A Sonic Journey

“A poem can be (and I hope these poems are) clear in and of themselves and still not seem easily legible. More important than a poem’s legibility is its embodiment. And if it can carry that embodiment beyond legibility, then you give thanks. The poem becomes an offering that can go out into the world and do its work.” Hari Alluri, in an interview with UBC Creative Writing Dept Undergraduate Chair and Associate Professor Bronwen Tate.

Hari Alluri’s third book of poetry, Tabako on the Windowsill, is a sonic journey in literary innovation. These poems take many forms and Alluri (Siya) masterfully braids language and evokes for the reader a magical quality, while very much in this world of human frailty. 

Alluri employs so many different combinations of literary technique – alliteration, juxtaposition, enjambment, cadence, sustained metaphors, cento, ghazals and rhythmic use of language, to name a few; that the reading experience is immersive; where the idea of the authorial voice is negated and what emerges is a poetic polyphony of voice. Underlying this mesh of poetic deployments is the fragmented telling of a migration story that spans the archipelagos of the Philippines, the landscapes of India and to the west coast of Turtle Island; Alluri, being of both South Asian and Philippines origins. 

There is a vulnerability and intimacy in these poems and a call to the reader for a reciprocity of a sacred response; an invitation to read and burn a poem as an offering. In this collection there is one detached sheet containing a poem and the instruction is to read the poem and then burn it. In the poem From Spiral and Storm, Siya writes The world this morning/reminds me too much/of my insides, this embodiment captures two paradoxical images of the world to the internal workings of the body; later in the poem Siya writes …Scratching/worry into my journal… wrinkled fire/in a mini vase. It doesn’t look much/like promise, but it is.

While multifarious in its expressions, the collection centres on rituals of fire and smoke as offerings, as he spans known mythologies, ecological destruction, history, colonialism and capitalism. There is a constant return to these elements throughout the collection; a lamentation of what is lost, what is remembered and how the contemporary moment makes some kind of meaning of migratory displacement. Siya evocatively captures these sensibilities:

… we’re all of us mules of history, loading it

on our backs. History, that merchant of itself. That clothing dryer.

Siya juxtaposes here the record of history as a burden that we carry and introduces two images that in first impressions seem incongruous to his naming of history – history as merchant to itself and the metaphor of the clothing dryer, both connote the rise of mercantilism as the precursor to colonialism, and the paradox of the drying out of truths concurrently and with the idea of making anonymous the messy records of human life. 

Siya’s poems are not loud or shrill, instead Siya writes beautifully crafted quiet melancholic words that capture the emotional valences of loss, memory and settlement. 

There is also a tenderness to Siya’s words, in one of the last poems, Train Station Offering to Popsi, Siya offers words of healing to his father who once tells Siya “It’s a small life” in referring to his own life trajectory, and in Siya’s words to meet his father there, Siya offers: 

Today, I try to grow small. Enough to hear

your body – into the groove – 

expand. The stars , the city lights

Who swallow them: they do not leave you,

But gleam. Like oil spill and candle

Glut – like a forest burning.

Siya also does an impeccable job of having a multi-lingual approach to some of the references made in the collection. His blending of relevant Tagalog words and ideas are chosen with care and do amplify what is shared in Tagalog and English. The collection returns to, refers to and raises the gods of old such as Anagolay – the goddess of lost things; which is appropriate thematically for this collection given the end point of many migration stories are the acute feelings of loss and being lost when language and culture ebbs away from the memory. 

What Siya seeks through this braiding collection of poetry around Anagolay is to seek what is hallowed, after learning the painful truth of Christianity’s colonial legacies. There is a kind of meditative litany that is called upon. These poetic utterances are a kind of letting go of the colonized mind and to return to a semblance of an authentic self; Siya’s own poetic language rich with ancient myths, the honouring of family relations and loss.