Juliana Spahr "What Anti-Colonial Poetry Has to Say about Language and Why It Matters"   When they were in graduate school the radicalness of something written was often evaluated. A work that was radical was a good work. At the time it was difficult to describe what being radical meant. It meant more a feeling, a hard to read feeling. Or something that one was not used to reading. It meant maybe ellipitical. Now they could define what had been meant by radical then as writing that used modernist techniques of fragmentation, quotation, disruption, disjunction, agrammatical syntax, and so on. And a work that was radical used more modernist techniques than other works. It wasn't all that simple, they had to admit. Content did matter at the time. But often as an afterthought. And even if the question of radical enough wasn't stated that bluntly it was often implied or back behind another question, such as was the work any good or not. Radical enough was also a game that men won more than women, although there was always Gertrude Stein who always won all aspects of the game if she was brought in. Yet somehow that didn't seem much of a comfort. Then they moved. They moved from a very cold place to very warm, lush place. The place to which they moved was called Oahu and it was one island among 132 in the earth's longest island chain. Their arrival to this island had histories. But their histories were small, were nothing, compared to the history of the island. Their history was like this. There was a day to day rhythm. One of them moved from bed to bed. One was always coupled. One was single every other night. There was a pattern. And so each day a thought had to be had about which bed had been the bed for waking. Or which skin had been the most touched of the skins. What certain specific memory had been the most recent. A smell. Or a feeling. Or a satisfaction. As a result, this relationship, a new relationship for all of them, had motion, had airplanes. When they began the relationship, one of them had met the other two in a city that was half way between the coast they moved from and the place they were moving to. Then they all got on an airplane to the place. Two sat in one row of two seats. One sat in a row ahead. The one who sat in a row ahead talked with another person in the same row who had lived on an atoll for a number of years. But now the atoll was gone because the ocean had risen above it. When they first landed they went from an airplane into a car. They went from a car into an empty apartment and then went from an empty apartment into a bar where they had beers in the afternoon. They were awkward because they got off the airplane on an island. They were awkward with their bodies in the five hour time difference after a ten hour flight. They were awkward because they had never lived together before. For a long time everything felt like airplanes to them. Like moving between. Like migration. Like motion. Like dry mouth and tiredness and boredom. Like stale air and the hope of getting somewhere. Like awkward sitting in seats. And sudden drops in altitude and turbulence that if they just held on and relaxed it would most likely be ok. All around them were reminders of what they were and of their impact. They lived among plants that grew into each other in various and unique ways. There was the huehue haole, or the passion flower vine, which smothered shrubs, small trees and the ground layer. Seeds from its fruit were dispersed by alien frugivorous birds. The koa haole which formed dense thickets and excluded all other plants. Most of the birds they saw around them came from other places and took over. The myna was introduced in 1865 to control army worms. The sparrow was introduced in 1871. The Japanese white eye was introduced in 1929. The red-billed Leiothrix probably escaped from a cage in 1911. As the birds changed, the plants changed with them from native to largely alien because the birds carried seeds in their feathers and in their waste. There was an indigenous bird, the kolea, that summered on the continent and wintered on the island. It was often called the haole bird because it came to the island, got fat, and then returned to the continent. They began in this place with new patterns of relating. There were new patterns of their relationship and the new patterns the history of the place left on their relationships with others. They felt stroked by the weather that was unusually pleasant. But they felt lost otherwise. When they first arrived, that the place was colonized unnerved them. At first they thought they never wanted to live in a place that was colonized. Then they began to realize that it was hard to find a place that had not been colonized by someone at some time. So then they decided that they did not want to live in a place that was recently colonized. Or a place that identified as colonized. But after they lived in this colonized place for a while, they became obsessed with other colonized places. They became colonialism groupies. They read colonial and postcolonial novels avidly. They searched out Senegalese films, mailing away for them from distribution centers on the continent. They listened to dancehall and reggae music. They looked at clogging in a new light. They read history, sociology, botany, literary criticism. As long as it was about how one people dominated another people, it felt relevant to their lives. Books that they had been made to read in graduate school and had found irrelevant to their thinking about avant garde poetry suddenly felt crucial. A friend would talk about her mother's schizophrenia and refer to Fanon and it would feel real and make sense in a way that it would not have five years earlier. They began to think they might now understand a friend they had had hung out with when they lived in Korea for a year who had "one Korea" stickers on his moped and his notebook and his