Naag Mountain by Manisha Anjali
Giramondo, 2024
rock flight by Hasib Hourani
Giramondo, 2024
Alas! There is no one in hell … all the devils are here!
– Aimé Césaire, A Tempest (trans. Richard Miller)
Who are you without colonialism? A difficult question to answer. In 1961 Franz Fanon identified this involution in his illuminating The Wretched of the Earth, about colonialism being so all-encompassing that it ‘forces the people it dominates to ask themselves the question constantly: ‘In reality, who am I?’’ (1967: 200). And it has been a prevailing preoccupation for writers whose families and selves have been scattered elsewhere due to historical forces that attempted to subjugate and annihilate their bloodlines. A counter-attempt at redress. But the colony manufactures its own strange loops, an Escher-esque idea that Douglas Hofstadter defines as ‘despite one’s sense of departing ever further from one’s origin, one winds up, to one’s shock, exactly where one had started out’ (I Am a Strange Loop, 2007: 102); for the same reason, archives are scant – it is here that writers interested in decoloniality must break the cycle and re-imagine new language, new selves. This is reminiscent of Virginia Woolf in A Room of One’s Own, where she notes that for (white) women writers like herself, ‘all the older forms of literature were hardened and set by the time she became a writer’ (1935: 116). In this setting, within a literary tradition that has historically foregrounded and advanced masculine values, it becomes the writer’s mission to find a new container, a new form, to write against this lineage even if there remains a cognisance, a type of double consciousness that constantly chafes.
For children of empire, the coloniality of knowledge and power adds another dimension to this conundrum, a poetics of contradiction that can be as liberating as it can be disheartening. Another strange loop. How can we write against the occupier using the occupier’s language? How do we begin to untangle and sever structures of power that seek to foster authority and violence, and especially so when these same structures of power are embedded within the occupier’s language? We cannot possibly be climbing those Penrose stairs forever. In Naag Mountain and rock flight, two incredible debut books of poetry by Manisha Anjali and Hasib Hourani (both published in 2024 by Giramondo), each poet respectively tackles these questions, albeit through different approaches – the former through dreams and revisionism, the latter through allegory and criticism. The result is two distinct yet intertwined narratives that make up a kind of river morphology, the colony’s detritus spilling into the stream even while the river’s shape and direction changes and as other textual interventions – sediments – accrue alongside. Here appears a decolonial lineage: Don Mee Choi’s DMZ Colony, Bhanu Kapil’s Schizophrene, Jennifer Chang’s House A, Lucy Van’s The Open … they – and many others I have yet to know and read – float alongside Anjali’s and Hourani’s books as confluences continue to appear, the river hurtling toward.
Both books begin with a construction of the ‘I’: Anjali through a ‘Naked Saint,’ who folds a piece of his emigration pass – ‘written in a language he does not understand’ (3) – into the shape of a jackal; Hourani through an etymological yet abstract explanation for how his surname came to be, followed by a series of words (‘it,’ ‘Israel,’ ‘something,’ ‘entity,’ etc.) that explains ‘the reason I am elsewhere’ (5). Anjali writes that the paper jackal ‘contains imaginal cells with instructions for metamorphosis,’ and it is here that time begins (3).
We cannot speak of decoloniality without thinking about temporality, the time we now know of and abide by a byproduct of colonialism. As scholar Dan Thu Nguyen points out in ‘The Spatialization of Metric Time,’ ‘the conquest of space is intrinsically tied to the mastery of time,’ the clock being essential to settler-colonialism in how it allowed outposts, missions, and the like to assume and maintain their authority within commercial and communication systems that would go on to solidify empires (30). Hourani tackles time slantwise in rock flight, the first section named ‘one’ giving way to five more ‘one’s: ‘one more rock,’ ‘one more rock thrown,’ ‘one more rock thrown onto the pile,’ etc., until ‘one more rock thrown onto the pile to tumble the mountain on my chest.’ Rocks are not only allegorical within the history of Palestinian resistance against colonialism, they act as tools towards self-determination, stone-throwing having played a crucial role against British Mandate authorities during the three-year-long Arab revolt in the late 1930s and ever since. Hourani’s skeleton, a kind of accumulative pyramidal image akin to a decolonial Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, then, acts as an amulet imbued with the spirit of resistance ready to propel the resistor as they gather their munitions towards something else.
Likewise, and more implicitly, the way time passes through Naag Mountain is hazy and nonlinear, conjuring a sense of overwhelm often at the core of the colonial subject’s experience; Anjali takes us through images that comprise both myth and memory, their delineations unclear. Another temporal thread surfaces when we arrive at the book’s second section titled ‘Port Douglas’: here we are introduced to ‘Paradise,’ an ‘obscure, banned’ film – ‘comprised of footage of the girmit, the haunted ‘agreement’, the Indian indentured labour system which was established after slavery was abolished’ – which washes up on the town’s shores, and where the girmitya (the subject of the aforementioned girmit) happen to be actors (25). ‘I did not consent to be filmed,’ the Naked Saint says when he reappears a few pages later, then ‘throws his bidi to the laughing waves, jumps into the oceans and erases himself from the film’ (28).
