Though much time has passed since British colonization of India, the bodily memory of the rupture and its subsequent Partition remains. Or rather, small sexual colonizations happen in the bodies of brown women—of silence, violence, and shame. A very particular form of Orientalism emerges through sexual control: a power that exists out of “gender specific sexual sanctions” that which function as small invasions (Stoler 645). The French word, trouer—to have sex with—literally means to tear a hole in. Thus colonial invasion is embodied, ripped, racialized.

I wrote a poem that can be classified as a ‘flower poem,’ but truly it is about such sexual violence that exoticizes and eroticizes ‘gentle’ and ‘fragile’ things—namely in the form of the Orient or a brown body. Departing from traditional Enlightenment and Transcendentalist treatment, this poem is not about the beauty of nature but the appropriation of the tropics: a “view of nature is always only partial, a fetish made to appear as a substitute for the whole” or “incapable of thought” (Mohanram 158). As the tropics have long been a “site of European pornographic fantasies long before conquest was underway,” the lotus flower signifies this subject of desire, both fragrant and delicate and referring to a vague idea of what India and its subsequent spirituality comes to represent—only emphasized by the musical embellishments of the sitar that are referred to as garlands (Stoler 635). Thus my homeland as an allegory for the “porno-tropics” lingers in subtler ways in contemporary society: be it through the fetishization of brown skin or that of the pseudo-spiritual mind. The botanical garden, then, is a zoo-like site for viewing representations of place and body reterritorialized and ripped from its origin and context.

Both the consistent citing of the source text (“Seven Poems for Seven Flowers and Love in All its Forms” by Bhanu Kapil) and the placing of the poem onto musical format can signal ways that colonialism can be decontextualized and reframed. The sitar also comes to represent this exotic India, and yet is stripped of its purity by the technology of Ableton with its many filters and the oft-appropriated drone of the reverse tanpura. These are ways that the whiteness of the West is represented as in contrast with the East: taking the form of an excessive masculine violence while “the embodiment of women—their weakness, their sexual availability, their penetrable bodies—becomes a liability for establishing the supremacy and invulnerability of whiteness” (Mohanram 25). The home or the bedroom—as the site of the sexual assault—is opposed to the garden as the outside; as Homi Bhabha says, “The recesses of the domestic space become sites for history’s intricate invasions” (Mohanram 35). Therefore, it becomes necessary to deconstruct such binary categories as is done in the poem-song.

Ideas of metaphor, allegory, and musical motif in the piece is contrasted with improvisation or deconstruction. Like Edward Said’s theories on orientalism, “sexual domination has figured as a social metaphor of European supremacy” signalling the “iconography of rule, not its pragmatics” (Stoler 635). In the poem as well, both the flowers and the violence itself investigates Stoler’s question: “Is the medium the message, or did sexual relations always ‘mean’ something else, stand in for other relations, evoke the sense of other (pecuniary, political, or some possibly more subliminal) desires” (636). Separating the metaphor from the act is impossible, and thus the poem-song attempts to blur these strict boundaries. The raga that the sitar is played in represents the morning and symbolizes renunciation, while the line breaks in the poem could imply a certain silence. Ideas of maps, wars, market replace the things that cannot be said, while the author’s notes do not clarify anything but instead pose more questions of borders, myth, and language. Such “signs and symbols of colonial violence” can be “’narrative indices’ and ‘ideological birthmarks’ of colonialism: the narrative origins of colonial discourse” (Balce 130). And yet these ideas are translated yet again onto music: will it be pleasing or aggressive, flowery or disjunctive, meditative or sinister? Can a poem-song mimic violence or will it stay a mere ‘metonymy of the colonies’ (Mohanram 11)?

The poem may challenge ideas of the nation-state as it pertains to body and history as marked onto this body to link it to colonial invasion. Both language and musical origin works in these ways: “something residual is left behind: that which cannot be homogenized/assimilated by the nation-state. It is this residual that reinstates difference, despite the demand for indifference by the nation- state” (Mohanram 67). With this marking, there is no ‘place’ to conquer, but there is skin which Mohanram believes “functions as a boundary” in that “it coheres bodies and identities and is present at the interface, mediating between the internal and external worlds” (151). The separate identities of the poem and the music must cohere to create a field-site that which breaks the rules of traditional: the jazz-like and fragmented structure of the poem even ‘steals’ bits of the source text while the sitar departs from the traditional structure of the raga to accommodate western and jazz ideas of melody and improvisation. The body of the track then emphasizes both invasion and resistance, both physical and internal, both outside and inside.

In these ways, radical arts may signal embodiment through Paul Gilroy’s concept of “the politics of transfiguration” that attends to the “lower frequency” of bodily memory (Campt 6). Whether that is represented by the lower frequency of the bass throughout the track (a possible Western intervention) or the space in between the stanzas of the poem, there is a deep engagement with that which has been forgotten or looked over. That is the radical nature of art—both poetry and music—in that sound transcends the body much like diaspora does. The track is easy to distribute and access as it no longer remains physical, even though its origins come from the body itself. The final product is almost external, disembodied, relying on not the ‘outside’ of the ‘public sphere’ but the larger social space that encompasses past, present, and future. Combining music with poetry pushes the idea forward, towards a different sense of embodiment: one that is safer and more tender departing from colonial and sexual violence. As Tina Campt says, “sound can be listened to, and, in equally powerful ways, sound can be felt; it both touches and moves people” (6). Sound can become body but then transform into something more.