Home in the Bones

We are directed to stretch the meaning of place from our understanding we developed the week before.  Using natural elements that exist within the colonial and post-colonial perspective, we can dive into the perspective these eight poets planted in our psyches.  The flowers of Ishigaki Rin’s walk to work, just off the footpath, beckon to me.  Flowers come to us and tell us the story of waking up and opening.  Even flowers considered “too poor” for her desk are still flowers she honors by name:  dandelion, clover, Philadelphia fleabane.  What insight Rin offers the reader when she compares herself, likely a girl “straight from primary school,” to these flowers.

She knows her world’s changed so much from hiring those girls to measure women by their market value.  Even though these fine “Women who bloom in competition…cannot possibly be wildflowers.”  Tokyo Station grew “Just like a graph of the economic boom/Tall skyscrapers bloomed.”  Such gorgeous and succinct prose to describe the physical change of her home.

The “New World Duet” Marilyn Chin dances with her lover, a white man, finds her forced to navigate the boundaries of a relationship in the U.S. where she is pushed to defend herself against the attack she levied on him of being racist.  This têtê a têtê follows on him reminding her how little her life as a female would matter if she’d been born in China or India.  Because she’s threatened by being a woman who is over forty and the headline screams she won’t marry, she knows it’s useless to describe her truth of humiliation in this country to a frog who only knows a well and could never understand the sea.

There is such erasure and obfuscation in Jam Ismail’s “Casa Blanca 1991” that I had to accept a certain foreigner’s ignorance about what the poem was about.  Was this deliberate to put the reader in the same position s/he feels in attempting to understand the heavy and far-reaching hand of the U.S.?  There are so many references to what feels like the 1991 Desert Storm U.S. military action against Iraq.  My guess is based on “troop couture.  designer war.”  1991 was the start of camouflage as a fashion textile.  It must be confusing for someone born in Hong Kong with connection to Canada to view the war through the lens of some CNN glamorization.  Reading this poem, I felt disconnected and lost to its meaning.  I wonder if this was Ismail’s experience and hence this poem about distance and erasure.

Bei Dao ignited my heart.  His prose is so beautiful!  Calling the night a black map of cold crows pieced together.  That is simply perfection.  He serves this week’s writing in both his first and final stanzas where he talks of home first upon his return:

“I’ve come home – the way back

longer than the wrong road

long as a life “

These lines show us it may be near impossible to return home because we’ve lived a whole life, a life that changes us.  Trying to return is like taking a wrong road because home just doesn’t look like what we remember.  This gorgeous poem, “Black Map” ends with a repetition of “I’ve come home – reunions” aren’t reunions part of the way back?

“… - reunions

are less than good-byes

only one less”

So sparse to say it all.  A reunion is meant to say hello, but Dao makes it only one less than a goodbye.  He seems to be saying there is never a going home because the home we return to is no longer ours.

 “Rhythm’s why they keep us…Rhythm’s why We’ve kept up” from the poem “Renegades of Funk” by John Murillo kept returning to me, those words replaying throughout my consideration of these readings.  Murillo is a skilled poet (“the abacus of scratch” !) no doubt, but he does something so deep in this poem dedicated to Patrick Rosal (who we read last week, “An Instance of an Island”) that it feels like decoding a revelation.  This seven-part poem, numbered with Roman numerals only confers the seriousness and the epic nature of the piece.  He is excavating with this poem and the reader is the lucky recipient of what he unearths.  He delivers a b-boy’s moves from breakdancing to the reader as steps they took to liberation.

“…we named

Our best moves free: to break and pop lock”

This poem dictates to any reader than the country he’s called home, has always made him, his friends and family, his ancestors pay a ransom to be here.  They find the strength in their bones, their bones are their home, and their poets and teachers from whom they learned rhymes are theirs.  They have their own “Nightingales and Orpheus” in “Kane, not Keats; Rakim, not Rilke.”