A Review of Rita Wong’s Forage.

[stephenhongsohn.livejournal.com]

 Rita Wong’s Forage (Nightwood Editions, 2007) is a delightful read in that in unites language play with a rigorous lyrical meditation on the late capitalist milieu.  Forage is Wong’s second poetry collection after Monkeypuzzle, which was released out of the now defunct Press Gang Publishers.  In her latest, Wong is keenly aware that everything seems for sale in this particular moment, so when she titles her collection, Forage, we immediately wonder about questions of sustenance in an age of globalization, transnational labor exploitation, and the increasing emphasis on profit margins.  In some ways, Wong’s work seems eerily prescient given the global economic crises, the continuing debates concerning global warming, and the widening disparity between the poor and the rich.  Wong is part of the growing Asian Canadian poetry community that includes the previously reviewed Weyman Chan, Fred Wah, Sally Ito, Roy Miki, among many others.  This collection is strongly interlingual where Chinese and Korean characters appear on the page to disrupt a unitary linguistic reading experience.  At different points, the lyrics are highly fractured, reminiscent of the more avant-garde poetic techniques of Myung Mi Kim or Fred Wah and at other points, possessing more of a prose-poem dynamic. 

 

Wong begins the collection with one lofty aim:  “how to turn english from a low-context language into a high context language” (11), adding later lines that structure her interest in the increasingly technocratic society that distances us from one another: “the internal frontier: my consumer patterns” (11) and “electromagnetic fields of refrigerator, phone & computer hum bewildered static” (11).  How does one make sense of the contemporary “noise” where everything can be bought and/or upgraded, Wong’s lyrics immediately ask us?  The following poems induce a certain chaotic formal element as lines from other poetry collections and other writers spiral around her lyrics, creating a terrain in which the reader must physically disorient the page in order to discern the “high-context” representational environment.  The mix of hand-writing and computer font serve to enhance a different aesthetic toward lyrical presentation, reminding the reader that poetry emerges from an embodied and enfigured source.  In “perverse subsidies,” the speaker asks, “will pay for you to take my garbage away so I never have to look at it, never have to imagine the roaches & rats crawling through cucumber rinds, ragged underwear, clumps of hair & crumbled up toilet paper.  seagulls & crows will feed on rotting leftovers, carrion will reek of fetid life, full, wasteful, extravagant to extinction.  fill my car, our streets, with the corpses of Iraqi civilians, the ghost of ken saro-wiwa, the bones of displaced caribou.  it will clatter down the graveyard that masquerades as a highway, emitting malaise to the tunes of eminem.  disaffect, reinfect me” (21).  The environmental degradation wrought by our “trash” irresponsibilities, the continued havoc occurring due to massive warfare, and finally the reference to the “ghost of ken saro-wiwa,” the ogoni activist whose fight does not remain unremembered here, all concatenate as part of a larger activist politic the poetry invokes.  I am struck most by the way in which Wong is consistently able to weave in these “calls to actions” amidst such densely textured image and sonic “scapes.” 

 

