I first came across Monica Youn’s work when she read from her latest book From From at the AWP convention held in Seattle earlier this year. It was one of the essays from the last section of the book “In the Passive Voice” which is a series of personal essays that deals the subject of race and the poet’s experience of it. In this instance, she is encountering a white man who is looking at her and smiling creepily while pretend-shooting at her with sound effect—
A black guy pulls up on his bike, starts locking it up.
He is extremely buff, wearing professional looking cycling gear.
I position myself next to him.
We don’t want this racist shit in our neighbourhood!” I yell.
“Right?” I prompt the cyclist, “Um, yeah...Right.” (122)
I was immediately drawn in. The hesitation in the voice of this guy is the place where the real stakes of the book are. One assumes that minorities should stand in solidarity (that is the obvious outcome in one’s head in a situation like this) but reality is much more nuanced than that. This instance in the essay also reminded me of a section from Cathy Park Hong’s book Minor Feelings (which I had just finished reading around then) where she laid out the various statistical differences in the social and economic status of the many minorities that call America their home and how that plays out within these communities and their relationship to each other in real life.
In this instance though, the very honesty and vulnerability in the speaker’s plea for solidarity activates the reader to the possibilities and impossibilities of the situation that is unfolding. It immediately makes the reader think What would I have done in that situation? Therein lies the power of Youn’s narration.
In the first poem of the book, she states what is going to be enacted in the poems that follow.
One figure is female, the other is male.
Both are contained.
One figure is mythical, the other historical.
They occupy different millennia, different continents.
But both figures are considered Asian—one from Colchis, one from Korea.
To mention the Asianness of the figures creates a “racial marker” in the poem.
This means that the poem can no longer pass as a White poem, that different people can be expected to read the poem, that they can be expected to read the poem in different ways. (3)
Upon a close reading of the book, one realises that the narrative could have very well started in the last section or any of the other sections as all of them are replete with the same attributes in most if not all the poems in the book—the doublespeak behind what is said (sometimes for the purposes of portrayal) and what is held back (that what is truly meant). In that way, there is a constant callback from one section to the others that one gets to witness in the book.
Through a collage of poems and essays, Youn explores race with the themes of containment, desire and micro-otherness that any immigrant in a vastly multi-racial country will experience. The speaker shows how the othering is not only by the majority but also by different minorities. Some poems also point at the otherness experienced in one’s own race when the homeland is shared by the violent majority. She unpacks this disillusionment with great care and thought, using parables from the Greek mythology to first show how everything is driven by a desire to be seen and wanted, and the pitfalls when those needs are not met or when they are extreme. This section mimics the doubleness of the book’s title with the Study of Two Figures in the section called “Asia Minor” which talks about being contained in geographic locations, rice chests, bull statues, boons and curses, faith, one’s own desires and the effect of that desiring. This section also raises the question—what is the consequence of not containing? The gaze here, is a constant reminder that there are different vantage points, and the mirror is cracked so that one sees different reflections based on where one stands.
Youn also talks about the present pervasion of racial markers through what the white people understand of Asianness i.e. the eyes, the hair, the exotic dancer, eastern mysticism, all of which then chips off from a multi-layered identity limiting the possibility to see something of value beyond this reduced version. She focuses on the subcategories within one continental identity i.e. Korean, Japanese, Chinese and unpacks the similarities and dissimilarities therein to uncover how containment of a race in a single narrative is impossible. Here again, I felt that this book could very well be in conversation with Minor Feelings (by Cathy Park Hong) which also deals with the subcategories of Asian American identity and what that means for the parties involved in the long run.
“Deracinations” is one such section where this is seen playing out while the speaker is coming of age in a highly racialised environment. Here, one gets to see a different kind of doubleness in play as the speaker is clearly steeped in American culture as is shown by the reading of curious George books, her mother having to coax her to watch K-dramas, her mother admonishing—
...And did you inform that idiot
you’re not Chinese, you’re Korean?
—No, Ma, I didn’t get a chance.
The mother turned back to the sink,
the dishes. And don’t talk
like a know-nothing American kid:
it’s not Karate. It’s tae kwon do. (28)
There is almost a push and pull happening here where the mother desires her daughter to be more Korean (suggesting that she sees her as more American) whereas her peers in other settings outside the home see her more as an Asian (yet still blatantly unaware of the accuracy of that Asianness). The speaker is then always contending with these double identities.
In “Installation”, a poem in conversation with Asad Raza’s “Root Sequence, Mother Tongue (2017)” she invokes a feeling of alienation with the images of a false sun, and lines like “Dawn is a rouged irrelevance to the east” and “Each of us subsists on a cubic yard of Miracle-Gro” (49) which in a straightforward way points towards the illusion of a prosperous America as the false sun, and Asia being the land of the rising sun. On the other hand these lines also point towards ancestry and the sturdiness of life that one can grow anywhere, even in alienation and containment as long as one knows one’s root sequence. Youn interplays between art, mythology, culture and life experiences to make sense of or state facts and happenings around her. One may not always come away with a resolution while reading certain pieces in the book but the tools are all placed in the text for the reader to make their meaning.
One of the most powerful sections of the book is “The Magpies” that draws jarring images of hate that slowly converts into violence, drawing the string between thought and action. Youn explores these parables attached to the Magpies in East Asian cultures where it is considered a harbinger of good news (from Notes) and the West where it is seen as a thief and a harbinger of bad luck automatically making it a metaphor for the immigrant identity.
Youn’s mastery lies in how considered the titles in the book (section titles included) are and how they play an important part where they expertly attach another layer of meaning on the poems in that section. Do people from Asia Minor look like what an average American considers Asian? What is the effect of the narrator placing racial markers and racialised incidents in a section called “Deracinations”? Even the later sections are arranged in a way that the reader can easily draw parallels between the magpies and the speaker with a passive voice.
The poems in this collection are incisive and highly charged with personal and political detail, such that once in, the reader cannot walk away without contending with what is at stake on a daily basis. Youn poignantly outlines the racialised sense of being, that one cannot escape while living in America. And it is this baring that makes this book a must-read. She does not tell us what to think or how to feel but ends exactly where the narrative had started in the book, again pointing to the circularity of the situation, always ending where one started no matter the sacrifices to forge a different path, but she hopes and leaves us in that opening—
There was never a chink in the rice chest.
No one could see into the rice chest.
There is a “you” in the poem.
You are a member of the English-speaking audience.
I let you see into the box, into what is private, into what is foreign, into what is inscrutable, into what has been buried.
I am the chink in the box. (139)
Aditi Bhattacharjee is an Indian writer currently based in New York. Her work has appeared in Alipore Post, Gone Lawn, Lunch Ticket Magazine, Sky Island Journal, Evocations Review and elsewhere. Most recently, her poems have received Honorable Mention for the Paul Violi Prize, nominated for Best New Poets, Best of the Net and shortlisted for The Prose Poem’s Spring Short Prize. She is a TIN House alum and holds an MFA from The New School. You can find more of her work at aditibhattacharjee.com