Singing Our Way Into After
Review of JinJin Xu’s There is Still Singing in the Afterlife (USA: Radix Media, 2020)
By Aileen Liang
JinJin Xu’s chapbook There is Still Singing in the Afterlife is the Shanghai-born poet and filmmaker’s debut, for which she was awarded the Own Voices Chapbook Prize. Across a suite of twelve poems, Xu traverses themes such as religion, family, death and culture. Often times, her speaker’s position of being caught between two poles appears in the very shape of the poem, disrupting the convention of left-justified lineation. By opening new ways of presentation, Xu invites voices, both living and dead, to haunt the page. In this twilight space of the living and the dead, the self and the other, the role of the reader is quickly established. We must lean in, attune ourselves, and seek out what lurks beneath.
The narrative of the opening poem “There They Are” acts as a framing device, depicting the birth of the speaker in a wan landscape. The world here is cold, “A sweaty country road. Stoves that won’t start,/ boxes of damp matchsticks.” Images of domesticity jarringly lack warmth, and instead are set in a world in which suffering is already foretold (“In the beginning,/ it is already too late”). This poetic cosmos is wet with despair and ill-suited for a child. The speaker’s parents, described metonymically via individual features (e.g. “her [mother’s] skinny blue wrists, his ear caressing a cigarette.”) accentuate the feelings of disembodiment. The complication of chronological linearity is Xu’s challenge against the language of birth. The voice of her speaker often interjects to rewrite the easy narrative, as she urges herself to “Put down my pen. Unfold my eyes.” The poem ends with “Let me begin again,” a near-paradoxical gesture since it is impossible capture in language what is at stake. This interrogative poetics appears throughout Xu’s collection.
The very next poem, ‘Night people’, is a formal experiment in presenting narrative and action. The poem is a visual spread of shadows, darkness, and light, words darting in and out of obscurity and spilling over the periphery. Its haphazard arrangement replicates the movements of the speaker’s mother traversing the night, moving through a house already asleep.
Xu positions the speaker’s mother as the usher of darkness, where in her wake “light drains from brass handles/ tiles fade square by square” and darkness blankets over the space. We hear and sense the mother’s presence, the hushed motions of “[slathering] on thickcreams” in the text’s lightened grey font and the gentle whisper of “早点睡” (sleep earlier) in white. In this shadowy space of light and darkness, the speaker frames their relationship as opposites, “you close/I open,” likened to the “开关OPEN CLOSE” of lights as transliterated from Chinese. Visually, the text for this quote dominates our vision while the mother’s movements fade into grey, and thus illustrates the speaker’s coming into a new language apart from her mother’s. This new, alien language threatens to disrupt the inherited tongue (“they say you turn off lights/ ON OFF”). The speaker’s attempt to learn English was conducted in stealth, by hiding “the book beneath my pillow” and “[lying] very still,” but this foreign language is hers to claim. Xu’s venture into the medium of English, full of fear and tension, constitutes a break from family tradition.
Besides family, religion and history are also inherited models of understanding the world that Xu examines in her poems. ‘To Red Dust’ is the shared name of two poems, both employing Tibetan spirituality motifs to negotiate death. In the first, Xu explores the relationship the speaker has with each parent in the context of religious faith. In the hope of healing an ailing mother, both father and daughter embark on numerous Tibetan pilgrimages. On their treacherous journeys they get on the “train [that] rises, guiding with it our eardrums,/ lungs, stomachs,” ring bells, and carve their names into the “gilded/ template gates, the stone railings, the orange shingles.” Her father practises his faith as a means of protecting the family unit and bettering their fortunes—repeatedly inscribing their names permanently on temple gates so that they may be “horizontal next to each other” forever. However, his Buddhist faith differs from that of the speaker’s mother who was raised in a Christian household. The tension between mother and father manifests itself in the form of brackets. Stanzas about the speaker’s father are sectioned with blank brackets “[ ]”, whereas memories of the mother are presented as intrusions of “[STATIC].”
