Preface

Note: upon hearing that I was embarking on a project of translation, the imitable Clare Pollard, then Editor of Modern Poetry in Translation, commissioned me to write an essay to accompany a couple of the Tape Letters poems; it was published in the winter of 2021 while I was away in Pakistan. This preface is an adaptation of the essay.

Thank you, Clare, for that early encouragement; I needed it.

In the opening lines of Out of Place, Edward Said wrote that ‘All families invent their parents and children, give each of them a story, character, fate, and even a language.’ Of course, we invent all of these things for ourselves too.

On Friday the 2nd of September 1994, I was born in a little village called Chappar, a half hour outside Rawalpindi, Pakistan. I’m told it was after the noon-time prayers, which is auspicious for Muslims, like all holy things that happen on Fridays, though no one can ever properly articulate to me why. This is the logic of all the superstitions that sustain us, I suppose: pay attention to luck and happenstance, allow the empirical evidence to stack, surrender your will, your God-given autonomy.

There’s a photograph of my father holding me aloft; ‘Jisre kurri koi kitaab ye,’ my late Granpa said or, ‘As if the girl is some book.’ I, only a few hours old, eyes streaked to the temples with powdered khol, look a little raw, or, ‘Kachi,’ as my mother says. This is the story I’m told. And I’m told the day my mother and I arrived at Heathrow for the very first time, in January of 1995, my father got four numbers right on his lottery ticket, but so did several hundred others, so it hardly matters. Auspicious, though, all of it.

One of my earliest memories – 1997 or 1998 – is of walking into my grandmother’s bedroom to find her sat on her double bed. She was speaking slow and into a microphone, recording something on a cassette for my aunt in Pakistan: a 90-minute monologue of, perhaps, recent happenings, confidences, love. In front of her was a metallic-grey suitcase, in which lay the most infinitely-complex instrument I’ve ever seen, couched in unstitched printed cotton. It had slots for two cassettes, buttons that when pushed crunched, and a wired microphone. She paused the recording, gestured to the space next to her, and asked me to say, ‘As-salam alaykum, bubo! Meh Suna yah.’ Or, ‘Peace be upon you, aunty! It’s me, Suna.’ She pressed the recording button, and I did as I was told, with what proficiency I cannot recall. This would have been the first time Pakistani air vibrated with my voice and formed something more sophisticated than a wail. Like all early stories relating to notions of a Self, like any living thing, the more we imbue them with present-day significance, feed them, the more authority they wield upon our lives. In the past year, this moment became fundamental.

To think of the auspicious is to also think of the superstitious; the latter has its own very specific gravity, but my family and I live our lives caught between their sway. The most notable superstition of all is one pertaining to Tuesday, which is rather simple: no good thing happens on a Tuesday. So, no new task should be begun, no joy felt too keenly lest it be usurped by a force equal and opposite in despair. Yet, on Tuesday the 21st of July 2020, I discovered Wajid Yaseen’s Tape Letters project, and I think it’s brought enough good into my life that it’s become a balancing force to the Tuesdayness. This is another superstition in the making.

The project serves to unearth, archive, and re/present the widespread practice of the Pakistani diaspora in England communicating via cassette tapes; like voice notes in instant messengers. These cassettes were either sent via post, or, often in the case of my family, handed to a relative travelling back home to pass on. Sometimes tapes were played in several homes before they reached their intended recipient – privacy, as we understand it today, non-existent. The focus of the project is on Pothwari, Pahari – transitional languages between Hindko and Punjabi –, and Pashto since the majority of cassettes acquired in England have been in these languages. They are all principally spoken ones with no written form, and tend to be transliterated using the Urdu alphabet, though, of course, not perfectly.

After conversations with Wajid Yaseen, I was commissioned to respond, in poetry, to a selection of five tapes acquired by the Tape Letters project, all currently held in an archive at the Bishopsgate Institute in London.

Pothwari is my mother tongue, my first language, and its capture on cassette tape provides some insights into the traditions of a rich oral culture. But to listen to a mother speak to her son, for example, estranged for decades, is to not only hear of her grief but also to understand that there is another insurmountable distance. This distance is familiar to poets and translators: the psychic ground that exists between what is meant and what is conveyed, what is felt and what we have the means to articulate. In the some thirty years that have elapsed between that tape and I, words and idioms have passed entirely out of common parlance, become superfluous or, in some cases, utterly untranslatable. There is the same insurmountable distance, that very same strain, between the parents’ Pothwari – ever in flux in Pakistan – and the language a child brings along to England, speaks only to strangers. In this way, I understand Pothwari’s evolving nature, the rules of its syntax and form, its lexicon, its grammar, all existing in a fraught mutability; unlike English, Pothwari is unhindered by the permanence and liabilities of script.

Be that as it may, the work published here is an attempt to reify speech into ink. In the sometimes-nesting form of the poems, I’ve sought to retain the nuance I can perceive: the pauses, the hundred indecisions, the way thought appears to run in tandem with voice then interjects and polices, all that unsounded longing. Ultimately, the translation attempts to perform what I, at least, consider poetry’s first function: to tell stories.

– Suna Afshan