Oceanic Assemblies

Review of Jan-Henry Gray’s Documents (Rochester: BOA Editions, 2020)
By Sean Chua

For a work that dwells in the space between bureaucratic procedure and lived existence, Jan-Henry Gray’s debut collection, Documents, fittingly begins with the following act of redefinition: “horizon—a permanent humiliation on the act of arrival.” The book plumbs the notion of distance and destination within the metaphor of horizon, drawing from his experiences as an undocumented Filipino immigrant to the United States. Through its collection of experimental forms, memories, refrains, and encounters, Documents bears witness to the messy work of migration and adaptation, its processes of dislocation and disorientation, and the everyday negotiations one takes to survive it.

For Gray, the immigrant’s existence begins as a negotiation between truth and fiction, the body and its representation. The poem “April 1984,” in the book’s first section, tells the story of a Filipino woman boarding a plane for California with her young children. The starkness of living in the gaps of legislature begins even before she embarks:

The young mother       born

         with the wrong name

                boards a plane.

These opening words are suspended, their unspoken weights brought into relief by the indentation of space that splits them. The young mother’s condition of entry to a better future rests on an overwhelmingly elemental contradiction between her “wrong name” and her identity as a “young mother,” foreshadowing a forged, precarious existence amidst the bureaucracy of the state and public opinion. Yet the poem does not dwell here, instead letting the unspoken weight of this contradiction hang over it like a sword. The same trepidation goes on to suffuse the rest of the lines, as when the woman’s youngest son waits to be born:

he will hear      the clatter          of two languages

     stories         about home       from the others and

               cry for his mother’s milk.

Here, spaces amplify the distance of migration, the gulf crossed between two continents and cultures. These are front-heavy lines, economical in their magnitude, and austere in their breathlessness, teetering on the brink of longing. It is a longing held between one’s origin and destination, between one’s past identity and future aspirations. This theme of liminality and negotiation will recur throughout the rest of the book.

Gray presents immigration documents as another dimension of this negotiation. The personal, for all its illegible complexities, is made heart-wrenchingly political through documents such as the customs form. Thus, in the poem “I-797-C,” Gray intersperses information requests made by an immigration official with terrifying legalese, framed by the poem’s mimicry of the actual document:

Under the official’s interrogation, the immigrant speaker must dredge up all their familial histories and lay them bare upon the table in order to prove their own personhood. We are presented with a singular life in all its richness—the outline of a husband, the sprawling shape of a family tree—all inscribed, quite literally, across the body of a form. One’s answers, fabricated or otherwise, is entangled haplessly with one’s relationship to truth: the immigrant is demanded by the official to “talk about love, how [they] got married for love.” Ironically, there is no space left for them to speak for themselves. It might be more precise to call this a maldocumented existence: an act of erasure wherein one’s life is filled in by the state.

Even more poignantly, Documents witnesses these acts of form-filling from the immigrant’s point of view, as in “Frank Quizon Gray Jr. III,” where the speaker forges their father’s signature for a letter: “I practiced my father’s signature/ this morning. I practiced my// father’s signature this morning.” The repetition is breathtakingly wistful, as if the speaker’s very act of forgery might conjure their father into being. “His cursive// is beautiful. His cursive is so/ so beautiful.” For Gray, answering to authority can also be a stirring kind of negotiation, exploring the multivalence of one’s relationships to power, bureaucracy, family, and the self as they are constantly worked and reworked throughout one’s life.

As the collection develops, Documents proceeds to inscribe the trauma of immigrant precarity beyond the form and the customs office, and into the realm of everyday life. Midway through the book, “The Dream Act” describes the process of an immigrant family moving into a garage below their landlord’s house:

There is a garage underneath the house.

the house has an address.

the garage does not.

We are treated to a glimpse of a world where the simplest things—everyday acts of living, playing, and homemaking—are tinged with austerity. The precarity of their situation is crushing. The immigrant family is to survive by staking its claim on American soil, act by painstaking act. Through these acts, objects are hailed into family, just as family is hailed into nation, reflected through nomenclatural shifts: “the father brings home a tree./ the family calls it a christmas tree.”; and eventually, “the children decorate the tree with ornaments made of paper” (italics mine). In the wake of the titular legislative act, the family, their home, and their belongings grow to take on an air of mythological significance. Gray uses the elemental weight of individual words to brutal effect, and the result is sparse and uncompromising. This is a story that has been told many times before, and it will be told many times hence.

Gray’s fascination with the weights of words is not limited to exploring their austerity. Throughout the book, his voice is shaped by the routine assembly and disassembly of sounds. In an interview with the Kenyon Review, Gray alludes to falling in love with poetry through his first dictionary: “I remember discovering the word ‘akimbo’. I loved its three short syllables and how it described such a specific action.” Documents goes on to pepper itself with moments that isolate such words and indulge in them. For example, in the closing lines of “In ‘The Store with Beautiful Things’”:

The poem ends in a cascade of trochees that cling to the tongue, relishing in their luminous musicality, a collection of small things that echo wistfully in the mind: “jigsaw,” “peanut,” “heartbeat,” “Amen.”

