On Divya Victor's KITH

Andy Fitch interviews Divya Victor for Los Angeles Review of Books's blog. In their conversation, Fitch asks specifically about Victor's book, KITH (Fence, 2017). He explains in his introduction why Victor is the perfect person to bring his questions to, questions like: "how to depict place through a 'ventriloquy of diasporic Englishes,' but without providing 'so many hunting trophies and taxidermies lining the walls of genteel libraries'? How to locate one’s 'diglossic or triglossic' milieu amid the 'sonic abstraction of atomic parts from a word,' the 'more filigreed densities of signification'? When I want to ask such questions, I pose them to Divya Victor." From there:

ANDY FITCH: A reader might assume that KITH will foreground a particular place and local culture. But KITH doesn’t seem to offer any timeless representations of “India,” “Tamilian culture,” “Singapore,” “diaspora,” so much as it tracks specific histories, durations, lived experiences, moments. So could you talk about situating this book’s study of kith in time as much as in space — and / or about how KITH’s conception of kith makes it hard to separate those two axes?

DIVYA VICTOR: I like to think about “situating” as an echolocating act. I write to emit sound, and the environment of the poem returns this sound to my ear, triangulating my location within an imagined community I belong to (“kith”). This compositional act becomes a co-constituted environment, where the poetic line is the azimuth — a way of imagining a direction towards a place where kith lives, rather than a geographic residence in itself. There is no home in these poems. There are no timeless representations. Like all animals that echolocate, writers who compose from or into diaspora are always measuring distance and displacement from a roving origin. I am the sonic register of delayed messages that are returning to a home in my ears, from where I write.

The book works to undo a nationalist notion of India. Yes, it is a nation, but it is also just an idea, a political fabrication that ripped millions of lives into pieces at the stroke of midnight on August 15, 1947 (and that continues to do so under Hindu fundamentalist reign). I have no interest in writing about India, per se. However, I am very interested in questioning and documenting how some people come to be perceived as Indian. North American audiences have a strange fantasy of homogeneity that connects Indianness to South Asian geography and ecology (palm trees, mangoes, peacocks, muddy rivers), even as the Tamilian diaspora has, since the 18th century, spanned Kenya, Uganda, Nigeria, Guyana, Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Canada, South Africa, Sri Lanka, Seychelles, and other spaces. When I think of kith, I do not think of locations — that is, how a person has always stood on ground marked by a certain flag, somewhere. Rather, I think of practices of being at the site of belonging: how an ancestor batters an oily pomfret while wrapped in a cotton sarong, how an uncle’s hips sway while breathing the salt air of the Arabian sea.

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