The Age of Aquarius
I’m not going to lie and say I didn’t enjoy The Enigma of Arrival because it was written by a misogynist, but when I first read it 7 years ago I hadn’t bothered to background check him so I managed to weep through the text without very much guilt at all. Revisiting it is a slightly different moral experience, but I would be lying if I said I haven’t. One of the projects I am working on at the moment is ghostwriting an autobiography (a frustrating, humbling exercise in imagination, voice, and role-play) and to somewhat prepare myself I been reading & re-reading other autobiographies. Not that any one person’s life can be used as a blueprint to write your own (or someone else’s), but it is something about the form I think (or so I tell myself). I liked Stay True more than I thought I would, and Crying in H Mart less; Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? paralleled all my previous movements through it, and The Enigma of Arrival was softer than I remembered.
There is this one bit in ‘Part Two: The Journey’ that is absolutely gutting. The narrator is making his way to Oxford from Trinidad because he has won a scholarship, but first he goes to New York. It is the first time anyone from his village has been on a plane so there is a big send-off, and his cousin tells him that sitting at the back of the aircraft is safest in case of a crash—a piece of advice rooted in an earnest belief in the logic of cartoons, where planes crash nose first.
Through most of the book the narrator uses history (in its grand, periodic way) to negotiate and make sense of his place/displacement against the backdrop of England. But then somewhere in the middle he writes, “I was carrying some bananas to New York”. And then again, some pages later, in a way I find inexplicably more heartbreaking: “I had come to New York with some bananas”.
I had come to New York with some bananas. I had eaten some on the plane and left the others behind, guiltily but correctly (they would almost certainly have been taken from me by the authorities). I had also been given a roasted chicken or half a roasted chicken: my family’s peasant, Indian, Hindu fear about my food, about pollution, and this was an attempt to stay it, if only for that day. But I had no knife, no fork, no plate, and didn’t know that these things might have been got from the hotel; wouldn’t have known how to set about asking, especially at that very late hour.
I ate over the wastepaper basket, aware as I did so of the smell, the oil, the excess at the end of a long day. In my diary I had written of the biggest things, the things that befitted a writer. But the writer of the diary was ending his day like a peasant, like a man reverting to his origins, eating secretively in a dark room, and then wondering how to hide the high-smelling evidence of his meal.
The narrator obviously arrives with quite a bit more than just some bananas, but the syntax produces a such a pitiful visual. I envy how viscerally he is able to convey the sort of shame that arrives with loneliness; when you know nothing and no one in a place you have travelled so far to be. Embarrassment and displacement is the body compromised. The image of a young man arriving in a big city with a mundane, tropical fruit from home and then proceeding to eat a stale, packed meal alone & hunched over the bin made me feel so sad. The immigrant story always gets me—people robbed of language and familiarity, fighting for their lives within and against brutal systems that don’t recognise their humanity, or fail to see how nobody chooses to leave their family behind for nothing.
The concept of an ‘opportunity’: of ‘getting to work’ in global cities once responsible for (or currently complicit in) the absolute desecration of ex-colonies and occupied territories is so mired in the resulting ‘first v. third world’ myth as well as the crushing reality of late stage capitalism, realised through everyday inequalities like visas, currency exchange rates, labour-producing economies, disproportionate policing, language/accent barriers, and so on. It was The Enigma of Arrival that (surprisingly) helped me to see how the body is the foremost site upon which all these things unfold & live, and much later in life I was/have been able to hone this research interest to explore how and why immigrant women that perform low-wage care work are constructed as ‘bodies without subjectivity’. I’ve written some bits here before—the “somatic mess, chaos, recklessness, and rebellion” in Unruly Bodies, and the archive as a body/the body as an archive in Dreaming the Archive.
Meanwhile, out of thin air, a desire unfolds in the universe and someone is always feeling like they’ve come to New York with some bananas.
Last summer I struggled to keep my head above water (what else is actually new) and I ended up drowning quite spectacularly in the second week of September when, all in a span of four days, I had to: 1) move out of my flat, 2) find a new flat, 3) submit my dissertation, 4) start a new job, and 5) pretend like receiving an “I feel relieved when you’re gone” text message didn’t bring me to my knees in shame and heartbreak. There is no time to curl up on the carpet and cry and be hurt when your lease is up at the end of the week. No feeling sorry for yourself.
I moved into my new flat in the third week of September and cried every day in a very empty, very white bathroom. We leased the flat part-furnished, so for the first week or so there were absolutely no fixtures in the bathroom: plain white walls, white bathtub, white toilet, white sink, white door. We have since put in a pink & white shower curtain, pink hand towels, a pink bath mat, a black laundry basket, black soap caddies, black & white towel hooks, a brown ceramic toothbrush cup, a green plant, a green candle, and a green tray, but for the first week it was so white. It was like crying in limbo.
Recently I learned that in Vedic/Sidereal astrology I am actually an Aquarius rising which pleases me a lot because I hated being a Pisces (Tropical). In all other placements that count (Sun, Moon, Venus, Mercury, Mars etc.) I am a Sagittarius so this discovery made sense to me: air and fire together. Water seemed a little counterintuitive. I also learned that Aquarius is about rebellion, humanity, and surprise. I don’t know a lot about astrology and I don’t think it is a matter of belief, but this made sense to me too. I am currently in my Saturn Return (also my sadesati, according to my mother), and seeing as my Saturn is in Aquarius, I have been moving through a lengthy process of unlearning, challenging, shedding, trying, recreating, and becoming. No feeling sorry for myself!
Things improved a lot for me after 25, and I think they will only get better. I possess an unrelenting determination that has saved my life many times over, and to be honest I’m selling myself short by telling you that I drowned last September, because I didn’t. I accomplished all those things. I found a flat, submitted an exasperating amount of paperwork, and collected the keys the very day I had to move out; I stayed up 30 hours finishing my dissertation and got a first; I went to work everyday and put together a new routine; I met new people and made new friends; and I picked my heart off the ground and continue to believe in a love that is stored up for me like an inheritance1.
In my persistent efforts to re-centre my intuition and balance my life on the scales of both gut feeling and method, I have begun teaching myself how to read/interpret Tarot. To me it has been another tool I use to read myself and the world around me, similar to how I have approached and embraced literature (fiction and otherwise) all my life.
I pulled this pair on the morning of my birthday last November, and it felt serendipitous even before I flipped through the little book to find out what each card meant. I understand The Tower as embodying all the qualities I respect and admire about world-building: transformation, upheaval, chaos, taking apart, putting together, bending realities into existence. Reversed, it symbolises an energy that is more internally than externally influenced/experienced, which I think reflects the lengthy process I talk about earlier, most acutely/consciously realised after I turned 25. The Ten of Cups signifies divine love, harmony, alignment, and emotional contentment, and I thought the two cards made a very beautiful combination.
I turn 29 this year and for the first time in my tiny little life I have finally been feeling like I know who I am. Maybe I have arrived at this point before, and maybe I will continue to experience this arrival at various other points in the future, for this is what it must be like to pay attention to your growth in a minute, intentional way; to learn the kinds of joy best suited to the joy seeker. When I know who I am, I also know who I can be.
This is from Letters to a Young Poet by Rilke and the whole line is “believe in a love which is stored up for you like an inheritance, and trust that in this love there is a strength and benediction out of whose sphere you do not need to issue even if your journey is a long one”.