“damage” is the poem that reminds me most of the current global economic situation.  Wong’s lyric speaker perceives the financial “culture” and capitalist ideology in this way:  “people walk around in various states of damage.  damaged goods.  mismanaged funds.  poverty rampage in corporate attire.  let them eat mutual funds.  the rate of interest is ejaculatory.  eleven dribbles into two.  murderous profit margins.  mowing the law.  moaning the lost.  manning the last financial post.  when did i become a commodity? a calamity?  indemnity?  the trend to credit facilitates fascism.  ATM: automatically tracks movement, a totalitarian market, antagonize the machine & see what happens” (45).  Besides the clear attention to semantic “sonics,” Wong’s lyrics also suggest the violence that comes with the unmitigated desire for money and the ways in which the body is configured in multiply disorienting ways under capitalism, as the speaker asks if s/he might be a commodity, calamity or indemnity, or perhaps some combination of all those elements.  Wong defines ATM not as automatic teller machine, but gives us other options that support her polemic lyric, “the trend to credit facilitates fascism.”  Here, ATM might mean, “automatically tracks movement” or “a totalitarian market” or to that we might instead “antagonize the machine” to “see what happens,” suggesting instead a revolutionary politic.  “trickledown infect” is more evidence of Wong’s gift for wordplay:  “intermittent insistence sinister complicity stillborn mister minister toxic tinctures stinking pistols stricken cysts or cynical sisters strychnine biscuits kiss or desist lore please pucker up and miss or responsible for which mess your dissatisfaction resists bores goriness consists of not cleaning up your mess for centuries nor paying your debts to those you’ve made poor with your thefts sir” (48).  The conclusion of “trickledown infect” seems to invoke a specific person and we can’t help but think of Ronald Reagan and his trickledown economics, now conceived instead as a kind of virulent disease with the power to poison as it is “toxic,” the power to kill through its “stinking pistols,” and upheld by someone “sinister,” his words like their own capitalist religion. 

 

In “for Lee Kyung Hae Korean farmer martyred in Cancun (1947-2003), Wong pens the poetic elegy for a Korean activist who killed himself in protest of the World Trade Organizations policies.  Wong’s inclusion of the Korean and Chinese characters for Lee’s name does introduce a panethnic politic, which often goes ignored in the consideration not simply of an ethnic politic, but a broadly conceived racial politic.  While the efficacy of Asian American panethnic activism has often been challenged (one of the most obvious recent occurrences being the Yamanaka Blu’s Hanging controversy), Wong takes this element up this interethnic consideration here:  “WTO/ smashes rice farmers into/ the enduring earth” (62).  A final poetic sequence grounds us back in Canada: “biking down the august streets of vancouver i find my pride at powell street.  reverberating into the crowd as exuberant taiko.  walk into a sea of issei, nisei, sansei pride, generations of pride in rock bands, doing park clean-up, serving corn on the cob, making videos, doing a post-atomic dance” (72).  Once again, the interethnic reference is striking.  Wong’s Chinese Canadian background is happily taken up with this larger sense of Asian Canadian “pride.”  In an era where the term “post-race” is often bandied about as if identity politics is inefficacious, Wong’s attention here toward other cultural practices and the embrace of those practices as a way into thinking about difference and the empowerment of difference is considerably refreshing.  We are reminded of course of the importance of nationality and geography to Wong’s lyrics. 

 

Wong is a highly talented lyrical technician, at ease with the ways that words can construct meaning against each other in almost violent juxtaposition.  At the same time, the wonderfully textured semantic landscape is always-already tempered with Wong’s progressive politic.  The collection would be an easy fit for any course on contemporary poetics or Asian “American” literature. 

Buy the Book Here:

http://www.harbourpublishing.com/title/Forage

http://www.amazon.com/Forage-Rita-Wong/dp/0889712131

 

A Review of Jenny Boully's [one love affair]*

[stephenhongsohn.livejournal.com]

 A Review of Jenny Boully’s [One Love Affair]* (Tarpaulin Sky Press, 2006). 

 

Jenny Boully’s [one love affair]* is an interesting amalgam of many different genres, blending together poetry, prose, and experimentalism together to engage a various meditations on love and loss of that love.  My first impression of this deceptively slim book comes from its interesting cover art in which a crack pipe is positioned over what seems to be a rainbow palletted sponge painting or water-color art pastiche of plants that shows a prismatic array including lavender, purple, blue, sky blue, hunter green, yellow green, yellow orange, red-orange, red.  The mix of impressionistically configured foliage as background to the crackpipe serves as an interesting metaphor for the ways in which affect and desire can warp the sense of one’s reality.  As such [one love affair]* is a highly fragmented text, with three larger prose poetic arcs, but even within this three arcs, they break down further into sets of stream-of-consciousness images that together do begin to mimic this sense of surrealistic disorientation found in the ruins of lost love.  The * denotes the use of footnotes that will appear alongside the various prose-poem sequences.  It is told that the lyric-narrative that emerges in [one love affair]* is at least and in part inspired by a number of different creative writers that the narrator-poetic speaker has read; this list includes Marguerite Duras, Carole Maso, Thomas Bernhard, among others.  The use of footnotes follows alongside Boully’s formalistic and experimental impulses that characterize her larger creative art and her two other major publications; we are reminded that there are always other side conversations, other thoughts that follow us as both read and write.  Characteristic of Boully’s work here is a lyric-sequence like the one below:

