The discipline of Comparative Literature is based on the assumption that the study of single texts and cultures is enriched by a knowledge of the texts and cultures surrounding them. It views literature from a broad and inclusive perspective in which philosophy, anthropology, history, language, and literary theory come together, and where the visual arts, theatre, and modern media suggest crucial comparisons. This journal aspires to embody those ideas.
Brio is a student-founded publication that combines literary criticism with fictive works and visual art. In an effort to represent the wide spectrum of discourses that serve as the foundation of comparative study, the journal accepts submissions from any source and in any language.
CONTENTS
A Note From the Editor
Faculty Spotlight: Professor Laura Torres-Rodríguez
All The Things We’ve Lost in Translation by Christhalia Wiloto
Two Poems by Beth Sattur
Prelude, Body, Outro by Christina Manubag
Imagine by Rachel Gilman
Two Poems by Gabriella Mayer
by Anastasia Damaskou
Three Poems by Jackie Yang
Scenes of Instruction and Contradiction in Henry James’ “The Jolly Corner” by John Lincoln
Poem Collection; Lucky Flow by Greg Drozdek
Shiu by Cindy Sharra
and Q&A by Ai Xin Liew
Amor by Adam Simon
Three Poems by Jenny Choi
Above image by Beth Sattur
Dear Brio readers,
A Note From the Editor-in-Chief
Literature has long been a way of coping with the world, an art form that gives power to those who might feel they have none. Literature can also be seen as a release from the more mundane aspects of daily life, which is perhaps the way that many of us are used to interacting with it. Given our current political and cultural climate, and the basic tenets of comparative literature as a discipline, however, the Brio editors were interested in exploring the abilities of literature to function as resistance; whether that be in a political, social, cultural, or otherwise undefined context.
We believe the pieces we selected for publication in this issue carry with them a spirit of defiance at some level, even if it’s not obvious at first. With certain institutions no longer appearing as the bastions of righteousness that they were before, vehicles for change and self-expression are becoming increasingly harder to come by. Despite this, we believe in the abilities of literature, especially comparative literature, to fill this gap, as it has in the past and will continue to do in the future.
We hope you enjoy our fall issue of the journal, and perhaps even feel inspired to discover your own creative voice, whatever that may be.
Warmly,
Libby Torres Editor-in-Chief
FACULTY SPOTLIGHT
An interview with Professor Laura Torres-Rodríguez, Assistant Professor in the NYU Spanish and Portuguese Languages and Literatures department.
In addition to her duties as a professor, Torres-Rodríguez recently finished a book entitled “Orientaciones transpacíficas: la modernidad mexicana y el espectro de Asia” (in English: “Trans-Pacific Orientations: Mexican Modernity and the Specter of Asia”).
Torres-Rodríguez is originally from Puerto Rico and received her Ph.D and M.A. in Hispanic Studies from the University of Pennsylvania, after attending the University of Puerto Rico. Her areas of interest and research include Mexican literature and culture, Orientalism and postcolonial theory, and Marxism in Latin America and Asia.
The below interview was originally conducted in Spanish. An English translation follows the original.
¿Crees que literatura y teoría puede actuar como una manera de resistencia contra retórica odioso? ¿Dónde se puede ubicar literatura (y en general, el arte) en la lucha política y cultural hoy en día, especialmente en los estados unidos?
Definitivamente, creo que la literatura y el arte pueden resistir las retóricas de odio en cuanto entendemos estas prácticas en su capacidad teórica. No se trata de pensar la literatura y el arte como espacios autónomos o separados del mundo de lo social, sino como dimensiones que le son contiguas, prácticas que reordenan activamente las formas de la imaginación social y colectiva. Esto no significa que el arte y la literatura estén exentos de por sí de retóricas de odio. Creo que parte de la importancia de construir colectivos de lectura en torno a distintos artefactos artístico, sobre todo en el espacio universitario que nos concierne, es la de generar un entrenamiento que nos permita discernir con cierto rigor las estrategias estéticas y discursivas implícitas en diversas declaraciones culturales. El salón de clase permite construir en grupo nuevas capacidades de inteligibilidad y respuestas creativas. Estos espacios pueden prepararnos mejor para responder a la manipulación discursiva y afectiva, a las políticas del miedo y a la pobreza de imaginación implícita en los discursos que mencionas.
En cuanto al papel del arte y la literatura en el panorama cultural actual, creo que lo que hemos aprendido es que es necesario ampliar nuestra noción de lo literario y lo artístico y privilegiar la dimensión colectiva que subyace a todo acto creativo. El ejemplo más inmediato y tal vez más trillado, aunque no por esto menos efectivo, es el de las consignas que están circulando por las nuevas plataformas mediáticas. Por ejemplo, los hashtags son configuraciones del lenguaje que deben ser consideradas en su capacidad literaria y teórica. Desde Black Lives Matter en los Estados Unidos, pasando por Ni Una Menos en Argentina y México hasta Se
Acabaron las Promesas en Puerto Rico, éstas son declaraciones que ofrecen y forman nuevas escenas de lectura de la realidad social en su dimensión histórica, política y estética. Estas frases, a pesar de su extrema economía lingüística, contienen una densidad y una complejidad teórica significativa.
En tu opinión, ¿cuán importante es un conocimiento de la teoría (Marxista, socialista, feminista, etc.) para los movimientos sociales y políticos hoy en los Estados Unidos?
Creo que uno de los problemas del panorama educativo neoliberal es una tendencia general a suprimir y borrar las tradiciones políticas y las alternativas económicas y de organización colectiva que precedieron su implementación. Con esto, se tiende a naturalizar la lógica neoliberal. En este sentido, movimientos como Occupy fueron y han sido fundamentales en los Estados Unidos al organizar espacios de educación política, teórica y estética colectivos fuera de las instituciones educativas formales. Creo que el derecho a recibir y a acceder a una educación política, teórica y estética plural es fundamental para la juventud; no para ser adoctrinados en una narrativa específica, sino precisamente para poder pensar alternativas que les hagan justicia a los contextos contemporáneos. Como dice la escritora Cristina Rivera Garza, habitar el presente es una tarea, un trabajo, que implica un compromiso con procesar los legados que nos preceden y con los que hemos contraído una deuda impagable.
¿Crees que ya ha habido ejemplos de la literatura y el arte que han funcionado como un forma de resistencia? Si ha habido, ¿dónde y cuándo? ¿Puede los estados unidos seguir estos ejemplos?
Voy a tratar de abordar tu gran pregunta de forma acotada. Una de mis metas de enseñanza es la problematización de las nociones de centro-periferia que continúan informando, a veces de forma indirecta, la enseñanza de la cultura y la literatura latinoamericana en los Estados Unidos. Como especialista en estudios mexicanos, creo que la retórica actual en los Estados Unidos en torno a México, por ejemplo, proviene, entre otros factores, de la profunda ignorancia que se tiene sobre la historia y la cultura del vecino latinoamericano más cercano. Me parece que las Américas comparten una historia común con múltiples continuidades que sigue estando muy oscurecida por las divisiones nacionales y lingüísticas, aunque existen múltiples movimientos e instancias de vinculación.
Actualmente en Estados Unidos se está haciendo más claro la importancia de construir un discurso crítico y estético en torno a la memoria histórica que enraícen los movimientos de resistencia actuales. América Latina tiene una larga tradición artística de suma sofisticación que concierne una teorización de la memoria y la fenomenología de la percepción temporal e histórica para interrumpir una práctica de recepción pasiva de los relatos históricos oficiales. Pienso en novelas como Pedro Páramo de Juan Rulfo o Amuleto de Roberto Bolaño o los
experimentos en la ficción documental como Nostalgia de la luz de Patricio Guzmán. En estos se insiste en la dimensión material y efectiva de la memoria, al presentar una visión del presente que está sedimentada por las voces y los cuerpos de los que ya no están o han sido desposeídos o desplazados por procesos y modelos de desarrollo que continúan en marcha.
Finalmente, si estás trabajando en un libro o proyecto, ¿podrías describirlo para nosotros?
