The Body in Agreement

by Rosalyn Dmello

Who is housed by a world?
—Sara Ahmed, What’s the Use: On the Uses of Use



Dearest Yardena,

Did you know about my affinity for cemeteries? Did that factor into your invitation to me to respond to The Body in Agreement, the incredible series of etchings that ensued from your haunting of the Jewish cemetery in Chinchpokli, where your ancestors are housed.

But you couldn’t have known. Because I rarely talk about it. It isn’t an open secret so much as a private, long-term obsession, one I acknowledge but choose not to name or classify; one whose provenance is uncertain.

I cannot specify the root of my fascination for haunting cemeteries. Perhaps it stems from the dearth of information I have of my ancestral lineage and the almost complete absence of any vestigial remains of my forefathers and foremothers. My father’s family couldn’t afford to invest in the lasting preservation of his parents’ bones. Once the lease ran out for their graves at the Dadar cemetery opposite Portuguese Church, the remains were disposed of. My mother and her siblings did manage to secure a niche at the church grounds in Navelim, Goa, where my maternal grandparents’ remains continue to be housed. I cannot even recite from memory the names of my grandparents’ parents and their grandparents. I cannot say at what point in Goa’s colonial history they were either converted or chose to convert to Christianity. It is both haunting and liberating—such a void of records coupled with the dearth of any real family mausoleum. It compels me to rely exclusively on my body’s inherent and unlearned gestures and mannerisms to access my ancestry. The way I hold a pen while writing or how I stir a Xacuti with a wooden ladle or crack garlic with my fist or even the rhythm of my breath when, bereft, I slip into tears. Maybe I like to presence cemeteries to occasionally grieve these missing familial archives; to lament the innumerable holes in the historiography of my being?

We’ve spoken about many of our shared obsessions that manifest as artistic and literary pursuits—the solitude of durational performance art, wombs and menstrual blood, the female body and the boundless scope of its infinite mysteries, diaristic revelations—coming upon your mother’s entry that let you backdate your first period—your Maharashtrian Jewish descent... We’ve even traversed the terrain of the in-between, those makeshift, un-engineered bridges; muddy-grassy patches that subtly punctuated our conversation during our last encounter. I was recently disheartened to realise I hadn’t turned on my recorder then and so, have no transcript of it.    It is usually my habit to record my visits to artists’ studios. However, as I retraced my steps to six years ago, when I had come over to see you, I realised I hadn’t ‘forgotten’ to turn on the app on my phone. I had just assumed or intended that our meeting that day would mark the beginning of many subsequent ones. I hadn’t come to ‘interview’ you. I was there to lay the groundwork for future conversations. I had made time amid other assignments and familial obligations during my short trip to Mumbai. We had no way of knowing then how many years would pass… how even now I cannot say when that might be. Soon, six years will have passed since I moved to Tramin, my marital Heimat, a small town of 3500 inhabitants in the border region of South Tyrol, an autonomous postcolonial province nestled in the lower valley of the Italian Alps. It is from here that I correspond with you, unable to shake off the incredulity with which I received your invitation to me to ‘haunt’ The Body in Agreement.

When I surveyed the video you sent me of this historic graveyard adjacent to the Chinchpokli railway station, I was instantly transported there. The aortic thumping of the local train in your footage spurred a series of flashbacks to the countless times I passed by it, pretty much daily for five years as I made my way from Kurla to CST and back during my time as a student at St. Xavier’s College. By the first year of daily travel, I had already learned not just the name of every station on that central line but could tell precisely where we were halting without ever looking out the window. Each stretch of railway had its own range of odours, some inviting, some that spoke of a poverty of resources leaving vast sections of the city’s populace without access to basic civic infrastructure.

