Shannon Nakai
Intimacies, Received
By Taneum Bambrick
80 pages. Copper Canyon Press, 2022.
The Rupture Tense
By Jenny Xie
120 pages. Graywolf Press, 2022.
(Trigger warning: Bambrick’s collection deals often and explicitly with the subject of rape)
This autumn two poets candidly ask us to consider the complicated telling of narratives within the limitations of language and memory. In recent years we have borne witness to the dismissal of sexual assault victims, to the censorship of curricula due to the implicative histories they uncover. In their newest publications Taneum Bambrick and Jenny Xie both question the currency of collateral damage when human life, human bodies, and human stories, are not only subject to the powerful, but also erased by them. Bambrick’s Intimacies, Received (Copper Canyon Press, 2022) conducts a transcontinental sensory exploration of the mind and memory of a woman who had in teenage years fallen prey to a rapist and now blurs the line between past and present. She perceives and connects her triggers through geometrical fragments, the only solid boundaries in a world in which time, lovers, and geographical places bleed into one another. Similarly, Xie’s The Rupture Tense (Graywolf Press, 2022) peers through camera lenses, stereoscopes, and the multifaceted prisms of time to examine, piece by piece, the curious tension of past and present — suspended in photographs during the Chinese Cultural Revolution, as well as memory compromised by the reductive tenses of language. Xie approaches each subject through peripherals, hypotheticals, litany of proverbs, grammar lessons, quadrilaterally structured texts, poems that resist structure altogether, and borrowed and presupposed memories. In both books language itself is stretched, tested, and uncontained as each poet realizes that trauma-based time is non-linear and the stories that often most need to be told ultimately show us where words fail us. They simultaneously demand and offer, in their respective collections, a new language.
The first few poems of each section in Intimacies, Received are untitled, where Bambrick lays bare some of her most assertively honest proclamations: “I prioritize self-protection / over solidarity. Over belief” (“Untitled: 1”); “every day I feel further from / an idea of queerness” (“Untitled: 5”); “More than love, I choose disappointment” (“Untitled: 7”). The narrative is complicated, bloody, and marked by returns. Bambrick’s speaker cyclically recounts distinct events, blurred in their fragmented replay. We get concrete details of her rapist mixed with tangible sensory images of her infection, a new invasion of her body, in Spain. Geographic returns also switchblade the timeline: each succession of trips to Tampa, her body is exploited by voyeurism or violence. For each trip to Sevilla she receives warnings of dangerous Spanish men, one of whom she takes as a lover but does not fully trust. His potential malice she senses in the streets viewing murals: in one instance he is “horsing / his fingers through the ties on my dress” (“Lovers’ Mural”), linking the following poem’s “horse tied to an old bridge … as if biting a leash –the most important place / was the place where somebody wanted me” (“Traveling”). As rape reduces a person to a body, so too does the speaker view her world reductively, literally in pieces. The square of a bird’s nest, the square knife slicing a pig leg (one of many allusions to the cutting and bleeding of meat), the triangle dive of a bird–the triangles on her tongue after contracting a post-coital kidney infection, the chicken blood and barbed wire fence of a triangle-shaped yard–she navigates a minefield of triggers that link innocent outings to insatiable bloodthirst, rife with references to tearing, bone cutting, stabbing, and bleeding. In reference to a bullfight she refuses to attend, her lover explains, “There’s the kind with the stabbing at the end and the other / where the bull doesn’t die” (“Inspiration”), a similar dichotomy she constructs between the man who violated her and the man of whom she is ever watchful for signs. In a bar a male stranger casually calls her lover a monster, leading the speaker to wonder: “if this term was in reference to what might happen between the two of us … until he pieced together what could have happened and told me that, in Spain, the word monster can also mean friend” (“Alligators: An Essay”). Language, like memory, is blurred and thus fails her. She is hesitant to use it, mindful of “saying, here, that I am queer in a way that might puncture the conversation” (“Erasure”). Later, she confesses “when I learned to speak” in a poem punctured by “the weight of a man’s body,” but her speech is rendered in fragments and gaps (“Cold Week”).
