Dr Davina Quinilivan (Department of Film and Television, University of Bristol) introduces her forthcoming book, Shalimar: A Story of Place and Migration, a blend of nature-writing, magical realism and memoir, which will be published by Little Toller in Spring 2022.
I am born of a colonial past and indigenous tribeswomen from Burma. I fashion new things from these old maps. Here and there. Different orientations. I do not name these new continents: the only gesture to the language of naming is the word ‘Shalimar’.
My book is an account of a period during which my father was diagnosed with lung cancer, my departure from our family home with my husband, the varying rural places we lived in the Home Counties, transitory, as I wrote my PhD thesis, and the imagined memories and stories which helped shape my perception of the world. It is a song, a lyric-memory, a fever-dream. Like the work of the lungs, this story is about the breathing in of a new continent: a meditation on the ever shifting nature of ‘home’ which is hopeful and new. Like the symmetry of the lungs, this book is divided into two parts: the story of the ten years I lived through the loss of my father, and the thoughts I’ve had about cinema and literature, the ‘second breaths’ I have taken as a writer after this period in my life. As postscript, it ends with a reflection on Devon, our new home, the place where I intend to lay my father’s ashes after ten years, in the summer of 2020.
Implied by the subheading which refers to ‘Place and Migration’ is this books’ investment in forms of navigation, orientation and exploration. In other words, more intimate geographies. Imagine Madame Scudery’s 17th century French map of an imaginary land, a ‘Carte du tendre’ (a map of tender). My map is both real and abstract, expressed through my reflections on journeying into Deep England, moving out of our family home, and narratives, impressions and ‘field notes’ which form a way towards a new ‘orientation’ of identity.
In ‘The English Patient’, Michael Ondaatje tells a story strongly rooted in the interrogation of imperialism, ownership, naming, Colonial identity and the fault lines of those systems which prove to be corrosive for his protagonists, a collective who must find new expression through tragic losses and indelible scars. Sensuous and sensory, the body has its own intelligence and this transcends all of language. It is no wonder Katherine chooses to entertain her husband’s exploration team with an ancient tale from Herodotus, the story of Candaules and the ring which makes its wearer invisible. To make the body invisible is the greatest act of imperialism, an expression of power which erases what is written on the body, or remembered through the skin. There is no sand, nor desert drift, in my own book, instead, there are forests and fields. Everything is a racking of vision at close-range, because my hand is better than any cartographic illusion. For some, this might come to represent a form of psycho-geography which the art historian Giuliana Bruno writes of in her book ‘Atlas of Emotion’ in which knowledge is embedded in the senses and vision is implicated in sensory experience; her pyscho-geographical analyses reflect a kind of lived experience of space that is antithetical to the penetrating, scopophilic gaze of Bauderlaire’s flaneur.
Curiosity came to signify a particular desire to know, which, for a period, was encouraged constantly to move, expanding in different directions. Such cognitive desire implies a mobilization that is drift. It is not only implicated in the sensation of wonder . . . but located in the experience of wander
Giuliana Bruno, Atlas of Emotion
I am a daughter of generations of Colonials, complicated by the knowledge that the women in my family, my great-grandmothers, descend from ethnic minorities, indigenous tribes and diasporas from Burma and India, Portuguese Kerala and the Shan hills. Within this history is the fact that my grandfathers were powerful colonials, from France, Germany and England. So, naturally, I immediately likened my father to Almasy, as he lay dying and speaking in an accented voice, English and Exotic (they called him Yul Brenner in the hospital). Yet, it is rather me who has become this mercurial figure. I have, finally, reckoned with that here.
In my younger days, I sought kinship, of any kind, and wisdom through the writings of Hanif Kureishi, Bidisha, Arundhati Roy (I bought The God of Small Things with a school book token) and Zadie Smith (a few years older than me and also from West London), then, bell hooks, Jhumpa Lahiri, Edward Said. In my late twenties, my father died and through this loss came a deeper exploration, an archaeological unearthing, of ‘home’, of entangled life and maps, journeys and territories, notably as I wondered, gypsy-like, at odds with everything, as I navigated through Deep England.
I started writing this book in the winter of 2011. By this point, and prior to my final migration to Devon, with my young family, we had moved several times though Surrey and Berkshire, sporadically interrupted with visits to Suffolk, Norfolk and Kent, reading Roger Deakin and Celia Fiennes, Jini Lash’s Suffolk Song Cycle, Ronald Blythe’s Arkenfield, Derek Jarman and Sylvia Plath. In Surrey, I found myself in a forest for the first time in my life. In Hampshire, I encountered the rituals of rural life including wassailing and grand corridors of oak trees which sheltered me as I breast-fed our first child. In Devon, I met a shepherd and women whispering into the lichen on an old ash tree as we recovered from a disastrous move, a difficult time doubled back and tightened further by the global pandemic which spread in 2020. Through all these things, I learned about trees and moss, red soil and acorns trodden by ruby red herds of cows, things which in their own, small symphony of life, enabled a sense of futurity. This is how we make new maps.
An extract from the book features in the Arts Council funded literary journal The Willowherb Review, edited by Jessica J. Lee, a peer-reviewed publication which brings together writers from under represented communities.