Your video captured my regular sighting of the mausoleums of Sir Jacob Sassoon and his wife Rachel from the vantage point of the cemetery, offering me the unforeseen possibility of speculative time travel. I suddenly re-inhabited my undergraduate body on its countless journeys in a similar local train, pausing each time as I passed by this stretch of land, always in awe of the solitude it encompassed. In your video, I spotted what felt surely like a flowerless champa tree. Were there also one or two tamarind trees?   I thought I recognised the tiny leaves and broad trunk. I was suddenly reminded that Chinchpokli derived its name from the abundance of chinch, Marathi for tamarind, and betel nut (pofali).

It was heartening to sense the illusion of time having purportedly stood still upon this stretch of land, as if oblivious to the teeming overgrowth, the dramatic ways in which the city’s skyline and coast continue to be ravaged by the tides of alleged progress and development, marginalising so many of its original inhabitants. As the 40-year-old me reconsidered the view that was a daily feature of my commute during my life as a 17- to 21-year-old student, I found myself summoning the word, Brache. It’s a German word I inherited from my father-in-law that suggests a negative compositional space, land left uncultivated, fallow. In other words, left alone—a rarity in a metropolis like Mumbai where every centimetre has inflated real estate value. The enormous beauty of this patch of land—apart from the fact that it silently houses the remains of a group of people who had so significantly contributed to the city’s early growth—lay in how carefully it was ‘uncared’ for—a reminder that sometimes, leaving something ‘alone’, un-manicured, allowing it to let itself happen, sets the terms for it to flourish; that ‘disuse’ can be uniquely generative.

I could understand why you moved your cemeterial haunting from Worli to Chinchpokli. In your email, you explained that for many years, the Worli cemetery was similarly uncared for, allowing the ground between the graves to be inundated by plants, grass, flowers, and ‘what most people would call weeds’. Until, mid-project, the cemetery received funding and predictably underwent a clean-up operation. The interstitial earth separating one grave from another was gradually cemented and all undesirable vegetal traces uprooted.

When you shifted the locus of your haunt to Chinchpokli, the differences in the landscape were apparent. It seemed more open, you reported, more overgrown, sometimes even overwhelming. ‘It’s massive, and you can easily get lost in the thickness of the foliage,’ you wrote. The wildness is what you connected with most. ‘It felt less controlled… raw…’ I related instantly. The witness of such lushness that was the conse- quence of the opposite of human intervention was part of the motivation behind my repeated visits to the Christian cemetery in Sewri. I went there for the first time in May 2015, when I first began writing letters to the dead and the imagined. I was seized by this inexplicable desire to haunt the graves of FN Souza and Dom Moraes. My mind had internalised both figures as quasi-  ancestral, on account of our shared Goan roots. They began to seem, to me, like crotchety ‘arty’ and ‘successful’ uncles, the ones you admire from afar and from whose fame you take second-hand pride in, but from whose patriarchal -minded DNA you prefer to distance yourself. I remember inquiring at an office about the whereabouts of both graves. A floorplan was consulted. I was given an alphabetic code. When I asked the recordkeeper about Dom Moraes’ whereabouts, he said, ‘you mean the unbeliever?’ I nodded. His grave resembled a jagged book, dog-eared, well-thumbed, different from the bird-shit laced, black granite façade of Souza’s final resting place. As I hovered in front of it, I caught the attention of a female caretaker. She appeared before me. She was decked in a resplendent turmeric-hued sari with broad indigo borders. Assuming I was a relative,   she offered to clean the grave. I wasn’t sure if Souza would have approved of such an act of care, but I imagined she would have been happy to earn some extra cash. I agreed. She returned with a steel watering can and a cloth.       As she splashed water and proceeded to wash the grave, I felt mesmerised by the melodious jangling of her bangles. When she was done, the epitaph Souza had chosen for himself gleamed under the reflective light of the late summer sun—‘Nature is the sole principle.’

This memory came tumbling back into my consciousness as I read your account of the Muslim caretaker of this Jewish cemetery who, you said, was aware of all the Jewish high holidays and knew many of the prayers by heart. Unlike at Sewri, the tombstones here are not numbered, which means this caretaker’s memory is the map. He is the keeper not only of the graves but their relationality. It is him one must consult should you find yourself looking for the resting place of a long-deceased relative. Does he keep tabs on who gets more visitors, which graves are haunted, which eternally bedecked with floral offerings?