 

“The drive away from New York happened alongside a drizzle, a gray rain, the encumbered night.  You explained how you would someday explain your sickness; however, I already knew and already loved you in spite of it.  (In spite of it all, I did, I do.)  Along the highway, shrubbery that appeared like reeds, cattails and pussy willows; even in the dark, hidden things” (29).

 

I place that fragment alongside the one below:

 

 “The entire catastrophe of being a poet is that, after the fact, everything will be too eerily coincidental: the fact that the fire could not and would not light; the fact that the kindling flamed fast only to extinguish itself; the fact that the bed sheets were two sizes too small; the suggestion the doves gave of not being able to roost, of having to move on again” (54). 

 

There always is the sense of mourning in this text and it comes really to a pinnacle point with the admittance that “everything will be too eerily incidental” for the poet, who will seemingly find meaning in linking external references together.  In looking back at the early block, the rain, the drizzle, alongside the strange sense that more things can be hidden than those sheltered by the darkness.  Foreboding and foreshadowing appear in these moments, the retrospection. 

 

The advent of independent press has been an amazing boon for writers of all different backgrounds and inspirations.  Since my own interest has been in Asian American literature and given the recent questions about how to define the field, Boully’s work provides an interesting example of a text that moves far beyond the “cultural nationalist” foundations that helped define certain boundary points of the field.  While the text doesn’t promote some a "radical" activist politic, the terrain being offered is one in which the American writer of Asian descent doesn’t necessarily have to rehearse a particular racialized trope in representation.  To a certain extent, Boully’s meditations do include references to “Oriental” poetic forms, that of the renga and haiku, but it would be difficult to parse out Boully’s ethnic background from the content provided.  One of my recent forays was to read the excellent collection on Asian Canadian writing; when thinking about going beyond “autoethnography,” Boully’s one love affair brings us into constellation with various images and moments which are so particular as to evoke the impossibility of this desire as being anything other than imagined for one couple and yet, its sentiment, its pathos is universal.  

Buy the Book Here:

http://www.tarpaulinsky.com/Press/Boully/index.html

A Review of Abraham Verghese’s Cutting for Stone (Alfred A. Knopf; 541 pages; $26.95)

[stephenhongsohn.livejournal.com]

 A Review of Abraham Verghese’s Cutting for Stone (Alfred A. Knopf; 541 pages; $26.95)

 

Abraham Verghese is perhaps better known as a memoirist, particularly his first, the tragic, yet poignant, My Own Country.  In that memoir, Verghese painted a very unique and particular portrait of small town country life as it was affected by the HIV/AIDS epidemic at a time when retroviral therapies had not yet been introduced.  Although HIV has long been connected with urban centers and high population densities, the viral “reservoir” moved to rural-urban locations as those in their terminal stages returned home to die.  Verghese treated these patients and the humanity with which he conveys their suffering also paradoxically informs his talent at writing.  Even in the midst of such difficult circumstances, he is able to communicate the pathos in such a way as to move the reader.  This talent is certainly at display in Verghese’s first foray into the fictional genre.  Given the particular conventions of the novel and particularly of fiction, that of the make-believe, Verghese exports many of the elements from the memoir that make this shift perhaps not so difficult.  In particular, the text stays firmly within the realist tradition, centralized on the life of Marion Stone, who grows up with adoptive parents in Ethiopia. 

