A CLOUD POETICS
An OS [re:con]versation with Vidhu Aggarwal, author of DAUGHTER ISOTOPE
[Editor’s note: Aggarwal’s book Daughter Isotope is currently available for pre-order — order your copy here!]
Greetings comrade! Thank you for talking to us about your process today!
Can you introduce yourself, in a way that you would choose?
Hello, my name is Vidhu (she/her/hers). I study and think about fantasy spaces. In other words, I am a person whose head is in the clouds.
Why are you a “poet”/ “writer”/ “artist”?
Dissatisfaction! Aren’t we all just looking for another medium to move in?
When did you decide to use the language you use for yourself (and/or: do you feel comfortable calling yourself a poet/writer/artist, what other titles or affiliations do you prefer/feel are more accurate)?
I think of myself as a deliberate amateur. As a low-res, lo-fi poet, among other identities. So much of the mythology surrounding poetry is that it is a pure, sacred, transcendent object. Therefore, my own practice involves various amateur antics in multi-media, such as visual collage, video, photography, and performance, which I enter into as a foreign language I have not quite mastered, much in the same way that my own immigrant parents entered into English. My media interventions and assemblages allow me to make poetry into a lumpy, impure, digressive thing, and put into poetry stuff that may seem corny, gimmicky, filthy — never to be transmuted into perfect object. A poem, for me, can have multiple versions and remixes — as can a poet.
What’s a “poet” (or “writer” or “artist”) anyway?
I hope: an identity open to everyone and anyone.
What do you see as your cultural and social role (in the literary / artistic / creative community and beyond)?
Art-making is social. My favorite role is as collaborator. I work at times with graphic artists, video artists, dancers, historians, and musicians. The advantage of poetry as a medium is its mobility and permeability. Thinking of myself operating a cloud poetics helps me think of the poem as a space that can inter-penetrate, precipitate, and dissolve into multiple media.
Talk about the process or instinct to move these poems (or your work in general) as independent entities into a body of work. How and why did this happen? Have you had this intention for a while? What encouraged and/or confounded this (or a book, in general) coming together? Was it a struggle?
I struggled with organizing the book into discrete sections. I could think of many different ways the poems might go together. Creating an index of symbols as a tagging system helped me develop an internal order and navigation. Of course, readers are free to engage with the index and symbols as they wish — as hyperlinks, as an alternative language, as game pieces. For me, this mapping was a way to think about how categorization systems create language in somewhat arbitrary and idiosyncratic ways.
This organization allowed me to think of the book as a series of overlapping clouds, and came out of conversations with Afrofuturist playwright Derek McPhatter about clouds and digital archives. This led me to Tung-Hui Hu’s book, A Prehistory of the Cloud. Hu speaks about the Cloud as an early metaphor of the internet, “a topography or architecture of our own desire,” and a space where old and new media are layered on top of each other. The Cloud is a networked, amorphous, decentered space for our online activities, archives, and ghostly footprints. It also refers to our borderless cyber apparatus with workers in Asia and other countries writing code, answering calls, and operating servers that form our networked communications and information systems. Rather than being clean and streamlined, this system is messy with a constant need for updates and fixes. I also played with different literary registers of clouds, as a type of deus ex machina — a god generator in myths and epics. I kept coming back to Wordsworth’s “Daffodils” (“I wandered lonely as a cloud.”), where a cloud is a lyric search engine in a poem that was part of the colonial education of my parents’ generation in India. I started thinking about clouds as a messy, layered type of diasporic identity, expanding and dissipating. In Imagining Otherwise: Asian American Critique, Candace Chu discusses the Asian American identity formation as “fantasy links between body and subjectivity discursively forged in legal and literary texts,” which I took as a type of cloud identity that is always in process, never fixed.
Did you envision this collection as a collection or understand your process as writing or making specifically around a theme while the poems themselves were being written / the work was being made? How or how not?
