Set to “stomp on the white playground of a page,” Scherezade Siobhan — writer, psychologist, and community catalyst — draws on Indian, Afghan, and Rroma heritages in her poetry collection The Bluest Kali,from Lithic Press. Writing from a polyglottal mode, the speaker in Siobhan’s poems — which brim over with clever and nuanced imagery, lush and achingly true — is unabashed about the multivalent layers of language throughout the book:
“if there is something to say / i’d rather it be as hard / and as violent / as the world whose burning window / i am.” (14)
The lyric voice in The Bluest Kali continues the mystic tradition of writing in the vein of such poets as Emily Dickinson, Hafez, and Basho. Unapologetic, the speaker discards any notion that lyricism (which, in less capable hands, is in danger of becoming too vague, too abstract and arbitrary) holds no discernible meaning. Yes, she says, “fuck those poems about fog and orchids. / fuck the portraits of lavender snow” (13).
These are poems that are necessary in a world where people of color (specifically, writers of color) are only recently gaining a foothold in a medium where white Eurocentric voices dominate. In the world within Siobhan’s violently vibrant poems, the speaker likens language and communication to a house. “Everything [she] is saying to anyone is an act of describing a house from the inside as someone takes a wrecking ball to it” (15). Such is the reality of a multilingual person, a multiracial person, or a person whose tongue leans towards the “karmic” feeling of a native tongue other than English (21). In building a culture-specific universe of words outside of the so-called “norms” of literary English, a person of color often finds this universe shrunken, collapsed, extinguished in the face of the “standard” and “proper.” Through its welcomingly brazen construction of marginalized identity through language, Siobhan’s collection, then, acts as salve for wounds sustained amidst such rigid linguistic expectations.
The Bluest Kali is about the movement of non-white bodies through white spaces in history. The title of the collection refers to the Hindu goddess Kali, as well as the Rroma goddess who goes by the same name. The Rroma Kali, also called Sara-la-Kali in Saintes Maries-de-la-Mer in southern France, has been tentatively linked to the Hindu religion: it is speculated that the Romani people came from and left India, and gradually settled throughout the European continent, perhaps as far back as the 11thcentury CE.
This tension is explored poignantly in the poem, “In the country of snow owls:”
“let me remind you of who you were before the violence, before the deer with its heart still warm amid the grains. your hands of brahma. you have made enough streets into bed. this you, this particle of god, this museum of muscle and myth. come, be again” (36).
Again, Siobhan likens the multilingual and multicultural experience to something which is built or constructed, inherently connected to a person’s mental and emotional state. Throughout the collection, the speaker talks about the psychological effects of living with her world of words constantly being deconstructed. She touches on the reality of clinical depression, which she describes in the poem “genres of prey” as a “long game of hide and seek where you hid[e] in the attic and they quickly [sell] the house” (38). To be left with only a “key to open the many rooms of loneliness” leaves one asking, “who can question the authenticity of pain? who can debate these darkrooms, this body trembling in a bathtub like a crimsoned tapir?” (37)
The language persists in its haunting beauty throughout the book. But there are also many moments of weary clarity. In the collection’s first poem, “The Mirror I Won’t,” Siobhan writes:
“What doesn’t kill you / Deafens you with the same questions on a daily basis — / What is your father’s name? What is your job? Why don’t you / Have one? Are you carrying a weapon? Are you a terrorist?” (11).
With striking intimacy, Siobhan challenges the stigma associated with living a neurodivergent reality. Those unaffected by mental illnesses often shy away from discussions surrounding such conditions as depression and anxiety, which in turn leaves those who suffer from those conditions feeling misunderstood. However, the speaker in The Bluest Kali acknowledges her neurodivergence with refreshing frankness: “To get better does not mean it goes away” (17). In “Fragments on MDD,” the speaker asks, “Is sadness an illness?” […] “Can I unoccur?” (18). And in “Rx DSM,” she yearns to “be something / beyond the pale gasp of comprehension” (20).
