San Andreas Fault: A Collaboration
In January 2022, grieving the death of my mother, I began walking sections of the 800-mile San Andreas Fault. I was accompanied by my partner, the artist Ashwini Bhat. A recent immigrant to the USA, Bhat was thinking about what it might mean to belong to a place. For both of us, hiking along the fault served as a form of meditation—a kind of secular version of the stations of the cross—and, later, as form of intimate collaboration.
Eventually, the two of us found ourselves in the desolate town where I was born in the Mojave Desert. As my memories and the present mixed, as my tumultuous inner emotions and the landscape coalesced, I felt my sense of self become kaleidoscopic. History, a geologist knows, is never far below the surface. Along the desert’s and my own fault lines, I found myself crossing permeable dimensions of time and space, correlating my emotions and the stricken landscape with other schisms, the fractures and folds that underlie not only my country, but any self in its relationship with others.
In collaboration, a number of art works and poems emerged from these expeditions. In one of the installations, my poem appears as a kind of word-detritus strewn along the central rift of a fault zone created by Ashwini’s sculptural composition. The staggered left margins of the short poems enact slippages along a strike-slip fault. Several poems from this exploration appear in my recent book, Mojave Ghost: A Novel-Poem, while the sculptures were exhibited at Shoshana Wayne Gallery in Los Angeles and at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco.
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