Initially, I started this collection with as an ongoing investigation of “avatars.” Avatar is the Sanskrit word for descent, and within Hindu cosmology an avatar is the incarnation of a god in material form in times of crisis. It is also the Western word for digital identity or alternative persona. In both cases, avatars imply the possibility of multiple iterations of the self, a type of cloud identity. When I wrote my last book, The Trouble with Humpadori, I played with the literal definition of avatar, as descent: specifically, as a descent into an abject body. Humpadori or Hump is a race monster, shifting in and out of multiple iterations of the racialized body in crisis, and morphing into gendered commodity forms. In Daughter Isotope, I play on the digital register of the word avatar, as an uploaded ascent into a floaty cloud realm — where the desire for upgrades follows narratives of assimilation, the search engine, the virus aspiring toward A.I. consciousness, crowdsourced Emily Dickinsons, and various cyber lives. I wander into sacred texts such as the epic Mahabharata, as well as digital gaming, the internet, and The Wizard of Oz. Krishna, an avatar of the Hindu god Vishnu, is one of the main characters in the Mahabharata, but is also a character in comics and video games. The Mahabharata, an epic about a civil war, is itself a cloud text — with encyclopedic tendencies — and was compiled over centuries. Vyasa, the purported author, whose name means compiler, is a surrogate for the generations of people (gurus and everyday folks like my parents) that created and continue to craft multiple iterations of the epic, which has no absolute definite version, and continues to be reimagined in soap operas, video games, and bedtime stories (my own first encounter).
Famous are these lines from the Mahabharata: “Whatever is here about dharma, profit, pleasure, and release is found elsewhere, but whatever is not here is nowhere else” (translated by Wendy Doniger). These categories of dharma, profit, pleasure, and release determined an ethos of an entire ancient Brahmin world, hierarchical, systematized, and patriarchal. Such taxonomic systems can evoke nostalgia and dangerous nationalistic longings. But I am interested in that nowhere else — the place of the uncategorizable, a site with no fixed location (an @), where I am an unmoored daughter.
What formal structures or other constrictive practices (if any) do you use in the creation of your work? Have certain teachers or instructive environments, or readings/writings/work of other creative people informed the way you work/write?
The structure of video games and gaming worlds really influenced me. The poems in the book started out as my rendering of a multiplayer online game. I created an elaborate system of gameplay/tiers/backstory, which I eventually abandoned. I am also informed by the worldbuilding in the science fiction of Nnedi Okorafor and Nalo Hopkinson, writers who apply cultural mythologies from Nigeria and the Caribbean, respectively, into technological fantasy-scapes.
I think of myself engaging in the aesthetics of the variety show. This formal variety speaks to features of what Arjun Appadurai calls “high globalization,” traditional “vertebrate” formal structures that coexist with metastasizing “cellular” infrastructures of our digital networks and affiliations.
Some of the ideas and works that have influenced this book include: Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s globalectics and cyberorality, Kamau Brathwaite’s video poems, Terrence Hayes’ anagrammatic procedures, Bollywood storytelling, Arun Kolatkar’s Sarpa Satra, Adrienne Rich’s Diving into the Wreck, Dante’s tercets in The Divine Comedy, Satyajit Ray’s film Devi, and poet Monica Mody’s feminist critique of Brahmanical Hinduism in her dissertation, Claiming Voice, Vitality, and Authority in Post-Secular South Asian Borderlands: A Critical Hermeneutics and Autohistoria/Teoría for Decolonial Feminist Consciousness.
Some of the poems came out of collaborations with visual artists (Bishakh Som, Kathy High, and Rachel Simmons). I also worked with choreographer/dancer Daiane Lopes de Silva and choreographer/physicist Weidong Yang, whose A.I. Sensorium creates a cyber-imaginary in dance. I began to think of certain poems as dance formations and shaped them accordingly.
Speaking of monikers, what does your title represent? How was it generated? Talk about the way you titled the book, and how your process of naming (individual pieces, sections, etc) influences you and/or colors your work specifically.
When I was a teenager, my dad, who was a civil engineer in the nuclear industry, actually wanted us to collaborate on a screenplay of the Mahabharata in English, a sort of pipedream he had about making movies, despite his more practical profession. At the time, I rolled my eyes. But what happens when a daughter gets hold of the familial/cultural archive? How does it destabilize that archive? The title, “Daughter Isotope,” derives from the scientific nomenclature for radioactive decay, in which a parent isotope decays into daughter particles, both stable and unstable. This decay process is used as a form of measurement that determines age across large timescales, but is also harnessed as energy within the atomic industry via a controlled chain reaction. While the first section, “Vyasa Cloud,” opens with the Mahabharata, the later sections move into other cosmologies and mythologies in U.S popular culture and media. As the book proceeds, “daughter” genders (such as Draupadi and Emily Dickinson) destabilize and evolve into different versions or avatars (toxic waste-products, strange hybrids, and cyborgs).