As seen, the brackets serve as visual cues of two different trains of thought: one narrative, the other the oppressive presence. Structured as filmic shots of the mother’s body, Xu’s [STATIC] intrusions allow the speaker and us to feel and see the mother as a deathless vision, hovering in and out of focus. It is against this presence that the speaker aims to claim a new way of thinking, to say “The Forbidden Word” which is repeatedly invoked throughout the poem.
If the first instalment of “To Red Dust” is about finding voice in the personal world, the second connects the experiences of death and grief to the political realm. Each section is titled with a place and date, which the poem starts off within the Mo Gao Grottoes: the historic home to treasured Buddhist art. Xu spotlights an image of “two figures drawn in red dust” carving their names into stone, which the speaker aligns to “ours, my mother, my father,” blurring the timeline of grand and personal histories. The speaker is herself inducted into this history when someone performs the ritual and “presses a red thumb to my forehead, opens my mouth.”
A quotation from the Qing Dynasty novel Dream of the Red Chamber (running vertically down the page) accompanies the speaker’s narrative. The quote tells the tale of a monk leading a singular stone “onto land into the form of a human.” The paratext presents the speaker as a successor in the long lineage of Chinese literature— for which she bears the aspirations and past lives of her elders. This lineage informs the speaker’s presence at the scene of the 2019 Hong Kong protests on the following page, where she reimagines teargas as a mass anointing (“my hands/ dipping the ladle in oil, lifting it high above our heads.”) Xu replaces the physical violence of the scene with the tranquillity of “a mother bathing her newborn,” painting death and pain as rebirth. The assimilation of urban chaos into nature, where “smoke and clouds emerge,” softens the violence of the state response to the protests. Against worldly tumult, Xu reaches for the sacred, pulling away from fixed time and place.
It is worth pondering in greater depth the ramifications of this retreat. A later section of “To Red Dust” is simply titled “[ ], 2018,” and it captures the speaker’s attempt to write to an unnamed political dissident, inquiring about their wellbeing while being acutely aware of the violence that is “lashing your flesh, your eyes.” Yet another section, “Shanghai, [ ],” calls for the speaker to exempt herself from these scenes of mortal suffering, inducing her to repeat that “I shall not see & I shall not speak –,” in the hope of reaching transcendence “on the mountain of eternity.” However, spiritual retreat without purpose results in disengagement, and this Xu recognizes as a form of violence against the dead. When at last the speaker enters into the placeless, timeless space of supposed transcendence in the final section, “[ ], [ ],” she rails against it. The soothing mantra of “om mani padme hum” is instead feverishly chanted, building up to an explosive declaration: “I want to howl your name// across the headlines, carry your body over the threshold.” The namelessness of the poem’s subjects may make “To Red Dust” hard to follow, but it is precisely this disorientation that the speaker resists, enacting the dual strain of forgetting and remembering mortal suffering in the path to transcendence.
In the form of a Tibetan pilgrimage Xu takes us through national and personal histories to grapple with death and profound loss. Matters of identity fade in the poem “Against This Earth, We Knock,” as lines are delivered by a disembodied speaker. Each line is end-stopped and complete, commanding mindfulness in each step. We experience a deep calm as we “Rise joint by joint […] Empty the rungs of your lungs.” The process of purification also requires of us a piece of the dead, “a singular tooth,” for instance, to bury in the afterlife. Xu also offers closure to the ghosts of her speaker’s past. A conversation with the speaker’s dead mother takes place at last in the ambient piece “There Is Still Singing in the Afterlife.” The mother-daughter relationship is reframed within the romance of folkloric butterfly lovers “Liang & Zhu.” The speaker reminds her mother of having “loved once / remember? / Five hundred years.” In response we hear the mother in italicized whispers, beckoning her daughter to “Come — today – today when winds change.” Their relationship defies both time and space, and the speaker sings like her mother once did, “singing in the bathtub you loved.” Through the pains of separation and the tumult of transcendence, the speaker keeps her mother alive in her living voice, forming a bridge between the two worlds, one built on an everlasting love.
A lover of words and the worlds spun out of them, Aileen Liang studies English Literature as an undergraduate at Nanyang Technological University, with an inclination towards women’s writing and Southeast Asian literatures. When she is not reading, she is writing frantically in various notebooks and documenting life as best as she can.
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