I imagined that over your repeated visits, you must surely have formed a bond, not just with him but also the dog he looks after. I wonder what he must have made of your haunting presence. Did he imagine you as someone nursing a prolonged grief? Did he see you as someone straddling the tensile space between belonging and belief? Did he ever follow the sight of you to see if you might have paused, perchance to pray? Or did he intuitively ‘get’ how you had begun a relationship not with a specific grave but the ground itself? That you had become a caretaker too, looking out for all the wild foliage that would spring up above this unmanicured plot? These were the starting points of your work… these ‘ungovernable’ elements that testify to the earth’s fertility, these instances of irrepressibility, like sets of ellipses that defy linguistic syntax or out-of-place punctuation marks, typographical glitches—alive, necessary, yet so susceptible to being read as unwanted or redundant. At what point in your eager consideration of these vestigial beings did the work take seed inside you? At what point did these stray observations become integral, become the firmament, the condition with which the body sought agreement? Do you even remember when you first began bringing back cuttings of these ‘ungovernables ’ to your studio?

As I was metabolising this series, I kept thinking back to the wall caption I recently helped compose and edit for In this space we breathe (2017-2018), a haunting self-portraiture series by the late Gambian British photographer Khadija Saye as part of my daily work as a freelance editor attached to an art institution. The show’s curators wanted to foreground Saye’s artistic decision to develop the series’ original nine prints as wet plate collodion tintypes, likening the process of lowering each metal plate into the silver nitrate liquid to a baptism ritual. It wasn’t a stretch. Spiritual transcendence formed the pulse of the series in which each image featured the artist in mystic communion with ritual objects like prayer beads, amulets, cowrie shells and plastic lemons, each tracing to her Christian, Muslim and Indigenous religious backgrounds. If Saye was using the print medium to reference a state of conversion from primal being into spiritual consciousness, were you also performing something sacramental, given the ritualistic nature of your etching process? Is the series a performance of burial, referencing gestures of resurrection and immortality through the repeated interventions of black resist dye on the zinc plate? ‘Each layer of ground is covered, carved into, etched, stripped, and then covered again,’ you told me. ‘That repetition is slow and physical, and it matters a lot to how the work comes into being… almost like time passing through accumulation… nothing is erased completely, they are buried deeper and deeper into the plate… and traces always remain… the plates carry this history, just as the body carries memory without always consciously recalling it…’

You inscribed the history of your body’s repeated wanderings within the necropolis at Chinchpokli by following the instructive daily recordings you had made over the span of several months. You described it to me as a way of ‘telling the body what to do’, even though you used the word automaton to encapsulate the prescriptive nature of these movements. Was this your way of documenting the mysterious nature of embodied intuition. You said it yourself… that while etching, the needle carves into the ground. You made the body the needle. Your body served as a compass point, just as the Muslim caretaker’s body is a compass point.

You wrote—‘The body moves, marks space, follows instructions. The body wasn’t improvising anymore, it was merely listening to a recorded voice.’ Is this the ‘agreement’ implied by the title? A syntactical fellowship between intent and intuition? Was this your way of haunting your own body?

You wrote—‘When I started carving, I listened to a different recording each time, never repeated. This was the last stage of the process. After that, the plate wasn’t etched any further. The word ‘ground’ became a metaphor… The ground you coat the zinc plate with before carving and the ground beneath my feet… The plate held the trace of the body, and the body held the memory of the instruction…’

The final action, you told me, involved applying earth pigment directly onto these prints, as if returning the work back to the ground—its site of origin, inviting another layer of time, touch and chance. You foreground the restricted nature of your interventions, your decision not to retouch the plates before you bathe them into acid, thereby ‘accepting whatever came, whatever stayed.’ Tell me, if all prayer is a form of surrender, is this work not a form of prayer; an instance of the body assuming the shape of a comma as it humbles itself on its knees?

