A Review of Fred Wah’s Breathin’ My Name with a Sigh and Sentenced to Light

[stephenhongsohn.livejournal.com]

 A Review of Fred Wah’s Breathin’ My Name with a Sigh and Sentenced to Light

 

For many, Fred Wah’s creative and critical writings require patience.  His lyrics and creative projects do not often lend themselves to quick readings and often times, attending to the impetus for certain representational trajectories are difficult to parse out at best.  His work might be considered avant-garde or experimental, but like many of Asian North American poets who fall under this rubric such as Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, Myung Mi Kim, or John Yau, there is still an invested politic to his work that cannot be subsumed under the sole purpose of an aesthetic radicalism.  To review both Breathin’ My Name with a Sigh (Talon Books, 1981) and Sentence to Light (Talon Books, 2008) together is a difficult task because both exist in different genres and appear over two decades apart in terms of their publication.  Rather than enforce some sort of false linearity between the texts, I plan to compose some impressions and meditations on each text and what they provoke for me as a reader. 

 

Sentenced to Light collects a number of different multimedia collaborative projects engaged by Wah and a number of different visual artists.  By “translating” these projects into text, Sentenced to Light enacts a new project in and of itself, creating interesting juxtapositions and dynamic meanings.  As an interactive and quite humorous stitch throughout the entire collection, Wah includes his “Homing Pidgin” project; he writes “These ‘one-liners’ were written as an interactive text for an animated website (http://www.vaarc.ca/lostandfound/) constructed by Cindy Mochizuki and displaying multimedia artist Haruko Okano’s 2006 ‘Homing Pidgin’ project’ an extension of the earlier ‘Hight Bridi Tea’ piece” (9).  The site is still functioning actually and going there reveals a quite hilarious “set piece” taking place at a Japantown restaurant.  Moving your cursor over a meal item such as a soy sauce container will reveal a different text.  In Sentenced to Light, Wah includes a line of pigeons (riffing on pidgin) on a wire with cartoon bubbles employed for their dialogue. Wah constantly uses puns and homonyms to disorient and entertain the reader.  These “pidgins” appear throughout Sentenced to Light, reminding the reader of the importance of text and the complicated nature of communication and intention.  Because there are a number of different multimedia projects included in the collection, each piece contains a useful introduction by Wah explaining some of the rationale behind each collaboration.  For instance, in the title project, “Sentenced to Light,” Wah explains, “This series of ppretences (prose-poem sentences) was written for a photo-text collaboration with Mexican photographer Eric Jervaise at the Banff Centre in the summer of 2003.  Eric’s photos are made on his hand-built panoramic view camera and provoke, here, sentences that ‘stretch’ to comprehend the vanishing edges of lens, eye and syntax” (11).

 

Perhaps my favorite of these multimedia projects is “Pop Goes the Hood” which is a “text for a video-text performance commissioned by The Powell Street Festival’s Spatial Poetics event in July 2005.  The collaboration was with Henry Tsang who produced a video triptych.  The performance was a reading by both of us with the video project on a large wall at Video In in Vancouver” (49).  Although the video does not accompany the text here for obvious reasons, there is a clear polemic related by Wah’s writings.  Wah includes quotations from various sources that speak to the development of commercial zones and other such centers in and around Vancouver and Canada.  He particularly invokes the rapid growth of the city in such a way that one begins to see Vancouver as a center perhaps of a kind of modernization imperative, one that focuses so much of commodities and financing that we are soon in the postmodern city.  Fragmented and disoriented, the Canadian might wander suffering from over-stimulation, crowded malls, traffic jams, and urban ennui.  There is a sense of ethnic erasure in this move to a “new urbanism”: “Except/ the Green Door’s gone/ And the Mah Jong’s clack/ Can no longer be heard drifting over Pender” (57).  Perhaps the most polemic of these multimedia project is “All Americans” as it juxtaposes “two panoramic renderings of the Minnesota Massacre of 1862” with the attacks on 9/11.  The line that most resonates here is: “We never thought of ourselves as the enemy” (85).  After having reviewed Rita Wong’s Forage and Weyman Chan’s Noise from the Laundry, this strain of activist politic is something that seems to be a larger project for the Asian Canadian poets.  To be sure, Asian American (US centered poets) have been interrogating questions about US empire (e.g. Barbara Jane Reyes’s poeta en San Francisco, Luisa A. Igloria’s Juan Luna’s Revolver are but a few examples), but reading these Asian Canadian poets in sequence certainly demonstrates a kind of lyric cohesion that makes one situate the importance of a geographical centralization to a poetic “grouping.”  Sentenced to Light is a very intriguing text to consider on the level of multimedia art projects, the kind that do not fit into neat genre categories and might be taught in a variety of courses. 

