Redeeming the Confessant

 I think this article was initially meant to focus on the affective geographies of street food pantries—coffee, bagels with blobs of cream cheese, and, on some days, samplings of Haleem, Chicken, or Mutton Kebabs sold from kiosks basking in their (seasonal) elite authenticity at Zakaria's iftar bazaar. Or perhaps, on the many afterlives (and deaths?) of Roland Barthes' A Lovers Discourse floating on the summertime river, abandoned on my favourite writing table, beside empty takeout boxes, and papers on Arabic and Persian metres. My lover fascinates me with stories of a (now) lost monsoonal in Dhaka- the baking of bátasá and Sandesh by women in frayed cotton sarees, silently inherited (and discreetly shared) culinary codes, worn wooden spoons, and the time-placeness of the sensory home. I follow the contours of her story and find myself caught up in the strange intimacies of an unfamiliar quotidian, the transactional undercurrents of her spur to memory, and my inability to escape the space of words of the other. Yet, this joyful novelty of listening to the ventriloquized voice of a traveler in faith must also come to terms with the writer's speechlessness in the referential scope of a lover's discourse and isolation in the unwanted state of linguistic love.

From Strangers, Kristeva explains,

[The] foreigner lives within us: he is the hidden face of our identity, the space that wrecks our abode…. By recognizing him within ourselves, we are spared detesting him in himself. ( (Kristeva, 1991, p. 1)

There is very graphic legibility that sits uncomfortably in confessional speech, you know? Something that seems to exhaust itself in the elusive referents of the written word, in the very search for a language of one’s own, before it can begin its work of translating desire- leaving us with an ironic aftertaste. I realize that the palimpsestic spaces and entangled temporalities of the cities that we inhabit between ourselves present an aberrant form of archival entity. Our little ceremonies of remembrance trace spectral contours, the space in between reach and grasp, a contingent, other time. Staging chrono-mashups, queer joy, a restorative nostalgic marked by temporal (and national) remove.

A confessant’s discourse against a terrible worldliness. 

References:

Kristeva, J. Strangers to Ourselves. Translated by L.S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press, 1991. (Published in French 1991).