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B O O K S , A R T S & C U LT U R E
Jennifer Wong / 21 June 2020 / Poetry, , Reviews
“Flèche”, poetry by Mary Jean
Chan
Mary Jean Chan
I
nterrogating the complexities of love, history and the power of
naming through refreshing experimentation in language and
form, Flèche—winner of 2019 Costa Book Award for Poetry—is a
significant and original contribution to Hong Kong poetry as well as
to the current scene of British Asian diasporic voices.
Raised in Hong Kong and now living in the UK, Chan explores,
with precision and originality, the different layers of female identity
and sexuality, one’s instincts for survival and resistance against
oppression, and the need for love and acceptance.
Chan draws the reader’s attention to the dialogue between the
poems and the narrative framework. The Preface consists of two
quotes: “We are defined against something, by what we are not and
will never be” and “This is a book of love poems”, suggesting the
constant tension between the inner self and the external world. The
title of the collection as well as the different sections are named after
specific techniques in fencing—a sport the poet is trained in—
alluding to the attacks, parries and counter-attacks that characterize
this at one time entirely male activity.
At the heart of Flèche is an intelligent
and profound redefinition of gender
Flèche, Mary Jean Chan (Faber &
Faber, March 2020)
experience and sexuality, where the
personal is also political. Alluding to the mass shooting in a popular
gay nightclub in Orlando in 2016, “At the Castro” uses a twin-column
form to heighten the sense of parallel narratives. The poet shifts
from an intense moment of love between dancing couples, to a
reimagined moment of terror:
what if you had been
by the bullet
would you have
stopped
into whose arms
surrendered
By situating her own lived experience within the collective racial
and political consciousness, Chan is politicizing the narrative of the
personal:
the way skin
but always
is never an apology
an act of faith
The “wounds” and trauma that permeate the collection include
her own coming out as a queer person, and her mother’s traumatic
experience in the Cultural Revolution in China. “Flesh” opens with
the mother preparing a meal, and what seems to be a poem against
meat-eating (“Some days I watched shrimp and prawns / suffer: their
deaths brutal, yet profoundly ordinary”) has by the end of the poem
transformed into a comparison of her own vegetarianism with the
mother’s involuntarily vegetarian meals during the Cultural
Revolution:
her rice bowl emptying so quickly I would never forget the three years
she became vegetarian: the famine leaving all
the trees bereft of their bark, the villagers so
grateful for something, anything, to chew on.
One of the remarkable strengths of this collection is the poet’s
success in crystallizing the complexity and paradoxical nature of the
mother-daughter relationship. The daughter is reluctant to accept
the mother’s story, but she feels compelled to understand it. In the
section entitled 母親的故事 (meaning ‘mother’s story’), “what my
mother (a poet) might say (1)”, the poet has crossed out those lines
that reflect on her mother’s traumatic experiences as well as the
lines in which she denies her longings and thoughts:
that she had scurvy as a child
that I don’t understand hunger until I can describe
what a drop of oil tastes like
that Mao wrote beautiful Chinese calligraphy
that she finds democracy to be the opiate of the masses
that I am a descendant of the Yellow Emperor
that Mao wrote beautiful Chinese calligraphy
Chan’s poetry demands that the reader read between the lines.
Some of the poems in the collection capture one’s conflicted feelings
in reconciling nationhood and identity. For example, “Written in a
Historically White Space (I)” is a powerful and strikingly original
multilingual representation of postcolonial space, and a way of
“talking back” to the white interlocutors:
The reader stares at my ⽪皮膚 and asks: why don’t you write in 中⽂文? I reply: 殖⺠民主
義 meant that I was brought up in your image. Let us be honest. Had I not learnt 英
⽂文 and come to your shores, you wouldn’t be reading this poem at all.
Words related to her identity and political consciousness are
transcribed into Chinese characters (⽪膚 [skin]，中⽂ [Chinese]，殖
民主義 [postcolonialism]). In this way, the speaker—through
maintaining the control as a translator—asserts her own linguistic
space as a poet of colour, as a way of “talking back”, while
representing the paradox of a bilingual, postcolonial upbringing.
In Chan’s poems, form becomes part of the language to encapsulate
marginality and intersectionality. A prose poem divided into sections
of different mental states, “The Five Stages” explores moments of
intimacy as well as one’s sexual awakenings and disillusionments. In
this poem, double slashes are used to punctuate the poem instead of
line breaks or punctuation marks, blending the narrative with
interior monologues:
// there is a knock // at the door // my heart is a stampede // she slips out of my arms
& calls // to our flatmates: hey, // what’s up? we were just // watching a film //
Fluent in Cantonese, Mandarin and English, Chan explores the
gaps in meaning between these languages, and the power one has in
wielding them. In the poem “speaking in tongues”, the mother’s
Cantonese expressions rhyme with the English words that the
daughter muses on. The deliberate misunderstanding or reluctance
to understand each other is later referred to in the poem as
I’ve discovered a secret
that half of my words
have been kept like a key
under a plant.
One is conscious of the divide between speech and silence, between
the visible and the unseen. For example, “The Heart of the Matter”
conjures a surreal meeting with the headmistress as an “awakening
to a room without walls, by which I mean a room without eyes.” In a
riddle-like, ironic speech, the headmistress confronts the speaker:
There is something you
want to tell the world
she’d say, sipping a sencha tea
On one hand, the headmistress’s question about “that ache”
alludes to the speaker’s compelling urge to “come out”, on the other,
it also suggests a fantasy escape from an oppressive society where
thoughts and desires cannot be freely expressed.
Bold yet tender, so honest and beautifully-crafted, Chan’s
collection redefines sexuality and identity on so many levels. Playful
in her adaptations of poetic forms and multilingual, multi-layered
storytelling, the poet captures the inner life of a queer person and
one’s struggles to feel accepted. Oscillating between the points of
view of the mother and daughter, Chan delves into the complexity of
family relationships and her conflicted identity growing up in Hong
Kong, while at the same time capturing love as a language for
survival.
Jennifer Wong is a Hong Kong poet now residing in London. Her books include Goldfish
(Chameleon Press), Diary of a Miu Miu Salesgirl (Bitter Melon Poetry) and 回家 Letters
Home (Nine Arches Press).
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