44 contemporary poetry
my childhood.’^37 A native speaker of Gujarati, she usefully makes
a comparison between her multilingual background and painting:
I have never been monolingual, so I don’t know what that
feels like. I think sometimes I experience my languages like a
concrete medium: like different colours of paint, for example.
I’m intrigued by the way various languages coexist in one
mind, the way they might clash and interfere with each other- but also the way they can enhance one another. It may well
be that knowing all these languages and having had to live in
different languages makes me more conscious of ‘the right
word’ and of feeling that any given language is almost like a
separate being.
Bhatt’s gesture here to a certain viscosity of language, or language
as a painter’s palette, is made evident in her poem ‘Nothing is
Black, Really Nothing’. The title comes as a translation from
Kahlo’s diary ‘nada es negro, realmente nada’ and the speaker per-
forms a homage to the lifework of Kahlo while framing a narrative
with her own daughter. Bhatt’s poem attempts to give an analytic
accuracy to her knowledge of ‘black’ through a series of intersect-
ing narratives through art history, anecdotal information, peda-
gogy and self-knowledge. Using Kahlo’s quotation as the basis for
her investigation and as a continual reprise throughout the poem,
she questions: ‘But Frida, how black you could paint’ (p. 30 ).
Placing her focus in one of Kahlo’s famous self-portraits ‘Fulang
Chang and I’ ( 1937 ), Bhatt comments how black ‘the little dark
hairs above your lips’ and ‘how black the hairs of your monkey’
(p. 30 ). In an attempt to quantify what constitutes true blackness,
the speaker adds that ‘true’ black ‘breathes’ (p. 30 ) also blue and
red. This meditation leads to a consideration of the early black
paint named elephantinum, noted in early Rome by the writer
and chronicler Pliny. Not unlike Ashbery, Bhatt takes a detour to
examine how the darkest black was made from elephants’ tusks by
Apelles, Alexander the Great’s court painter.
Bhatt’s speaker states that she must resist the temptation to
create a compendium of alternative readings of black, descriptors
such as ‘black heart’, ‘black mood’ (p. 31 ), since her quest is far less