artistic tradition in
Persia as mirrors are used there to adorn houses and
shops. The sight of English mirrorwork fills the poet
with surprise, but at the same time leads her to
wonder about the possibility of transplanting
something typically Iranian into an alien, British
environment. What this poem shows, which was not
present in the previous poem is, above all, the
possibility the poet acknowledges of approaching
British culture, through and with the help of her own
culture: "The area is still new to me but, as the
mirror-/ tree seemed to suggest, somewhere to/ come
home on my own terms"(Khalvati: 2000, 29). The scene
of the poem is the street where the poet is walking,
but continuous references to the cherry-tree as seen
from the house, shift our attention from an outdoor
setting to an indoor scenario, which parallels the
shifting between the poet's private, intimate thoughts
and people's lives as they spin around her. Moreover,
the parts of the poem written in italics are cues the
poet addresses to an invisible interlocutor, once
again underlining the contrast between her inner
feelings and her public voice. Nothing as ancient as
the desert land evoked in "The Bowl" is presented
here; on the contrary, details of an everyday,
metropolitan life are given, such as the newsagent's
she passes by or the drycleaner waving his
hand.
- In this poem Khalvati also
tells us about the creative process of her poetry:
"The real become imaginal and vice versa" (Khalvati:
2000, 29), she says, stressing the role played by the
transfiguration of objects, which is connected to the
play of memory. The metaphor of the mirrorwork
explains the poet's vision of herself and people, as
it symbolises the fragmented self of all human beings:
"each fragment whole, each unit split" (Khalvati :
2000, 33). We are mosaics, puzzles, created out of
many fragments, each complete in itself, but still a
part of a whole. This long poem affirms the
fragmentation of the human condition : it is lamented,
but accepted as inevitable. In this condition, past
and present mingle so much that each fragment of the
present is aligned next to fragments of a past we
cannot and should not renounce. As the mosaic is
created out of "crock from Turkey, blue on white,/
shop-surround in Ankara, Stoke Newington" (Khalvati:
2000, 34), the presence of various cultural elements
enriches the mosaic of our lives. Cultural differences
are still noted and acknowledged, as is stressed in
the lines
-
- The English
are good at this. Iranians
- hopeless.
- Coming up
mirrorwork in Hackney, my father,
- for example,
might shake his head (denoting
- in Iran
admiration), note differences
between
- theirs and
ours - mirrorsmiths, community -
- and feel,
without expressing it, a severance,
- a loss of
context (Khalvati: 2000, 35).
-
- However, the only solution is
to feed the desire to see things as they are and "to
accomodate differences" (Khalvati: 2000, 35).
Expressing the wish to meet, to find a point of
communication, of exchange, transforms the
indifference towards what the locals do with
mirrorwork, an ancient Persian tradition, in an
"incipient sense of the customary"(Khalvati : 2000,
35). The dismay which makes us asymmetrical has to be
cured, the initial bitterness towards England which
the poet acknowledges, melts away.
- Fellow countrymen or
countrywomen are often associated with movement and
means of transportation if they do not belong to the
family (the father figure is portrayed too, strongly
and vividly). Like the taxi driver in the poem "Rice"
they underline the continuous flow, not only between
two countries, but two cultures, two ways of living.
Other countries are named as well - the U.S.A., for
example - and other languages (the German spoken by
Baba Mostafa, for example). These poems deal with
people who have travelled, who are aliens in a foreign
country, but who have brought their own Iranian world
with them wherever they have gone. In the poem "Earls
Court" we are in the tube, a place where displacement
becomes more tangible. The scene depicted is very far
from the natural landscapes that usually fill
Khalvati's poems and is also far from the cosy
atmosphere of her home. The underground - which
appears in other poems as well - immediately recalls
the image of a continuous movement, of shifting from
one place to another, underlining oscillation,
rootlessness, migration. The faces of the commuters
are anonymous, foreign, ignored and ignoring. However,
the face of a 'brother' emerges from the unknown
crowd, a man whose marks the poet recognizes as
familiar - the Islamic stubble, his speaking Farsi,
the rings on his fingers. Habits and language are what
the poet recognizes in him and what create a bond,
even if the two do not speak to each other. The
identification with such a character is easily made,
so strong is the need for dialogue, for an exchange
between two people who share the condition of being
exiles. The man becomes the mirror in which the poet
can see her own face. Once again, the poet's
imagination enriches the life of the man with her own
projections and with a language she herself does not
use in her poems:
-
- Like a drunk
I want to neighbour him, sit beside
- his stubble's
scratch, turn his talking into
chatting.
- I want to
tell him I have a ring like his,
- only smaller,
I want to see him use his key.
- I want to
hear the child who runs to call
- Baba!
I want to hear him answer, turning
- from his
hanging coat: Beeya, Babjune,
Beeya!
- Ah! Vieni,
vieni!... (Khalvati: 2000,
21-22).
-
- The nostalgic curiosity we
may find in the poem "Earls Court" is not in contrast,
however, with other poems where Khalvati shows that
her roots are deeply planted in a mixed soil. Nothing
is one-sided. An exchange of glances, of dreams and
inventions passes between past and present in
"Needlework" where the woman of today looks at the
woman from the past, or is it the other way round, the
woman of the past is looking at the woman from a
distant future:
-
- On an upper
landing where my work
- is hung, in
another century,
- some strange
and foreign woman
- may try to
picture me
- and fail. Or
is it that I fail
- to picture
her? I cannot think
- what she
would want with me.
- With
hollyhocks and bonnets (Khalvati: 1995,
67).
-
- This exchange of glances
takes its origin from an object belonging to the
sphere of women, to needlework, embroidery. It does
not really matter who starts the game, who starts
looking, seeing, considering: flexibility is necessary
to fight divisions. The poet's goal is not to divide,
but to combine - two countries, two heritages, two
parts of herself. In the final poem in
Mirrorwork, the poet is revising her Persian
and translates a few words of her native language into
English, combining their meanings, placing words from
the Gur'an and the Bible one next to the other -
provided they are 'good words'. Her wish is now to
"learn how to set the future / newly bathed upon my
lap, / bring sky down to wrap us in, / feel myself as
human as I am" (Khalvati: 1995, 92). Human, using both
Farsi and English.
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