Discovering the poet Cypher, in their debut collection The Self is an Ocean, is accessed through deliberately sequenced pieces that enable the reader to inhabit the physical body of the narrator. Many poems have triggering subject-matters; “All my survival has caught up to me. /  My pasts flash before my eyes like old movie scenes.” (Young God). But as Cypher says, writing from a place of sincerity, their ultimate purpose is recognition and compassion, emerging from being subjected to unendurable cruelty, to a liminal place of strange beauty and shifting landscapes:

The white flesh inside –

fresh with life –

sits rugged against the walls

of my mouth.

Thatha watches me, standing

tall in his blue-black veshti.

Eat, he says. Eat Well. (Elaneer)

Cypher is a Tamil diaspora writer living in Canada, a “self-taught brown and queer Tamizh,” which is the native name of the Tamil language, a classical Dravidian language spoken primarily in South India. Cypher’s voice, “a two-syllabic soul,” is not Western or predictable; instead, infused with their Tamil roots, or else, the unique sound and movement in language of a South Indian removed to Canada, forming a uniqueness that settles on Cypher’s choice of words, enabling them to at times become movement in their rhythmic cadence and juxtaposition:

Still, as I sculpt the poem

into shape,

a word, a line,

leaps from my grasp,

slipping away

like a hare I can’t catch. (Surrender)

At other times, Cypher’s words feel like a gentle seeking, a release of grief and an urge for life, is so bold and bright, you can’t look away, with lines like: “If we are mirrors, then your tides are mine.” (Friendly Tides) In other poems, there’s a youthful, modernism in their directness and hopefulness:

It’s the current beneath my stream,

and the sturdy ground on which I stand.

the father who’s my fan and critic extreme,

and lifts me up with his bare hands. (Identity)

Cypher’s origin culture swirls within her, as a divining rod to unify the electric memories that refuse denying, releasing a “dam of honesty” as in the thundering poem; To the White Woman Who Called Me Uncivilized for Eating with My Hands, where witnessed racism and prejudice is spit out so precisely, nothing can be denied:

Have you ever

ripped and dipped naan into palak paneer,

watched the green seep into the white flesh

as you roll them into one, and

smelled your childhood inside your palm?

The seeming simplicity of Cypher’s poetic wisdom is often breathtaking, yet repeatedly runs far deeper than surface platitude, reminding us to shed all assumptions:

Wherever we drive, we will find that the world is made

of the same water and dirt. It should stand to reason

that if all views are the same, then there is no place

worth going. (Life is a Landscape)

I personally gravitated to the harder poems, not without appreciation for the uplifting, but out of a curious connection to Cypher’s struggles. In particular, her raw poem, You Ruined My Homeland For Me. Deeply touching those of us who are familiar with the true legacy of abuse, often becoming inked into a literal land, forcing many never to return and also understanding, in exile the pain doesn’t diminish. This poem is so acute in its rendering of this specific experience. Having worked with survivors of abuse within their household, the indelible marks on the soul and body are lifelong. Cypher’s poem, utilizing lines like: “You made weapons / out of furniture, / turned the house into a blade.” Can speak of something few find the words for. This behind-doors shame-inducing abuse, often handed down through generations without acknowledgement, is an ouroboros, committed to replicating destructive patterns of tyranny and pain, until someone breaks out. Cypher’s poetry does just that:

Years later, I am still

there. That nightmare,

well-fed and alive, is stored

amidst the ridges of my spine.

The acquisition of a person’s body by an abuser, transposed into the figuration of a bear, literally ‘bares’ the deepest secret about abuse:

When your claws

puncture the mattress,

my phantom

flies to the ceiling. (The Bear)

The Self is an Ocean, reminded me of the play ‘Double Serpent’ by Sam Max, in the surrealist, yet indelible way abuse and its impact on the body is described through bulimia, suicidal ideation, surrealism, nightmares and body dysmorphia. Giving just enough literalism, then rushing into the interconnectivity between literal and metaphysical scars. Additionally, in Where Are My Queer Elders? The question(s) that need to be asked are posited, “Where are we?” Closely relating to modern Indian identity and queerness, simultaneously asking and unyielding in their thirst for something that has been quashed and misplaced:

Tell me where to search,

and I will seek you out.

I will stitch your undead legacies

to my skin, stain the lands I travel

with your steady red drip.

Yes, it’s not easy reading, but given the secretive history of abuse behind closed doors, it’s impossible to denigrate the need to articulate it as the only way forward. Moreover, as a psychotherapist working with trauma-survivors, I locate in these poems, the courageous working through trauma, alongside disassociation and it is the knitting together of parts, in relation to the subjugation of the body, that’s so deftly achieved.

Never out loud. Never allowed

to let them leave, because every time

they rise up through me,

they suffocate themselves before they speak (Young God)

What this deafening cry of honesty creates, is a taut canvas for understanding the legacy of abuse directly, through its inevitable but brilliantly nuanced linkage to identity, ethnicity, sexuality and physicality:

As I watch myself

fly away, my will

hardens.

I’m pierced

by my own

ache. (A Persona is a Parasite)

For those of us who’ve experienced abuse within the family, the ‘Amma’ (mother) in The Self is an Ocean, is vividly conjured with horror imbued recollection: “Let’s get you fixed at sixteen.” This mother, turned tormenter, is indited by Cypher’s recollection(s), rather than her retribution. She lets truth condemn her, rather than her own rage. This objective stance while challenging to maintain, allows the reader to reach their own conclusions, rather than join a war. The agonies are written as stories that unfurl, revealing the secrecy many experience, like in the poem The Secret Between Amma and I Pt. 1, where she says: “Our secret grew / beyond my body.” This is how abuse is perpetuated, through terrorizing and weaponizing secret-keeping. Shame prevents revelation, but somehow Cypher has survived to speak the truth:

I feel Grief

untangling herself from my side.

I hear her

dust herself off, fix her shoes,

and sing a lovely tune. (The Return of Grief)

The body horror; allusions to abuse and disassociation, in poems like Film Footage, are visually emblematic of a survivors experiences; “I spent my childhood with a split / -open mind,” and remind us of women’s bodies in films and photographs, in how they are inhabited and taken over, by the patriarchal gaze; fetishized if they are deemed ‘exotic,’ subjugated and controlled for their youth, their naivety, without empowering them. Cypher’s collection is whole in its consideration of unbearable experiences, with a hopefulness, born of reducing horror down to its composite, that of her mother’s legacy and inability to break out, but not Cypher’s own future, which has resisted the lure of the past and stands firmly facing the future, where she is enough of everything.

When my

daughter finally arrives – a poem, blood-coated and mushy – my

months of nursing her fade to irrelevance. I just love her. (Creation)

About the Poet:

Cypher (she/her) is an emerging self-taught brown and queer Tamizh diaspora writer living in Canada. Her writing is deeply musical, political, philosophical, and introspective. Cypher’s poems have been featured by the Wildscape Literary Journal, OTHERSIDE, FLARE Magazine, Livina Press, FeelsZine and several other publications. She works during the day as an engineer, and all her time outside of work is split between building community and creating art. Ideally both – simultaneously.