Student of the Month December 2014 / January 2015
Featuring:
Akta Kaushal
University of Hawai’i at MÄ noa
A Note on the Series: Our Student of the Month series features on our
website stellar student writing and visual art from the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa, the institution where our roots dig deep. In print for more than 40 years, our journal has been an established voice in the Pacific and beyond for decades, featuring work from emerging writers alongside literary heavyweights. The Student of the Month series is our latest effort to expand Hawai‘i Review’s reach in local and far-reaching literary communities.
Copyright © 2015 by the Board of Publications, University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa If you are a student and would like to feature your work in Student of the Month or an instructor for a creative writing course and would like to submit exemplary University of Hawai‘i student work to Hawai‘i Review’s Student of the Month initiative, please send submissions to our Submittable account at bit.ly/submit2HR Contact us at hawaiireview@gmail.com
Introduction
Politics and Sensuality The Poetry of Akta Kaushal Akta Kaushal completed her M.A. in postcolonial politics at Aberystwyth University in Wales in 2013. Of her education abroad, she reflects: “I needed a space to better understand how colonialism has informed and continues to inform our histories and our lives today.” Indeed some of Akta’s research interests include postcolonial feminism, postcolonial literature, and queer theory. As a Ph.D. candidate in the Political Science Department at UH-Mānoa, Akta explains how her research experience in Hawai‘i teaches her how “malleable and sometimes unusuable” the term postcolonial can be: “Learning more about colonization in the Pacific and ongoing injustices has allowed me to gain traction on something that is globally pervasive, but at the same time locally contingent. Exposure to indigenous perspectives and worldviews has really pushed me to grapple with what it means to inhabit a space ethically, consciously, and responsibly.” While she continues to engage with postcolonial discourse as a scholar, Hawai‘i Review is privileged to get to know her poetic side as our December 2014 / January 2015 Student of the Month and feature the folllowing three poems: “Prayed wording,” “Catharsis,” and “Phantom Limbs.” “I study politics,” Akta states. “But there is a lot more life and nuance to the political than what can be illustrated in a regression table.” When asked to distinguish between poetry and academic writing, Akta describes how “poetry offers an embrace of lived experiences and ways of being that other forms of writing cannot give me.” She goes on to elaborate a relationship between poetry and resistance: “In relation to the form, it can be a resistance to other modes of expression and articulation. In relation to the political, if we see resistance as being more than inactivity or refraining from doing something, it can be an embrace, a willingness to unsettle and be unsettled by the unexplainable and unacceptable that surrounds us.”
Akta’s belief in poetry as embrace is reflected in her work. Her poems “Prayed wording” and “Catharsis” were written last spring, and her sensual language and imagery make readers aware of the body in exciting and vivid ways. Quite appropriately, Akta draws from Audre Lorde and advocates that the erotic is a veritable source of knowledge and power. She continues: “Whether visible or not, we have inscriptions of stories and memories etched onto our bodies that we cannot control, nor can we conceal. This is where ‘phantom limbs’ makes sense to me, though these inscriptions might not always be indications of something traumatic. What do our bodies experience, remember, forget, and archive? How do our relationships with others, along with the spaces we enter and live in, affect our bodies in very real ways—a flinch, a gaze, a quiver, even a throbbing pain?” Her first poem “Prayed wording” reveals a beautiful, almost haunting relationship that undergoes a crisis of communication. What is compelling, especially in the context of Hawai‘i Review’s forthcoming muliwai issue, is that this crisis of communication inscribes itself on the body of the speaker as well as on a body of water: “You echo in my throat” (line 2), “deaf tongues” (13), “May the sea burst from your eyes” (21). Akta confirms that she shares her poetry with Hawai‘i Review as a way to make sense of the muliwai, to bear witness to the different bodies of water— literally and metaphorically—she has seen meet here in Hawai‘i: “[T]he people I have met on O‘ahu have shown me the value of storytelling as a knowledge source and learning practice, in how mo‘olelo give form to the genealogies of people, places, land, water, and the gods. In many ways, this authorizes what I already know and believe. However, I also feel guided to be a better listener, to recognize my own position and the importance of necessary silences and stepping back, and to be in awe of the struggles, dreams, and worlds of the people who I have been fortunate enough to encounter here.” Akta is passionate, eloquent, and creative, and we are proud to feature her work this month. Mahalo nui loa e Akta. —No‘u Revilla, Hawai‘i Review Poetry Editor
Prayed Wording Mumbling roars, You echo in my throat, As the wide-mouthed, unforgiving sea With un-timed grace Fills you, I dive. But, you drown, cannibalizing the sea, Entrapped carcass, In a loud clamor that distracts As it beats its waves outside your heart. The slang before my words, Their failure, Swallows your deaf tongues. Chanting, Lift me from the crash, of desperation’s throb; these waves, They drum, push hard, inside the walls of my chest, grasp for its de-tensifiable forks— Impossibly numerable. May the sea burst from your eyes. [3/5/2014]
Catharsis Dizzy from blinks drawled, Our archived convulsions make contact. Tarred chaste vermillion of past lives, Carving, stamped— You dig through my scalp. Building a temple on charred bones, I lick them. Sliver me open, I offer my heaving ribs. Wrangled, In hyphens, their hymns harmonize. Ferried by caresses without touch, Through fleshy belting, we Extract the lyrical bones that chime from our stomachs, we Let them scrape inside, up our necks. [3/7/2014]
Phantom Limbs “Believe me, the zombies are more terrifying than the settlers; and in consequence the problem is no longer that of keeping oneself right with the colonial world and its barbed-wire entanglements, but of considering three times before urinating, spitting, or going out into the night.” —Frantz Fanon, Wretched of the Earth Scavenge away. Unearth eulogies for these scattered bones, bones that haunt our stories, bones buried deep, deep under glistening concrete, bones less grievable, for court rooms, for classrooms, for living rooms— They ache. Naked wrists, turban-less heads, shaved faces, garlanded photos. I mourn our carnal fixation of ghosts, the ghastly limbs of brown, decapitated daughters, with long braided hair, preserved by the raping of Partitioned borders, of Afghani fingers dragged with teeth, locked in the plastic bags of Gibbs’ ‘Kill Team,’ of Aravan’s castrated dancing goddesses, who, as widows, beat the bangles off their bearded wrists. of pesticide-filled bellies, one every thirty minutes, swelling the graves of high-yielding economic logic. of this poem, typed on occupied land and water, marinating in blood.
www.hawaiireview.org Hawai‘i Review Staff, 2013-2015 Anjoli Roy, Editor in Chief Kelsey Amos, Managing Editor Donovan Kūhiō Colleps, Design Editor No‘ukahau‘oli Revilla, Poetry Editor David Scrivner, Fiction Editor
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