House A
Poetry
Omnidawn, 2016
$17.95, 128 pages ISBN: 978-1-63243-023-6
In Jennifer S. Cheng’s House A, the poet explores the idea of “house” in all the ways it shows up (and is absent, and recaptured) in her life, as a child living and then fleeing with her family during China’s Cultural Revolution. In a new country, Cheng deconstructs, makes sense of, and builds notions of “house” anew through memory, math, architecture and philosophy.
The first section of the book, Letters to Mao, is a collection of letters written to Mao Zedong by the narrator, as both a precocious child and as an adult casting a backward glance. The letters are poetic and imaginative, exploring large questions of history, language, culture, place and displacement. They are also grounded in intimate notings of the quotidian (patterns in the linoleum, her mother’s lullabies, a wasp nest her father invited in). Eventually, a growing awareness of the Cultural Revolution takes hold, such as when the narrator overhears,
my uncle as a twenty-year-old in prison, whispering, only it wasn’t
a whisper but a drunken fury, They’re trading children, do you understand?
Throughout the letters to Mao meander her ruminations on water as a carrier of meaning. These ubiquitous and enveloping streams and bodies of water give the reader a sense of the unformed, the embryonic, a substance that can hold or become anything:
I hope you understand that what I am trying to do is give you a history
of water, which, like memory or sleep, is fluid and wafting in refracted
light. History as water, so that I am giving you something that spreads.
In the haunting second section, House A; Geometry B, we follow the narrator’s wayfinding to and through the lost and imagined “house.” Throughout these pages, Cheng cites French philosopher Gaston Bachelard, whose book, The Poetics of Space, contemplates architecture: its groundwork in art and architecture theory infuse the inquiries of this section. Here, Cheng asks a number of questions, employing the quantitative – algebra, geometry and topology – as frames for understanding and defining. The motifs of water and sleep remain, even as they become attached to a quantitative lexicon: “a heptagon is water, a / nonagon is sleep.” This is also an embodied geometry:
for the house is physically inscribed on
our bodies; a diagram of the function of the functions of
inhabiting the house.
The attachment of house to body is explored through other ideas, as well, such as the notion that “a house is a map we unfold carefully, lest / our breath is caught in the center ridge.” Occupying a geometric space that may be charted, but is still fluid with memory, the narrator gathers new information through tests and experiments:
if we suspend a weather system inside a
hallway, its longing the shape of the
smallest hour.
These lyrical findings help the narrator integrate the many parts of her journey. We hear her address them: “dear house, dear ocean, dear triangle of / suspended light” and ultimately land on a knowledge that “we build a house to locate ourselves.”
Throughout the third section, How to Build an American Home, Cheng addresses displacement and efforts at integration, employing archival diagrams and photographs that speak alongside her words, creating new layers of meaning. We learn about the experience that “children of immigrants / take their house wherever they go” and
children of immigrants gather bits
of wire, thread, a safety pin; they arrange them like a blueprint, not knowing
why or how they know the shape.
That experience turns to language in the new country, with shifts in lexicon, mistranslations, rhythm and dissonance felt in the body. When the father speaks foreign words, they are “something that bleeds in a sink full of water.” Hearing someone else speak, she feels “the vibration of / my own body 8: bone language.”
This book is incredibly evocative for any reader who carries their own preoccupations around “house,” migration, dislocation and identity (and that’s a great many of us). Cheng’s craft is exquisite. The book has a singing arc, and at the same time each section and each stanza are resonant on the line and word level. This achieves an intimacy that balances the enormity of the subjects of ocean-crossing, history, memory and the self at the core of all this. Ultimately, it is the searching language in this poetry that, looking to locate and shelter the self, holds the reader in much the same way a house and its unseen dimensions do.