Divya Victor is poet, essayist, educator, and currently Associate Professor of English at Michigan State University, where she is the Director of the Creative Writing Program. She is the author of THINGS TO DO WITH YOUR MOUTH (Les Figues); UNSUB (Insert Blanc); NATURAL SUBJECTS (Trembling Pillow), winner of the Bob Kaufman Award; Scheingleichheit: Drei Essays (Merve Verlag); KITH (Fence Books/ Book*hug); and, most recently, CURB (Nightboat Books), which won the 2022 PEN America Open Book Award and the 2022 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. It was also a finalist for the 2022 CLMP Firecracker Award in Poetry.
Curb is a sharply lyrical work that occurs at margins, boundaries, and edges that are social, political, and personal. Pushing on the boundaries of migration, the boundaries of identity, of class, of family, and of form, Curb navigates South Asian diaspora and forces a confrontation with America’s history of violence against brown bodies through poems that bound acrobatically across lyrical and legal language.
Divya Victor spoke with Matt Dhillon about Curb, diasporas of scale, and the poetry of witness during her visit to the University of Michigan.
Matt Dhillon (MD): The first thing I want to ask you about, and the first thing readers encounter is the title itself. There are so many ways to read it, curb as limit, curb as launching point. What do you think is the work the title is doing?
Divya Victor (DV): I really enjoy plain titles, nouns that are also shimmering as verbs. And I like language that at first glace doesn’t seem very poetic but seems actually more sociological or architectural, like Kith is one of these, which feel like language that doesn’t really belong to poetry. I enjoy titles that appear really blunt, but that become sharper the more you look at it. So that’s just sort of an aesthetic enjoyment of mine. I really enjoy curb as a verb and a noun. The single syllable, seemingly final declaration of it. You also have this really luxurious vowel in the middle and this sort of purring R. So, it’s both a really well-defined texture and action in the mouth because of its compactness, because of its hard-edge-ness, but it has this kind of motor inside it. And I think of the book that way too, it’s a highly structured book but it’s got a motor within it that keeps churning and turning.
I first began, very simply, thinking of curb as an architectural division in urban space. There are so many cultural codes that we perform at the edge between the private and the public, and, growing up in India, that edge has all kinds of signification. Like, growing up we sort of get a sense of class and caste and religion based on what you did on your stoops, whether that’s the drawing of the Kolam or the lighting of camphor, or whether you chose or don’t choose to comb your child’s hair on the stoop. That says all kinds of things about the kinds of belief systems you have. And in the US, there are customs too around stoop behavior or curb behavior, like what kinds of conversations you can or can’t have at the curb with your neighbor. What are you definitely not talking about when you’re standing at that edge? And because the book is so curious about how immigrants move through public space, that seemed like the right spatial element to fixate on. Because there is the feeling of being oneself within what we might claim as private property, and then you cross a curb and you’ve become something for someone else, and you don’t have control over that.
MD: The book is very attentive to space, with titles that address very directly domestic architecture, hedges, stoop. I’m thinking about location in the book, the effort of locate and to move through space. Do you feel like there is a searching that runs through this book?
DV: Yeah. Through the book itself, and through me, too. One of my frustrations with diasporic writing in the United States is the diaspora is seen too globally and not locally enough. There is a question of scale. How does the diaspora as a kind of seeking, to use your word, or a kind of cognitive mapping, to use Fredric Jameson’s term, how is that occurring at a much more local scale, within the body, within the living room, starting in bed, moving to the kitchen, and then extending itself out in these smaller local circles? And how do we have a kind of diasporic sensibility, or a diasporic self-knowledge in these very, very local spaces?
Tamil people say if you really care about the person’s house you’re entering into, or you care about what relation to enter into this home, you cross the threshold with the right foot. That is a practice related to boundaries and crossing boundaries. That’s the kind of local practice of moving through space that I’m interested in, not only large-scale geopolitical boundary crossing, which of course I’m obsessed with.
