Aimee Nezhukumatathil

I seem to have developed the worst memory for what I read—as well as a terrible habit of watching Law and Order reruns whenever I'm exhausted at the end of the day. I had a mother who was fanatical about making sure our lives never revolved around T.V., so naturally, as an adult, I chose a partner who insisted when we moved in together that we needed satellite T.V., and I find myself turning on the television much more often than ever before (but never, it seems, at a time when something actually good is on!). I don’t know if the T.V. habit is pure laziness or connected in some way to a need to turn off my brain after a long day or (as one friend suggested) an attempt to numb out so I won't have to do the writing I'm supposed to be doing. Probably a combination of all of the above. In any case, I’m hoping this blog will get me back into the habit of reading daily and thoughtfully, of living the way I used to live, partly in my regular waking life and partly in the imaginary world of whatever I am reading. I always write better, and more, when the T.V. is off and that imaginary world is alive in me.

This weekend I read Aimee Nezhukumatahil’s poetry collection miracle fruit. The first poem, “One Bite,” opens with a vivid image of the miracle fruit for which the book is named. It goes on to tell the story of the old man who sells the fruit on the roadside, who is wearing only one sandal and calls the speaker “Duttah.” So far, the poem is well-crafted, and its narrative is interesting—but I am not yet dying to keep reading. But then I get to the last two lines. Who can resist a book whose opening poem ends with the questions, “So how long before you lose/ a sandal and still walk? How long/ before you lose the sweetness?”

And that is how many of Nezhukumatahil's poems work, starting with quiet, vivid imagery, weaving a story that seems either quite simple or else intellectually intriguing, but not full of the wholeness of a poem. But then, the ending blooms into a question or statement or image so profound that the reader is left breathless. I kept feeling the urge to go back to the beginning of each poem and re-read it, to try to make sense of those fantastic endings that seemed at once so out of place and yet so exactly right. Take the poem “Swear Words,” which seems at first to be about how a mother responds to her daughter's use of Tagalog curses—until, at the end, “Diablo” becomes an actual devil dancing on the kitchen counter, making a mess of things.

Many of Nezhukaumatahil's poems weave together multiple narratives or curiosities or ideas. There are few stanza or line breaks that clearly signify shifts. The speaker seems to be chatting casually with the reader at first, but then suddenly she describes the colony of bees that “shake out a hymn on legs and wing as thin as a baby’s eyelash” or hands the reader a beautiful, wide impossibility like “Who knows/what god I will inhale.”

Nezhukumatathil is an American-born daughter of a Filipino mother and an Indian father. She writes of visits to the Phillipines and India, of her childhood in the U.S., of lovers and students, with a humor that is the antithesis of so many “funny” poems getting published these days. Word play, hilarious finds (like the billboard in Manilla that proclaimed “Welcome to…the only Catholic Country in Asia! (beware of pickpockets)” or the creative writing student’s dutifully crafted by characteristically vague metaphor “suddenly as anything” or absurdities like cheese curds are never included in a poem just because they are “interesting” or “funny.” They are always pathways into some deeper insight. It is rare to find a poet whose work appeals so profoundly to both the head and heart.

What does Nezhukumatahil’s work have to do with the subject of this blog? She is inventing, it seems to me, a new kind of spirituality that is at once Filipino and Indian and solidly American, that is about meditating on the word or story or memory or thing in order to catch the fullness of its mystery without actually bothering to slow down. And yet we do slow down, because we are taken by the endings, or the suddenness of a fresh metaphor that means exactly two things and something altogether new--never forced, never overreaching. Her work is also about not taking oneself too seriously--something all of us writers could stand to remember--but also about taking oneself seriously enough to write authentically. To me, her work is prayer in its purest form, a walking, living, breathing prayer that permeates all of life—and the kind of poetry I aim (and usually fail) to write myself.