A prominent theme in Bambrick’s work is the reallocation of blame. Like rape, her infection is re-assigned back to her, contracted, as the doctor suggests, from the meat of her country; in a later poem meat is described as “Disgusting … smells like a dirty woman” (“Erasure”). In her prose poem “Alligators: An Essay” she recounts how, groomed by the man who would ultimately rape her, her thirteen-year-old shame arises for “how young I must have seemed to him as he dug through my childhood bedroom alone.” She rebuffs the suggestion posed earlier in the poem, “Is it scary living in Spain because of the men?” that cruelty can be reassigned to a preferably distant location and other culture. “I reminded many people that I grew up in a country governed by terrifying men,” she responds (“Alligators”). Bambrick’s re-coding of perception, in which violence is ubiquitous regardless of nationality, creates a reversal: she appropriates the homeland violence elsewhere, everywhere; she reassigns the violence of her rapist, as she confesses, “I look for ways in which all men resemble him” (“Alligators”).
The object of her poems that address “you” shift between Tampa rapist, Spanish lover, and a queer ex-lover “C” who pronounces her “unresolved about men” (“Willow Street”). The titular poem, whose speaker is the Spanish lover, views the nameless woman from a distant angle: a man who offers love but still largely misunderstands her, questioning her queer sexuality because of her assault, describing her as naive and unpracticed in love, accusing her of rewriting the story when, in fact, the very title rewrites it through a softening. An intimacy received suggests a willing offer, a gift, and bypasses an alternative means of acquisition. “I love you” is her most direct intimacy freely given, “if I don’t think about / who you were before me” (“Untitled: 8”).
In her newest publication, Jenny Xie presents her readers a subliminal freedom: “To act in the present tense, thoughts few” (“1968 Stereoscope”), though Xie’s speaker admits this is a freedom primarily enjoyed by wild animals. The multilinear encompassing of transcontinental histories simultaneously rendered speak to the more complicated reality of human experience and perception, both instrumental themes in Xie’s work. Continuing themes from her previous publication, Eye Level, her newest collection considers both subject and medium of what is seen. The act of seeing implicates a seer, and her chosen epigraph by Walter Benjamin illustrates the conundrum of the beholder securing a elusive moment in the photograph that is now past, but present both for the subject and for the viewer. The photograph provides a cohabitation of a past present captured by the camera with a future present of a next generation, equipped with history and retrospect, to plant their gaze backward. Xie considers these implications literally, as thousands of hidden photographs by celebrated photojournalist Li Zhengsheng, “still hunting the realm of the unsayable” (“Memory Soldier”) offer intimate glimpses into the bloody Chinese Cultural Revolution that the poems’ speaker both beholds and describes. Yet she also considers how memory itself
…is image, whole in itself
That we furnish the image internally
…That memory contains no vector
(“The Rupture Tense”)
The same complications and limitations one encounters with the historicity of photographs Xie also considers in memories. “Meaning, which cannot attach continuously / Language so remote, it dogs its scent back to / infanthood,” and in the following poem, “Memory pulls the past out of its outlines and stuffs it back in all the wrong / spaces” (“Broken Proverbs”). Like Bambrick’s, Xie’s speaker discovers that memory is a tool for storytelling, but itself is a terrible storyteller. It’s ultimately an indictment of a larger problem, which Xie locates: “Yet the distance / between the seen and the known / can’t be crossed by the senses” (“Memory Soldier”).
The poems are largely concerned with distances. A girl’s face is occluded by a Mao placard in a Zhengsheng photograph. Similarly, Xie positions the action of her poems on the peripheral or out of sight: a mother asleep in a pigsty, teenage years spent in the holding place of uncertainty, damp spots left on a pillow. Xie’s speaker observes the aftermath of propagandas borne upon restless youth, though even “the chaos of the revolution can’t scrape nostalgia’s residue off childhood” (“Broken Proverbs”). Placing the speaker is tricky. The situation of distance is visually rendered by immense space on the pages. “We who are of distance,” she observes, the proximity of “Two bodies separated by a slab of air” (“The Rupture Tense”), but for the speaker, the distances are cultural as well as geographical. Straddling multiple cultural identities, she ultimately belongs to neither. Her American tongue, which she holds with circumspection, compares the skies of Brooklyn to Hefei, but a critical voice–possibly an internal one–questions her authority. “And what did you understand of exile and closure? … About VPNS, coded / chats, the bitten and erratic ghosts? About a kind of collective / disfigurement that never goes corrected?.” The heightened awareness of her westernized protection from such effacement likewise efface her; like the girl in the photograph, the speaker, too, is positioned to the side and blocked in favor of the more pressing narrative at hand. Red as a symbol of blood clots and drains has nothing to do with her, raised in a country where “The suds of money, without fail, washes away the chorus” (“Broken Proverbs”), or “money as pigment, red collapsing inward” (“The Rupture Tense”). Without fail, citizens respond to the censoring of capitalist ideals and luxuries with rampant curiosity of the west, sampling the commercial goods their own nation manufactures and ships overseas and which she brings back as gifts of knock-off Chanel sunglasses and Macy’s clearance colognes. Everything can be commodified, even fate, sold like a vendor’s wares by a seer who “scans” and “scams” with words “jammed with sweetness.”
