Sovereign Life
Review of Han Vanderhart’s What Pecan Light (USA: Bull City Press, 2021)
By Jennifer Anne Champion
What can a woman from a tropical modern city-state make of a collection of poetry about Louisiana farm life? The majority of Singapore’s inhabitants are severely distanced from agriculture beyond eating it, let alone the activities, histories, and cultures of farms halfway across the world. And yet we are not entirely unfamiliar with the baggage and pain derived from the intersection of race and labor. Approaching the work of Han Vanderhart, in particular their first full collection, What Pecan Light, it is evident these poems engage with questions about history and how its monuments and symbols are interpreted in multiple ways. The verse is medium-length in most places and formal, with a number written in pleasing couplets.
In “Song of the South,” a poem written in short definitive statements, the narrator says, “Most of/ all, the song is black and white. Most of all/ we don’t talk about it. We don’t even hum.” ‘Methodist’ values—such as not drinking, not acknowledging porn or divorce, and presumably race which is never explicitly mentioned in this poem—become performances, motivated by a will to conform to the stiflingly “humid,” hypocritical heart of the good Christian family. All the while, this conformity is underpinned by shame as explored in later poems such as “Having Taken Part in the Late Rebellion.” The silent disavowal of certain topics is sandwiched by luscious descriptions of Southern cuisine. The references to comfort food are a palate cleanser, but they are used by the poet critically, as further performances of grace in order to circumvent guilt: “We name the pigs Caesar and Pompeii/ knowing neither of them will survive.”
A more direct examination of the poet’s own personal family history vis-a-vis slave-owning occurs in the poem, “Having Taken Part in the Late Rebellion,” concerning a pardon plea written by the poet’s third great grandfather to President Johnson on the retrieval of his property. The quotations from the plea have to do with John ‘Jack’ Allums’ disavowal of violence in the Confederacy’s attempt to secede. They make up quite a list, but are so notably precise that one cannot help imagining the acts of violence that are being categorically denied:
By his account, Allums did not order the taking of Fort Morgan or Mount Vernon
Arsenal, nor aid in nor advise the taking of either of them.
Did not serve on any Vigilance Committee during the war.
Did not shoot or hang any person nor aid in shooting or hanging anyone for real or
supposed disloyalty to the Confederate States.
He writes this twice.
These declarative statements are damning, but what is left undeclared? Vanderhart wonders about this too in their concluding line, “Enslaved persons, but for this he does not ask pardon.” The conclusion, to my mind, carries with it a chilling ambiguity when considered with the line before it, “He will endeavour to be a peaceful and loyal citizen in future.” Losing a war does not change anyone’s mind but merely subjects it to the winning ideology. So while Allums may, in writing, endeavor to be ‘loyal,’ he does not embrace emancipatory ideals through goodwill but fear, and perhaps resentment. I make this point with no intention of equating the loss of the Confederate States to the inhumane violence of slavery, and neither does the poet. I write this only to say this poem gives me some indication of the lingering resentment harbored by those racially privileged in the US—a resentment alluded to in other poems, notably “Poem Ending in a Line from C.D. Wright” and “The Confederate Flag Is a War Flag.”
Fear of the state as it relates to political, social, and economic autonomy is evergreen. As the poet rightly points out in the poem “Confederate Monuments,” the fear is normalized these days in the names of things, streets, buildings, and holidays, so that the legacy of powerful (and oppressive) forces remain in our society but are not explained. When violent forces are rendered mundane, it is easy for citizens to be passive or even self-congratulatory. I think of this often when I pass by the statue of Stamford Raffles, the colonial founder of Singapore. Children see the statue and know he is celebrated in this country’s culture and history but do not understand that this history is one we should interrogate and resist. As Han recollects in a later poem, “I had to do the work of books/ to find what I did not want to find.” To be ashamed and appalled is not the preserve of Americans but of every citizen of the world if we were all to dig hard.
That said, this is not a collection written in fear or guilt, although it is about both. Each successive poem makes plainer the guilt behind seemingly mundane objects and personal history. The result is a poetry that is clear-eyed and accessible, with very little ornamentation; that bears witness to a history of participation in enslavement, past and present. Consider these lines from the poem “Post-Antebellum in the States”:
As a child I ran with a rebel flag
and we did not question
our play, which was violent
and harmonized with our idea of God.