The work conflates metaphor and methodology to produce a kind of hermetic ecstasy. You create a shrine for marginalia, as if to remind us of the desirability of the unwanted, the inexorable necessity of the ungovernable who remain ‘in use,’ even in their material transcendence from irrepressible shoot to immortalised debris. In doing so, you create a continuum between tenses, producing a non-grammatical artefact, a body of speech that bears witness to embodiment, an deposition that reminds us of the alluvial nature of our origin. In etching and punctuating the mystical protocol of your body’s surrender, you shape the work into an epitaph, not one that memorialises the dead so much as impregnates the future.

Yours
Rosa

Dear Rosalyn,

Thank you for staying with ‘The Body In Agreement’…giving it the space it needs…and the time for allowing it to connect with you…

When you wondered about the invitation, I found myself smiling. We have known each other for many years, and across that time we have returned again and again to conversations about work, about the body, about the female body, about the transient body, the body that keeps changing, shifting…Asking you to respond to this work felt more like continuing something we had already begun a few years ago… now, we are just allowing it to find another surface, another shape…not very far from where we had already been…

I found myself thinking back to when you wrote about So It Goes…I remember how we spoke about the uterus…the way it slowly withdraws once it looses its function…it slowly recedes… becoming smaller… and almost withdraws itself into the body. When I brought the foliage from the cemetery into the studio, that came back to me… it gradually shed its water, its moisture, its immediacy. Over the days, as time passed, it too would begin to retreat..curling inward, changing scale, leaving only a trace of what it once circulated…

I too often feel how little of my own lineage I can actually remember… what remains with me are a few steel and copper utensils that still bear the names of family members for whom they were once bought…their names and dates carved into the metal creating jagged impressions due to the vibration of the handheld machine…you may remember Rosalyn, that it was common practice, and I think it still is in many parts of India, to buy new utensils and have them engraved…dated for a particular occasion or person… I also have several black and white photographs…they hold faces that look familiar, I know they belong in my family but I cannot place them in a personal history. Occasionally I find scribbled notes on the back of these photographs, a date, a name, someone’s hesitant attempt to map relations… they offer me small clues but still don’t quite connect…they rarely join, never quite becoming a line…

And our walks through cemeteries, hauntings as you choose to call them… why does the living body keep returning there? Is it because these spaces hold absences that seem wider, deeper against the sound of one’s own breath? And what about the caretaker’s mental mapping leaning towards the landscape? The tamarind tree, the champa tree… how interesting that they became reference points for him as living markers that continue to grow among the graves, inching upwards towards the greyish blue Mumbai sky…

Back in the studio, the zinc plates with the ground applied on them, began to feel like miniature burial sites…I immersed them repeatedly over several days and each immersion pressed the earlier layer further into the surface, burying them deeper and deeper within….This affinity to water is continuous with earlier works too, e.g. the Transience series and Kenosis, where form slowly disintegrates but the material remains, available to be reclaimed and reworked later…In etching, what is taken away is permanent… the surface holds an irretrievable loss…the loop was once again abandoned… the work got a certain finality…
When I followed the recorded instructions, I wasn’t trying to control the body…in fact I was allowing it to loosen, I wasn’t making any decisions, simply nudging the conscious mind to drift into slumber for a while… allowing even gender to fall away for that moment…I simply turned into a ‘body’ quietly in agreement…with air, with breath, with gravity and with its gradual movement towards decay…The body was surrendering… a gentle, very gentle surrender to nature…It feels close to Chinese calligraphy, where a line encapsulates the minutiae of breath, intention, and emotion…Perhaps agreement rests somewhere there…in that meeting of breath and mark….

Reading your letter, I felt that the work seems to shift slightly… as if another layer has settled over it.. perhaps that is what this exchange leaves behind…A space for eventually allowing other layers to gather, for as long as Time permits…

Love,
Yardena