Giannina’s Doorknobs, an essay by Sarah Ahmad
Latin American Literature Today #28
Giannina’s Doorknobs by Sarah Ahmad
EXCERPT
The last time I visited Giannina, she showed me eight jewel-like doorknobs resting on her kitchen island, all in different colours and sizes, lined up neatly in two rows in ascending height, like morning assembly at school. I just got these, she told me with excitement, how many more do you think I should get? I examined the knobs, holding a deep sapphire one that was catching the light from the Hudson River in my hands. Placing it back to join its dutiful row, I told her four would be nice, and she nodded, slowly, in agreement, as if the number I had named was somehow portentous, as if both her and the existing doorknobs had been awaiting this proclamation. Four more doorknobs.
As a young reader, being able to talk to the person who had written a book I loved was inconceivable. I grew up vagrantly across military bases in India, and most of my reading was sourced through the holdings of the libraries at the various cantonments, squirrelling into dusty shelves to retrieve clothbound, gold-stamped hardcovers that sometimes had been last checked out (or issued, as I was used to saying) by a British officer named Smith or Evans. Prone to fanciful narrations of my own life as an Artist (or what I hear now is main character syndrome), I would touch and read these books with gingerly devotion, as if in reading them I was communing with those who wrote them, wanting to make as good and attentive of a first impression as the milky, muscular hands I pictured having preceded mine in holding their spines, brushing gently over the sentences that I imagined having grown older, wiser, lonelier in the years they had spent between readers.
I found Giannina Braschi’s Empire of Dreams in a space both dustily similar to a quiet military library in small-town India and wildly different and opposite in its abundance—the magically crowded Grey Matter Books, the bookstore beneath the water tower that I accidentally always call lighthouse to friends driving me over. I had encountered the title while reading scholarship on cities, empires, and colonization, so I recognized the book instantly. Though I knew I was going to take the book home, I perfunctorily did my first-line-test, thumbing across the introduction to the beginning: “Behind the word is silence. Behind what sounds is the door.” Reading Empire asked me to be an awkward acrobat, trying to match Giannina’s intensely comic and brash leaps from line to line, the text crowded with characters who move on to caricature themselves, pages that are addresses of buildings, contradictions that believe so firmly in themselves but are, in fact, not seemingly in tension with each other at all. I am rather resolutely not a playful writer or reader but was seduced by Giannina’s dollhouse of an empire, rambunctious and elusive. Instead of the familiar joy of being alone with the quiet of a book, a solitude I have relied on for years, opening the pages to her poetry thrust me onto a hectic stage, a deer in the headlights as clowns, kings, witches, rabbits, a shepherd in a beret whizz and whirl past. In Empire of Dreams, I find the names I had treated as sacrosanct as a hungry, young reader—King Lear, Rimbaud, Divine Comedy—except here, they were licentious, grabbed within the vortex of the unruly New York the book charts and populates. Or, as Giannina writes, I want everything. Everything. Everything...
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Sarah Ahmad was born in Delhi and grew up across the Indian subcontinent. She is poetry editor at Guernica and a PhD student in literature at the UMass-Amherst, where she works on feminist-queer architextures in contemporary transnational literatures and writes in-between poem-prose beings. She has been a contributor to the minnesota review, Poetry, The Margins, Gulf Coast, Muse India, and other journals.