HCSHR 3:12 — H Masud Taj, Embassy of Liminal Spaces.

 

HCSHR 3:12 — H Masud Taj, Embassy of Liminal Spaces. pdf publication,  Produced by the Department of Foreign Affairs, Trade and Development Canada in conjunction with poet H. Masud Taj, 2014 H. Masud Taj, Poet & Architect, Ottawa, Canada

                                                                                               reviewed by Sandra Stephenson

An architecture of script

A visual poet’s delight: 

            Though it’s impertinent of me, who reads no Arabic, Sanskrit, Hindi, Persian, or Pali, to comment on these works, I’m certain, with no palpable reason, that the beautiful arabesques of Masud Taj’s visual poems take place on liminal, subliminal and supraliminal levels within a single page of text.  They have meaning in language(s), form(s), time(s) and space(s). They are drawings and architectures – loose, flowing structures that obey physical laws like gravity, though they clearly need not, often trailing off into unlikely imbalance.  They’re a cartography of migration.  They are text in English, hinting at text in a fine and exotic ancient script; and they are messages.  Art and calligraphy, they comment on liberty and confinement, on the politics of boundaries.  Here and not here, arrival and departure, thresholds, separations.  Pain and joy mingle chaotically in a most orderly fashion, following the whist of the ink-brush. 

The edge between the two [sides of a flag] takes no sides

Despite its ambiguity, that edge—whether it’s of a flag, an emotion, a paradox—it holds “a universal affirmative/ proposition”.

            Reader and writer are complicit in sharing spaces, admiring decors, ‘guardians of liminal spaces’ once they have met on a page or in a room.  Bureaucracies, embassies take their place in the space of decimals, increasing and decreasing; powerful despite the insignificance of a point of ink that makes a decimal or a period.

            The creations, originally hung on placards and walls in the Canadian Consulate in Bangalore, are unpunctuated except for questions   ?   Theirs are the slippery words of translation, of your own arguments for yourself (in a language not yours) presented to determine your future.  A language which could slide into incriminations but must not.  How memories of things ‘at new sites of reception’ will form slippery ground under, a refugee applying for asylum or a person in transition.  “Where do polar bears and tigers belong?”

            Occasionally the script is barely legible, and its deciphering is part of the pleasure.  Does it say reception or rejection? Axle or also? (Turns out it’s “All”)  Trade or trace? 

“all b’s are a’s / and / all a’s are b’s” — But there is a non-serif-fonted transliteration at the back of the book, complete with translations in French and Hindi.

 

On one unnumbered page we find:

This foreign island is on native soil
When you stand here
you are in a space warp

and later

There were countless ways to be not you
but it was you ……

Everything is in the past anyway…
[ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ]
Remain behind the curve of your relocations

The order of the poems is interchangeable, constantly curling back on itself as the script itself does, as the mind does when it makes a decision to leave, and deals with doubt and uncertainty.  There is no page number or permit number that can obliterate the second thoughts.

            Embassy of Liminal Spaces is a collection of linked verse, of instructions.  There’s nothing puzzlingly post-modern about this stunningly beautiful and matter-of-fact contemplation.  Nothing earth-shatteringly new in the text, which is reassuringly predictable, though profound and timeless.  You want to go back to it like Kahlil Gibran, as an “archaic lingua franca.”

            The poems are followed by essays by Bruce Meyer, who wrote an introduction to Taj’s poems on the wall at the Canadian Consulate in Bangalore, and Petra Halkes.  Meyer’s points out: “An embassy is a door between one nation and another.”  His essay is a reassurance to people travelling through that door, about the embassy’s helpful role, about the enlarging effect of travel, about the message that we all belong to one nation, that of the human race.  In passing, he includes a story highlighting the Ojibway people of Algoma area in Ontario, reminding travellers to Canada they will be on native land.  He compares poets and architects - Taj being both - as people who build something from nothing, making “the journeys of our lives possible … so that we can carry our knowledge with us to others.”

            Petra Halkes, in her essay, “Wayfarer,” informs us, “Taj is an oral poet.  In performance… the gestures of his hands and body draw invisible lines in the air…”  She makes the precision that in his calligraphy, he “lifts his pen after each letter.”  Her very fine essay is full of historical points, referencing the “profusely inscribed Taj Mahal,” for example.  It’s worth the read, as it includes a reflection on writing itself, on what has been lost in the transition from calligraphy to type-face (borrowing from Tim Ingold:  Lines, A Brief History), and from oral poetry to the page. Tracings and threadings as opposed to joining dots are fine historical points of the human creative project, and I’m grateful to Petra for delving into it, and to Taj for inspiring her. 

The two essays remind me of another First Nations story told by a bead-crafter from the Haudenosaunee:  the beaded patterns on moccasins describe histories of migration among the Iroquois, which can be read by other nations to identify the wearer.

And finally, curiously placed at the very end of the book, is Taj’s own commentary on his work: 

Sections, be they architectural or textual, are microcosms. The earth turns on its axis; the sun arcs in the sky; calligraphic shadows shift in the liminal gallery, falling on its wall, fleetingly inscribing you: as you move along the curve, inadvertently circumambulating an elusive centre. If you stop to take in the view or look at the poem you find yourself looking out at a world superimposed with calligraphic silhouettes. When you read the poem, you read the world.

                                               Reviewed by Sandra Stephenson

                                               November, 2020

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