A Close Reading of Carolina Hotchandani's poem "A Cord to Bind Us" (first published in Diode)

The following poem by Carolina Hotchandani was first published in Diode:

A CORD TO BIND US

Was it not then, as I saw the future embodied

in the body of my child, I sought a story

to tether us together—my daughter, myself—

a story, too, to tie the mother-me

to the one I was before I birthed her.

The cord had been severed.

Then I heard a woman ask,

Is that white baby yours?

as if all I was was not

white, as if all my daughter was was white,

as if I were a brown

wet nurse feeding the baby

the only white drops of me—

When people find out that I’m a poet, often the second thing they do (after we exchange good-natured jibes about the lack of money earned by poets) is ask me why I love poetry so much. If I have a sense that they’re serious in asking the question (and not just setting up an opportunity to respond to my answer with “But really, it’s the money, right?”), I will tell them that poetry seems to me to be the closest thing we humans have to telepathy — to being able to experience the world through someone else’s senses.

Poetry accomplishes this in a few ways that I think are worth recognizing, ways that Carolina Hotchandani deploys smartly in the short poem above.

For one thing, poetry slows us down when we read it. The structure of a poem, both in formal verse (e.g., a sonnet or a ghazal) or free verse, is built upon the construct of the line, a syntactical unit that is distinct from (and may coexist with) the sentence. Where the line ends in a poem (commonly called a “line break”) is not always where the sentence in the poem ends; the first sentence in this poem occupies the first five lines, with the breaks coming at points that emphasize ideas:

"as I saw the future embodied / in the body of my child” (The speaker recognizes the vastness and possibility of the future in the small and vulnerable child.)

“I sought a story / to tether us together—my daughter, myself—” (The speaker understands her need to make sense of this vastness and the changes she’s undergone.)

“a story, too, to tie the mother-me / to the one I was before I birthed her.” (As much as the speaker recognizes the future in her daughter, so too does she recognize that the changes have created a distance between her self and her once-self.)

By bending this sentence across five lines, Hotchandani creates, in effect, a cinematic montage that allows the reader to understand through imagery the dynamics at play here — we’re offered insight into how disruptive the experience of motherhood has been for the speaker. This isn’t to say it’s been bad, just a tectonic change in the story the speaker had always told about herself — in other words, her previous understanding of herself.

The following line is the only end-stopped line in the poem: “The cord had been severed.” In this five-word declarative statement we find the figurative understanding of the cord between selves past and present, as well as the echo of the umbilical cord between mother and child, encompassing the physical and psychological dis/unities the speaker is experiencing in adjusting to this new role, in attempting to balance the needs of both child and self. This is a reversal from the title of the poem, “A Cord to Bind Us,” subverting the expectation that was set and supported by the first five lines — the cord was, perhaps, frayed in those lines, but not fully severed until now.

This end-stopped line represents another element that Hotchandani skillfully uses to shape our understanding in the poem; often called the volta (from the Italian word for “turn”), this is a fulcrum point in which the dramatic tension of the poem shifts. (The German-speaking poet Paul Celan referred to this as an atemwende, a “breathturn.”) In Hotchandani’s poem, it heightens the emotional tension that plays out over the remaining seven lines. As the reader shifts to wondering about the effect of the cord being cut between mother and daughter, we encounter a new voice in the poem:

”Then I heard a woman ask, / Is that white baby yours?”

With this imposition of an external voice for the first time in the poem, we as readers are shifted again into another understanding of who the speaker is, one that challenges not only the maternal ties with the baby, but also the implied default of whiteness that is all too often assumed in our society. It also introduces a further element of double vulnerability for the speaker, in that it questions not only the parentage of the child, but also the right of this woman, now understood to be a woman of color, to have and hold her own child. “The cord has been severed.” takes on a new shading in light of this question born of assumed discongruity leading to distrust or disbelief.

The next lines of the poem display a powerful facility with rhetorical distancing emblematic of the speaker’s need to oppose the invasive question:

“as if all I was was not / white, as if all my daughter was was white,”

These doubled constructions amp up our recognition of the innate absurdity of that question and refuse the reductive assumption that propelled it, leading into the final lines and the historical allusion they contain:

as if I were a brown

wet nurse feeding the baby

the only white drops of me—

Where to begin in unpacking the complex legacy of wet-nursing, particularly here in America, where slaves were used as wet nurses on plantations in the Antebellum South? What is the message unspoken in the idea that a woman of color is good enough to feed white children but not worthy of freedom or citizenship? And how do those associations enter into this poem, where a mother’s relationship to her own child is being questioned? We leave this poem on that question, unanswered, forever thrust into our minds by the final em-dash.

So what, then, does this all have to do with telepathy? Well, for one thing, I’m a child-free white man, but because of the brilliant construction of this poem from images and precise language, I am able to read it and have a better sense of the world the poet experiences in a way that I’ve personally never found in any other art form. (This, of course, is not to devalue or demean any other forms of art; they all excel at certain things. This is just one of the values or functions of poetry.) In order to approach poems this way, one must be empathetic, to understand that one’s own experience is not the only way to experience the world. This, of course, is why poetry is such a fearsome thing to those who want to control others.

Want to hear more of Carolina Hotchandani’s work? She’ll be reading with the equally brilliant Josette Akresh-Gonzales on Zoom for What The Universe Is: A (Virtual) Reading Series on February 15, 2024 at 7:30pm Eastern. Register at bit.ly/WTUIFeb2024