When I began writing this book, I walked around our neighborhood with a clipboard and tried to identify all the plants in just the neighborhood, and people in the neighborhood are mostly white retirees so they have a lot of time for their gardens, and I wrote down all the plants that I could identify with my app and I tried to map them through a colonial route first. Like, how does a coleus arrive from what we used to call Java into my neighbor’s front yard? Why are we using certain flora from colonial contexts as ornaments in our front yards to build this fairly white neighborhood? So that’s the kind of local moving through space I was thinking about as well.
MD: Also thinking about orientation, how did the coordinates at the corners of the pages emerge?
DV: Firstly, I really like dog-earing my books, which is, I know, a polarizing practice. I really enjoy the marks that reading leaves on a book, you know, a body was here. I love having evidence of reading on the object itself. So, that was the first impulse. How do I let the reader know, and how does the reader let themselves know, I was here? How can that locating practice be related to the kinds of locating and seeking that the speaker, or the personae, or the figures in the book are also trying to accomplish?
The next, I really love Erica Baum’s book Dog Ear. And I was definitely inspired by that and the aesthetic sensibility of that.
And then Srinivas Kuchibhotla, one of the men whose lives—whose deaths are discussed in this book, he was a Garmin engineer and he worked with geospatial location. And I was really quite compelled and intellectually interested in this horrific irony, that when he was in Kansas going to get an after-work drink with his friend at a bar, he was misrecognized as an Iranian, an “illegal” Iranian, by a man who sort of misplaced and displaced him. I keep thinking about how that led to the end of his life, to his murder. All day he had been working to locate objects in space, in the right space, at a certain time, and how he was seen as being in the wrong place at a certain time. That irony, I was obsessed with it. So, I thought, we have to not allow these cases, these hate crimes, to be dislodged from the place in which they occurred.
The coordinates are sometimes coordinates that reveal exactly where the poem is being composed and sometimes it reveals where the site of composition is in relation to the site of recall, so what place am I remembering while I’m composing in another place. Sometimes it documents who I’m thinking about, where something happened in relation to where I’m composing. And sometimes it documents a place where I’m not at all, like Ellis Island and Staten Island. I’m not there, but people like me were there once. So each of those dog ears is a kind of orienting effect born out of my own disorientation about how I relate to these figures.
MD: In the beginning of the book, we start in a very domestic place saturated with a kind of unspoken hostility. Right after that we move to direct violence, the documentation of police brutality. I’m interested in the relationship of the domestic architecture, that is really foregrounded in the placemaking of book, to the violence in the book.
DV: Being other in this nation and elsewhere is a kind of domestic practice but it’s also a domesticated practice. It teaches you how to be in relation to others very quickly. Like, how do we in any given space know how to orient our bodies? I always sit so I can know where the door is. I always check the exit signs. Why do some women and femmes walk a certain way at night rather than another kind of way? Why do we cross the road to the lamplights? Why do we hold our keys in our hands when we’re in a parking lot? These kinds of learned behaviors are adaptations towards certain facts of unsafety.
When you know that a nation is not safe for you and that there is political pressure and actual legislation that is ongoing to exclude you, to make you more vulnerable, to kick you out, you learn to adapt to those behaviors on a very local, private, interpersonal scale. And I became interested in how some of those external messages about belonging, not belonging, start refracting and playing out in the domestic space as well. We can’t actually keep policy outside of the personal. We can’t keep national sentiment about migration outside of the quarrels within biracial families. It comes through, it bleeds in, it shines into the house like light through a glass pane. It illuminates or overshadows what is going on inside. I think poetry’s real capacity is to let that light be on the page. How does that broad, overwhelming sentiment infiltrate the most private, intimate spaces?
There’s a very small note in the notes section of Curb where I observe that in some Tamil households, when we’re fermenting batter, we like to keep it in the oven and leave just the oven light on, which keeps it at a low, warm, kind of humming temperature, and it just keeps you oven at a different, kind of tropical, temperatures compared to the frigid rest of the midwestern house. That is the scale of the domestic that I am thinking of, this idea that you can keep a little bit of your safety, your memory inside your home.
