Colonialism’s tail is long; it gives you whiplash. It happened in the past and it continues into the present in ways both subtle and overt, ceding to a type of wilful contradiction that creates the falsehood(s) surrounding ‘nuance’ as people attempt to grapple with myriad overlapping untruths. What better way to look at an untruth than to insist the truth lies somewhere in between yes and no? For Anjali, this problem persists in CSR brand sugar, ‘the company that once owned my family,’ and which ‘planted our bloodlines in the great southern waters’ (9; 17). Its spectre is an affront: ‘The Colonial Sugar Refining Company has been established in every place we have ever lived,’ a geography of violence that trails Anjali from Fiji to New Zealand to Australia (67). This becomes a recurring nightmare in the final section, ‘Mountain’: ‘The Colonial Sugar Refining Company is still a company’ (76).
How do we live with such paradoxes, especially when they are occurring in conjunction with our lives? The never-colonised might make resigned comments such as ‘we live in a society,’ but the colonised might respond: ‘whose?’ This specific frustration brings to mind Don Mee Choi in DMZ Colony. Citing Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus (‘Language is made not to be believed but to be obeyed, and to compel obedience’ (qtd. in Choi, 97)), and Deleuze again in his 1987 essay ‘What is the Creative Act?’ (‘information is a controlled system of order words. Order words that are given in our society’ (qtd. in Choi, 97)), Choi expands further through an invitation that asks readers to collectively re-imagine colonised ontologies:
I obsess about ‘order words that are given in our society’. In 1945, it took less than thirty minutes for order words to be carried out, to divide the country I was born in, along the 38th parallel north. Order words compel division, war, and obedience around the world. But other words are possible. Translation as an anti-neocolonial mode can create other words. I call mine mirror words. Mirror words are meant to compel disobedience, resistance. Mirror words defy neocolonial borders, blockades. Mirror words flutter along borders and are often in flight across oceans, even galaxies. Mirror words are homesick. Mirror words are halo. Mirror words are orphaned words. Now look at your words in a mirror. Translate, translate! Did you? Do it again, do it!
(99)
This is one way of doing translation. You pull apart words and reexamine them, scrutinise their properties and roots; within a language lies another one, hidden. Did you? Do it again, do it! Like time, language is another one of colonialism’s strange loops, an eternal reminder for the diasporic poet who does not write or publish in their mother tongue. Anjali states this unequivocally, gesturing to ‘the order of fictions and deceptions’ until it builds to a crescendo almost right smack in the middle of the book:
Shortly after the birth of literature, we became suspicious of the written word. We had knowledge that was shared telepathically, by mouth, ear and performance. The written word was a tool for the manipulation of truth. Every untruth that was written down intercepted our oral histories. When a story is shared by mouth, the story is never the same. It changes the way it wants to, and every version is true. We pull the propaganda instruments out of our throats. We hang our mother’s singing shellfish from our ears. Imagination is a political tool designed to keep us in love. It is our responsibility to always be in love.
(51)
At the heart of both books lies an apprehension towards language, a sense of distrust. Naag Mountain: ‘When our eggs hatch, we put blindfolds around our baby snakes so the propaganda cannot be seen’ (18). rock flight: ‘and the more time i spend with words the more i realise that they do not mean anything at all’ (10). Both poets know what it is to be shaped by propaganda, to see propaganda destroy an entire people, gradually, over an entrenched period of time. We are after all the children of its vestiges. The limits of language are feared as the diaspora poet-critic ends up indicting themselves.
At this, we can see how both Hourani and Anjali move through tonal changes that oscillate between transparency and opacity, perhaps one way of addressing audiences in a settler-colonial literary culture that still necessitates a certain plea for conviction. Within Euro-American social mores particularly, the imperative can be seen as impolite, inappropriate or even offensive, so this almost always gives way to indirect speech acts that privilege politesse. You don’t (typically) say ‘STOP! ,’ but you say ‘I have to ask you to stop.’ For Hourani, then, the imperative mode appears in the shape of several How-Tos, instructing readers ‘how to’ hold a breath, make a box, make another box, make a rock, make a sling, make ‘your own’ explosion, make another rock, and finally, make a box back, which is similar to Naag Mountain in terms of the denouement to which it builds up:
ONE suffocate settler annette TWO suffocate the suffocating state (‘HOW TO MAKE A BOX BACK:,’ 75)
