Asian American Literature Fans

Upon reading Mary-Kim Arnold’s effulgent Litany for the Long Moment, a work that I can best describe as multi-genre, multi-form, you’ll immediately understand the unique moment in which we find ourselves, especially as readers of Asian American literature broadly defined. Littered throughout Arnold’s text is a genealogy of Asian American writers, some specifically referenced (like Theresa Hak Kyung Cha and Myung Mi Kim) while others are certainly obliquely called out with respect to similar formal and contextual issues being explored in Litany (notably the many brilliant KAD memoirs such as Jane Jeong Trenka’s Fugitive Visions and Jenny Heijun Wills’ Older Sister. Not Necessarily Related).  Let’s let the official description give us some key contexts:

“The orphan at the center of Litany for the Long Moment is without homeland and without language. In an extended lyric essay, Mary-Kim Arnold attempts to claim her own linguistic, cultural, and aesthetic lineage. Arnold explores the interconnectedness of language and identity through the lens of migration and cultural rupture. Invoking artists, writers, and thinkers such as Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Francesca Woodman, and Susan Sontag, Litany for the Long Moment interweaves personal documents, images, and critical texts as a means to examine longing, loss, and identity.”

This rather pithy description gives us a decent condensation of the text, though one thing that I would really want to really want to emphasize is the question of genre and form, which is defined here as a “lyric essay.” I’ve been wondering about some of the problems that come up with things need to be categorized and named. In this case, I’ve been reading quite a number of things called “essays” and have been thinking about what constitutes an essay versus something like a memoir. In any case, the term essay seems to give more latitude about the content that is included. In Litany for the Long Moment, Arnold often ventures beyond the autobiographical, especially in considering elements of Francesca Woodman’s photography and the general historical development of Korea as a country (along with its language). I read Litany at two distinct moments in my life, one in a period prior to COVID and when my mother was still alive, and then after COVID and after my mother had succumbed to an infection related to her metastatic cancer diagnosis. It’s interesting to think about my different reactions to the texts. Initially, I remember responding so much to the question of home and homecoming. At one point, Arnold travels to Korea, in part to search for more answers to her background and to get a sense of what it might mean for her to embrace a Korean ethnic identity. There are no easy answers. What Arnold faces are feelings of rupture and of alienation. Nevertheless, so much about what makes Arnold’s work so affecting is the kind of depth she gives to questions of searching and of identity. She reminds us of the fact that Korea is a peninsula rooted in rupture, the very land split into two. Following my mother’s passing, I am rooted so much in the text among the complicated attachments of parenthood. For Arnold, the question of two mothers can only really be considered following the death of her adoptive mother, who she senses would have felt betrayed had she been alive to see Arnold consider looking for her biological family, for going back to Korea. Arnold of course understands the gravity and complexity of alternative kinships, while also feeling the pull of her biological origins. I am struck on this latest reading also about the intriguing and ambivalent nature of language that Arnold explores: “If language creates, can language also destroy?” (84). Though posed as a question, Arnold clearly ventures an answer in the creative realm with this publication. We bask in the sense of poetic potentiality that Arnold sees in language, even if Litany still reminds us that there is so much the loss one must necessarily confront. An extraordinary work, one that must be taught alongside so many other brilliant essay collections having come out; it is inspiring me to think about a course on the Asian American essay!

Buy the Book Here:

http://www.essaypress.org/mary-kim-arnold/