cellphone but who was always saying that he hated North Korea because it had no discos. At the end of the Senegalese film Faat Kine when Kine's son makes a speech about tradition being respectful of women, they felt a small thrill that nationalism could be progressive even though they did not understand the politics of Senegal and they felt nervous about relating too strongly to nationalisms from places they knew little about even as they knew this nervousness was part of the problem, part of the reason it was so hard to make things better. This same thrill took the form of goosebumps at local protests. And certain songs and chants on the radio wold also give them chills, especially ones of regaining the land. This chill they thought was probably about the sudden possibility of escape from large systemic limitations. They too were trying to escape from large systems, from limitations on relation, which is why these moments that had no direct relation to their lives felt so thrilling. They had no metaphor. They had met one afternoon at a bar and talked it over. At the bar meeting, it was hard for them to talk. They felt uncomfortable. But they decided to move to an island together. Once they were on the island they had no words for themselves. They had only theories. And the words they thought they might use did not work. They did not know what to make of how it felt reassuring to watch on public television the female hedge sparrow vigorously shaking her tail feathers at two different male birds to indicate her desire to be inseminated by each of them in close succession, to watch a cable channel's documentary on the marrying tribe of the Amazon, to watch the music channel's soap opera subplot of a girl and her agreement with two guys which involved neither of them having sex with her independently but was of course immediately broken by two of them when the third went off to study. The interest they felt in these images that came at them without their input made them feel stupid but they could find few models to turn to among their friends so they could not stop thinking about these models made for them by other people far away from them. Lack of understanding was all around. It defined them. They could not understand the marrying tribe. They did not even know the real name of the marrying tribe, the name that the members of the tribe had chosen to call themselves. Shortly after they found themselves on this island it was announced that a giant melting puddle of ice had formed on one of the poles of the earth. Things were melting. This mattered because the ocean surrounded them. The ocean was huge and it was filled with `o`opu and `ala`ihi and `u`u and limu and plastic. It was so huge and so all around them that it was strange to think about. And then even stranger to think some more about it rising. The vastness of the ocean made the television news strange because behind the news anchors was a representation of the island amid this huge expanse of ocean, a growing expanse, and although the news was about what was happening in the rest of the world there was no evidence of the rest of the world on the back drop. So they were newcomers to the island with a new history of relationship for them but they were at the same time part of a long history of arrival to the island. The island was contested land. It had big metaphors of place. The history of this island was one of overthrow and occupation by those who arrived from elsewhere and then of denial of rights to certain humans who were already there on the island and of racism and of repression of culture and language. They were a part of this history of occupation and it remained with them and was inescapable in most daily interactions. They had no choice in how they were seen as occupiers. It was with them in line at the grocery store and while waiting for the light to change at the intersection. It was with them when they walked down the streets and when they met people in a bar. This history swooped down and then took away what they thought they were and replaced it with a weak complicity with power that they didn't like about themselves but had to accept even as they tried to speak out against it in their tiny ineffectual voices. The longer they lived on the island, the more they learned. They learned that the ocean that surrounded the island where they lived spans over one third of the earth's surface and contains 25,000 islands (more than all the other oceans on the earth combined). They heard that there might be as many as 1200 languages in the ocean and that Papua New Guinea has close to 800 alone. Often it was said that this was a problem or a limitation that the people who lived on the islands must overcome. The societies on these islands are too segregated some would say. They mimic the geography. They can never get along these people. And thus they cannot govern. Or thus their literatures are of limited scope and applicability. Because there is an excess of specificity, there is an excess of dependency and a lack of development or maybe even a lack of radicalness. But they learned to think of this expanse of salt water not as a separation but as a connective fluid. They thought of travel, trade, and migration. They thought of canoes and of jets. They didn't think up these things on their own. They thought of them because they learned them from other people. Epeli Hau`ofa, for instance, pointed out at a conference the difference between seeing the ocean that surrounded them and its various islands as "islands in a far sea," which implied tiny dots of land separated by wide expanses of ocean, and "a sea of islands," which implied a more holistic perspective in which the ocean and the islands are joined. This really helped them to understand how their view had been limited by their emphasis on the radical. And the poet Joe Balaz had a poem that went like this: Eh, howzit brah, I