SUNEETA PERES DA COSTA

Travelling in a North Indian city some years ago, I got lost on the subterranean floors of a public building and even more disoriented by a sign I saw on a doctor’s door: ‘Sex determination of foetus not performed here’. Wanting a child myself at the time, it was what the sign didn’t say which provided the entry point, or portal, into the title poem’s psychological world.

When I knew Giramondo wouldn’t go with ‘and Other Poems’, the ‘The Prodigal’ felt sufficiently expansive to encapsulate the myriad meanings and associations of the whole manuscript. I observe that these deviate from, even escape, canonical ones of the parable of Luke 15:11-32 – familiar to me from a Catholic childhood – with its settled arcs and redemptive imaginary of home and patrimony; leave-taking and remaining; the lure and māyā of foreign travel; filial piety and disobedience; servants, masters and indentured labour; want and abundance; squandering one’s inheritance; self-realisation, repentance and humility; forgiveness and reconciliation.

The Prodigal is itself a patchwork of poems, sewn together from different modes – lyrical, narrative, confessional, dramatic, prose. To the extent that their identities can be called diasporic, the poems’ speakers register a contested sense of belonging to history and country, through a reckoning with imperialism’s traces and encounters with contemporary forces of ecocide, ethno-nationalism, gender and caste violence.

The word sūtra – in Sanskrit meaning a string or thread, or even collection of threads; that which holds things together; aphoristic syllables and words woven together; a condensed verse or text – arises a few times. Spiritually, a sūtra may also of course be a prayer or invocation; for instance, the Heart Sūtra. Sūtras are also written on prayer flags whose threadbare fragments birds carry away to make springtime nests (this is occurring just beyond my window as I draft this Note).

The poems, invoking gods and goddesses, stigmata and samskāra, simultaneously conjure the mystical and the mundane world: skins, scars and tattoos; frogspawn and spiderwebs; sand-lines, battlelines and fissures; wombs, soil, hair and vines; blood and leads; scissors and axes; banksia and thorns; husks, shells, songs and bells. Metaphors of suturing, mending and healing act as counterpoints to cutting, breaking and tearing, I hope testifying to the inextricable connections between the landscapes of the body, the living Earth and interbeing.

— Suneeta Peres da Costa, October 2024

A note on The Prodigal

The Prodigal

Debut Poetry Collection

Out 1 November

Published by

The Giramondo Publishing Company

The Prodigal unravels myths of homecoming and return, belonging and displacement, patrimony and sovereignty. Marked by its attention to the body, its strengths and infirmities, Peres da Costa explores the experience of suffering through earthly and human ecologies and primordial connections.

Reeds stuck to her unwashed hair
and her cheek was bruised from sleeping
on the long string of tulasī beads she’d
bought at a temple stall in Tiruchirappalli.
Unbeknown to her they would tattoo
her skin in the night, writing their faint,
inscrutable calligraphy. No less than road
signs or stars or the compass of her GPS
(when the Airtel Towers gave signal),
she placed faith in the skein of these
wooden auguries. If they broke, she’d
weigh again the argument of freedom
over sanctuary, wild arithmetic that had
led her away from what was promised,
already hers. Her sandals – loose from
the monsoon – had been repaired at mochī
twice over; and the clothes she had taken
quickly, in the dead of night, slipping by
undetected while the watchman slept –
yellowed, grown threadbare.
Copyright © 2024 Suneeta Peres da Costa

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