Saraswati Blue | essay by Anuradha Prasad
"Or is it pink?"
Welcome to Khôra, a dynamic online arts space produced in collaboration with Lidia Yuknavitch’s Corporeal Writing. Visit our Archive to read previous issues. Scroll down if you want your work to be considered for future issues.
Over the next two weeks, we’re introducing you to the members of KHÔRA’s new curated team. This brilliant group of writers and artists is collaborating with us to bring you four gorgeous new issues between now and June. Today’s lyric essay is by writer Anuradha Prasad with artwork by Jordan Tierney.
Anuradha Prasad is a writer living in Bangalore, India. She holds a Master’s degree in English Literature. She writes short fiction, essays, and poetry. Her work has appeared in Sleet Magazine, Literally Stories, The Bangalore Review, Borderless Journal, Muse India, and Usawa Literary Review.
Jordan Tierney lives and works in Baltimore, MD. Always an artist, she has also worked as an illustrator, building renovator, gallery owner, and museum exhibit fabricator. Her artwork has always been the result of intimate knowledge of the terrain she walks. She worries about climate collapse, and especially her daughter’s future. She is awed by the abused urban streams and forest buffers of Baltimore City. The beings struggling to survive there inspire her to use her skills and a little sorcery to change the valence of trash she collects from negative to positive. This process of observing nature, collecting trash, and making visual poetry has become a spiritual practice. Jordan loves this planet and is grateful for the places where her feet touch the ground here.
Saraswati Blue by Anuradha Prasad | artwork by Jordan Tierney
“Or is it pink?
You’d know, but I can’t ask you. You are dead. It’s a chasm I can’t cross. It stands between you and me and me and my history. You were the history and the bridge to it. You are dead.
Who I am: it stopped and began with me. With you gone, I don’t start and end with me. A continuity I had shunned is suddenly a lifeline, necessary. Behind me a chasm. In me, memory’s volatility. In me an urgency to dig for my roots, risk an uprooting.
Where do I come from? Who do I come from? I didn’t want to come from you. I didn’t want to know you. I muted your stories. I saw your disappointment. For I was not the first to mute you…”
Read Saraswati Blue.
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Leigh Hopkins
and the Corporeal/Khôra squad