Naming the Unnameable: Daribha Lyndem’s NAME PLACE ANIMAL THING
In Daribha Lyndem’s novel Name Place Animal Thing, the effective use of layering of time, space, and cultural practices culminate into a generational arc of south Asian female adolescence and young adulthood.
The eponymous quartet of Daribha Lyndem’s Name Place Animal Thing (Zubaan 2020) is a popular game from the author's childhood in the 90s. It is also a narrative shorthand for the process of discovery, belonging, and loss, which underlines the cognitive, experiential, and emotional map of coming of age—one that the story charts with expert strokes of firm certitude and suspended disbelief. Name Place Animal Thing is thus a self-reflexive nod to retrospection itself: to the expressive gesture, unpredictable and fraught, of inscribing in language from a temporal distance, landscapes that are elusive to interpretation, eroded by the passage of time, and defiant to being categorised into such tabular orderliness that the pedagogy of these childhood games demand.
Lyndem’s autobiographical narrative—shortlisted for the JCB Prize for Literature 2021—is set in Shillong, Meghalaya, the author’s hometown. The city is on the cusp of change and modernisation, as it transitions from the quiet seclusion of an erstwhile colonial town—its material topography and architecture steeped in vernacular history—to a bustling, tourist city with an expanding urban infrastructure and appearance of new cultural norms. There is a special significance of place in giving personal memories their specific affective value, and in serving as a conduit between the individual self and an unstable world of shifting sociocultural horizons. It is emphasised in the book’s attentive chronicling of different sites. Landmarks which intimate experiences are crystallized and dynamic repositories of culture, including cultures of migration, ethnic clashes, religious conversion and faith-based animosities, and linguistic and socioeconomic divides, and finally as markers of the impermanence of seemingly-solid and familiar structures.
The author-narrator’s (referred to as D throughout the book) school building is such an example, a stark contrast progressively growing between the “old” hybrid Victorian architecture with its earthquake resistant Assamese roofs and concealed fireplaces, and the “new” functional additions suggesting nothing more than mundane brick and mortar. There is the Chinese-immigrant family owned AVVA—which in the days before KFC and Dominos doubles up as a local restaurant serving exotic food and creating space for collective conviviality and leisure; there is the small-town beauty parlour, with its array of glamour magazines catering to middle-class aspirations to Westernised beauty ideals; there is the modest neighbourhood convenience store with its avuncular owner and coveted stock of stationery; and most poignantly, there are the makeshift “aloo-muri” joints set up by Bihari vendors: at once sites of clandestine gastronomy, everyday camaraderie, and painful farewells, as well as spaces of precarity and violence. Name Place Animal Thing delineates places as complex, layered geographies etched by conflicting claims and multiple, contradictory meanings, both territorial and personal.
The book’s effective use of this layering of time, space, and cultural practices is what makes it at once a generational arc of south Asian female adolescence and young adulthood, comprising a shared continuum of the embodied experience of inhabiting a common sociological matrix: bullying, peer pressure, forbidden romance, body dysphoria, institutional disciplining, apathetic and phobic attitudes towards sexuality, as well as a profoundly intimate and lovingly articulated record of the traditions, customs, histories, and the quotidian life of the Khasi community.
This layering is also what prevents the narrative from slipping into the traps of either cold ethnography or glib generalisation. Instead, we are invited to participate in the first-person narrator’s non-voyeuristic, playful, non-fetishising gaze, which oscillates between the critical scrutiny of an informed adult and the perplexed immersion of an observant but confused child—all with acrobatic ease. It takes us into the single-woman household of Mei, the narrator’s grandmother, with its class hierarchy which the children rebelliously “pyllon shroin” floating in tea; the vibrant landscape of faith in which denominational skirmishes, evangelical zeal, conversion experiences, and ecclesiastical rituals coexist with private moments of epiphanic communion with the numinous, either through silent prayer or sublime encounters with choral music; or the understated but perennial threat of violence that runs like an undercurrent through the uneasy peace of ethnically and linguistically diverse neighbourhoods, frequently erupting through varying forms of microaggression—and occasionally, something even more dangerous.
However, Name Place Animal Thing’s singular strength is its use of the autobiographical form to create nuanced and compassionate literary portraits of individuals, who like her locales, leave a transformative impression on young D's subjectivity. In a book which has seven out of ten chapters named for and organised around these influences—mentors, a help, a best friend, a driver, nonhuman companions, and a local retailer—unconventional and unexpected friendships provide the structure, emotional, and moral anchor of the narrative, as well as D’s personal trajectory.