 

I shift now to my review of Wah’s Breathin’ My Name with a Sigh.  The Talon Books description of Wah’s Breathin’ My Name with a Sigh calls attention to this work as a “long poem.  Although the genealogy and inspiration for Wah’s poetry at this time might derive in part from the Black Mountain Poets (his inclusion as part of the TISH poetry group), there are a number of points where I am reminded also of Myung Mi Kim’s Dura, another long poem with radically fragmented and disjointed poetics.  There are a number of ways in which this long poem is extremely challenging.  One element that comes down to a trick of detail is the fact that the piece does not contain page numbers.  One wonders what motivated this creative or editorial decision.  Second, there are natural breaks in the long poem that seem to suggest separation into “poetic packets,” if one might call them such that the work might be seen as a number of poems that are left untitled.  Thinking of Breathin’ My Name with a Sigh as a long poem suggests a longer unity that is interesting to think about.  The opening of the long poem immediately establishes the jarring tonality of the lyrics:

 

I like the purity of all things seen

through the accumulation of thrust

forward especially the vehicle

container maybe/or “thing” called body

because time seems to be only it appears

to look into the green mountain valleys

or through them to the rivers & nutrient creeks

where was never the problem animal is

I still have a name “breathin’ it

with a sigh”

 

Characteristic of Wah’s poetry is that words seem to flow into each other such that line breaks don’t seem to really provide signposts as to the lyrical meaning.  The general sentiment seems to suggest that the embodiment of a particular lyric speaker and the “realm of the senses” and his experiences are the motivation for the long poem’s content.  As generic as that might sound, the conclusion does seem to suggest that the body does not exist in some sort of vacuum and if we are to move a little bit autobiographically in that final moment, that Wah’s family lineage has a longer and more complex history where the “body” cannot exist out of time and space. 

 

Although I can’t mimic the exact spacing of this opening lyric sequence, it seems to be around 1.5 line spacing, which might not seem important, except that later on, Wah employs single spacing.  Indeed, the form and placement of the words on the page is a key element to Wah’s work as he frustrates the reader’s desire to understand and comprehend what is being communicated.  For instance, he leaves portions of the long poem as an underlining, suggesting that the reader must literally “fill in the blank,” even if the letters or words that could be used to fill in the blank cannot be deteremined.  Other portions of the work include blacked out words that cannot be made out or strangely employed superscripted letters.  Such linguistic de-stabilization especially in context of the lyric opening seems to be aimed at the chasm between experience and perception, reality and representation. 

 

Even with many opaque passages, a through-line does emerge in which a transnational poetic sentiment is advanced.  As Wah’s lyric speaker queries:

 

Are origins magnetic lines across an ocean

migrations of genetic spume or holes, dark

mysteries within which I carry further into the World

through blond and blue-eyed progeny father’s fathers

clan-name Wah from Canton east across the bridges

in the bioplasmic cloud of simple other organism

as close as out under the apple tree?

 

There is a clear autobiographical sentiment that motivates this passage as he continually comes to reference his family name, Wah, part of what the lyric speaker seems to “breathe with a sigh.”  What does it mean to be a mixed-race subject, of Chinese-Swedish heritage, and be able to “pass” for white?  The references here to “migrations,” “spumes,” and “bioplasm,” do center the instability of what is nature, what is meant to be part of a specific genealogy.  What does one inherit and what does one learn?  It is here in this more narratively driven sections that the poetry collection begins to gain more and more traction, taking on a kind of snowball’s poetic effect: 

 

waiting for sasketchewan

and the origins grandparents countries places converged

europe asia railroads carpenters nailed grain elevators

Swift Current my grandmother in her house he built on the street

and him his cafes namely the ‘Elite’ for Center

looked straight ahead Sasketchewan points to it

Erickson Wah Trimble houses train station tracks

arrowed into downtown fine clay dirt prairie wind waiting

for Saskatchewan to appear for me again over the edge

horses led to the huge sky the weight and colour of it

over the mountains as if the mass owed me such appearance

against the hard edge of it sits on my fore head

as the most political place I know these places these strips

laid beyond horizon for eyesight the city so I won’t have to go

near it as origin town flatness appears later in my stomach why

why on earth would they land in such a place of Pleistocene

sediment plate wedge arrow sky break horizon still waiting for that

I want it back, wait in this drunk Christmas night

for that largeness of itself my body to get complete

it still owes me, it does

 

The sense of displacement embodies the lyric speaker here, as he admits, “I want it back, wait in this drunk Christmas night/ for that largeness of itself my body to get complete/ it still owes me, it does.”  The question of origin points returns here as Europe and Asia as separate lineages collide together and meet in Canada, as the speaker is “waiting for Saskatchewan,” waiting then perhaps for this sense of completeness, attached to some finite geography. 

 

Wah’s work is certainly a challenge, but a productive one and one hopes that a definitive collection will appear that reprints and makes accessible some of his works that seem to have gone out of print.  It is difficult to make full sense of a trajectory of his poetry given the fact that I have no yet read enough of his work, but there is a unified sense that he is invested very much in the density and texture of language, not simply written, but the way that it sounds and the way that meaning can both be amplified, disarticulated, and subverted. 

 

 Buy the Book here:
http://www.talonbooks.com/index.cfm?event=authorDetails&authorID=201
http://www.amazon.com/Breathin-Name-Sigh-Fred-Wah/dp/088922188X/ref=sr_1_12?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1233705945&sr=8-12
http://www.amazon.com/Sentenced-Light-Fred-Wah/dp/088922577X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1233705970&sr=1-1