Wasps in a Golden Dream Hum a Strange Music

By Asher Ghaffar

“In the age of increasing surveillance of borders, the border is where every thing significant occurs; map the border and you begin to understand the pulse of a nation,” Asher Ghaffar writes in the introduction to wasps in a golden dream hum a strange music, his debut collection of poetry. In 2003, he was stopped at the Wagah border post, where hundreds gather to watch the spectacle of the aggressive flag-lowering ceremony on both the Indian and Pakistani side.

Deploying the Wagah border literally and metaphorically, Ghaffar movingly describes the affective dimensions of “race” from the position of second-generation Canadian-born Muslim immigrant, deftly interrogating media depictions of the War on Terrorism. As Ghaffar writes: "I saw an ocean between two worlds / where flowers burst like paper rage."

He also documents, in a series of cascading questions, the multiple ways that he came to understand the aftermath of the July 7th suicide bombings. At times the poetry is productively conflicted between narrative and verse, and the text opens up a fertile space where multiple genres flourish and jest.

In the spirit of anti colonial poets like Aimé Césaire and Mahmoud Darwish and more recent experimental writers like the late Theresa Hak Kyung Cha and Nathalie Stephens, Asher Ghaffar documents a restless and often beautiful search for a rich and complex anti colonial poetics for our times, without falling into comfortable dogmas: “I sought a form for the body in crisis, the body in alliance with the flight of bees. I searched the archive for the voice which would break the density further. I sought the drive that was not the drive for death, but the drive for everlasting life in fervor.”

• Language: English
• Publisher: ECW Press
• Release date: Oct 31, 2008
• ISBN: 9781554903382

Book preview

Acknowledgements

INDUCTION

"All observed crows are black.

Therefore: All crows are black."

GENESIS

In the age of surveillance, the border is where one discerns the pulse of a nation. The border is the inverse of the wide expanse of the frontier where we envision ourselves as infinite and unruly — where we come to know ourselves, embodied in divisive histories. Jarred out of ourselves — we never knew ourselves until we were suspended between worlds. We gaze in two directions like Janus, god of gates, unable to budge. The border is where the fantasy of frontier rots. Remembering is a convulsion into wakefulness. In time we grope. In timelessness we explode.

I was interrogated on the Indian side of the Wagah border and didn’t cross until the following morning. There, I witnessed a ritual that occurs every evening. I felt myself trapped at the precise place where my family crossed, did not cross, after the division of the two countries in 1947. On the Pakistani side, a few of my belongings were stolen by military police.

I imagined stories. They emerged like billowing deliriums. I thought of possible scenes, crude sketches in my brain that darted back and forth like a bee pollinating two types of the same flower. I unearthed God. God deserted me. Watched re-run Bollywood films. Became untenable. Silence found me. I sought a form for the poem, but what good is poetry at a time like this? I desired to write a poem and a story. (These two desires grate against each other, angry, confused.)

The stories attempted rotted and collapsed in guttural debris. I groped at the pieces, a logic, an altitude to scale. Body grew bat wings and splattered black blood against the wall. I became the voice of the dog, the aardvark — the genesis of a. When I was a child, I worshipped the illusion of a frontier, licked its wild exterior. I regressed. Molted. Became the fodder for their physiology and roamed in the fields eating the glass of their illusions until I exploded like a gutless golden calf.

I sought passage across the border so as not to be caught in the charnel ground of history. In the carnal ground, I collided with myself, was alive for the first time, felt my body close to me. My hands grasped the lush grass, nourished by the green of death, the possibility of an encounter with those who crossed over with the baggage of their dreams, which rotted into these leaves, this trunk of nothingness vanishing.

Trapped in crossfire. Nocturnal rooms jarred open. I seek a form for the body in crisis, a form in alliance with the flight of bees. I search the archive for the voice that will break the density further. I seek a drive that is not the drive for death, but the drive for the everlasting life of fervour.

THE MASTER BEDROOM

The painters have taken over

the house, or the painters have taken

over his sleep. The house is large

without furniture, or with furniture

pushed up against the wall.

His father is arranging the house

like a feudal lord arranging a field

for labour. The painters scrape, peel

the wall. He wants them to take over

the house when his mother leaves.

The kitchen is clean and white.

His mother has left jewellery scattered

around the master bedroom. This room

looks like a soup kitchen, the painter says.

The kitchen was half-painted,

as his mind is now, in rose.

He is getting married, so the painters

arrived, or his mother is getting married

because she is arranging his marriage.

He is already married to the walls

they’re scraping. His mother is getting

married without his consent and he is being

scraped without the wall’s consent.

He is learning to walk on water. The painters

have taken over this house. The house is alive

with the fumes of paint. The bride arrives.

Let’s make it clean, she says.

ON THE QUESTION OF A BORDERLESS BODY

Only when the self falls asleep does it begin to inhabit the skin of a black bear. At least that’s how it was last night. He was making love to his partner in a cabin in the mountains and there were black bears surrounding it. The dream shifted ground and he was in a tannery where bear skins hung down like waterfalls. He was inside the skin of a bear. And the bear tore away at the skin. The bear couldn’t get inside. The black bear could have been his own blackness. A psychoanalyst would not pick up on that nuance. He would not imagine that a dreaming body could attack itself. A psychoanalyst doesn’t believe that a congealed race projects a body into the myth of race.

Ever since he was a child, he knew he was meant to learn how to ride the tiger, like Durga. He is not a Hindu — much less a shaman. In deep sleep, there was insentient bliss. From this he discerned that the self has no fixed boundary. It could wander into other countries, into disparate yarns. It was unmarked in dreams. It didn’t belong to race or class. It was borderless.

This doesn’t mean dreams lack historical agency. This doesn’t mean every dreaming body is cosmopolitan. This doesn’t mean that, lacking a passport, one can gather the sensations of a new world, or an older world. The body is fed by the blood of history — living off the accretions of others, existing only because some other body is non-existent, or absent from itself. This makes living mournful. Alternately, it lends some urgency to life. Every narrative crawls out of another, before arriving at a border. Every race crawls out of another, before arriving at a border. Narrative is a species of madness. Every narrative is a little like Oedipus wanting too much.

Every narrative has the urgency of a death wish and simultaneously the urgency of immortality. He appears at the border. Appears at the border. He appears at the border at a moment of quest, only to rupture that quest with a clause. Only to be eaten alive, cannibalized. He could be his father’s body. He could be in a zone of indistinction — where laws are annulled, or where the Father’s body is the Law. The border transmigrates into his mind, so he can discern where he came from and what he might be, as a threshold. If he is a threshold, if he can speak from two cosmologies at once, united into a cosmology of loss — linked chain by chain to rupture, which arranges itself into mutated syllables.

IN POSSIBLE DEPARTURES

1.

The migrants who came to the new world were conquerors of themselves. They thought they had mastered what they had left behind.

After Father died, I searched for the key to what was forbidden. I sought it in the wind between land and ocean. Was the wind a messenger from me to me? What parcels of letters did it bring to me, what messages did it refuse to convey, what nocturnal spaces did it jar open? I asked too many questions, and the question of all questions, which was a limb growing down from the sky and sprouting