I am struck by this filmic observation of a childhood game, pretending to be soldiers in the civil war as “theatre so real we perform it again.” At its core the poem asks if we can ever escape the performance of our violent histories when they are “pressed” into our foundational identities. The poet offers sound advice for this question in another poem “Where Art Thou: A Family Account”: “Keep these failures close […] cradle this knowing// like a chick in your/ hands.”
The question then is how do we keep our failures close without, as Vanderhart puts it in another poem, giving “company” to “the white ghosts of the South”? How do we ensure that work about ourselves and our histories today do not prop up harmful ideologies of the past, yet still meaningfully addresses racism, colonialism, and reparative justice among other things? Poems such as “When Someone Says a Poem Is Masterful,” “Remembering That My Grandfather Hunted Men with Dogs in the Alabama Woods,” “Confederate Statues Are Falling This Morning,” “Confession,” and “The Confederate Flag Is a War Flag” are wonderful examples of personal reckoning.
In “When Someone Says a Poem Is Masterful,” Vanderhart writes succinctly in five sections of mastery in art, slavery, gender, and nautical navigation—a heady blend that is itself masterful in poetic craft. And yet the poem also includes the lines:
who is the master of art? (no one)
who wants to master the body of a poem? (no one should)
Vanderhart demonstrates that one should be precise about what one is speaking of, that to “make [is]… better than to master.” In the dichotomy set up between master and subjected, Vanderhart sides with the subjected who labors but is careful about positioning themselves as a ‘voice for the voiceless’—a common trope among well-meaning but patronizing poets. Vanderhart cannot speak for the marginalized as they are a person with “a master in the family tree,” but they can acknowledge and reckon with that history and their present privilege and choose a side. Once that side has been chosen, to return to the above quotation, allies in their advocacy should tread carefully and not let ego seep into the body of work that they do.
My favorite poem from this collection is “It Was a Field before It Was a Battlefield.” The line “We have each taken something that belonged/ to itself first, something that was once a wide/ and open green” hit me hard with its acknowledgment and condemnation of human nature’s thieving and appropriative traits. The poem concludes, however, that our appropriation of fields (and other humans) around us does not change their essential nature. There is a dignity that is sovereign and endures even in the life we have sullied and harmed. This is a source of comfort for those who grapple with guilt due to human intervention.
I wish more all poems in What Pecan Light were this impactful in their imagery. I was confused particularly by the imagery of chickens in this collection, which to me which sporadically pepper a collection ultimately and most powerfully contributing to discourses on race and power. Tender as the chicken poems may be, agricultural pieces like “Chicken Coop,” “Unwashed,” and some of the earlier poems seem somewhat terse, needing more connective tissue. It is possible that there is a greater point that how we treat our animals mirrors how we treat each other. It’s hard for me to say because the chicken analogies are so diffuse and flexible in their deployment. If chickens as a metaphor are used in this way, the greater point is right. I certainly feel this best in lines such as these from “Homily on the Hand and Eye”:
The lesson of the broiler
chicken is that we are bare.
Under feathers, we are all bare.
It is entirely possible that I am missing the poignancy of these fowl (remember I am a city girl, and so the humble chicken is more comical and abstract to my cultural imagination), but these poems detracted took me away from an otherwise solid and heartfelt work of personal history. Nevertheless, I am thankful to have been given a view of Louisiana, as exotic to me as I suppose Singapore may be to a Midwestern American audience.
Jennifer Anne Champion is a poet, textile artist, and literary arts educator. She is the author of two chapbooks of poetry: A History of Clocks (Red Wheelbarrow Books, 2015) and Caterwaul (Math Paper Press, 2016). Her work has also been published in the Quarterly Literary Review of Singapore, the Straits Times and Esquire Magazine (Singapore). She was Singapore’s digital poet-in-residence at the Norwich Centre for Writing (UK) in 2021. Her current passions are song-writing and discovering Singapore embroidery traditions.
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