Acabo de terminar un libro titulado Orientaciones transpacíficas: la modernidad mexicana y el espectro de Asia Como puertorriqueña al fin, siempre me ha interesado la historia contada desde geografías y ecosistemas que se perciben como marginales a los relatos centrales de construcción nacional o continental. Este para mí es el caso del océano pacífico en las historias culturales latinoamericanas. Debido a que América Latina ha estado, debido a su condición postcolonial, orientada mayoritariamente hacia el Atlántico y Europa, se ha tendido a descuidar en los estudios críticos sobre la región la importancia geográfica, estética y cultural del circuito marítimo transpacífico que vincula materialmente a nuestro continente con Asia. Por ejemplo, México, durante el periodo colonial, ocupa un lugar fundamental en la creación de una red comercial-imperial en el Pacífico a través de la ruta entre Acapulco y las Filipinas. Sin embargo, durante el siglo XX, este vínculo directo de siglos es parcialmente olvidado; el Pacífico a pesar de su materialidad parecería desaparecer como referente cultural e histórico. El libro mencionado explora las formas diversas en que Asia reaparece durante el siglo XX en obras canónicas de la tradición intelectual, artística y literaria mexicana para recuperar su innegable importancia en los discursos centrales del latinoamericanismo.
Do you believe that literature and theory can act as forms of resistance against hateful rhetoric? What is literature’s place (and art in general) in the political and cultural war that is taking place now, especially in the United States?
Definitely, I believe that literature and art can resist hateful rhetoric insofar as we understand these practices in their theoretical capacity. It is not a matter of thinking of literature and art as spaces that are autonomous or separated from society, but as dimensions that are contiguous with it, practices that actively reorder the forms of social and collective imagination. This does not mean that art and literature as such are exempt from hateful rhetoric. I think part of the importance of constructing reading groups around different artistic artifacts, especially in the university, is to generate a type of training that allows us to discern with true rigor the aesthetic and discursive strategies implicit in various cultural declarations. The classroom can thus collectively build new capacities of intelligibility and creative responses. These spaces can better prepare us to respond to discursive and affective manipulation, to the politics of fear and poverty of imagination implicit in the kind of discourse you yourself mention.
As for the role of art and literature in today’s cultural climate, I think that what we’ve learned is that it is necessary to broaden our notion of the literary and the artistic and privilege the collective element underlying all creative acts. The most immediate and perhaps trite example, although no less effective for that matter, is that of political hashtags, particularly ones that are currently circulating through new media platforms. For example, hashtags are configurations of language that should be considered in their literary and theoretical capacity. From Black Lives Matter in the United States, through Ni Una Menos in Argentina and Mexico to Se Acabaron las Promesas in Puerto Rico, these are declarations that offer and form new scenes of reading our social reality in its historical, political, and aesthetic dimensions. These phrases, despite their extreme linguistic economy, contain a dense and complex theoretical significance.
In your opinion, how important is a familiarity with theory (Marxist, socialist, feminist, etc.) for current social and political movements in the United States?
I think one of the problems of the neoliberal educational program is the general tendency to suppress and erase the political traditions and alternative economic, as well as collective, organizations that preceded its implementation. With this, there is a tendency to naturalize neoliberal logic. In this sense, movements like Occupy were and have been fundamental in the United States in organizing collective spaces for political, theoretical, and aesthetic education outside of formal educational institutions. I believe that the right to receive and access a diverse political, theoretical, and aesthetic education is fundamental for today’s youth; not to be indoctrinated with a specific narrative, but precisely to be able to think of alternatives that do justice to contemporary situations. As the writer Cristina Rivera Garza says, to inhabit the present is a task, a job, which implies a commitment to process the legacies that precede us and those with which we have accumulated an unpayable debt.
Do you think there have already been examples of literature and art that have worked as a form of resistance? If so, where and when? Can the United States follow these examples?
I will try to address your big question in a concise way. One of my teaching goals is the problematization of center-periphery notions that continue to inform, sometimes indirectly, the teaching of Latin American culture and literature in the United States. As a specialist in Mexican studies, I believe that the current rhetoric in the United States around Mexico, for example, comes, among other factors, from a profound ignorance regarding the history and culture of our closest Latin American neighbor. It seems to me that the Americas share a common history, with multiple continuities, that is still very obscured by national and linguistic divisions, despite there being a multiplicity of movements and instances of connection.
Currently in the United States, the importance of constructing a critical and aesthetic discourse around historical memory, one that may bolster current resistance movements, is becoming clearer. Latin America has a long artistic tradition of great sophistication that concerns a theorization of memory and the phenomenology of temporal and historical perception and which allows for an interruption of the passive reception of official historical accounts. I think of novels like “Pedro Páramo” by Juan Rulfo or “Amuleto” by Roberto Bolaño or experiments in documentary fiction like “Nostalgia de la luz” by Patricio Guzmán. These insist on the material and effective dimension of memory, presenting a vision of the present that is sedimented by the voices and bodies of those who are no longer here or who have been dispossessed or displaced by ongoing processes and models of development.
Finally, if you are working on a book or another project, could you describe it to us?
I just finished a book titled “Orientaciones transpacíficas: la modernidad mexicana y el espectro de Asia” (in English: “Trans-Pacific Orientations: Mexican Modernity and the Specter of Asia”). As a Puerto Rican, I have always been interested in history told from geographies and ecosystems that are perceived as marginal to central narratives of national or continental construction. This for me is the case of the Pacific Ocean in the cultural history of Latin America. Because Latin America has been, due to its postcolonial condition, mainly oriented towards the Atlantic and Europe, it has tended to neglect, in critical studies about the region, the geographical, aesthetic, and cultural importance of the Trans-Pacific maritime circuit that materially links our continent with Asia. For example, Mexico, during the colonial period, occupies a fundamental place in the creation of a commercial-imperial network in the Pacific through the route between Acapulco and the Philippines.
However, during the twentieth century, this centuries-old direct link is partially forgotten; the Pacific despite its materiality appears to disappear as a cultural and historical reference. The aforementioned book explores the diverse forms in which Asia reappears during the twentieth century in canonical works in the Mexican intellectual, artistic, and literary tradition to recover its undeniable importance in the central discourses of Latin-Americanism.
All the Things We've Lost in Translation
By Christhalia Wiloto
One moment you’re sitting on a couch somewhere in Jakarta, listening to the soft hum of the air conditioner. The next, you’re in Saigon, making your way through a street in war-torn 1960s Vietnam. Or perhaps, watching the sun rise and fall through a small window from a prison somewhere in French-colonized Algeria. Stories have the ability to take us to places where we have never been, to see sights that we have never seen; they give us access to the foreign and strange and familiar, however brief and fleeting.
Ultimately, literature tells us about how people lived. It tells us about what people have cried about, what they have lost, how people wake up in the morning and make their coffee, and how the moon looks before they fall asleep. It tells us about how things fall apart, and how people fall in love. It may even remind us of emotions that we too have felt, whether it be something that we vaguely remember feeling at some time and some place, or something that comes to us with such an intensity that it washes over us and consumes us.
But language is a fickle thing and oftentimes words betray meaning. It’s even more difficult when you’re reading works in translation, where it’s easy for meaning to get lost in the chaos altogether. I recall a time when I was younger, assigned to read an Indonesian translation of Hemingway's “The Snows of Kilimanjaro.” Having been raised abroad, I struggled with the language, and these words felt foreign to me.
In my difficulties to comprehend the Indonesian, I picked up the story in its original English, desperate for some understanding. This was where I had my first encounter with literature being lost in translation. The short story in its original English spoke of a waterbuck, a creature that did not make an appearance in the Indonesian translation. Confused, I traced through each line, carefully paying attention to each word until finally I had found something: bebek air, a water duck.
And yet, these kinds of mistakes are not truly what is lost in translation. While unfortunate, this was just a small, careless mistake. The heartbreaking realization of all the things we may have lost in translation came years later, through a reading of Albert Camus’ L’Étranger in its English translation. In an article for The New Yorker, Ryan Bloom dissects the infamous opening line by the eponymous narrator, “Aujourd’hui, maman est morte.” It’s a short sentence, apparently simple. For years, many translators in many versions of the novel have used the same opening line: “Mother died today.” Simple, but incorrect. Bloom explains that within the novel’s first sentence, these seemingly minor translation decisions have the power to change the way that readers read and perceive everything that follows.
