Published last week by Canongate, August’s Book of the Month is Alycia Pirmohamed’s ‘Shorelines: Memory, migration and the selves we become’. Winner of the 2023 Nan Shepherd Prize, the book sees its author trace the legacies of migration and memory on her life, examining the idea of homeland and the mythmaking it demands. Read an extract below.
How will you / have you prepare(d) for your death?
I know the beginning and the end. The rest is smoke, its tendrils weaving into an enormous field of blank space. Many faces vanish into the dark night of the past. I rest underneath a sequence of memories that fade away like the inky text on a grocery receipt. I don’t like to let things disappear, but they still do despite my concern, and they always will – gone like that story I once heard about Prophet Muhammad, the story that darts into the wood of my childhood like a deer slippery with rainfall. Or the one that mingles with the chapter of my father bent over his tasbih while, outside, trees snap back in the northerly wind. All that in-between space. All that cigarette smoke that clouds the memories of my small-town past. For many years now, amongst the clutches of illnesses in my family, I have lived in anticipatory grief. It drapes over everything, every emotion, every desire, obscuring the narratives underneath. The notion of death presses quietly against us. My mother tells me that I was born with a burial plot, a little section of earth, a halved and halved again slot of prairie. I wonder if it is next to my grandfather’s plot in Calgary, those fragments of his life that I’ve always wondered about. My sisters have one too. All of us do, in the vicinity of one another. This is a tradition, or even a methodology, to keep us together beyond the materiality of our bodies. This is a metaphysical kind of togetherness. I was born into a religion that wants to eternally house my soul. My mother tells me about my burial plot when I’m visiting home, luggage thrown in the back seat, the oceanic distance sweetly closed between us. We have spent our lives wandering away from one another only to arrive together, again, someday in death. Later, my mother sits next to me with our whippet, Samantha, stretched out between us and the bright winter sun streaming in through wide windows. The light strikes our hands in a way that suggests forever. The whole visit I think about past lives and what might have come before the beginning. I think of all the life I will tread across and all the land that I will eventually become. Deer. Soil. Daughter. Wind. Smoke. Rain. Amen.
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And what would you say if you could?
It’s not enough. Grief enters the dream body and something inside shifts. The lens through which I view the world is one of constant change. All things, even the mundane, slot into before and after. I picture a hard, round knot inside my chest. Something in-between the size of a glass bead and a marble. Every so often, I think it rolls or slides and I feel a twinge. Other times, it’s a large object, both invasive and flaring, too great to tamp down, too nebulous to unwind. These days, everything feels like a raw nerve. I see a small bird enclaved in a small tree and call it grief. At the height of the worst storm of the year, I fixate on roadside ferns splitting wildly in the red warning wind. My floral duvet is peeled apart and I refuse to leave my bed. Is it okay to put that here, in this visible and public space? This is an admission of my flaws and sorrows. I wonder if it’s my trespass as the author of these words, or the trespass of the person who reads them. Poetry itself rarely feels like enough, not nearly as often as it feels like spectacle. Another shift. Grief is the cold weather grazing. Grief is the dim lamplight growing darker. Grief is the missed video call or else its grainy picture. Grief is the dullest pull at the most sensitive heart. Grief is listening to ‘Blue Is the Eye’ while driving further away from home. Grief is green hills and farmland and first lost languages in the distance. Grief is the inability to describe the always cooling tea. Grief is the artist on stage whose eyes close as they hit the perfect note and suddenly you think oh my god why am I crying?
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‘Shorelines: Memory, migration and the selves we become’ by Alycia Pirmohamed is out now and available here, published by Canongate (£18.04).