Ghazal as Native Speaker
“You taught me language, and my profit on ’t / Is I know how to curse.” —William Shakespeare, The Tempest (1.2.364-365).
The fact is that I am trying to be honest. I swear.
I can only say what I mean. I mean the body
is a measure of rain, of current: how little it takes to sink.
I want to hold myself like an armful of birds. Not a bullet, not a body
swaying without music. Survival can be an act of loneliness, an act of
wild noise. A way of saying my first language is grief. My second, too. Anybody
could tell you that. Every morning the same sky. Burning stars
against a velvet drape. Open mouths like doors, like caskets, like my body
still warm. I think I am looking for a mouth
to sing with. I think I am nothing without teeth. Sure, a body
can’t be whole without ending somewhere. Sure, I am not whole.
I believe in so much that isn’t there: an apple’s body,
bruised and alive, wildfires leaking in the backyard, a pulse as you sleep.
The fact is that I am still trying to be honest. The fact is that everybody
is trying to be honest, that the loneliest parts of the world
are still trying to be found. I want there to be noise, a mother’s body,
the hiss and the foam at your mouth. The floodgates after the first bite.
There are jungles ripe with this kind of wildness. The body
is a measure of softness, so let me tell you my grief. Give me more
to call my own. In the absence of rain, burning field. Something, somebody
to last the night. A way to stomach the uncertainty of rain.
Something to do with these blue hands, this quiet body.
Analytic Component:
“Ghazal as Native Speaker” is a poem that reimagines Caliban’s story by focusing on his relationship to language. Like in Shakespeare’s play The Tempest, Caliban functions as the native speaker of a language stripped from his body, a new tongue forced upon him by his oppressors. In writing the poem, I was inspired by instances in which Caliban appeared to display both his aversion to and his affinity for language, respectively: “You taught me language, and my profit on’t / Is I know how to curse. The red plague rid you / For learning me your language”; “Be not afeard; the isle is full of noises / Sounds, and sweet airs that give delight and hurt not” (Shakespeare 1.2.364-365, 3.2.129-130). In turn, I decided to write the poem as a ghazal, a form of poetry that revels in the ambiguity of language; by definition, ghazals require a refrain that explores a word or phrase in different contexts with every repetition. In The Tempest, Shakespeare establishes Caliban at the bottom of a hierarchy of language; in a sense, his body becomes a warzone displaying the struggle of language as a way of exclusion. In the poem, I chose to repeat the word “body” to reflect this idea: Caliban’s slow assimilation, his forced tongue, the sense that his body is not wholly his own.
Despite this repetition, in the poem, I wanted to establish Caliban beyond his portrayal by those written in power: namely, Prospero. While the Caliban of Shakespeare’s The Tempest is complicated by his villainy, the Caliban of my poem merely wonders how to be whole; how to exist beyond shadow, beast, savage; how to dare to dream. As a result, I found that focusing on Caliban’s possibility led to a reclamation and perhaps the redefinition of his identity. Despite the fact that his language is reduced to noise by Miranda and Prospero, Caliban maintains agency over his own tongue and establishes his speech as a language of power in its own right: “[L]et me tell you my grief. Give me more / to call my own.” Traditionally, a ghazal is written with the intention of being sung. In the same way, Caliban begins to see his language as something beyond noise—as music. Ultimately, the Caliban depicted in “Ghazal as Native Speaker” exercises power over himself and his adopted tongue, even when denied the right to his native one.