The body, in turn, is also a house of sorts in The Bluest Kali.In “Mira explains halal/haram,” the speaker declares that “any kind of gutting is a punctual repositioning of an animal’s stamina to exist inside its own vulnerability” (34). The demolition of a house, the gutting of a body — both akin to one’s native language being fractured, eroded daily by the demand to streamline and assimilate. Siobhan’s skillful use of metaphor, which here equates language and body to structure and home, creates a much-needed space for the marginalized tongue, the overlooked other, to reside in.
Siobhan — whose many projects include The Talking Compass, an emotional and psychological safe space which has guidance and counseling resources for wellness, The Mira Project, a submission-based global project that aims to start conversations about street harassment and gendered violence through digital storytelling, and Bruja Roja, a publishing space for women — especially women of color — to share literary and artistic work, as well as essays — calls this book a “series of linguistic exorcisms” in her synopsis.
And, truly, language that threatens a person of color’s cultural heritage and identity is excised in these energetic poems. Daily, people of color are “conditioned to be most pleasant to those whom [they] hate the most”: namely, those who speak or live in the transgressive mode, one that pushes for Eurocentrism in not just language, but also lifestyle (15).
The Bluest Kali is a worthwhile, emotionally heavy read. But the book also has its moments of celebration. Siobhan clearly takes pleasure in playing with English in innovative ways. In the poem “Remission,” she revels in the possibilities of language: “To write, / to wreck, to retch, to requiem — the cortex / and vent; the sap of each syllable” (17). The speaker in “Sifar” likewise rejoices in her “body’s tilted abecedary, its primal mezzotint” (23). And in “grrrls,” Siobhan pays homage to fierce women:
“girls with bodies pronounced like explicit quasars. girls with nails, a cloister of hyenas soliciting the ebony prairie out of its colonial pitfalls. girls with dreams paling to anemia. girls with aspens knitted into their fingerprints. girls with guns gardened beneath their tongues. girls with bellybuttons of peeled almonds. girls with breasts like an unspent molotov cocktail. girls with honeycomb hips; terra cotta urns pockmarked. girls with dignity the color of snow-kissed fossils” (54).
In the poem “Mira as Garganta Rroma” (Rroma throat), the speaker turns “Persephone in the streets” and “Hecate in the sheets” (56). These touches of whimsy give balance to the truths presented in the collection, truths which sit heavy on the reader: “Tiredness is my inherited dialect” (71).
And why should it not be? If language is a house, a home — and if a home is for resting in — when and how will a person of multivalent tongues and heritages ever make their way to a place of comfort in the face of bigotry — in the face of the pressure to blend in, to erase one’s identity in order to live peaceably in this world?
Yes, the speaker in The Bluest Kali is “gifted with pessimism” in that she “always predict[s] the wrong things right” (66). The speaker, like so many multilingual people of color, has come to expect the worse — to normalize their own normalization. This collection is especially important in a time where multiethnic and multilingual people finally have some sort of platform on which to voice their realities — ones in which they battle not just discrimination and prejudice, but also the inherent destruction of their identities by those who demand “perfect” English and Eurocentric modes of living. In “Bone,” Siobhan writes:
“In a house abbreviated by twilight, loosened threads of nightshade spasm and curve into a shadow theater of ghosts. The first bird unsettles the wet bamboo of lawn chairs like a pint-sized spaceship — its wings still sunlit with a trodden wildness” (67).
As a “honeyed mongrel” who has “tried / to scheme [her]self into a quieter animal,” the speaker embodies the polyglottal person (56, 59). The Bluest Kali is fierce and rare in its deft navigation of the complexities of living in a linguistic house — a linguistic world — constantly being broken, repaired, and broken again. The speaker’s consistent refusal to be misinterpreted and reduced permeates the collection’s wild and inventive language. Yes, “some homes are like the brief pain of papercuts” — but, it is poems such as these that challenge and divert this pain, and are sorely needed by those who daily face implicit bias based on their otherness. Scherezade Siobhan lays bare her unpronounceable heart — perhaps so that the wandering reader, one whose brown body never feels at home in the white, white world, might find a resting place — if only for a moment.
“my heart is unpronounceable:” Tongue and Language as Heart, as Home was originally published in Anomaly on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.