Poem of the week: Where the Script Ends by Arundhathi Subramaniam

Where the Script Ends

His shirt is tangerine,
the sky Delft,
the sunshine daffodils.

Even jealousy gleams brighter here
than broccoli
             stir fried.

In this daytime land
the canals speak
an unambiguous tongue.

We look over our shoulders
for a hint
of Venice.

All languages are honest here,
just none honest enough.

At home he speaks a dialect
he’s never written in -
not even when his mother died.

And I know what it is to live
in a place where the mind’s ink
has many tributaries, fermented enough
to make all songs
seem just a little
untrue.

It doesn’t matter
whether he reads my lips
or I his mandarin fine print

because it still makes sense,
the old dream –

woman and man
under a night sky

and for a moment between them,
a single moon.

As an Indian poet writing in English, Arundhathi Subramaniam is familiar with the pressure-points on cultural identity exerted by language. In this week’s poem, from her latest collection, When God Is a Traveller, brilliant colours and clear, plain diction evoke a setting that seems to promise an ideal locus of feeling liberated from utterance. This unnamed “unreal city” is presented as the first-time tourist might perceive it, radiant with sunshine and water and sudden possibility.

The “script” of the title suggests both a performance script, one which is imposed, falsifyingly, on the speaker’s relationship with her companion, and the written words that confine language itself to the page. Perhaps it’s an effect of hearing many unknown languages that the speaker has the fleetingly utopian impression that “all languages are honest here”. But the thought is immediately contested strongly by the qualification that none is “honest enough”.

After the opening stanza’s lively colour-combo – the tangerine shirt, Delft sky and daffodil-yellow sun – brightness becomes more sinister. The comparison of jealousy, traditionally green, to the vegetable, broccoli, is faintly comic, and self-mocking, perhaps, but the oily sheen of “stir-fried” gives the emotion prominence, and even suggests a certain calculation: the raw passion of jealousy has been carefully cooked.

After the contrast between the “unambiguous tongue” of the canals and the obscure “hint/ of Venice” has been offhandedly registered, stanza five marks the first calling-to-account of language. The generalisation that no language is “honest enough” seems to implicate the couple in question, especially the man: “At home he speaks a dialect/ he’s never written in …” An offence against family piety is implied in the assertion that he has never written in this dialect “ …not even when his mother died.” Severance from his mother’s tongue, his actual mother tongue, may be painful for the son, but the speaker’s colloquial and emphatic double-negative (“never …not”) suggests an accusatory tone, a note of impatience. The point made is a resonant one, because it happens so frequently that people today are educated beyond the aspirations of their families, and away from the accent or dialect of childhood. They literally can’t write home any more.

Stanza seven brings in an admission of complicity, or at least shared knowledge. The speaker has also lived in a difficult place, one where “the mind’s ink/ has many tributaries, fermented enough/ to make all songs/ seem just a little/ untrue”. “Fermented” suggests decay (old, stagnant, bacterial streams of linguistic formulas) but also intoxication, perhaps the heady intoxication of poetry and its unreliable songs.

“Mandarin fine print” seems to denote the opposite of the erotic lip-reading summoned by the previous line. In another poem, Leapfrog, Abramaniam imagines that words “alight on paper, only/ for a moment”. Such a brief encounter with script is the ideal, perhaps, but, in this week’s poem, there’s a final gesture that seems to shrug off language altogether. Finally, “it doesn’t matter” that there are differences or corruptions of linguistic understanding between the couple: they can access a connection which doesn’t rely on words.

The last image is dramatic, filmic: once again, a touch of self-mockery might be detectable. We’re invited to imagine a foreign city at night, the “woman and man” standing silhouetted against the sky. So to the ultimate romantic archetype, that single moon which, for centuries, has looked down on separated lovers and united them in imagining each other’s gaze reflected in its light. For a moment, it closes the space between different genders, languages and ways of reading. For a moment, the end of the script seems to be the beginning of something differently intelligible – “because it still makes sense,/ the old dream …”