Bloom writes in his article: “There is little warmth, little bond or closeness or love in ‘Mother,’ which is a static, archetypal term, not the sort of thing we use for a living, breathing being with whom we have close relations. To do so would be like calling the family dog ‘Dog’
or a husband ‘Husband.’ The word forces us to see Meursault [the main character] as distant from the woman who bore him […] We condemn or set him free based not on the crime he commits but on our assessment of him as a person. Does he love his mother? Or is he cold toward her, uncaring, even?” It wasn’t until 1988 that a translator changed a single word, altering the line to “Maman died today.” Keeping the French two-syllable word maman suggests a touch of softness and warmth that allows the translator to better avoid changing the intended characterization and influencing the reader, he explains.
Many consider translation to be an easy task, that any bilingual writer will have the ability to bring a literary piece to life in another language. However, literary translation shouldn’t be done word for word, and translators are not merely invisible and passive mediums through which poetry and prose may pass from one language to the other. There’s an art to translation, the awareness and caution of literary devices and context, an active exploration of the author’s mind and the world around them, as well as their intentions. These are things that many Indonesian publishers do not seem to understand, or if they do, do not seem to care for.
Despite these reservations, I continue to read and explore Indonesian literature. I fell in love with Eka Kurniawan’s dark humor, his refreshingly blunt take on Indonesia’s past; a past that I would have never known or come to understand had his work, Beauty is a Wound, not been translated into English with such thought and concern. My heart ached with Sapardi Djoko Damono’s simplicity, and the way that his poem, “I Want”, had the ability to convey in written words these emotions that I had found so familiar.
Through these translated works, I found myself rediscovering a nation and a place that I have called home for so long, but have never quite understood. While there hasn’t been nearly enough, there are some beautifully translated Indonesian works that translators have crafted with thought and care. I’d like to think that they are now being slowly passed along from country to country, from hand to hand.
It pains me to know that I have fallen in love with words without ever knowing what the writer had meant to say in their original tongue. But maybe that’s okay. Maybe this gap in knowledge and understanding is a price that we have to pay to be able to get a small taste of what life is like beyond what we already know. And perhaps that is how things are meant to be, as long as in our translations we keep trying our best to preserve meaning so that these messages and wisdom can be passed down to the next generation of thinkers and poets and lovers, and the next.
One day, I’ll be able to pick up a book in a bookstore somewhere in New York, or Shanghai, or Buenos Aires and read about how Indonesians lived. I’ll read about what Indonesians have cried about, what they have lost. How Indonesians wake up in the morning and make their coffee, and how the moon looks to them before they fall asleep. I will read about how things fell apart there, and how the people there have fallen in love. It may even remind me of emotions that I have felt, whether it be something that I vaguely remember feeling at some time
and some place, or something that comes to me with such an intensity that it washes over me and consumes me.
And one day, someone from a foreign country somewhere will come to discover these things, and I hope that they too will fall in love with Indonesia.
***
Women
By Beth Sattur
Women
Characterized by fragility, frailty, always something about us to suggest weakness.
What we like; makeup, clothes, romance, frivolous things, something a woman who is an intellectual will never touch, and if a man does he is gay, or a top earner in the field.
A woman, who dares to like what a man does-- a video game, for example-- has to hear death and rape threats if she turns on Xbox live, while boys complain they can never find a girl who loves video games.
Women, we are not frail, we are born screaming in blood, and our growth into womanhood is characterized by the flow of blood, every month until we are too old to create life from our bellies, our wide hips giving way to aging.
Women, every day is a battle, every move we make to avoid men: wear a different top, walk a different route. Say nothing when you're called a bitch, a whore, a slut, when men make vulgar propositions, when they follow you and yell, “You think you can just walk away from me girlie?”, when they sit
in your class in college and roll your eyes and tell you that sexism doesn't exist anymore.
When one, two, three of your friends, men and women both, even your own mother was sexually assaulted, and none of them have received justice, and in most cases they have not even tried.
A woman, told by a friend of the family he’ll spank you if you get married early; then, when he is told it’s creepy, he becomes angry and insists that you’re offended for no reason. This is “welcome to the real world.”
Being a woman is having your best friend incessantly harassed at work by a coworker, and when she told someone and he was fired, she was too afraid to go to the back room, knowing he'd be sitting there, waiting.
Women, birthing every human being that has ever existed, only for our sons to crawl out of our wombs and beat us into submission.
Women, our number one threat is men, yet men look away as the problem continues to
exist in front of them; in their streets, in their homes, in themselves.
Women, earning less than a man in almost every profession, working twice as hard to be thought half as good.
Women, characterized by sweat: of physical labor, of natal labor, of exercise to be thin, yet curvy enough to ensure we are pleasurable.
Women, whose president had double-digit sexual assault accusers and admitted on tape to groping women, who actively promised to defund women’s healthcare.
Women, who are told when we beat a boy at sports that he “let her win” when we are merely eleven.
Women, listening to rape “jokes,” to men discuss how PC culture is ruining America, and how no one has a sense of humor anymore.
Women, who now have a 9-5 job but are still expected to do all the housework and raise the children.
Women who love other women, who fuck other women, are viewed as being an insult to men.
Women who are black, brown, Latina, Asian, but who are only showed in TV as irrationally angry, conservative nerds, sex kittens, or submissive nerds.
Women, who contributed so much to human knowledge while being banned from education, and our contributions still being erased from most textbooks to this day.
Women, whose genitals are mutilated to keep them from experiencing pleasure in sex, lest we cheat on our husbands; baby girls who are killed for the burden of being a girl, or punished by being burdened with the weight of men’s burdens.
Women who are murdered by lovers or rejected suitors, in a “passion crime” as the media says, as the man is handed down a sentence of five years in jail by another man.
Women, who cannot drive or travel without a man’s permission.
Women, who are alternately forced to cover our heads or remove that covering.
Women, who are kidnapped and sold to men for sex and physical labor every day, every country.
Women, who are abused in every way by men, denied opportunities by men, put down by men, invalidated by men, hurt by men.
Women who don't want feminism, who insist that we aren't “victims,” that their individual lives are just fine, thank you very much. Women, who attack other women for being whores and stay with their cheating husband, who say the other woman is a slut because of how she dresses, that this
individual woman sporting a low-cut top has caused the downfall of all womankind.
To Younger Beth
When your middle school friends leave, let them go.
When you think you have a crush on that girl, you do. And that’s okay.
When the teacher mocks you, stand up to her. She only did it because she knew a thirteen-year-old couldn't fight back.
When you want to wear that shirt, do it. When your gym teacher says you can’t wear a tank top because boys will get “hot,” do it anyway.
When your first boyfriend hurts you, tell him he did.
When you have to change in gym class, hold your head up high.
When you have to attend gym class, don't give a shit about what happens.
When you fail your first, your third, your twentieth fencing tournament, let it hurt. Then sign up for the next one.
When it’s your eighth-grade graduation, don't let your “friend” hold your honor cord. She’s going to “accidentally” break it.
Women are not victims, but there is no shame in being one. We are not lesser to admit we have been oppressed. We have endured. We will endure, stronger.
When anyone insults you, use all the venom and power your tongue has. Be angry. Be a bitch.
When you lost your popular friend group in high school, let them go. Don’t continue to sit at their lunch table every day for the next few years.
When you have to attend that rally about how you should never have an abortion (even in cases of rape or incest) stand up on your chair and yell at that woman. Detention is worth it if you saved a girl’s life.
When the administrator makes fun of your ripped jeans, tell her you couldn't afford regular ones ‘cause your Mom was too busy paying the school tuition.
When the same administrator tells your Mom she should’ve ironed your robe at inductions for National Honor Society, tell her your Mom isn't a wind-up maid with a real working vagina.
When you hook up with that girl, don't be afraid of what will happen. Be proud of it.
When you don't get into the Ivies, life will go on.
When you get accepted to NYU but can’t afford it, just go.
When your Calculus teacher fails you for the last marking period of your senior year in high school even though your grandfather died and you had been wishing to join him for the better part of a year, don’t give a fuck. Seriously, no repercussions will come from this.
When you steal the honor stole at graduation, never give it back.
When you wanna fuck him, do it, and fuck the consequences too.