Xie’s poems tease out the symbiosis of subject and object through the personification of the latter juxtaposed against the robbing of humanity from the former. A watch contains a pulse while a man is stripped of character; “evening sprouts / electric umbilical cords,” an artificiality replacing the maternal, while a mother loses a piece of her skin in a factory. The evening also “chews” (“1968 Stereoscope”) and construction sites bear “flabs of skin” (“The Rupture Tense”), grisly allusions to the class-based mass cannibalism that occurred during the revolution. “If feeling comes, some form of modern distance will clot it” (“Reaching Saturation”) she assures us. “To gain pace, shed superstition, shed customs, shed any spiritual feeling,” and then goes on to ask, “What is spiritual feeling?” (“The Game”). The subject is hollowed, emptied, ultimately silenced.
In the photographs, unspoken stories emerge: iconoclastic assaults on Buddhist statues foreshadowing the bodies Zhengsheng would go on to capture, “close enough he could smell the spume of blood and of brain matter” (“Memory Soldier”). Additionally Xie’s poems consider the nature of photos themselves, a holding place where the dead can meet the living.
Can it be true? That every memory that solidifies into an
image becomes a grave?
A photograph is no place to keep the dead.
They peer back at us from their positions and see, anchored
in our eyes, a way out.
Herein lies Xie’s thesis: the ruptures allude to a break in dimension between the dead and the living, akin to a photograph. “One day, she’d leave her youngest / with a lesson on how to lie still / and exit the body,” she notes, “All those years, the dead were just giving / you lessons on how to listen” (“1977 Stereoscope”). The prevalence of ruptures throughout the poems reflects the prevalence of the dead signaling to the living. Xie apprehends two distinct signals.
The first, located in “Reaching Saturation” and following a series of haunting couplets, she notes that “What is encoded in red lines / is a collective debt paid.” The dead have surrendered to the living generation the priceless offering of life, of stories born from suffering and sacrifice. Their stories, like Zhengsheng’s photographs, remain in oblivion for their benefactors, today’s youth unaware of the protests of the youth of the past; who do not possess “a shared sense of how to exhaust history in ourselves” (“Expenditures”). Her poem “Deep Storage,” riddled with literal gaps, simulates corrupted storage but also the elliptical blanks in memory, as well as the limitations of language. Each blank occludes, if not a word, a space for a word that does not exist. “If there’s an afterlife, she’s borrowing language from it.” Therein lies, for Xie, the second signal, a new language.
The speaker appraises herself with her current available language and discovers “I’m more verb than subject” (“Misconjugate”). This raises the question: what do we do in light of who we are? And how do we arrive at who we are presently without a collective sense of the past? If we can’t answer this, we compromise or erase ourselves altogether. The remedy is in saying the unsayable, piercing the limitation that even a camera lens couldn’t negotiate, the dare Xie issues: “What stays in you is a sanctioned secret. What ends in you ends. / In time you’ll grow into a silence so clean, it’ll feel like being emptied” (“The Game”). Instead, she resists both the silence and the limitations of speaking. “Post-Memory” conveys the balance between:
Struggles we had
a name for and those
for which we didn’t.
…Occasionally we
were released
from one
struggle though
we didn’t
detect it.
Shannon Nakai is a poet and reviewer whose work has appeared in The Los Angeles Review, Cincinnati Review, Tupelo Quarterly, Atlanta Review, Cream City Review, Heavy Feather, Cimarron Review, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and elsewhere. A former Fulbright recipient and Pushcart Prize nominee, she holds an MFA from Wichita State University, where she teaches creative writing and literature. Follow her on Twitter @shanviolinlove.