Review: When I Reach For Your Pulse

To adapt a feminist axiom, I want to believe that as the world moves towards deconstructing imperialism, the opposite of colonialism isn’t postcolonial essentialism but postcolonial fraternity. A future, in precis, in which no matter their identity, everyone who has been disenfranchised by the enduring impacts of colonialisation will be enfranchised by and included in all aspects of their societies.

An elusive vision perhaps but reading Dunedin author Rushi Vyas’ powerful and haunting new collection When I Reach for Your Pulse gives me the faith to believe I’m not alone. Originally from the United States, Vyas’ composes a work in which an instance of traumatic personal loss acts as a starting point to poetically examine and dismantle the private and public impacts of British colonialism, American imperialism, patriarchy and caste hierarchies. The result is a politically charged meditation upon the world we live in and the world we might bequeath to those who come after us.

If this sounds confronting, then I’m here to tell you it is; at least, in part. The first poem, the compelling Effigy hits hard with its consideration of the suicide of a parent:

 I waited all my life for my father

                to die and when he finally did I heard

                the whip of voices caged within

                his skull … we cut him from the ceiling, fed him

                sweets, dipped him in oil, and burned,

                like an effigy, the voiceless body

Such is the catastrophe, such the antagonism propelling this book forward. In the questions evoked in this unexplained loss – why? what becomes of those who remain? – others arise. In the narrative of subsequent poems, like Midwest Physics: First Law, for instance, US aggression overseas is provocatively juxtaposed by a migrant father and son’s spectating of a nationalistic fly-past during a local sports game while contemplating what has been sacrificed by fleeing their origins. As such, the questionable surrealism of the game is subsumed by the question of uncurbed and indiscriminate imperialistic slaughter in the name of (supposed) international stability and by the fraught existence of migrancy.

Into the vacuum of uncertainty and trauma, particularly that experienced by migrants, Vyas astutely offers inventive solutions. So, in a verse such as Suicide Note in absentia, Part 1, Vyas’ provides us with an imagined answer to the introductory parental death. While in the evocative Conditional Bridges, the ongoing understandable doubt and anger experienced by some mourners is offset through beautiful, symphonic cadence, by the willingness of others to bear everyone’s suffering.

Thereafter, in a collection that’s constantly querying and questing, When I Reach for Your Pulse begins to break down its own certainties as a way to uncover alternative ways through grief. In this, language, form, poetic technique and even individual poems shift, become stripped down into Erasures (poems that absent their content either with blank spaces or blackout) and/or repeat themselves. Consequently, whereas the titular offering incorporates cavities – absences of meaning – in its text, others embrace Hindi, sample another poet’s work and replicate the titles and structures of initial poems in the book. Therein, for instance, creative inventiveness completing personal absence, there are poems such as Midwest Physics: Second Law and a return to the moving Effigy (again).

If all this still sounds confronting and shaped by constant uncertainty, then – to adapt that earlier term, essentialism – essentially, this isn’t so. Because, amid the understandable interrogation of self and text amid the impacts of familial suicide, the collection affirms that life endures. For this author and collection that means an ongoing embracement of unique identity, the poems layered with connection to personal belonging: culture, family, spirituality, cuisine, geography and more. In the deconstruction of colonialism and patriarchy, these poems remind us, lies the possibility to recognise and celebrate our similarities. Or, as Vyas’ writes at the close of the poem, Funeral: Durga Puja:

                bow to her          bow to

                her         bow to her          nature is

                everywhere the same.

Reviewed by Siobhan Harvey