When four guys yell at you at the park for twenty minutes, telling you to “suck my dick, bitch,” and “she definitely hears us, what should we do next,” and you’re scared out of your mind, don't be. You’re something that they could never understand, never touch.
When you need to be right about everything, that’s okay.
When you want to die, don’t.
When men try to tell you what you know, tell them to go fuck themselves.
When someone, or many someones, call you a whore, be proud of it.
When that stranger says he wants to taste you, tell him the next thing he’ll be tasting is blood in his throat.
When Trump wins the election, it’s okay to cry about it. Then give him hell.
When you see a homeless person, give them a dollar, without expecting thanks in return.
When your brother stabs your Mom over Thanksgiving break, it’s okay to go to the mall with your friend. You deserve a normal life.
When your friends inevitably read this poem, they’ll still love you. (Probably.)
When you get the B+, forgive yourself.
When you've asked me, many times, to give you a hug and tell you things will be okay, know this: I can’t hug you. But things will be okay.
Prelude (therapy)
By Christina Manubag
the day i turned twenty, my baby sister took a gun, pushed It to her temple, felt the chill of the metal, pulled the trigger and fell she used to tell me stories how fairies and elves lived in the walls and that’s why mama and papa always tried to tear them down
(i ate the last of the leftover rice in the fridge.)
when i was two uncle kituk took a match and said “give me your hand” i screamed i’ll never forget the smell and the taste of salty fish tears (i’ll make that for dinner.) and i still have the pink lima bean on my palm to prove it
i made my first american friend in the first grade his name was teddy and he had tiny dots all over his face
i’d never seen that before but (walmart: toilet paper, detergent, those cookies that becky likes.)
i don’t believe in facebook so we don’t talk anymore i heard he’s working as a lawyer i always saw him as a writer (the basement’s too fucking cold to sleep in.)
eight years ago my oldest daughter took a gun and put it to her sweet forehead said life was too much, or that it wasn’t enough i don’t remember but then she heard the footsteps of her baby sister
across the hall and she wiped the salty tears off her face and put the gun back into the case back under my wife’s bed and shut the door
(almost forgot- walmart: cold medicine, tissues)
last week my second oldest daughter got a tattoo of a sweet pea for (me? is that for me? because i call you “sweet pea”?
she’s a real idiot sometimes.
you know, doc, this isn’t fucking working out.
i mean, you haven’t said a thing.
fucking thief.
i’m sorry, but you need a new fucking profession.)
Interlude
Raise your head when you place the green and orange pill on your tongue and swallow. I know what you believe, that the faces surrounding you are staring, peering into your mind. Do not mind them; they will soon become faceless entities. I know you are afraid of it, of white powder dusting your blood. Injected serotonin paints your cells white; you feel a change of mind. Thoughts become beige and tears skin-colored nothings. Elation floods your veins and it is thick, sweet, white chocolate butter. Do not mind it.
When you were two, your father swore that he had never heard a louder cry. You cried cacophonic tones enough to lose two octaves of your voice. Eyelids red and thin and swollen, you cried that the slide was too tall, the children too mean, the sun too bright. You cried enough to numb your father’s ears and your mother’s heart when she refused to hold your small body.
When you walk home to the same boy for the nineteenth month in a row, make sure to take your time. Feel the sweat on his hand as it grazes your neck, and let the tears seep into your cheeks when he boards the plane. You feel smaller now, but please, do not believe your voice when it says he completed you. When you touch the thick skin around your stomach, thighs, breasts, cheeks, know that his scent will wash away within a month.
At eight years old, you felt a profound, inexplicable tingling in your chest for the first time. It did not hurt, yet you tried to maneuver your small hand under your ribcage and sever your gushing aorta from its cavity. Every now and again, the sensation returns. Sometimes for weeks, sometimes months. I know how real it feels, the burning, the churning in your chest. Tears adorning your face and a rusty razor in your left hand, do not be afraid to lie, to overcompensate for what you are about to do. Say it. Materialize the words.
“You is kind, You is smart, You is important.” Just like Minny Jackson would say. She was a colored woman, but not in the same way that you are. She felt colored the way that slaves feel the nerveless, smooth scars etched across their backs. You feel colored the way that a drag queen feels the tacky, beige foundation plastered onto her skin. You still don’t know how to understand what it is that you understand about the differences between your lives. Do not feel too guilty.
Learn to love your name, [mʌnúbʌg]. The guttural [g], stress on the [u], voiced bilabial nasal of [m], voiced alveolar nasal of [n]. Love the acrobatic tongue that extends to form the syllables, to perfect them. It was never one for the easy way.
Learn to love your name, [kɹɪstinʌ]. The crisp, voiceless stops of [k] and [t]. A moniker given to followers of a Messiah you have not acknowledged since the day you told Mommy you wanted to die and she told you to pray to Him. Love the roll of the tongue.
Remember that as words are not the sums of their parts, people are not the sums of their names, or their orange and green pills, or the hands that graze their bodies. What is beige to you, thick, sweet, white chocolate, is deep violet or potent ash to another.
To love someone is to suspend disbelief for the sake of what, I still do not know.
Outro (plan b one step)
I wouldn’t even know how to tell her.
Tell her how beautiful
Her long, heavy eyelashes are when she Cries, how
Her thick, dark hair looks just like Her great-aunt’s in those old pictures
How
Her name has no meaning, but That’s ok!
She
Creates the meaning every Time she smiles at a barking dog, Unafraid of everything she is So much smarter than her mother
Her mother, who is so afraid To touch her
To move
To breathe
When she’s near her because What if she breathes and the wind
Knocks her baby down, crashing, crushing her Tiny body and it’s
Over
Or what if she moves and the earth crumbles Underneath both of their feet and
They fall but she’s still too small she Doesn’t know how to climb back up like Her mother and then it’s Over
Or what if she touches her and she’s made of sand and she blows away in grains in the wind and it’s Over
today she asked me why grandpa has a lima bean on his hand and i told her i told her that sometimes people are bad but that doesn’t mean they are bad people and she shriveled her tiny brow and asked,
“then why do they do those things?” and I said, “because they are sad” and she shriveled her tiny brow and asked, “is that why you have a flower drawn on your back? because grandpa was sad?”
and i said, “no” and moved on later
i ran the water in the bath and filled it with that pink soap that smells like bubblegum, and she walked
inside the tub all by herself this time and I scrubbed the dirt out
of her dark, thick hair while she played with the little squeaky duck i rolled my sleeves up out of the water and then she asked me,
“what are those lines on your arms, mommy?
why did you hurt yourself, mommy?
why are you crying, mommy?”
her long, dark eyelashes under the water and her thick, soapy hair and I stretched my arms out without a single thought more squeezed her small, chubby body until the veins in my arms became a bright Blue
And I looked down At an empty embrace And it was over
Imagine
By Rachel A.G. Gilman
What do you do when there’s a boy you’d like to screw? What do you do when he is standing dangerously close to your bed? What do you do as he looks at the bulletin board on your wall, the one hanging above the poster from a pub bathroom in London that reads “WOMEN’S BODIES ARE NOT FOR SALE?” What do you do when he leans in and squints at the pictures pinned to it-- of bands, of your high school friends, of you and your mother? What do you do when you catch yourself noticing the way his pants hug his ass before he bends back up?
What do you do when he props himself against the wall with one foot balanced on it? What do you with his “too cool for school” expression, his pouty lips, those big, sad eyes, and his color-confused hair that sprouts upward? What do you do when he says, “nice place?” What do you do as every word in your vocabulary disappears and you feel those two shots of vodka pull their way out from the orange juice, fogging up your brain?
What do you do when you start thinking about stripping him of his clothes, layer by layer-- his Chicago Cubs baseball cap; his heavy, denim coat; his gray, Champion sweatshirt with the drawstring pulled out; his dark blue button down; his t-shirt from high school summer band camp; his unevenly roll-hemmed khaki chinos; his black checkered socks that slouch at the ankles; and his Samba sneakers, how you want to pull off of him and leave them on your rag rug with everything, everything else?
What do you do now that you have him down to his blue, plaid Hanes boxer shorts?
What do you do when you want him to undress you? What do you do when you have him start by removing each of the silver rings from your fingers? What do you do when he is kissing the bones in your knuckles and dragging his tongue across the grooves in your skin? What do you do when his tongue is on your neck, tracing wet lines from mole to mole as he makes his way to your collarbone? What do you do when you don’t even care about the possibility of bruises he could leave in his traces?