MD: One of the recurring motifs in the book, that I think of as a recurring character, is the document. We encounter government forms and documents asking for identification. In a book that has been referred to as docu-poetic in places, how is the document working to reveal and occlude?
DV: I’ve said elsewhere that documentary poetics must begin with the question of what cannot be documented. That is, in some way, about the right for people to move through space undocumented. But it’s also about what can never be documented, what can never be placed into a stable set of symbols that multiple people agree on, which is what often a bureaucratic document is seen as: that it’s ratified, that it is in some ways eternal, that changes to that have to then be further documented. But most kinds of oral history through which we know ourselves, whether that’s in the stories our families tell about us, whether that’s in the mythologies we are developing about ourselves, it’s too disobedient to document. I’m most excited by documentary poetry that places in dialogue the document with what can never be documented, the unsayable, the totally amnesiac, the taboo, and the ineffable. That really excites me, and I do think in this book I’m trying to sort that out.
MD: I think you mentioned that sound is a primary engine for you when you sit down to write, and the sonic elements of the book are very propulsive. Hearing the work aloud especially, there’s an interplay of many voices: interjections, questions, records. There are a lot of voices sitting in one poem. In some ways the speaker becomes a listener in many of these poems. I’m wondering how you feel about the positionality of the speaker, which does seem very observational in some of these poems.
DV: I love that observation, that the speaker has to both recede and be observational at the same time: that they are participant witnesses within the poem’s world. I think, because of the collusion between a tradition of confessional American verse and then political spoken word, that sort of blends into what I think of as the witness lyric in the present, here in the US. Which is, I think, distinct from what I think of as the polyvocal lyric, also very much part of the American tradition in the present. The differences between them is that the witness lyric propels itself forward and claims a kind of primacy and stability, I remain, I see, I am at the center of the seeing. The polyvocal lyric, I think, can allow the speaking voice to recede, allow for another voice to enter, and shift between witnessing, observing, describing, and then just listening. So it’s active and passive, participant and observer. So it allows, like, different kinds of roles. I can be a spectator, and I can know what the difference is between being a spectator and a witness. I can be someone who is affected or someone who is unmoved. All of those negotiations cannot be habitual, they have to be intentional in the poem.
MD: Thinking about writing into the space of outrageous violence that so many of these poems do brings up the question of where the speaker sits in relation to these. In the present moment, we are somewhat uniquely in a position in which we are all kind of onlookers to everything all of the time. How are you thinking about positionality writing into that space?
DV: There’s a very big difference between witnessing and spectating. And I think we are much more often in a sort of passive onlooker role than we are an active witness role. Because witnesses have responsibilities. They have prescribed behaviors. They have actions that need to follow from feeling and sensory experience. But spectators can stand there, onlookers can just wait and see what happens and what unfolds. So I’ll first just say that there are distinctions between these categories of seeing. And in terms of what is happening in the present, you know, if you’re a witness you can’t swipe up on Instagram. Then you’re just an onlooker, you’re passive. And the way the genocide in Gaza has been televised, the way it’s present in our daily recall. You cannot, I don’t think most of us walk through hallways without flashes of images coming in from the newsfeed. But we mangle our attention so far away from that image, we distort ourselves so completely so we don’t pay full attention to it. And our complicity is written into the cognitive and imaginative distortion and bending away.
Witness is labor. It’s labor, and so it is governed by rules and best practices and policies. It’s not just like something we can inherently do. You’ve got to be trained. And I think in the United States we have been trained to only witness a certain very narrow band of atrocity, historical atrocity, and we are trained to witness only the pain and suffering of certain kinds of subjectivities. To eliminate a people on their land, we must first have managed to eliminate them from our imagination. So how does poetry refuse that program of elimination in the imaginary? That’s the work.
