 Sunrise, in Karnataka, India. (Photo © 2022, Afaa Weaver.) This photo is of one of the Hindu temples at the entrance we took to Hempi, a world heritage site.. It is located in the state of Karnataka, which is on the southwestern edge of India. Sangam, Confluence of Poets October 21-24, 2022 From Boston to Karnataka, India Hardly two months after my son Kala passed away, I received a phone call from Tess Onwueme, in Abuja, Nigeria. “I want you and Kristen to come to Nigeria,” she said. “I want to get you out of the country. I know you. Otherwise, you will just sit. Before Nigeria, I want to send you to this poetry conference in India being curated by my friend Shiva.” Shiva is H.S. Shivaprakash, the noted poet, playwright, and yogi. “Sangam, Confluence of World Poets,” was being held in Ballari (formerly Bellary), a city 194 miles north of Bangalore, the capital of Karnataka. So I began the difficult process of preparing for international travel again. It had been three years since Kristen and I went to Taiwan for our honeymoon, returning to the U.S. just before news of the virus was let loose. Now the difficulty lay in getting the visa to India. When September arrived and I still did not have it, I used a reputable service and secured it. India and Nigeria are two of the most difficult countries for visa applicants. I packed and took the train to Boston, so I could fly out of Logan, which made no sense, but was pure nostalgia for a city where I spent the last twenty years of my full-time teaching, and where in 2019, I received the St. Botolph Club Foundation Distinguished Artist Award. Kristen and I were welcomed to stay at the St. Botolph Club, with its lovely setting on Commonwealth Ave, whenever we make shorter visits to the Boston area. From Logan I flew to Paris where Air France would take me to India. It was around midnight when I landed in Bangalore airport, and along with two other poets was taken to nearby hotels to rest for the five hour drive up to Ballari. I was just a little upset when Air France let me know they had misplaced my baggage. In the hotel I dreaded having only one set of clothing for the whole conference. When we drove off with only the promise from Air France that my bags would be brought up to me, I knew I would probably have to search all my survival skills to remain sociable. Seven years earlier, my bags were misplaced on a trip to a conference in Alaska, so I had some experience with surviving with very little clothing. A small group of us met our driver, who was also an academician and member of the conference staff as well as a skilled driver. He was determined to get us there quickly and safely. My concern for my baggage gave way to the amazing way the landscape seemed both new and familiar. The method and manners of driving were all new. The kind of courtesy I saw on the road from Bengaluru to Ballari seemed to depend more on a spontaneous agreement, actions totally opposite of what I am used to in the U.S. In India horns are used to make drivers in front of you aware of your presence, so you can ask permission to pass. The driver is on the right side of the car, and with a standard shift, the foot/clutch coordination was mystifying. The moving parts of the traffic felt like the parts of a living instrument, where the music comes from a membrane that breathes between the trucks and cars moving at different speeds, with the animals at their own slowness, the cows motionless in the medians. It was the world of farming, and I felt the similarities, as well as the differences, such as the stone formations in the hills that defied gravity. Stones weighing several tons seemed poised to roll away at any minute, and I could not imagine how they got to their places. The landscape spoke with clarity. I sat in the front with the driver, and two poets sat behind us, speaking in Spanish, a language vaguely familiar to me after six months with a tutor in Manhattan when I was in my thirties. While guessing the meaning of what I could hear, it was the landscape that spoke with a greater clarity. We were in the countryside, and everything reminded me of my paternal grandparents and their farm in Virginia. People as brown or more brown than me were most of what I saw, as well as some lighter than all of us. This was clearly not America, but I sensed a consanguinity woven from the shared history of cultural disruption and extraction of resources and human beings for centuries under European colonialism. I rode along, sitting next to the driver and pushed aside global disaster for awhile so I could see how life continues. The familiarities of India to my experience as a Black American extended to bathing, and with one set of clothes that was, of course, a special concern for me. At the hotel airport there was a large tub in the bathroom, with a stool. Right away I understood it was where I would have to bathe, just as I did when we were at my grandparents’ farm in Virginia each summer. We had a large galvanized tub my aunt filled with water heated on the wood burning stove. When it was filled and the water at the right temperature, we washed ourselves, using smaller basins