What do you do when you are then down to your skivvies, the nice ones you have on tonight, just in case?
What do you do when you imagine the two of you embracing, your hands making their way from the back of his hair down to his shoulder blades where your just-grown-out fingernails make the lightest of impressions in his pale skin? What do you do when that action elicits from him a throaty groan? What do you do when that makes you giggle but also turns you on? What do you do when your mouth starts to play connect the dots with his own beauty marks, those on his chin, on his cheeks, and right behind his ears? What do you do when your lips start to swell and you can’t catch your breath? What do you do when maybe that’s okay, when breathlessness feels better than breathing ever has?
What do you do when you want more?
What do you do when you think about taking him into your bed, under the covers, then pulling the box of condoms from your nightstand drawer? What do you do when it’s happening, when everyone else has gone, and he’s finally inside of you-- not just your head, but your body? What do you do as his name tickles its way onto your mouth, released in a moan as your back arches and you two pull closer together?
What do you do when your wide eyes meet his brooding ones across your coffee table for a moment too long? What do you do when you think about all of this, the possibility of it, as you watch him bitterly lose a round of drunken Jenga and realize you’re still daydreaming? What do you do when you realize all of this stuff can only live in your head? What do you do when you know it’s just lust and you hope it’ll pass, but your only experience is with love so you really aren’t sure? What do you do as he reminds you it’s your turn to make a move?
I wanted things that weren’t mine (Jason David Cayne)
By Gabriella Mayer
Just as I say
A memory of 9/11 doesn’t exist in my mind
Somber wrinkled eyes come my way
Only to squint: “were you Not in school that day? you were old enough to remember!”
Daughter of Jason by the TV Apple barrette pulling back hair as a Videotape plays where she and Jason soar
In the air, tipping arms and legs
Down to the ground with the invisible ledge and the teacher
Calls her name in class
A student declares she’s out that day, a glance to the right is her empty desk Yellow walls showcase the white-starred crowd’s annual meeting, Needless to say, I stare through the black, blue and red to her terracotta face Even if I never knew him at all.
when the broken glass glitters in daylight
On 12/14/2009, the Westboro Baptist Church picketed outside of the Jewish Federation of South Palm Beach County on US 441-South. Within its campus were two K-12 schools.
don’t expect someone to not stare. the road’s too wide, let the gates hide something else, stark sharpie shards on white hearts held by white knights.
honeychild, you better look away. your teachers warned they have too much
to say on monday you learned on friday. don’t think that of rallies you could always predict the new gestapo waving torches to watch the world cringe. honeychild, shout in the megaphone if it means you could have one night ignoring “--- will not replace us.” this isn’t about doctrine but about misdirected faith, about obsession over myth. if the church cannot outcry the wrong side, leave me to blink
until they leave the premises stop threatening bombs on children.
if the church covered in ruined hindu marks calls me to prayer, let me hear
that holy screech & deny his forgiveness. honeychild, come
& sing. there’s nothing to be afraid of until you forget the crawling worms, until your song
is my song & your education is my education & your hope
is my hope & us & us
By Anastasia Damaskou
-όλοι μαςΣώματα περιπλανώμενα στους δρόμους –αυτής, μίας-
Mirror
You see him on the street, wrapped up in ragged clothes. A frozen body fighting for warmth. His gaze distant.
You look beside him; a man downs like water something that’s not water.
Liquid that –maybe–helps him forget or remember pain or happiness.
Humans -like you and melost, without destination -all of us-
Roaming bodies on the streets of –this, acity.
Scant people will stop to look, to talk. Yet they know what he needs.
Ugly slap of life
loneliness, cold nevertheless struggle. We baptize them sick, redundant.
I won’t hurt you, he says. I don’t know why I’m talking to you at this moment. Maybe god wanted it.
Himself a symptom Symbol of a broader disease, our own.
A Museum of Clouds
By Jackie Yang
Cumulus collecting on today’s drifting dawn, charcoal clumps hide a burning orange sun.
Sailing stratus on a Mediterranean sky, as breeze-blown brushstrokes sweep overhead.
Citrus cirrus, champagne-shaded strokes, melting to mauve in the warm summer night.
Satisfaction for the Soul
They call him the dream dealer, they say you find him in your sleep. He wheels his wares through worried minds to relieve them when they weep.
A cure for the weary elder, a hand for the downcast youth, a glimpse of golden paradise, an escape from the blackened truth.
Come see my stock, my bottled bliss, come taste a glass of glee. He swirls a daydream in a jar, uncorks a flask of ecstasy.
Here have I these dreams for sale, happiness—at an easy price. The cost is but a sliver of self, a bit of essence, cut clean and nice.
Now, now, don’t fret, young sleeper, don’t twist away in fright. What harm is there in paying this to make your dull life bright?
I’ll pluck away a tiny fragment, snip away the smallest thread so you can have your merriment, no worries, it’s fine, go ahead. His kind eyes sparkle winningly, his teeth gleam, his smile lingers. He dangles a dream before your eyes, twists a promise between his fingers.
So you grasp the fragile neck of hope, you breathe in the smell of freedom. You shake his hand and then succumb to euphoric, addictive Eden.
They all seek out the dream dealer who in return, asks a simple toll: contentment for a slice of spirit, satisfaction for the soul.
St.
Simon’s Island, Georgia, April 14th
The osprey dove, a speared pendulum, curving in a wide arc from the sky, to the lake, and back out again, above the boathouse, holding a wriggling, silver fish in its talons.
And my girlfriend’s dad, a sun-baked, metal-wristwatched, khaki-shorted middle-aged man with Irish blood and a thin beard and an early retirement (who did not know about us) gave a whoop as it took off
across the afternoon sun.
There is so much life on this lake, he told us, birds from everywhere pour into this aviary for a better shot at life.
Later that evening, I encountered the first person of color that I had seen in Georgia since crossing the bridge into Glynn County. He was a nameless man, part of an invisible team of six that hung along the side of a highway to paint the railings of a metal, olive bridge.
I had been keeping an eye out for company, for anybody with skin not sour cream or its tanned variants.
And it turns out it was there, in the landscapers, construction workers, gold caddies and waiters and bus boys and select members of the hotel staff and sweaty sushi-chefs in one tiny restaurant where they slathered mayonnaise over fake crab rolls.
A cynical piece of me said, here is the better shot, waiting on all the same polo-wearing, sunscreen-covered, Mercedes-driving rich folk that moved through the Spanish oaks like pale ghosts.
I had to think of that bird of prey, diving into a lake to search for its next meal,
and that unlucky, squirming fish to serve its dinner.
Scenes of Instruction and Contradiction in Henry James’ “The Jolly Corner”
By John Lincoln
Henry James’ short story “The Jolly Corner,” tells the story of an American expatriate named Spencer Brydon, who has returned to his home city of New York after a thirty-three year absence spent in Europe. The story details Brydon’s reintroduction to the city, which in his absence has been much transformed by the processes of modernization. Brydon’s is essentially a reactive response, and he finds most of the changes disquieting. However, he also finds in himself a surprising aptitude for business, which comes to haunt him in the form of a specter of his “alter ego”: an American industrialist. In its exploration of Brydon’s readjustment to the American city, largely depicted through his relationship with his childhood friend Alice Staverton, the story brings to light physical and social changes brought about in the American city during the turn of the 20th century. The story further explores transformations in American values, and specifically exposes certain contradictions and hypocrisies existent within the values of Brydon’s own social class.
Brydon has returned to the United States primarily to visit his properties, and importantly, to oversee the renovation of a building he owns. As Brydon becomes acquainted with the processes of renovation and construction, a personal conflict begins to emerge at this site of instruction (it is both a construction site and an instruction site, so to speak). The narrator describes the reconstruction of one of Brydon’s houses, and says of Brydon, “now that it was going forward, it had been not the least of his astonishments to find himself able, on the spot and though without a previous ounce of such experience to participate with a certain intelligence, almost with a certain authority” (75). This aptitude for business deeply surprises Brydon, as “he had lived his life with his back so turned to such concerns and his face addressed to those of so different an order that he scarce knew what to make of this lively stir” (75). Although Brydon finds that he has a “capacity for business,” this results in an internal conflict for him; such values run contrary to those of Brydon’s social order, they are seen as “vulgar and sordid” (75). The apparently ‘disinterested' values of an older, rentier class from which Brydon comes (whose values are also related to those of an older "Europe"), are thrown into conflict with newer, ‘interested' values of American industry in the 20th century.