heard you goin mainland, eh? No, I goin to da continent. Wat? I taught you goin San Jose for visit your bradda? Dats right. Den you going mainland brah! No, I goin to da continent. Wat you mean continent brah?! Da mainland is da mainland, dats where you goin, eh?! Eh, like I told you, dats da continent- Hawai`i is da mainland to me. From this they learned the obvious-language carries perspective. And they also learned about how place matters and how places have hierarchies. They thought of how Benedict Anderson speaks of how at moments in his encounters with anti-colonial nationalism he felt like he was looking through an inverted telescope. All these reversals worked similarly for them. They inverted their perspective. They changed the way they thought about things through their dead ahead obviousness. They thought about how Hau`ofa's metaphor of connected islands helped them understand their lives in this new place. In their apartment, they each had their own room. They lived their lives most fully in their own rooms. Most of their emotional life was experienced at their desks and they often interacted with each other from these desks through their computers. Yet the desks that they had in each room were identical. They had made them together on the same day out of plywood. And the desk chairs were identical. They had gone together to the office warehouse store and they had bought three identical desk chairs with wheels and blue denim upholstery. They each had computers on their desks. But they kept their identical desk chairs at different heights. And they kept different sorts of things on their desks and their computers. One had papers and books strewn about in piles, abandoned birds nests, and several lamps. One had ashtrays and matches and voodoo dolls and candles. One had shells and weird materials found on the ground and math books. They wondered if they were a new pattern or a very old pattern that had fallen out of style and then been forgotten about. None of this thinking went much of anywhere. They wondered about this in the back of their heads, in the background of their daily thoughts. The front of their heads couldn't really see the pattern or make sense of it. They were as aquarium fish who did not understand they were in a tank and there was no where to go. Among these desks, the day to day felt normal to them. They got up and made breakfast and then they went and did the things they did for work and then they would meet later in the day and eat dinner and then do the things that people did before they went to bed like read or watch something on television. This they thought of as normal life. They just did it with the motion of moving between three instead of one and another. They talked about these things and other things amongst themselves at the breakfast table or on the lanai late at night while watching planes leave. They talked some about the pool of melting but cool water on the pole. And then some more of the atoll that was no longer an atoll. They thought of Kiribati and Tuvalu. This caused thoughts also of what it meant to be part of the country that uses the most energy. The country most responsible for the growth in the ozone hole that was growing over islands that were far away from this country. The country that had recently withdrawn from the Kyoto accord and had absurdly blamed developing nations. The country that was bombing other nations right now so as to be able to continue playing a leading role in the melting of ice caps. And the country also responsible for the bombing of various nearby islands. They thought about citizenship in a land where the nation occupied. Then this lead to thoughts about the extinction of species, which had a special relevance as more species were dying on the island they had moved to than anywhere else. This was all juxtaposed to daily life on the island itself where the air felt moist and lush and kind. And it was so wonderful, yet so not theirs, that they did not know really what it meant that it was going away. Or what it meant that some of it had been lost because it was so much more wonderful in terms of nature than other places even as it was an island of loss that they had no idea how to imagine it as more than what it was right at the moment. They were limited by their ability to envision it because nature in their lives, in the places where they had grown up, had always been shaped by the development and industry that was creating the hole in the ozone, the melting pool of ice, the disappearing atolls. All of this made them think about nature poetry. Many people around them were so moved by the land that they wrote poems celebrating nature. Sometimes people arrived by plane, wrote a poem, and then left by plane. These poems were called 747 poems by those who either didn't leave by plane or by those who both hadn't arrived by plane and didn't leave by plane. Late at night in bars they could often be heard declaiming to anyone who would listen that nature poetry was the most immoral of poetries because it showed the bird, often a bird that like themselves that had arrived from afar, and not the bulldozer. But when they looked more deeply at nature poetry, when they looked beyond the poems collected in anthologies that had images of the surf on the beach and looked instead at poems written by those who had deep connections to the islands they realized a whole new use for nature poetry. They read a poem, for instance, by Ku`ualoha Ho`omanawanui that begins as a nature poem with the koa`e bird gliding over Halema`uma`u which turns into a plane over Waikiki and ends with asphalt. This was a poem that included both precontact and postcontact nature in it and that split perspective changed the things they could say about nature poetry dramatically they realized. And they read the Kumulipo, a creation chant, where nature is a large complicated system. The Kumulipo had