The protagonist of this poem is St Thomas. The name Thomas represents the Koine, or Alexandrian Greek, dialect form of the Aramaic name Tauma, meaning ‘twin’. The Gospel of John glosses it in formal Greek as Didymos. The name seems appropriate to the apostle who will forever be associated with his attitude of doubt towards the Resurrection – a doubt paradoxically born of his loyalty towards the living Jesus – and his empirical approach to what would become a mysterium tremendum of the Christian religious imagination. In Thomas, we see ourselves: creatures of schismatic consciousness twinned against ourselves, judging ourselves against hazily perceived Doppelgängers, always wondering who we might actually be.

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‘Redburn on Shore Leave’

This poem is a palimpsest-like improvisation around Chapter 34: ‘The Irrawaddy’, of Herman Melville’s Redburn: His First Voyage (1849). See Melville, Redburn (with an Introduction by Elizabeth Hardwick; New York: Modern Library Classics, 2002). The floating fragments of Hindustani that appear through the poem are bandishes, or compositions, from the repertory of Hindustani music. Several of these compositions are thumris or chaitis, traditionally sung by women. These genres, whose origins lie in domestic or ‘folk’ contexts, in cycles of seasonal celebration or the romantic and erotic lyrical experiments of tawaifs or courtesans, have been incorporated into the hierarchy of postcolonial Hindustani classical music under such patronizing and patriarchal rubrics as ‘light classical’ or ‘semi-classical’. Expressive of female desire and political awareness, many of these compositions encode the absence or loss of lovers who have migrated to the city in search of work, been imprisoned by the colonial police, or been press-ganged into distant indentured labour in the Caribbean or the South Pacific. In the course of the poem, some of the bandish lines are broken up, recombined, or mixed.

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‘Cargo and Ballast’

Dedicated to the memory of the Martiniquais philosopher, poet and literary critic Édouard Glissant, this poem incorporates and improvises around passages from his memorable work, at once psycho-history of the Middle Passage, sociological inquiry, ars poetica and political manifesto, Poetics of Relation (trans. Betsy Wing; Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997). The poem also includes material from the trial of the owners and crew of the slave ship Zong in the early 1780s, arising from the dispute between them and their insurers, who refused to pay them compensation for the slaves they had thrown overboard as ‘perishable goods’ in the days following 29 November 1781. The Atlantic slave trade did not recognize African slaves as human beings and regarded them as cargo; sick or dying slaves, as well as newborn children, were often thrown overboard by slavers. Business practice dictated that the ill be sacrificed so as not to infect the healthy; and, in any event, insurance could be collected on what was chillingly construed as reasonable losses.