The pieces in this work explore the phenomena of sign-bearing and distance, using interlaced forms of (an)notation: letters, planting and labor logs, poetic scraps, meditations on digestion, and queer reconstructions of faith in diaspora, as well as visual documentation of the narrator’s work-worn hands.

Jhani Randhawa is a nonbinary Kenyan-Punjabi/Anglo-American counterdisciplinary maker and collaborator based between the U.S. and the U.K.. Author of Time Regime (2022), winner of the 2023 California Book Award for Poetry, Jhani’s work is interested in fugue states, ecological grief-tending, and formations of friendship across species and consciousness. They are the co-founding editor of rivulet, an experimental journal dedicated to investigations of the interstitial.

Today, yesterday, the new moon. In cool humidity we rise, we plant. A comrade down the line marks an approximation of feet with a trowel, squatting. On a short row nearer the winding highway, I drop beads of coriander along ridges in furrowed earth, two fists’ distance apart. Hands lay flat, curl fingers under. Inhaling flies. Twenty seeds, visible only for one year, dried. I dimple the soil, push fi ngers in. Merge lips of soil with palms. It’s here on my knees, collapsing meeting loosely living matter, I feel my old pelvic wound in a new register. The limit edged into my body. Can we call this process healing, inhabiting a learned and yearning kind of ache. Stains of a document, stains of a flat touch finding density.

To remember being wiped down. An abstract gesture catalyzing plurality. Whose sensations are these, which scatter, leaving numinous fissures, indistinct and suffusing? Which sink and dissolve and interpenetrate? Where does this live? Arching my back, I encounter a future here with my body that becomes the field—it emerges as we plant turnips. This is to say, we must resist containment.

Artist Reflection

I would perform her hands or seek them, and when she died I dreamed of her fingers. 

In this collection, my contribution “Semaphore” is a multimodal visual essay in seven mudras. Each mudra in “Semaphore” is a performance in two parts, literary and visual. When the body catches a memory, like a pearl of sweat catches the light, something is there like practice: the images in this piece are dance notation, are spiritual messengers drawing from my own cultural access points and fabricating reconstituted approaches to meaning. 

Semaphore is the name for a method of visual signaling to transmit messages over distances. It is a method of mediating these messages and offering directives. Less speech act than dance notation, semaphore is a method that catalyzes performances of passage. Mudra, like the semaphore, is also a mediator, but of meditative and esoteric aspects rather than modular transactions. Mudra, a Sanskrit word meaning “seal,” “mark,” or “gesture,” is a symbolic and corporal signifier, made by the placement of hands or the body’s stretched contortion, its expression shared by performer and observer. A stabilizing form. There are eight to ten mudras that lay practitioners might use or be most familiar with; from Buddhist or yogic imagery there are over fifty hastas or mudras made with the hands and arms alone in Odissi and Bharatanatyam dance.

The pieces in this work explore the phenomena of sign-bearing and distance, using interlaced forms of (an)notation: letters, planting and labor logs, poetic scraps, meditations on digestion, and queer reconstructions of faith in diaspora, as well as visual documentation of the narrator’s work-worn hands. And the images of my hands, photographed in two periods of mourning a year apart, in different regions in North America, are vehicles, impressions. I’m interested in the loose relation that holds these mudras together in their interpermeating universes. Between this loose-ness and the open space (one could call them gaps, implying a kind of danger, including the danger of those empty-geography narratives used by settler-colonialists to simultaneously erase and displace extant communities), in memories of pleasure and grief, resonate the horizons of circular migration and colonial, ethnic, ecological, and gendered violence. These open spaces “sign” across biomes, built environments, human community, bodies, and imagined futures, accruing and shedding meaning while in transit.