a brief vogue some years ago because it is one of few creation chants that present creation as evolutionary. In the poem, life evolves from single cells. It begins in slime then in coral polyp then grub then earthworm. But what they found most moving about the chant was how it pointed out the connectedness of life. As the chant lists the creation of a number of animals and plants it lists one from the sea and one from the land to speak to their inconnected nature. So the refrain of the chant goes, "Born is the Hauliuli living in the sea / Guarded by the Uhi yam living on the land," each time listing a different thing from the sea and the land. This was moving to them because they felt that things that pointed to connection might be one way to show how one nation's oil use could cause the disappearance of another nation. And there was the song by Brudda Iz that sees the state of nature not as something for humans to celebrate but rather as something humans should mourn. The chorus goes like this: "Cry for the gods, cry for the people/Cry for the land that was taken away/And then yet you'll find Hawai`i." They recognized nature poetry in these contexts not as immoral but as politicized, as telling the layers of history, and as a warning as Brudda Iz sings, "that our land is in great danger now." This was just one way that writing mattered on this island where they found themselves. Not their writing. But the writing that was written out of this place. It slowly dawned on them, but it was so obvious that they couldn't understand how they had managed to not think on it before, that poetry had a different resonance, a different importance in places of activist nationalism. All sorts of poetry. Both radical and not so radical. Both English and Hawaiian. Many people involved in the sovereignty movement on the island were also poets. Poems were read at protests with great regularity. The genre's assumed shortness, its lack of rules and structures, its link to orality, made it a genre of populist protest. With the populist protest came controversy. Poetry it seemed was always in trouble with someone. Often the controversy made its way to the front page of the local newspapers even if the local newspapers didn't really publish much poetry in them. Before they arrived there had been a controversy over a poem written by Huanani Kay Trask. Trask caused extreme emotion in many people because of her activist support for sovereignty and her outspoken nature. Often when they told people that they met in casual situations on the island that they worked at the university these people that they met would mention her name to them with anger. They themselves didn't feel this anger and these outbursts always made them feel uncomfortable. They felt that Trask had the right to say what she wanted to say and they admired her abilities to say things that other people wouldn't say but might be thinking. Trask wrote a poem called "Racist White Woman" that began like this: I could kick / your face, puncture /both eyes. // You deserve this kind / of violence." When this book was published a student from the midwest made fun of this poem in the school newspaper in a cartoon. The cartoon quoted the poem and had Trask madly screaming it at a cowering woman holding her book overhead as if it was an axe. Much controversy erupted from the poem and the cartoon and this was just one of many ways that poetry mattered on the island. A colleague said that the poem wasn't racist because it was about a specific woman and she named the woman's name and this woman was a well known member of the administration of the university who was notorious for saying racist things. Their colleague felt that if it wasn't about all white women, it wasn't racist. This they were unsure about. But what they liked about the poem was how it swooped down and caught them. It made any claim to poetry's aesthetics irrelevant. It used no radical modernist techniques yet it induced in them a profound dislocation. It made them nervous. It was how the history of the place caught them. Suddenly they and their values had a positionality that they didn't realize they had before. They were unsure if it was the poem's skill that caused the dislocation or if it was that the poem exposed to them their confused attempts to negotiate the university where they worked. The university had been set up by those who arrived from elsewhere and it carried mainly the values of the other place. Of all the institutions in the island it had done the least mixing, the least of that constant even if often unequal exchange that so defined life on the island and produced things like slack key guitar, hapa haole hula, and the paniolo. The English Department, which was where they taught, offered many courses in early British literature, some courses in American literature, a few courses in the literature of the islands right now, and no courses in the literature of the islands that was created before the arrival of people from somewhere else. This was typical of most departments. Written into the charter of the university was a statement that its purpose was to educate the immigrants who arrived to this place, a statement that deliberately ignored the presence of the people who were already there. All of this bothered them about the university. And it made them have to rethink the way that they had worked so hard to get a university job because it seemed somehow less coercive than most jobs because it didn't really involve selling things or making things for people to buy. They had to instead think of the university as a very powerful institution designed for the most mundane sorts of socialization to western values. And then they had to think about their own presence and role in this university and this socialization. None of this was easy to figure out. In some ways they felt the answer wasn't to just leave. The answer was to join