This conflict is explored in a scene in which Brydon angrily laments, and then rejects a supposed alternative life he could of lived should he have stayed in America. Brydon laughs at how different things could have been, and how different he himself would have been had he stayed, before scoffing at his own irrational refusal to “agree to a deal” with his other property on the jolly corner, a deal which would make him a significant sum of money. Brydon refers to his refusal as a “total absence of a reason” and explains “there are no reasons here but of dollars,” further exclaiming to Alice Staverton “let us therefore have none whatever - not the ghost of one” (79). This absolute rejection of such “reason" foreshadows later events in the story: Brydon comes to be haunted by just such a ghost.
This conflict is further brought to the fore in a scene in which Brydon shows ‘Miss’
Staverton around his old property, which sits on the “jolly” corner (“jolly” ironically evoking the language used in the social environ from which Brydon hails) (77). As Miss Staverton explores the old grandeur of the house, she exclaims “I hope you don’t mean they want you to pull this to pieces!” (78). Brydon angrily responds that this is what “they” were “at” him for daily, and that “there were values other than the beastly rent-values” (78). In response, however, Miss Staverton quips “In short you’re to make so good a thing of your sky-scraper that, living in luxury on those ill-gotten gains, you can afford for a while to be sentimental here!” (78). Miss Staverton thus brings to light the contradiction of Brydon’s station, and of his professed values. Although he makes claim to values other than “the beastly rent-values,” he is still clearly bound to such principles; the logic of the market necessitates it. Brydon can only “be sentimental” temporarily, and further, he can only hold off on renovating the “jolly” corner because he has sacrificed the integrity of his other property.
It is also the case that Brydon has only been able to comfortably live in Europe “on the product of (his) flourishing New York leases,” their “respective rents” producing an income large enough for him to live without working (74). Thus, the rejection of “rent-values” is ironically exposed as being vacuous: it is only through the very extraction of rent that Brydon can live the way that he does. The supposed disinterested values of Brydon’s social order are exposed as being essentially hypocritical; such ‘rentiers’ are reliant on the market, and inextricably bound to the very rent-values (value in a double sense) that they spurn. This is perhaps further exposed in Brydon’s surprising “capacity for business” and “sense of construction” (75). The text states that such “virtues” had merely been “dormant in (Brydon’s) own organism,” and when given the opportunity, they emerge unfettered (75). Therefore, the very values of business, seen as so vulgar and sordid, are actually latent, or dormant within the supposedly disinterested values of Brydon’s own class.
Through its depiction of Brydon’s re-introduction into New York, and his surprising aptitude for business, the text ironically brings to light the hypocrisy of Brydon’s social order. Brydon’s discussions with Miss Staverton expose their unjustified and hollow reactionary stances towards modernization, their dislike of the modern mostly having to do with the superficies of taste. It further becomes clear in Brydon’s own surprising capacity for business, that this tendency was “dormant” within him all along. This conflict is further brought out in Brydon’s later being haunted by a ghost of his “alter-ego,” the alter ego of an American businessman. What is perhaps most disturbing about this ghost though, is not that it is something foreign to Brydon, but that perhaps it merely represents a “dormant,” and not so deeply buried aspect of himself: he is already in a sense this very specter that haunts him.
Sans Booze
By Greg Drozdek
Let's go back to school and take a course on boredom.
If nobody wants to go out for drinks after, We’ll all get A’s.
3 AM
She will serve me to too many. I will not stop her.
Tuesday
Today, you say to yourself "Stay dry!"
Too long since a dry day done, and another begun.
‘The Kiss’
My waitress takes away my Chekhov's 'The Kiss'
Lucky Flow
after filling my cup.
My Anton now exiled to the counter, unopened.
‘The Kiss’ - a prop before closing.
Beach Work
At my dirty bit of beach by the pier, I crack a beer and feed sparrows bread bits, Then munch bodega cheese.
I kill two more before beach work: plastic and cans to the trash. Driftwood home with me.
The Wolf Fading
The lady - plain - on my beach
With the wolf – smoky black - stalking duck
– dark - fat - in the water
Edging up silent – the wolf - all hunter nowUntil she holds out the rope, And he comes running - hand-licking –happy?
In the novel, he’s writing about an older man and a younger woman. He’s bored to tears with his life and writing clichés. The older man, the younger woman, bored to tears. When did his spark for language leave? He likes the sound of this line as he types it, but also feels he got it in a bit of lucky flow. This is what he calls it when the pen on his paper races ahead of the sound in his head. It used to happen more when he drank more, but now he drinks less and writes less, and less freely. He had some poems published, a short memoir published. He got confident, wrote a few plays without shame, produced in small earnest productions, one even had a set. He smiled at a waitress and played the writer at the café. For once, he felt as though the pen was his friend.
And then. The pen got heavy. The pen got stiff. He worked out more and focused on his teaching. Everything about his life was more full, everything but the writing. He tried to be patient, he went to readings, listened as he sat on his hands. But as his own cohort cackled their “likes” and “totallys” and now “literallys” he felt ancient.
So one day, in a lucky flow partially helped along with some pinot, the idea of a novel, a poem about a novel, came. He went to one of the last boho-spots he knew, and listened to the poets read about: a lost cat, the precariat, a first kiss, a river with no fish. No one cackled like-speak, not even one “totally!” He read last, his Lucky Flow-Novel Poem to an even quiet that was not hostile.
He held his pen in his hand all the way home. And he hoped there was more lucky flow to come.
“En qué idioma cae la lluvia sobre ciudades dolorosas?”
Pablo Neruda, Libro de las preguntas
SHIU
By Cindy Sharra
një threnody pa fjalë një reverie e poezisë dhe e vdekjes
ajo nxiton kur duhet, qan kur mundet
lë pellgje te holla blu: jetë nga nje perëndi pagane
vetëm përtej qytetit shiu mund te qaj me gëzim
kam dëgjuar se vendi është i panjohur— një shpifje në një hartë
i padëgjuar.
“In what language does rain fall over tormented cities?”
Pablo Neruda, “Book of Questions”
RAIN
a wordless threnody a reverie of poetry and of death.
It whimpers when it can, weeps when it must,
leaves puddles, lurid blue: oases from a perverted paradise.
Only beyond the city does the rain cry out in joy.
I hear the place is unnameable— a smear on a map of uncharted land.
By Ai Xin Liew
卧虎藏龙1
“The dragon out of water is humiliated by ants.
The fierce tiger that is caged is baited by a child.
As long as I am imprisoned, how can I dare strive for supremacy?
An advantageous position for revenge will surely come one day.”
--Poem 74
The Chinese call America “美国”, i.e. “Beautiful Country”. Although some argue that the name is a transliteration of “America”, with its second syllable sounding a lot like the word “美” (mĕi), it is of some significance that only the word “beautiful” was selected out of all the Chinese characters that are also pronounced “mĕi”. Not only does this name invoke idyllic images of aforesaid country like a rapturous sigh, it also reflects the romanticised notions that the Chinese had of America as the land of freedom and opportunity. Prompted by wars, famines and suffering, generations of Chinese immigrants left their homeland for this “beautiful country” “driven by ‘necessity’ [and] stirred by ‘extravagance’” (Takaki, 31). Their romanticised perceptions, however, were rudely shattered when they came face to face with the narrow and derogatory mind-sets of many Americans. Although their unfair treatment caused them much suffering and disillusionment, their experiences also further stirred their ambition and patriotism. These emotions are clearly displayed across poems carved in Angel Island, particularly Poem 74.