In turn, there are allusions to the ethical and empathetic potential embedded in childhood’s peculiar transcendence of the sociocultural boundaries of the association through which adults construct the world. There is the landlord’s gentle Nepali driver, Bahadur, whose industriousness is a source of fascination, and whose children become part of the D’s household bonding over shared meals and television programmes. There is Mary, D’s grandmother’s caregiver and cook who becomes a confidante and ally in defiance of societal prohibitions. There is Mrs. Trivedi, the Hindi teacher, in whose quirky vulnerability the teenage narrator finds a kindred spirit.
Name Place Animal Thing conveys the lost insouciance of an outgrown season, its evocative metaphors, lyrical word pictures like vintage watercolour postcards... The semblance of innocence, however, is a disguise, a reference perhaps to the dangers of perspectival distortions produced by the temporal distance that the act of autobiographical recollection has to straddle.
The titular ‘animal’ and ‘thing’ are signified with a traumatised neighbour’s golden retriever, and a childhood toy, which share between them the spectrum of relational impermanence and affective durability, standing in the book’s map of unmappable encounters as those unnamable attachments whose enduring hold on us transgress the limits of finitude and refuse the constraint of naming. The semantic excess at the heart of these relationships which cannot be pinned to normative models of kinship or sociality is also what makes these associations into rich sites of questioning and radical alternatives, as well as assertions of solidarity that cross ethnic, religious, age, and economic lines to address a common universe of loss and grief.
The final chapter of the book is a part-obituary, part-tribute, part-remembrance of the D’s closest friend Yuva, and the rugged terrain of their relationship till the latter’s untimely passing. In some senses, it is the central clue to reading the narrative as a testament of memory’s labour in the face of the traumatic inevitability of loss, personal and cultural. Yuva is Nepali, a “dkhar” (the Khasi word for non-tribal) whose friendship with the narrator is an act of subversion leading to bullying and ostracism. While the two girls share a complex, intense intimacy—straddling the difficult extremes of ordinary teenage existence interrupted by the extraordinary demands of illness and convalescence—the narrative refuses to either pathologise or romanticise their relationship, choosing instead to foreground the constancy of everyday commitments as the place where its value and also its pathos persists.
Thus, in the detailed chronicling of this association, the narrative allows its readers to re-experience in a circularity without closure; the coming-of-age narrative is now filtered through the otherwise culturally-underrepresented lens of young-adult female friendship. Yuva’s eventual fate is shocking, but the narrative reinstates her diaries left to D as a witness to the persistence of the ordinary. The metaphysical incomprehensibility of death continually haunts the peripheries of human affairs, and this includes our penchant for sensationalising it into cultic ostentation or irrational supernaturalism (lampooned in chapters on the lore of the local graveyard and frenzied theatrics of certain kinds of worship traditions). But death’s daily, resonant intimacy with life is almost imperceptible. The unnoticed expressions of fragility and mortality—for which the author’s early encounter with dying moths becomes a symbol—is what embodies the redemptive register in the book’s loss. We see its capacity for possible social and ethical transformation through forms of shared grieving.
Name Place Animal Thing conveys the lost insouciance of an outgrown season, its evocative metaphors, lyrical word pictures like vintage watercolour postcards, and keen attention to detail retrieving the author’s childhood and life in Shillong in the 90s and early 2000s. The semblance of innocence, however, is a disguise, a reference perhaps to the dangers of perspectival distortions produced by the temporal distance that the act of autobiographical recollection has to straddle. This narrative innocence is not naïve nostalgia, nor is it an attempt to ventriloquize childhood's peculiar viewpoint. Lyndem’s imagination pierces and jolts, poignant in its precise capturing of the painful rendering of this supposed patina of innocence by the edge of experience. This experience is unprecedented and catastrophic.
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Paromita Patranobish is an independent researcher based in Delhi, moving between academic and creative interests. She has a PhD on Virginia Woolf, and has taught in SNU, Daulat Ram College and Ambedkar University Delhi. When not teaching or writing, she loves to spend time with her camera and telescope doing amateur photography and stargazing. You can find her on Twitter: @paromita33.