up the fight to make things better. But they had to admit that they weren't sure which fight to join because there were so many and some felt so dislocating. And when the president of the student association gave a speech in which she said that she would buy any haole professor who wanted one a one way ticket off the island, they longed to follow after her and ask for their ticket back to someplace, but to what place they were not sure. When they were a child they had each of them owned a metal globe and each of them had spent many hours looking at it and noticing the smallness of the world. All these moments kept provoking in them a certain anxiety that the world was too small for them and they thought a lot about how to make themselves even smaller. In addition, they even had to think what reading meant. They loved reading. It was something they had done more than any other thing in their life. It had provided untold hours of only child solace to them. And they liked to romanticize reading through the story that Frederick Douglass told of learning to read by exchanging bread with poor white children and of how reading was the pathway from slavery to freedom. They also loved the story of Frankenstein's creature who learned to read by looking through a peephole. Their own father who had grown up in an orphanage and hadn't been to college also worshiped reading. As long as they were reading, their father didn't make them do any chores. Reading, he would say, is more important. This caused them to be constantly reading in their childhood. But once they began to look around at the university and its problems, they also realized that their emphasis on the written word meant they were missing a lot of literature for writing and reading had come late to the island, had arrived with the people from somewhere else. They realized that oral cultures had their own complexities and ways of speaking and of learning and had things to teach and that the emphasis they and their culture placed on reading meant that these things were less or even not accessible to them. It was like the radical issue. It wasn't that they had to give up their love of the radical as defined as modernist techniques. It was that they had to resee the radical, to see it as the continent not the mainland or as one space in a sea of islands. They began to see poetry as a series of contiguous systems, systems that didn't merge but that were beside one another. They saw this in the various poetries they saw around them on the island. Around them was local poetry which was also Asian-American poetry and there was experimental poetry and there was MFA poetry and there was slam poetry and there was the nature poetry of the university and the nature poetry of the community and there was Hawaiian poetry and even some other forms of poetry that didn't really have names. When they turned to the continent there were even more forms of poetry. They thought it only made sense to see these as a series of individual forms of writing that were also connected. It bothered them when colleagues of theirs said that there were two types of poetry: lyric and language. This they felt was excluding a whole diversity of poetries written by people of many different races and classes and sexualities and positions. They longed to organize something-a conference, a book, anything-where they brought all these poetries together but they didn't know how to begin. Many of these poetries did not mix because of various fights and many of these poetries did not mix because they just refused to see the other as even present. As they read and watched and listened to all this, they wondered about their own roles as writers of words, but as writers of words who were of the race and origin of the colonizers. They themselves wrote in English. This was like many of the people who lived on the island. Although many also wrote in Hawaiian. And many also wrote in both English and Hawaiian. This English of theirs also had a history, or a content. They had learned English from birth. And their parents had learned English from birth. But their grandparents had learned other languages from their birth and came later to English, except for one grandmother who had learned English in Ireland because it was mandated. English was growing and they were a part of this growing. What started with nineteenth English imperialism had been continued by United States economic politics, the growth in multinationals with United States ties, and the technology industry. They knew that Ngugi wa Thiong'o called English in Africa a cultural bomb. They knew that he pointed to how English "annihilate[s] a people's belief in their names, in their languages, in their environment, in their heritage of struggle, in their unity, in their capacities and ultimately in themselves. It makes them see their past as one wasteland of nonachievement and it makes them want to distance themselves from that wasteland. It makes them want to identify with that which is furthest removed from themselves; for instance, with other people's languages rather than their own." They knew also how the colonized have turned the English language into their own language in some of these places. This was even more complicated where they lived because most people spoke a language called pidgin which was really a creole as their first language but then this creole was becoming more and more like English because English at this time was such a language of power. They knew that as people who arrived and people who write they were caught up in the cultural bomb of English not in the making of new Englishes. English had arrived to this island as they had arrived. English had arrived with whaling ships. Then it had become the language most people spoke not because it was better and not because it was easier and not because it had more literature or it had more economic power but