The novel exists as a re-telling for his twin brother, Shiva, but the reason he must tell this story is not fully known.  What is of course interesting is that even though the novel itself is then supposed to act as a kind of confessional, Marion does not complete the narration.  Indeed, the novel shifts in third person perspective, moving the text into a different register, where the lives of Marion’s biological parents and adoptive parents collide in Ethiopia at the Missing Hospital (the strange hospital title is the result of a mis-pronunciation that has nevertheless stuck).  What the readers come to learn is that Marion and Shiva’s mother was in fact an Indian nun, Sister Mary Joseph Praise, who comes to Ethiopia after an unnamed trauma she experiences while completing her missionary work in Yemen.  From there, she reunites with a doctor (whom she had met previously during a sea voyage in which a fellow sister is killed during a Typhus outbreak), Thomas Stone (whom she was able to save), from whence part of the title comes (the title also references the Hippocratic Oath:  “I will not cut for stone, even for patients in whom the disease is manifest, but will leave this operation to be done by practitioners of this art. Into whatever house where I come, I will enter only for the benefit of the sick, keeping myself far from all intentional mischief and corruption, and especially from the pleasures of love with women or with men, be they free or slaves.”).  Sister Mary Joseph, later pregnant with twins, dies in childbirth and Thomas, distraught, flees Ethiopia and abandons the children leaving them behind with another OB-GYM doctor, Hema, and her eventual husband Ghosh.  The second section of the novel concentrates on the challenges that Hema and Gosh face raising the twins and then finally moves into the story of Marion himself, a betrayal entertained by his twin, Shiva, and the unrequited love he experiences for a girl he grows up with, Genet.  The Hippocratic oath’s importance is made clear as Marion himself becomes a doctor, but the specter of his father always haunts him and so much of the novel relates the phantom reappearances of Thomas Stone. 

While the novel is quite lengthy, Verghese continually infuses each character with particularity and is thus able to generate momentum for the plot.  The interesting framing device that opens up Cutting for Stone is at first abandoned and only returns with the focus on Marion himself.  This change is my only major critique of the novel as it seemed to disrupt the narrative unity.  One wonders if Marion is indeed re-telling the story how he would have had so much access to the details related to his parent’s life, so one must suspend disbelief immediately on the level of the narration in the first section.  However, the social context for the work is quite evocative and places Cutting for Stone within the transnational framework that has re-invigorated American Studies.  In particular, the various migratory networks engendered by Indians is depicted with much complexity, where the Middle East, South Asia, Africa, and the United States all constellate together.  Ethiopia’s post-World War II political instability is not simply glossed over as the social context within which the Missing Hospital exists serves as a chaotic backdrop to the lives of the major characters.  The novel of course also benefits from the fact that so much of it takes place directly within the hospital, a space and culture which Verghese is able to draw from as a kind of “hospital informant.”  Scenes relating surgeries are particularly masterful and tension-filled.  Much of the first section of the novel concentrates on the complications related to Shiva and Marion’s birth and Sister Mary Joseph’s eventual death and the reader is pulled through such moments with narrative grace.  In the consideration of a regionally specific “Asian American literature,” Cutting for Stone adds to the rich tradition that Rajini Srikanth interrogated in The World Next Door; one waits with much excited for what narrative genre, plot, or story Verghese might take on next.  Since the novel is accessible on the level of its prose and fresh on the level of its plot and lengthy in terms its page count, Cutting for Stone might be the perfect book for the longer airplane ride or that lazy vacation where you plan to sit by the pool and catch up on all that reading that you had been meaning to do… 

Buy the book here:
http://www.amazon.com/Cutting-Stone-novel-Abraham-Verghese/dp/0375414495/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1233551587&sr=8-1