The Boatmen Sing

 We are living, as it were, at the membrane of metaphor and memory. In fugitive anticipation of the boatmen's songs, of arrivannce, hotel stationery and the daily crossword. Unsurprisingly, my writing is an act of infidelity- I skim and skip my way around your words, through your memories and moments of being, and hold myself accountable for their suspension. As a mnesic trace...as remnants for my part of the world, where the aromas of coffee, slow-cooked curries, and cinnamon from the avenues and alleyways of your home town are a contested inheritance. An inheritance of loss, almost; the affective residue of the unsalvageable past kept alive by the cities they inhabited in their displaced condition. Perhaps this is also why I find it easiest to insert myself into the urban text, into the home as an ethnographic self, because it is here that my performativity is most ‘at-home’ with its self-made otherness. 

Perhaps this is why, between field notes and narratives of memory, metaphor, and souvenirs, any ideas of being at-home, remains for me a certain self-indulgent excess. A surplus of meaningfulness and fraught possibilities that I cannot quite articulate.  

I am tempted to cite something from a text that I keep going back to- a chapter titled Ending Writing, at the Beginning, from a book by Elizabeth Mackinlay:

I line up critical-and-autoethnography-and-heart and un-forget that in doing so, “I’m coming, I manage, I arrive” (Cixous, 1997, p. 276) because it is with a “transgressive scholarship of the body with a heart” (Spry, 2010, p. 277) that we end at the beginning of arrivance. 

4:47 am.

Signs of habitation behind the walls of homes, the yellow highlights and orange accents along the corridors of apartment blocks seep into a bluegrass soundtrack for the town's sleepless. Ours was a world of rooftops and love songs, three-act plays, and neon food courts. Of a phantasmic image of a home in which we never dwelt. Yet, we have always been strangers at (perhaps, to) home. Always the homecoming 'I' perhaps, but never quite 'at' home, not even in the field of metaphor. The incalculability and otherness of the home that I arrive at- in the sense of an alterity, nevertheless, is still perhaps a return to the familiar. Along with the dust, and the light seeping in through the faded yellow muslin curtains in my bedroom. Brickwork in once-bright yellows and reds- jumbled, like the turmeric and vermilion threads from the shrine where we sat with our camera equipment wrapped in brightly coloured cloth, encircled by a sweet and musky fragrance, that I keep looking for in the local dargāhs close to home. I keep looking for the sung/coloured word, in the urban phantasmagoria, the strangeness of the Imperial library. 

what colour is the sacred?