While waiting on Souvankham Thammavongsa's Cluster to come in, I had a chance to borrow three of her earlier poetry collections - Small Arguments, Found and Light. All three are on the Pedlar Press imprint. They all have the same characteristics of being undersized volumes with truly tiny print. These are not books you want to read if you have any trouble with your eyesight! Surely for the worse, I found that the physical characteristics of the books carried over and found the poems pretty underwhelming. That said, I did reread them all a second time and found a few poems I liked, particularly from Small Arguments.
There are a few features that carry over into all books. She often returns to the imagery of bones, even when discussing butterflies! Souvankham learned English as a second language, and she frequently focuses in on the odd features of language (that native speakers often overlook). So for instance, she comments on the way that joule and jewel sound identical, and bear/bare. In some cases, her investigation broadens to other languages, so in the collection Light, she considers the Arabic word for light (noor) and how it is made up of circles (only in English transliteration of course) or the way you can almost "lick" the Dutch word for light (licht). She does the same with a handful of Lao words and expressions. Still, a little of this goes a long way, and most of the poems didn't go much deeper than these somewhat shallow observations.
I wanted to like Found more than I actually did. The concept is that she found a scrapbook belonging to her father from the time when they were living in a refugee camp in Thailand, and she is examining different aspects of the scrapbook in the poems. So a few poems look at the stamps he had saved (from different responses to his appeals to refugee resettlement agencies). There was only one US stamp, a 31 cent airmail stamp. What's a bit radical is that she represents the underlining of key addresses and the crossing out of months with different diagonal lines. In fact there are seven "poems" that are nothing but a calendar month and a single diagonal line on the page. And then 3 blank pages for the 3 months that followed. In this sense, it functions as an interesting representation of the scrapbook, but doesn't succeed particularly well as poetry. (I should note that there are more conventional poems in the volume, but they didn't really stand out for me.) It may not come as a complete surprise, but Found was made into a short film about the scrapbook, and presumably the broader experience of coming as a refugee from Laos to Thailand thence to Canada. It's possible that I would appreciate the film more than the poems, but without seeing it, it is hard to say.
Small Arguments starts out with a somewhat typical introduction (at least in the immigrant literature vein) in that Souvankham's life was completely changed by learning English. In "Materials" she writes "Growing up, I / did not have books // The only reading material / there was / were old newspapers laid out / on the floor / to dry / our winter boots". Then "When I learned to read, / the winter boots / lay dripping in the hallway; / ... / because I knew this / this // would be my way in".
There really is not much else related to the immigrant experience in Small Arguments. There is naturally more in Found and flashes of it in Light. Instead, the poems focus on small domestic things, like still lifes (individual pieces of fruit) or different types of insects. Things that are indeed small and seemingly (though not actually insignificant). Whether this is related to the instincts of an immigrant to not draw attention to him- or herself is not entirely clear.
She brings up an interesting insight in "A Coconut" that in order to get at the good parts ("To discover / what it keeps // from you") one must use violence to force one's way inside. She also personifies snow and finds that it also has a hard-knock life. "The Snow / tries so hard / to be like the rain // It will fall / into the same places / ... {but} everything in this world / is against it / even the sun."
In a bit of a twist, when I got to Light, I preferred the poems that were less about the immigrant condition ("Perfect" is a good example of trying hard to be the perfect model minority immigrant, however) and those that were a bit more universal, such as "I Remember." In "I Remember" Souvankham discusses quite a few things that seem quite comparable to my childhood. "I remember Hopscotch and roller skates / ... / I remember burying pennies in the ground, thinking they'd grow into trees just because I was told they didn't. ... / ... / I remember dissecting a white rat. .../ ... / I remember riding the bus for fifty cents." Actually, in more and more high school biology classes, they are doing away with dissecting of actual animals and moving towards computer simulations. I can just sort of see the other side of the debate (that this is imposing our dominance over animals for no particularly good reason), but in general, I think this is doing a disservice to students. There's nothing quite like the real thing when studying biology. At any rate, this is something I also remember, but my children may not experience. I suppose I'll find out in another year or so. Souvankham doesn't really get into the morality of experimenting on animals in the poem.
Speaking of morality and how what is "acceptable" changes over time, Souvankham was able to write unironically about her love of Michael Jackson in "Paris, 1:00 AM" but she probably could not do so today (after the release of Leaving Neverland). She hears someone singing Man in the Mirror and "It makes me think of / a Michael Jackson button I had in Grade Two // I hid it in my coat pocket / and took it out to kiss it whenever / no one was looking // After some time / his face began to disappear // My mother always said / never to love a thing too much". Prophetic words indeed. At any rate, for pretty much any Gen Xer growing up in North America (and likely the UK as well), Michael Jackson is part of your teen years, and knowing just how much a creep he really was is not going to change how deeply his music is embedded in your consciousness. It's definitely a tricky balancing act, trying not to ignore how much he once meant versus not wanting to celebrate him any longer.
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