to focus on our faces, or our feet. Now sixty years later, I made sure the floor was dry so that I would not slip as I moved to sit on the stool and bathe, just as I did when I was a child. With just one set of clothing, I would be all too recognizable over the course of the conference. A change of clothing would have made me, to my perception, a more sociable presentation, but there I was. I had to rely on my uncertain charm, and my walking stick, which won so much admiration I was beginning to get a little jealous of the thing. When I wasn’t so self-absorbed, I was learning, and the lessons were all around me in the way I was received. It was the kindness that helped me to see more deeply into what made me feel the certain bond of being in a nonwhite world, not unlike the blackness of my childhood, in Baltimore’s southern style segregation. I gave my reading from "A Poet Reclining." The group shot was on the day I arrived at Sangam. Shiva is opposite me wearing a tan suit Each poet who read was part of a panel that included comments from translators and scholars commenting on each poet’s work. When I sent poems to the conference to be selected for presentation, I chose a cross section, including poems from my ekphrastic project on the work of Marc Chagall, a manuscript I completed in the late eighties when I was approaching forty and being an adjunct in New York City, and Newark, New Jersey. The organizers chose from the Chagall project. After I gave my reading, I heard an immediate and structured critical response to my work, as the panelists had much to say about “The Poet Reclining,” including the passage of time, and reference to the circles of reincarnation, which was not conscious on my part. It was all wonderful but what came later in the conference when I was asked to come to the stage was a total surprise. I was asked to stand onstage with a group of poets and translators.
Blessings bestowed. I felt dazed. A newly elected member of the government gave me the blessing given traditionally to someone recognized as an elder. He swept my feet with his hands. I felt that dazed feeling I have had before while receiving an award, a feeling that made me want to run away. This time I could not shrink away or hide in plain sight, as I was being inundated with respect. The respect extended to my walking stick, and to the extent that one of the translators took a smartphone photo of it and sent it to me. For me all of this was of deep importance as a Black American in a nonwhite nation. Here’s the poem that inspired all of the commentary and my elder blessing: The Poet Reclining I can never convince my father that my best work is done in naps, in the greenest of grass, near the smell of manure, of the song of neighing and snorting, in the infinite music that fills the word with bright meaning. After I am half out of life, I can have discourse with the trees, with each leaf that tickles itself, and flirts with the branch, sending me the secrets of a woman, of the distinguishing flurry of her smile. In this grass I always dream that if I stay a little longer I will leave this skin, skull, heart, brain, femur, and blood, and melt into the soil and multiply like the infinite beads of this planet, becoming the thing I spend my life singing to. But I cannot convince my father, who uses manure, tearfully, for flowers, hoping to raise my mother from her berth in the earth. from "Stations in a Dream" Dolphin-Moon Press, 1993 "I felt the joy of being away and finding other parts of myself." After the conference I rode back to Bangalore on a route that took me through Hampi, accompanied by Udayan Vajpeyi, a writer and film critic who is also a physician and professor of medicine, and Prabal Kumar Basu, the poet, essayist, and editor. As they explained what I was seeing, I felt the joy of being away and finding other parts of myself in my interactions with everyone, and with the miracle of a world that is pulling itself into newer postcolonial ways of being, a world with billions of us in our complex little lives that intersect with everyone else in ways we cannot perceive, the humanity of entanglement. At the airport I retrieved my lost bag, and hobbled with my walking stick through the airport, little by little being convinced that I am now one of those travelers who needs a wheelchair at the airport. Kristen met me at the train station, and I came home to my American life, which I love, with my blended family of kinship across the spectrum of race, a blending of things that cohere and things that baffle us all in the realm of infinite love. In the several moments of affirmation that happened for me in India, while deep inside my grief, the light that has opened in me since Kala passed away grew brighter with a fragrance only catastrophic loss can give when we honor our pain. My deepest gratitude to everyone who made the Sangam conference possible, all the staff members, translators, scholars, poets, and all who came to make this memory we call “The Sangam Influence,” a force for a better world. Afaa M. Weaver Juneteenth, 2024 Comments are closed.
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