Contraband
by Phil Powrie
Today I woke up with an echo phrase twisting on my tongue, pivot-perched between English and French — smuggle coquille.1
What could a smuggle coquille be? A dream word, a shell of meaning. Not strange when you’re bilingual. But a weirdly awkward collocation, a throwback to childhood echolalia, to the franglais we used to speak as a family (go voir, j’ai tasted, etc.).2 Smuggle coquille has thrown me, thrown me again into the thick of it, the sticky in betweenness, the word-plays, the swirling poles of sense and nonsense.
Smuggle coquille V1. Contraband dreams, smuggling empty shells, ready for some kind of linguistic barter, French for skin, English for cloth. Can I take off my skin like I take off my clothes?
Smuggle coquille V2. Dream pillows stuffed with words, bons mots and mauvais mots,3 light shards and dark shards, lanterns swaying in the dream mists. They lurk like spittle on my pillow.
Smuggle coquille V3. In the morning I strip the pillow-shell. Syllables spill out like confetti. A sudden childhood memory, an instantané.4 I used to pick confetti near the lychgate to stitch the flocked colours into rainbow dentelle.5 Language as lacework. English with French holes, or French with English holes?
Smuggle coquille V4. My dream words are empty shells waiting for the ambiguities of le sens,6 meaning and direction smuggled across borders.
Smuggle coquille V5. I mix and match, cross and twist through my languages. Rêves7 reshape their contours into border-thief reivers. Plunderers, border-crossers, looting French here and English there. Anglo-French: being in between is being where the hyphen is, neither the one nor the other, hyphenated.
Smuggle coquille V6. English seashells all explode — whelk, conch, periwinkle. Or they ambush — limpet, wentletrap. I prefer the sensuous French — crépidule, fissurelle, pétricole, corbicule, shells that smuggle in trees (ormeau) or musical instruments (lutraire), goddess shells (vénus).8
Smuggle coquille V7. I imagine my languages bartering, new words blooming in the borderlands — shellcock, smaquille, coqsmu, quiguille.9 Smuggled from their shells, linguistic migrants, genderless, all smiles in their darkness. Language as contraband, smuggled, reshaped, reframed in sleep. Half one language, half another, more than either, an obscure crossing.
Smuggle coquille V8. An unlocked shell-curl, something to trade, so that I can pay my way.
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1 coquille = seashell
2 go voir = go see, j’ai tasted = I’ve tasted
3 mauvais mots = bad/wrong words
4 instantané = snapshot
5 dentelle = lace
6 le sens = can mean both sense/meaning and direction
7 rêves = dreams
8 Names of seashells in French
9 Non-existent words, combinations of French and English phonemes
Phil Powrie is a UK-based former academic who taught cinema studies. He is bilingual and binational and worries about being in between. His work in French has been published in the journals L’Altérité, Hélas, Hespérie, Lichen, Luna Rossa and Revue Restes. His work in English has been published in Blue Unicorn, Green Ink Poetry, Ink Sweat and Tears, The Lincoln Review, Lotus Eater, morphrog, La Piccioletta Barca, October Hill, Orchard Poetry Journal, The Poetry Porch, Shot Glass Journal, and South, amongst others.