because of a law that from 1896-1970 banned the language that had been there originally. Now the language that had been there originally was being reclaimed. It had never totally gone away. But now it was growing again. It reentered most easily through song. Whenever they turned on the radio, they would hear songs in this language. They would hear both old songs that never went away and new songs recently written. And they would also hear songs that mixed both languages. They were in particular interested in this mixing of languages. It happened in poetry that was not made to be sung also. The part that was in English allowed them to enter into the work. So they would enter and then soon they would find themselves suddenly unable to read the work. There were numerous examples of this sort of poem. Trask did it a lot. Also Teresia Teaiwa, Ku`ualoha Ho`omanawanui, Darryl Cabacungan, and Alani Apio. Although this turn to other languages had been one of the radical techniques of modernism, they felt it had a different intent here. In modernism, writers turned to other languages for reasons of cosmopolitanism. Here it was a reminder that there are places of entry that require knowledges. It was both a stand back gesture and an invitation to go and immerse one's self in years of language learning in order to read this work, in order to talk about this work. Despite their longing for smallness, they felt stuck in a question about whether it was more ethical to just make one's self smaller and quieter and sit at the back of the room or whether one should speak out loudly about how wrong the history of the place was and risk getting told to sit down and shut up because their place of birth made them part of the problem no matter what. This was a constant question for them because they were all writers of some sort. They found themselves thinking hard about how to negotiate all this, about analogy, about the word we, about how to be in a place that was so not for them. They made different decisions. One of them more or less stopped writing anything that was cultural. Another moved away in frustration. Another just kept trying to think about it over and over while not sleeping at night. There were no right answers and if nothing else they learned from this to respect various people's decisions as their own and none of their business. One of them found it was hard not to write about the island despite their lying awake at night worrying whenever they wrote something about the island. And even though they felt a lot of pressure not to write about it. The pressure came from all over. When they had first decided to move to the island, a fellow graduate student had said to them that he hoped that they were not going to turn into this other woman, a woman who like them had come to the island from elsewhere and now worked hard to write about and publish the work of writers of the island. But that sort of snide pressure not to write about the island was nothing next to what was said at times by those who had long ties to the island. It was clear to them that there was such a long tradition of appropriation that anything they might say they would have to say sideways. But it was hard to stop this writing about the island even as they worried about appropriation in their work because this island had played a large role in the literary and filmic imaginaries of their culture. In this imaginary, the island was a welcoming multicultural paradise filled with beautiful young women and wise old people who did not ask for much and shared their land and food and culture and even welcomed their colonizers as civilizers. These were stories the colonizers told to tell how they were welcomed. They did not want to write things like this. But the other response that they saw when they looked around them, the response of many like them, was to ignore the island and build a bunker. This did not feel right either. They tried instead to think about what could be left in and what could not. There were no easy answers. They distrusted any that they were given. But nonetheless they found themselves suddenly inserting the words of plants or animals in the language that was spoken in the islands before English. Words like mai`a, `ulu, kukui, and ti would suddenly appear in a poem about what people might carry with them. Or they found themselves describing themselves and people like them through metaphors of invasive alien plants. Like koa haole and huehue haole. And also trees like kiawe that was brought to the island in the 1800s and grew so out of control that it is responsible for lowering the water tables all over the island. They tried out some various metaphors. Was the relation between themselves and the culture of the place before people like themselves arrived like the permeable membrane on the snorkel? If it was, were they the water or the air? And who was breathing under water? Or was it like the orchid, somewhat dependent on a host and yet not totally? In their more optimistic moments they thought group sky diving, the sort where fifty or so people all dive at the same time and then try to join hands in a big radiating wheel while in free fall, might work. It was hard to do, the group had to attempt many dives before they got it right. But once it was done, there was a center and then people radiating out; it was nonhierarchical in the vertical sense; everyone was on the same level; but some were closer to the center; everyone was touching through hands and yet everyone had their own parachute. While they felt partial to such optimistic metaphors, they had to admit that they did not really live them all that well outside of the relations they had with each other. As much as they felt uncomfortable on the island, when they went back to the continent, they still felt uncomfortable. Not infrequently someone would say to them that they should not live on the island where