Carol Rumens looks at a vivid portrait of the distances between cultures, languages and lovers – and the romantic wish to overcome them
As an Indian poet writing in English, Arundhathi Subramaniam is familiar with the pressure-points on cultural identity exerted by language. In this week’s poem, from her latest collection, When God Is a Traveller, brilliant colours and clear, plain diction evoke a setting that seems to promise an ideal locus of feeling liberated from utterance. This unnamed “unreal city” is presented as the first-time tourist might perceive it, radiant with sunshine and water and sudden possibility.
The “script” of the title suggests both a performance script, one which is imposed, falsifyingly, on the speaker’s relationship with her companion, and the written words that confine language itself to the page. Perhaps it’s an effect of hearing many unknown languages that the speaker has the fleetingly utopian impression that “all languages are honest here”. But the thought is immediately contested strongly by the qualification that none is “honest enough”.
After the opening stanza’s lively colour-combo – the tangerine shirt, Delft sky and daffodil-yellow sun – brightness becomes more sinister. The comparison of jealousy, traditionally green, to the vegetable, broccoli, is faintly comic, and self-mocking, perhaps, but the oily sheen of “stir-fried” gives the emotion prominence, and even suggests a certain calculation: the raw passion of jealousy has been carefully cooked.
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The “script” of the title suggests both a performance script, one which is imposed, falsifyingly, on the speaker’s relationship with her companion, and the written words that confine language itself to the page. Perhaps it’s an effect of hearing many unknown languages that the speaker has the fleetingly utopian impression that “all languages are honest here”. But the thought is immediately contested strongly by the qualification that none is “honest enough”.
After the opening stanza’s lively colour-combo – the tangerine shirt, Delft sky and daffodil-yellow sun – brightness becomes more sinister. The comparison of jealousy, traditionally green, to the vegetable, broccoli, is faintly comic, and self-mocking, perhaps, but the oily sheen of “stir-fried” gives the emotion prominence, and even suggests a certain calculation: the raw passion of jealousy has been carefully cooked.
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