There is, I think, a possible further diasporic reading of Gray’s fascination with sound. Here, words are constituted and re-constituted in their speaking, understood less for their meaning than for their pure sonic substrate—as when one learns a foreign language, playing with new words and phrases on one’s tongue before internalizing their usage. It is a process as intimate to the immigrant as their constitution of their own identity, as the poem “Birth Certificate” alludes to: “I place words// and words together,/ un-together, take apart.” And in “On Translation,” where Gray’s argument is as much semantic as it is sonic: the falling branch is not a twig until it is “with-the-ground” and near (but not touching) the root of its tree—only then is the mute consonant ending of “twig” concordant with the distance it has travelled. To paraphrase “April 1984,” I cannot help but wonder if Gray’s poetic sensitivity is born from a negotiation between the “clatter” of two worlds. It resembles a translation, but not in the usual linguistic sense. Instead, it evokes a sense of translation on an existential level, originating from and mediating on one’s horizontal displacement between spaces, languages, and cultures.

In these entanglements of family, authority, nation, race, and power, other lives weave in and out. A series of Documents’ poems concern maids in Gray’s homeland of the Philippines. “Maid Poem #3: Before a Feast for Maids” echoes the immigration official of “I-797-C” with its one-sided questioning, ringing sickly sweet with the employer’s benevolence: “Anything you want./ This is for you./ All of us.” Through the imagined employer, Gray is also questioning his past relationships to these maids, further entangling himself in a web of hierarchies and memories. In other pieces, the past arrives dredged from hearsay and memory to confront the poet in the present: as in “Maid Poem #2” where he recalls “their names, the smell of their skin,” or in “Maid Poem #6: Proscenium,” where the boy of his memories, ignoring the maid, “looks across the courtyard, and sees me” (italics mine). Implicit in these poems are the gulfs of power and geography and their impassable horizons. These are poems of reaching, of trying to bridge the gaps between origin and destination—an origin that Gray, as an undocumented immigrant, has been unable to return to since.

Other poems detail encounters with lovers, celebrities, and fellow immigrants as their lives briefly intersect with the poet’s own. Of meeting Allen Ginsberg, in “d. 1997”: “I’m looking for you in these impossible rooms/ squinting for a flash of flesh, a mouth is a mouth—” Reaching, grasping, the two men hold onto each other’s arms. Or, in “In the Fields, I Learned a Hymn,” where the unnamed man tells the speaker: “Boy, cool my knuckles in the new soil—/ where it’s soft.” “For Tanzania” recounts a story about a Caribbean girl and her girlfriend. Moments like these ground the book in the corporeality of common experience. They are poems about touch, smell, and mutual understanding between transient individuals. They interject the poet’s experience with a plurality of encounters, a multiplicity of takes and entry-points. “The doors of the building open,” writes Gray in the final poem of the collection, “Immigration and Naturalization Services”: “You watch as the others exit. Then, another word approaches.”

Gray’s voice is rawest in the sprawling prose poem “EXAQUA.” In it, he voices his fascination with bodies of water: “Water is the medium, the texture, the space, the weight, the motion/ emotion of your writing/ thinking.” The motif of the Pacific is an attempt to reconstruct the gaps between himself and his homeland, his self and the world around him. A line from “In ‘The Store with Beautiful Things’” returns with a vengeance: “Do you feel like you have seen the island sinking? Yes, I feel it sinking inch by terrible inch.” There is a fear of losing what little ground has been gained to the gulfs of distance and forgetting, that the poet’s work of reconstruction and documentation will eventually come undone—or worse, shown to be impossible. The depths of the ocean floor can only be told through the multiplicity of things that have collected there: “language, tea kettles, dominos, plastic kazoos, birth certificates.” Perhaps it is through these things that the poet can finally bridge the horizons of distance, drawing from the strength of the assemblage, the power of every single word, expressing the whole through nothing less than the sum of its parts. Thus, below Documents, the ocean sits, conceptually as well as visually—from the formatting of “EXAQUA” itself, its words gathering at the bottom of each page, to the stark white-and-gray horizons that demarcate Documents’ section breaks, and the images of water, memory, and distance that echo throughout.

In this respect, I have been cautious not to solely interpret the collection as an account of Gray’s own experiences as an undocumented immigrant. Yes, this book contains poems about immigration and the experiences of immigration; but more than that, it traces out the shape of a life in all the pluralities it contains. It spans the struggle of consolidating oneself across vast distances, the permanent horizon of settling into somewhere new, and the everyday magic of the words, acts, and objects that comprise it. Above all, Documents is a slowly rising tide that assembles itself from this multitude, insisting on its presence to the last.


Sean Chua is an urban studies major at Yale-NUS College, Singapore. He dabbles in poetry and speculative short fiction with a magical-realist, queer, or geographical bent, exploring the interstices of place, memory, technology, and the body.