What does this book DO (as much as what it says or contains)?
It does: vortex. It does: choose your own adventure. It does: clouds.
What would be the best possible outcome for this book? What might it do in the world, and how will its presence as an object facilitate your creative role in your community and beyond? What are your hopes for this book, and for your practice?
My hopes are for more collaborations. I like to think that the permeability of poetry allows me to settle, if only briefly, into alternative spaces, however flat, congealed, or uncomfortable to me. In my collaborations with professional graphic artists, choreographers, and sound artists, I like to hear my poems spoken by other voices, remixed and made strange to me. I’m reminded that language, even when I use it, does not originate with me, and is always shifting, moving — plural and salivating.
What does it mean to make books in this time, and what are your thoughts around shifting into digital books/objects and digital access in general?
While I love print books, I am all for accessibility and reach, especially in thinking about archives as moving, changing, and expanding. Digital access feels key.
Let’s talk a little bit about the role of poetics and creative community in social and political activism, so present in our daily lives as we face the often sobering, sometimes dangerous realities of the Capitalocene. The publication of these volumes now falls during an ongoing global pandemic, intersecting with the largest collective uprising in US history, with Black Lives Matter, dismantling white supremacy, and abolition at the fore. How does your process, practice, or work reflect these conditions?
As Adrienne Rich writes in “North American Time,” “Poetry never stood a chance / of standing outside history.” I believe any work is embedded in the politics and conditions of its place and time. The time in which these poems were written saw the mainstreaming of white nationalism in the U.S. and Hindu nationalism in India. These virulent movements are not unrelated, generating exclusionary, anti-Muslim policies, perpetuating anti-Black racism, and justifying violence against minorities. The current fear surrounding the Southern (Mexico/U.S.) border is represented sometimes as the foreigner’s unassimilable, undigestible alien body, the body that can never be American enough. A big question for me is: How do we upend patriarchal master narratives that support state-sponsored violence when such narratives are often formative? Stories from the epic Mahabharata were told to me as a child as epic adventure tales. The Wizard of Oz, which I take as a fantasy of the U.S. frontier, originated as a series of children’s books by L. Frank Baum, who advocated exterminating Native Americans. For me, tackling some of the stories was a way of questioning the logic of militarism, perpetual war, and state violence. How do some of these narratives go viral, transmit across time and generations? How can we alter them? Is it possible to imagine other communities and affiliations? The internet, home of our social networks, was developed as part of the military complex. In my work, I attempt to explore the features of cyber-communities and transnational networks operating through unofficial channels that engage in alternative imaginaries, at times resistant and hopeful, at times toxic and violent.
I’d be curious to hear some of your thoughts on the challenges we face in speaking and publishing across lines of race, age, ability, class, privilege, social/cultural background, gender, sexuality (and other identifiers) within the community as well as creating and maintaining safe spaces, vs. the dangers of remaining and producing in isolated “silos” and/or disciplinary and/or institutional bounds?
Institutional support for innovative work across difference remains elusive. Community is everything. Out of necessity, the crisis of the pandemic has created a greater impetus for virtual communities, collectives, and events, not limited by geographical region. Hopefully, some of this energy around virtual community-building persists and forges new artistic alliances — for myself and others.
VIDHU AGGARWAL’s poetry and multimedia practices engage with world-building, video, and graphic media, drawing mythic schemas from popular culture, science, and ancient texts. Her poetry book, The Trouble with Humpadori (2016), imagines a cosmic mythological space for marginalized transnational subjects. Avatara, a chapbook from Portable Press @ Yo-Yo Labs, is situated in a post-apocalyptic gaming world where A.I.s play at being gods. She has published in the Boston Review, Black Warrior Review, Aster(ix) Journal, Poemelon, and Leonardo, among other journals. She is currently engaging in a “cloud poetics,” as a way of thinking about personal, collective, and digital archives as a collaborate process with comic artists, dancers, and video artists. Her next poetry book, Daughter Isotope, will be coming out with Operating System in 2021. A Djerassi resident and Kundiman fellow, she teaches at Rollins College.