they lived because white people had done enough damage. While they admired the political attention to history of these people, they always felt weird that these people could not see the history of where they were standing and how it was a similar history of loss of land and continued disenfranchisement. Once they looked at various histories, they did not know where to put their bodies on the globe. But they also felt uncomfortable among their friends who had no politics when they would return to the continent. So uncomfortable it was hard to hang out with them. The concerns of these friends-often concerns of radical enough and of aesthetics-felt falsely separated from the world around them. When back on the continent, among their old friends, they found their alliances with them to be suddenly different. People who they had previously found politically over reactive and shrill, suddenly felt comfortable. People who felt comfortable previously, suddenly felt to be part of the problem. This made them distrust their judgment. If what had felt right previously, so right that it was located in a feeling of comfort or instinct, now felt so wrong, they might be wrong about many other things. They lost their faith in their vision. They were unsure which end of the telescope through which they looked. They felt annoyed when their friends did not want to discuss colonialism or did not want to go to the African film festival because they did not like that sort of stuff. What sort of stuff they would say defensively. It was like nationalism. They had been against it as they were for the radical at one time. But now they saw it as a tool, one that could liberate and repress, like most tools. And they felt obligated not to dismiss it too easily. They cringed when the woman who was at Cambridge sent them a paper in which she kept talking about all of American poetry as if it was one whole thing and she said that that poetry is guilty of nationalism when she meant something more like jingoism. Or when their work appeared in an anthology and in the anthology it was said that what was good about the work in the anthology was that it was anti-nationalist. They knew these feelings were silly, unfair, even damaging to their relationships with kind people. But they continued to find it impossible to talk about aesthetics without also talking about who took over who. It was like nature poetry. It enraged them if it didn't somehow address the human occupation of nature or culture. Somehow, for reasons they themselves did not understand, all their attention to colonialism and nationalism felt relevant to the way they thought of themselves, to the way they wrote the story of their relation with each other. In part this was probably just proximity. They became something built around triangles and dimensions at the same moment they realized they were by necessity aligned with colonization. They had always thought of themselves as normal and they had always thought of themselves as working for a solution of various sorts, or at least as against the problem or not responsible for it. Two aspects of self identification had been challenged at the same time. This is why they were always looking for models of human relation and this, as a result, defined their reading and writing. They did not want models to matter but a scarcity of models made the ones they came across big in their minds. When talking to others, such as their parents, they kept resorting to metaphors of nature, as if that would make them natural. But the metaphors of nature always failed them. Everything happens somewhere in nature. For every polygamous hedge sparrow or Amazonian fairy wren there were all those birds that mated for life. And the documentary on the life of birds cautioned that the extreme infidelity of hedge sparrows was not widespread among birds least they identify too completely. So here is what happened. The three of them moved to an island that was not theirs and while this sounds like a little grass shack story with a ukele and a palm tree, they were lovers of desks and they were trying to be like the finches who grew new and different beaks in reaction to the wide variety of microclimates on their island yet they still tried to keep their love of connection in the front of their minds. They arrived by plane. And they identified with planes. And they didn't like this part of themselves but it was a part of themselves anyway. They avoided words to describe their relation because words felt wrong. And there were not any really. They heard rumors of there being words for their sort of relation in the language that was originally spoken on the island, but they could not speak this language. They asked a few people who studied it about the words and these people did not know them. In their language all the words made them feel funny or dirty or untrue. Instead they just configured themselves in sets and forgot about words even as they often found it necessary to use metaphors. They tried to understand the balance of stools. The rules of triangles. The smoothness of three point turns made by a new but practiced driver in a driver's education class. They tried to think of their desks and their lives as universals and particulars, as boundaries and ties, as locals and globals, as individualisms and collectivisms. They pictured the interconnected hubs of migration in the sea of islands. And they took comfort in connection that also had individualism in them-sea of islands or the kolea's daytime claim to a certain plot of land and then the nighttime nesting in groups or fifty sky divers falling quickly to earth each with their own parachute and yet joined together for a moment by their hands. And things went on being normal really. Or feeling that way even though they didn't really like that word, even as they long to take comfort in its cloak, longed to be able to use it about themselves.