The first two lines of Poem 74 provide historical context for the reader. As the poet writes, “The dragon out of water is humiliated by ants / The fierce tiger that is caged is baited by a child” (“蛟龙失水蝼蚁欺，猛虎遭囚小儿戏”). The “蛟龙”, a certain sort of dragon, is a fierce creature from Chinese mythology that is particularly connected with the element of water. As a symbol of power and prestige, dragons were used to represent the Emperors of China and, in extension, China itself. Meanwhile, the “猛虎”, or wild tiger, is often depicted in Chinese folklore as the king of the forest. The humiliation and torment suffered by these majestic animals can thus be seen a metaphor for the indignities suffered by China after the Opium Wars, when the victorious British and their allies forced China to “open its ports to foreign trade, pay indemnities of 20 million silver dollars, and, most damaging of all, grant … extraterritorial
rights” (Lai, Lim and Yung, 4). To many of the Chinese, seeing their once-powerful and ancient nation brought low by foreign invaders was shameful and tragic. It also precipitated the start of tax increases, famines and general hardship. With this then-recent history encapsulated within the metaphor of the suffering dragon and tiger, the reader can therefore understand what prompted the poet to leave his homeland and journey to a foreign land.
Besides providing context, the first two lines also refer indirectly to the poet’s feelings of displacement and helplessness. Oftentimes, opening lines in classical Chinese poetry not only establish a setting, but also hint at the poet’s own emotions. For example, Li Bai’s poem “Quiet Night Thoughts” begins with “Bright moonlight before my bed; I thought it was frost on the ground” (“床前明月光／疑是地上霜”). Li’s opening couplet establishes both the time and location of his poem, as well as the icy loneliness of his surroundings. Similarly, the anonymous poet’s vulnerability can be seen through his descriptions of the dragon and tiger being clearly out of their elements. Like the “dragon out of water” and “tiger … caged”, he has been torn from all that he knows dear and placed in a foreign and hostile environment. This displacement would have rankled less if the poet felt like he had been treated fairly. Although fair treatment should be given to any immigrant, it was clear that this poet felt like he was, at the very least, equal in stature and knowledge with his captors and thus undeserving of the treatment he was receiving. For one, his writing shows a firm grasp of the structure and rhythm of classical Chinese poetry; there are two couplets with seven words, each last word of each couplet rhyming neatly. That, and the fact that it was written backwards a remarkable feat of calligraphy shows that the poet was clearly both literate and educated, not a “village bumpkin” (Lai, Lim and Yung, 38) of “a backward, heathen, and degenerate country” (5). This injustice was also compounded by an awareness that he hails from a country with a thousand years of history, traditions and culture. It is no wonder then that the poet casts the enemies in his poem as miniscule “ants” and an immature “child”, undoubtedly voicing his infuriation at being treated as such by those he deemed inferior.
All of these factors his turbulent history, unfair treatment and wounded ego combine to stoke the poet’s desire for success and revenge, as well as a growing sense of nationalism. This can be seen through his emotional identification with the tiger and the dragon. He draws a link between the trapped animals and his own imprisonment by using the phrases “遭 囚” (to suffer imprisonment) and “被困” (to be trapped) to describe the tiger and himself respectively. Like the tiger and the dragon, there is massive potential in both animals and in himself, and both undoubtedly want to “strive for supremacy” again. Although the kind of “supremacy” he wants is vague it could be economic and political dominance for himself and for his homeland ––this question reflects the general ambition for success that drove the poet and countless other immigrants to America. With the power gained from “supremacy”, the poet then imagines a grim ending to those who wronged him and his country.
The poet of Poem 74 and his compatriots left China during what would later be known as the “century of humiliation” (Wang, 7). This century deeply influences the way China chooses to shape its national identity, politics and memory and its seeds can be seen in poems carved on an island 10,000 kilometres away. The fact that Poem 74 in particular was written backwards shows that either the poet was exceedingly proud of his work and expected it to be copied, or that it had received much praise within the community of immigrants at Angel Island. Regardless of which is true, it is undeniable that nationalist pride, personal ego and anger were dominant emotions on Angel Island. In the face of xenophobia and humiliation, the Chinese on Angel Island clung to their pride and to their ambition, dreaming of a day when they could better their futures.
Q&A
Dear reader,
Please read this aloud, if you can. The questions ought to be spoken in an American accent (or what you think is an American accent), while the answers ought to be spoken in a Singlish accent (if you can).
Q: So where do you come from?
- Eh. This is fine. I can answer this; this is good.
A: Singapore.
Q: Where is that?
2 3 4
- Sian . Sekali all these angmohs think it’s in China.
A: It’s a peninsula at the edge of Malaysia.
Q: Oh, so it’s not in China?
- My god.
A: No. In fact, we’re a few hours hours away. By plane.
Q: Malaysia, then?
- I am not going into the merger and separation . 5
A: We were part of Malaysia for a few years, but we separated due to politics and … other issues.
2Hokkien slang; meaning a range of emotions such as tiredness, weariness, frustration, boredom, etc Parallel with the word, “ugh”
3 Malay word; literally translated: “Once/At one time” However, used in context as “What if/Suddenly”
4 Hokkien; literally translated: “red-haired person”, although it is a blanket term to describe all people of Caucasian resemblance (i.e. white people).
5 From 1963–1965, Singapore was part of Malaysia
Q: Huh, I didn’t know that. So, how is your English so good if you’re Chinese?
- Wow, there’s so much here to unpack. The fact that you thought I must have come from China. There wasn’t even room for Vietnam or Korea or Japan (all of which I could, arguably, come from). The stereotype that, just because I’m not from America or anywhere recognisably “Western”, I must have acquired English through some sort of magical procedure.
A: I learnt it. In school. I speak it. At home. We were a British colony for a couple of years too––actually, more like two decades.
Q: Oh, I see! Does everyone speak English in Singapore?
- Yes, bodoh6
A: Yes.
Q: What’s it like in Singapore?
- Shit, now all I can think about is the food. Which one should I start with? Chicken rice? But that sounds so trite. Like, they know what’s chicken and rice. But how do they know about chicken rice ? Maybe satay . After all, they have it on SQ. Or roti prata with 7 8 9 curry. They have Indian curry in America, don’t they?
A: It’s hot. Like, all the time. The food’s awesome, too.
Q: I heard you can’t buy gum there. Or worse, you might even go to jail for it.
- Please, 老天爷 , give me a break. Is this, literally, all they read or care about? 10 Personally, I think gum is a scourge on earth. What you don’t have, you never miss.
A: I’ve chewed gum in Singapore and I’m still alive. Ha, ha, ha!
Q. Right, yeah. And you guys still do capital punishment, right?
- Mmhmm, and you guys also have the highest incarceration rate in the world. Not that it’s a competition or anything
A: Yeah.
Q: But I heard it’s really clean, too!
6 Malay for “stupid”.
7 Although called “Hainanese” chicken rice, this dish was actually invented locally Chicken is steamed using a combination of sauces, and the resulting broth is used to steam the rice that goes along with it Entire family businesses can be sustained with this dish alone
8 Malay dish made of speared pieces of meat (usually chicken, beef or lamb instead of pork, due to most Malays being Muslims) grilled over charcoal. Usually consumed with peanut sauce, cucumber and small slices of onions
9 Indian flatbread, served with toppings/sides ranging from sugar, butter, curry, or curried chicken.
10 Chinese for “dear God above”
- Super, duper clean. Like, awesomely clean. I don’t think I’ve ever seen tissue paper in the MRT , much less a rat. 11
A: Mmhmm, you get fined for littering.
Q: Oh my god, really? That’s so strict!
- Or you could just not litter.
A: I guess so. I mean, that’s how we keep everything clean.
Q: Thanks man, this was such an interesting conversation.
- Let’s see if you’ll remember it.
A: You’re welcome!
(2 weeks later)
Q: Wait, you said you are from Singapore, right? 11 Mass Rapid Transit, i e the subway
Amor
by Adam Simon
No había espacio en 2056. Una serie de catástrofes globales había surgido de la fuente que era el siglo XX y alcanzó su ápice en el XXI; la degradación económica y ecológica, combinada con la proliferación de sustancias psicotrópicas, resultó en una nueva revolución sexual que vino a ser conocida como el Florecimiento, obviamente una reacción a la desilusión y el desencanto que era tan penetrante en ese tiempo. Sin embargo, el Florecimiento no era un intento de remediar el mundo o celebrar el amor libre. No - era un esfuerzo concertado para acelerar el proceso de destrucción, de sobrepoblando.
