Lunch Break – “Closet Space”
“Lunch Break” is a poetry column appearing every fourth Friday of the month. Look for insightful appreciations of contemporary poems from around the world. This month, guest columnist Sharmane Tan looks into Taiwanese American poet K-Ming Chang’s “Closet Space” and discovers the breakages of love. Sign up for notifications here.
I know I’m godless when
my thirst converts water into wasps, my country a carpet
I finger for crumbs. A country
my grandmother breeds
dogs instead of daughters because only one can be called
home. I am trained to lose accents,
to keep a pregnancy
or cancel it out with another man. My tongue is
a twin, one translating
the other’s silence. Here
is my lung’s list of needs: how to hold water
like a woman & not
drown. I want men
to stop writing & become mothers. I promise this
is the last time I call my mother
to hear her voice
beside mine. I want the privilege of a history
to hand back unworn
to grow out of
my mother’s touch like a dress from
childhood. Every time
I flirt with girls, I say
I know my way around a wound. I say let’s bang
open like doors, answer to
god. I unpin from
my skin, leave it to age in my closet & swing
from the dark, a wrecking
ball gown. In the closet
urns of ashes: we cremated my grandfather
on a stovetop, stirred
every nation we tried
to bury him in was a war past calling itself
one. I stay closeted with
him, his scent echoing
in the urn, weeks-old ginger & leeks, leaks
of light where his bones halved
& healed. With small
hands, I puzzled him back together. I hid from
his shadow in closets
his feet like a chicken’s,
jellied bone & meatless. His favorite food was chicken
feet, bones shallow in the meat
When he got dementia,
he flirted with my mother he mouthed for my breasts
like an infant
We poured milk
into his eyeholes until he saw everything
neck-deep in white
the Chinese color
of mourning, bad luck, though the doctor
says everything is
genetics. I lock myself in
the smallest rooms that fit in my mind, my grandfather’s:
a house we hired back from
fire. So I’ll forever
have a mother, I become a daughter who goes by god. I urn
my ghosts, know each by a name
my own.
Published in her debut poetry collection, Past Lives, Future Bodies (Black Lawrence Press, 2018), K-Ming Chang’s “Closet Space” interrogates what it means to inhabit a body irreparably wounded by the ongoing violence of history. Lesbian theorist Monique Wittig writes in Les Guérillères that “the language you speak is made up of words that are killing you” (69) and in Chang’s poem, a history of racism, homophobia and imperialism condemns the queer, diasporic body to perform the same self-annihilating function.
At every turn, the speaker’s bodily desires work against her: thirst turns water into wasps, lungs need to be taught how not to drown, and lesbian desire must be unpinned from the skin, left to age in the closet without anyone’s witness. Queer desire, rendered monstrous by homophobia, becomes a site of distrust and danger for the speaker as she confesses wanting “the privilege of a history / to hand back unworn”–something prelapsarian, before Eve’s sinful desire, like the speaker’s thirst, became synonymous with god’s abandonment. By using her thirst as an indication of god’s absence in the opening line, the speaker ultimately struggles with the idea that there is no making it clean for people like her–like a good, holy baptism ought to do–whose bodies are always already imprinted and scapegoated with history’s sin.
After all, there is not supposed to be space in the closet, but like the staggered contrapuntal form that the poem takes, we brutally cleave our lives into two to make space: creating “a wound” which defies our bodily desires in order to survive. And there lies the cruel paradox: in making yourself smaller, like the poem’s two columns, you get to take up more space in a world that is systematically designed to deprive certain people of it. In an interview for the Taiwanese American, Chang notes that she “used to think that Taiwanese diasporic identity translated into invisibility” and the poem, too, asks how the metaphor of the closet may work differently for queer diasporic women, since America’s national imaginary centralizes whiteness in its representations of queerness. To that end, the speaker brings her dead Taiwanese grandfather into the closet with her, and the poem deftly uses caesuras to literalize the distance between the speaker’s queerness and her ethnicity:
In the closet
urns of ashes:
every nation we tried
to bury him in was
him, his scent echoing
in the urn, weeks-old
& healed.
The corresponding column to this segment:
we cremated my grandfather
on a stovetop, stirred
a war past calling itself
one. I stayed closeted with
ginger & leeks, leaks
of light where his bones halved
When the two columns are weaved together, the speaker is “closeted with / him, his scent echoing / in the urn, weeks old / ginger & leeks”, hence sharply imbuing queer diasporic invisibility with a racist history of erasure that constitutes Asian-American existence. Like the spectral presence of her grandfather’s ashes in the closet, the distance between the speaker’s desires and the bodily history she has inherited is always yoked together–yet never truly reconciled, as fracture inevitably breaks and defines a body continually subjected to political violence.
While reading the poem, I thought about what my own queer realization felt like. Instead of bringing me closer to my desires, I turned over every memory I ever had, wondering how it was possible to have lived in so much self-betrayal. The queer body breaks and breaks to allow for survival, but the cost, as the poem suggests, is a perpetual mourning for a wholeness that never quite arrives. Perhaps, then, we ought to live with this injury: towards the end of the poem, the speaker urns her ghosts, and in a bold act that defies silence, names them one by one.
Sharmane Tan (they/she) is a Masters student in English Literature at Nanyang Technological University who is writing a thesis on the politics of negativity in contemporary queer fiction. She is also a freelance film and television journalist, with bylines at Girls on Tops, Film-Cred, and Into the Fold Magazine.
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