Language Of All Our Becomings

By Rona Luo

Review of State of Play: Poets of East & Southeast Asian Heritage in Conversation, edited by Eddie Tay and Jennifer Wong (London: Out-Spoken Press, 2023)

“Every anthology is the formation of a community, is it not?” asks Eddie Tay in the anthology he co-edits, State of Play: Poets of East and Southeast Asian Heritage in Conversation, an expansive collection of essays, letters, transcribed voice notes, and video calls between diasporic poets spanning Asia, Europe, and North America. Published in the UK by Outspoken Press, State of Play teases out both common and divergent themes and anxieties among its contributors, including the anxiety over “doing race wrong” (Monica Youn), “fossilizing existing imbalance and exclusiveness” (Tim Tim Cheng) in the institution of poetry, making work “without cannibalizing the experiences of others in a predatory way or an exploitative way” (R.A. Villanueva), and writing poetry “in a world of continuous colonial theft” (Khairani Barokka). Tay and co-editor Jennifer Wong’s chosen form for the anthology – conversations rather than craft essays – allows poets to ask questions that haunt them, without having to have all the answers.

The result is a collection of unusual vulnerability and genuine revelations. We see poets grappling with the colonial imprint of the English language, writing “to unlace the corset of English tense(s)” (Lisa Kiew) while also resisting the idea that a “single language, English or otherwise, can be the language of all our becomings” (Aaron Maniam). Similarly, Will Harris points out that in a world of increasing hybridity, “a singular language which defines & shapes us is an illusion.” Joshua Ip goes even further, considering creole languages such as Singlish a “drastic improvement” and an “upgrade” over the inefficiencies of English. Lisa Kiew muses that the English language is “particularly suited to a scarcity mindset” – in contrast, we see these diasporic poets working and reworking language towards multiplicity and abundance, “all pulsing to different grooves in the daily sonic atmosphere… grooves that form part of the same song without knowing” (Khairani Barokka).

The term East and Southeast Asian (or British East and Southeast Asian) is a relatively new one in the UK, popularized during the pandemic by community groups organizing against rising anti-Asian hate. I can’t help but think of State of Play’s resonance with Aieeee! the seminal anthology of Asian American literature published in 1974, a time when activists were building a new Asian American identity, distinct from solely Asian or solely white American identities. Whereas Aieeee!’s editors defined the new Asian American identity within national borders, and intentionally included only authors who had been born and raised in America, the East and Southeast Asian identity employed by Wong and Tay is much broader. The contributors’ criss-crossing migration patterns and their relationship to home and homelands “as a traumatic, cesarean excision” (Alvin Pang) speak to the globalized diasporas of today. This anthology makes space for multi-leg immigration journeys like my own, moving from China to the U.S. as a child, and now making a home in the U.K., as well as the journeys of Anglophone writers born and raised in Asia, educated in the West, and now living and writing in Asia, but not necessarily in the countries of their birth. The expansiveness of State of Play’s international dialogue and solidarity comes as a relief to me, as a poet trying to unlearn my own Asian American-centric perspective.

Much has been written about the limitations of Aieeee!, and in building a new community, there are kinks to be worked out in who is included and excluded under this East and Southeast Asian term. Although the editors admit that “it is impossible to fully encompass the complexities of Asian identities, and this book does not pretend to do so,” it is hard to overlook the centrality of poets of the Chinese diaspora in this anthology – at least 70 percent of State of Play’s contributors have some Chinese heritage. This abundance of representation comes at the expense of experiences not included: the anthology features no writers of Japanese, Thai, Cambodian, Hmong, Burmese, or Laotian heritage, to name a few, and other cultural identities are represented only by a single writer. Although the driving force of a collection should never be the ticking of diversity boxes, for poets of East and Southeast Asian heritage writing towards multiplicity, the conversation would be enriched by a greater range of perspectives. Furthermore, de-centering Chinese diasporic voices in East and Southeast Asian communities is an important step towards decolonizing ourselves from not just Western colonization, but also historic and present-day Chinese colonization in East and Southeast Asia.

Palestinian American poet George Abraham makes a call in their 2021 Guernica essay for poets to write towards a collective lyric-we, as opposed to the lyric-I: “The essence of this lyric-we would be solidarity — to show up in language and off the page. A poetics not just of theoretical insurgence, but that demands the poet, the readers, and all listeners enact the poem with our lives.” Many of State of Play’s contributors are similarly concerned with practicing their poetics off the page: Chen Chen discusses Ocean Vuong’s warning of “how easily we can slip into language that implies war or any type of conflict rather than taking time to imagine a different relationship,” and sets an intention to “care about my language all the time, in every context, with each person,” rather than putting care solely into language on the page. Jay Gao discusses Erica Hunt’s notion that “writing poems is a type of rehearsal: a rehearsal in order to live freely.” However, practicing one’s poetics in life is easier said than done – Marylyn Tan points out “it is so easy to say ‘become ungovernable’ and then live wholly domestic.”

How then do we write and live towards greater freedom from a colonial language of scarcity, from policing “as an act of reducing and redacting space” (Mukahang Limbu), and from the “divisions of race in the racial capitalist system” (Sarah Howe). The poets’ own acts of resistance litter the anthology and offer us a glimpse of possibilities, from Monica Youn working through the ways in which “anti-Blackness is constitutive of Asian American identity,” as described by political science scholar Claire Jean Kim, to Romalyn Ante resurrecting Baybayin script as a way of “recovering and relearning what was lost,” to Jinhao Xie maintaining in their poetry “the space for ambiguity, anti-clarity, and anti-voices,” to Marylyn Tan working with the power of pleasure, “the absolute clusterfuck pleasure that i think must undergird all of our organizing, all of our writing, all our advocating for better things for each of us.”

Despite its limitations in representation, State of Play covers a breathtaking range of experiences, poetics, and possibilities among poets of East and Southeast Asian heritage working today. Jay Gao writes that “the poem may end with a line but poetry manages to continue way past it, burying itself into the future,” – so too, I believe, this anthology will continue seeding important and necessary conversations in poetry for years to come.

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Rona Luo is a queer, neurodivergent poet and acupuncturist based in the UK. A Kundiman fellow and member of Southbank Centre's New Poets Collective, her work has appeared in ANMLY, The Massachusetts Review, Mom Egg Review, fourteen poems, and Bi+ Lines anthology. Her visual poetry has been exhibited in London’s Royal Festival Hall.

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