Miles y miles comenzaron a reproducirse sin parar. Muy pronto, las casas no eran suficientemente grandes para acomodar a estas familias grandes. No pasó mucho tiempo antes de que muchos se convirtieron a la vida nómada. Esta tendencia continuó hasta que casi todos estaban vagando, sin trabajos, viviendo de conservas y qué animales pequeños podían atrapar. Cuando llegó 2050, el gobierno era poco más que una formalidad. Vivieron en la anarquía pacífica.
Pero con cada año que siguió, tu familia se encontraría con otras familias con más y más frecuencia, hasta que finalmente, en 2056, había muy poco espacio para caminar en absoluto.
Hicieron lo racional.
Comenzaron a apilar a las personas más robustas y más anchas en el fondo, para que estas personas formaran una gruesa losa de tierra sobre la que pudieran caminar. Hacia 2058, habían cubierto cada centímetro de la tierra continental. Había un nuevo terreno. Por un corto tiempo, gruñían mientras caminaban sobre ellos, pero dejaron de quejarse y pronto, dejaron de hacer ruidos. En 2060, sin embargo, se encontraron con el mismo problema de nuevo. Así que establecieron otro terreno de gente, que gruñía y caía en silencio como sus predecesores.
Recuerdo un momento en que mi padre me llevó a dar un paseo y me contó nuestra gran historia como lo hago ahora contigo. Recuerdo exactamente que era cuando por un instante nos quedamos charlando que un hombre debajo de nosotros me mordió en el tobillo. Grité y mi padre inmediatamente comenzó a patear a este hombre. Recuerdo a mi padre, moviendo con tanta rapidez, sostenido por una confianza conocida por pocos hombres, mientras señalaba con su dedo al hombre que me había mordido y gritaba -No! No!- Mi padre me miró y sonrió, y yo le devolví la sonrisa, sabiendo muy bien y quizás por primera vez que yo pertenecía a él como él pertenecía a mi, cautivados por el amor de padre y hijo. No sabíamos nada de las complejidades de este proceso, solo su origen. Mi padre arrodilló, como el gran pastor, y quitó uno de los zapatos del hombre. Poco después, mi padre me llevó y me aferré a ese zapato, pasando el dedo por sus cordones.
There was no room in 2056. A series of global catastrophes had surged out of the wellspring that was the late 20th century and reached its apex in the 21st; economic and ecological degradation, combined with the proliferation of psychotropic substances, resulted in a new sexual revolution that would come to be known as the Blossoming, obviously a reaction to the disillusionment and disenchantment that was so pervasive at the time. The Blossoming was not an attempt to remedy the world or celebrate free love. No, it was a concerted effort to accelerate a process of destruction, of overpopulation.
Thousands and thousands began to reproduce without stopping. Soon enough, houses were not big enough to accommodate such large families. It was not long before many turned to the nomadic life. This continued until almost everyone were vagabonds, jobless, living on preserves and whatever small animals they could trap. By 2050, the government was little more than a formality. They lived in peaceful anarchy.
But with each year that followed, one’s family would encounter other families more and more frequently, until finally, in 2056, there was very little room to walk at all. They did the rational thing.
They began to stack the sturdiest and widest people on the bottom, so that these people formed a thick slab of ground on which they could walk. By 2058, they had converted every centimeter of earth. For a short time, many groaned as they walked over them, but they stopped complaining and soon, stopped making noises at all. In 2040, however, they encountered the same problem once again. So we started work on creating a new ground made of people, who groaned and then fell into silence like their predecessors.
I remember a time where my father took me for a walk and recounted to me our great history as I do to you now. I remember exactly it was when we momentarily fell into idle talk that one man beneath us bit me in the ankle. I cried out and my father immediately began kicking this man. I remember my father, who moved with such swiftness, held up by a confidence few men knew, as he wagged his finger at the man who had bitten me and cried out “No! No!” My father peered back at me and smiled, and I smiled back, knowing full well, and for perhaps the first time, that I belonged to him as he belonged to me, captivated by a love between father and son. We knew nothing of the intricacies behind this process, only its source. My father kneeled down, like the great shepherd, and removed one of the man’s shoes. Soon after, my father took me away and I held fast to that shoe, tracing my finger over the laces.
WON
By Jenny Choi
I am a broken grayish thing made of four-thirds; I am two halves that do not
match & I am not sure if I will ever come to terms with a match never made or with a third that belongs not even elsewhere.
the battle of my self is like the sun trying to shed its light on both halves of the Earth.
how do I let one side bask in the rays of open skies while the other shivers in the claustrophobic winter blackness?
this illusion is in my blood, that I am one thing and not the other, that I want to be more of one and less of the other.
I bleed this want of balance.
there is a word in my second language in which this invasive sentiment crookedly laughs.
원 (wish)
In English, it sounds like the past tense of victory.
But really, it is no victory.
A victory of fantasy is no victory of mine at all.
ANOTHER
for 엄마 [Mom]
I.
My name is Jenny.
저는 유진입니다. [I am Yoojin.]
I am American.
그런데 더 한국사람처럼 하구싶어요.
[But I want to be more like a Korean.]
I am from New Jersey.
서울에 있을때 제일 편해요 [I am most comfortable when I am in Seoul.]
And my home is where I can be safely tucked under my family’s wing.
그런데 제가 굉장히 사랑하는 사촌은
서울에 살아요 [But my precious cousins live in Seoul.]
I am nothing, because I am neither.
II.
My sister taught herself Korean.
저는 왜 더 노력을 안했을까요? [I wonder: why did I not work harder?]
I did not.
굉장히 후회해요 [I regret this very much.]
When my parents address me in Korean, 그래서 저는 저의 한국이름을 더
좋아해요. [So I like to be called by my Korean name.]
I answer in English.
(At the very least, I can recognize my name, claim it as mine.)
I am neither, but another.
III.
But to others, 솔직히 말하면, [If I speak honestly,]
I am not quite American.
저는 미국 사람이에요. [I am an American.]
After all, I look like an other 하지만 한국사람처럼 행동할때의 나 자신을 더 촣아해요. [However, when I act as if I am Korean, I like my own self more.]
I am another, so I am.
The Brio editors are enormously grateful to many wonderful people for making this journal possible. Thank you to Alyson Wild and the entire New York University Comparative Literature Department, as well as Laura Torres-Rodríguez for her valuable insight and advice. Special thanks is also in order for erstwhile editor-in-chief Nicole D’Alessio, who patiently guided us every step of the way. Without the support of all these incredible people, our ambitious endeavor might not have come to fruition. We would also like to thank all those who contributed their work-- you challenged our expectations and helped us define the journal and bring it to life. And thank you, of course, to our readers. In the spirit of comparative literature, we encourage you to criticize, analyze, and submit to Brio. Above all, we hope it helps you see the world in a new light, and opens up a dialogue where you go.
The fall 2017 issue of the Brio literary journal is edited by:
Libby Torres, Editor-in-Chief, studying Comparative Literature with a focus in Spanish and Creative Writing. She likes dumplings, Derrida, and dogs.
Mark Sologuren, managing editor, studies Comparative Literature. He brings good tidings.
Anastasia Damaskou, editor and staff writer, is a senior in CAS studying Comparative Literature. She speaks Greek and English fluently and some Spanish acquired while studying abroad in Buenos Aires.
Ai Xin Liew, editor and staff writer, is a freshman at the College of Arts & Sciences whose first name consists of two words, not one. She hails from a city-state-nation, and misses all the food she wrote about. Though technically a music major, she is also interested in exploring writing-related fields.
Cindy Sharra, editor and staff writer, is a sophomore studying Comparative Literature, Philosophy, and foreign languages.
Zachary Lewis, editor, is a senior in the Department of Comparative Literature, with concentrations in sociology and Spanish language literature. His interests include 20th century continental philosophy, political economy, post-boom Latin American literature, and Marxist theory.
Cover design is by Andrea Long Chu, a Ph.D. candidate in Comparative Literature at NYU who works on gender, sex, bad politics, and all the feels. Her work has been published in Transgender Studies Quarterly, Women & Performance, and n+1.
For more information on submissions and editorial positions, visit the NYU Comparative Literature website at http://complit.as.nyu.edu/object/complit.ug.brio. Or email us at briojournal@gmail.com.
