The book Salvinia Molesta by Victoria Chang is a tangled trellis of image
and emotion, weaving a story of fear, loss, and violence. From this framework of intense and
frightening subject matter, each poem hangs like an over-ripe fruit, eloquent
words making the outside palatable, while the inside remains an upsettingly truthful
vision of humanity’s disillusionment and depravity. In her uniquely gentle and motherly tone,
Victoria Chang reassures us while simultaneously forcing us to open our eyes to
the gloom that surrounds us, as in the elegant yet desolate opening stanza of
“Ars Poetica as Dislocated Theater:”
There is a
cliff. There is a woman on the
edge of the
cliff. Her arms open. The sun
and sky become
larger. The wind needles into
her.
…
But where am I
now, having seen the cliff, the woman
on the edge,
having heard the music and its
crescendoing
feet?
Though the poem,
like quite a few in the collection, begins with warm and beautiful imagery, in
this case reminiscent of pregnancy and motherhood, the stanza continues with a
questioning of the speaker’s life and place in the world. This is the position Salvinia Molesta takes in regards to almost all of its subjects:
from the poverty of Communist China under Mao to the suicides of corrupt
American businessmen, Chang chooses not to condemn the inhumanity in the world,
but rather to make us question it and our part in it.
In this collection, her second book
of poetry, Chang holds a mirror to the reader, and with each poem a twisted
picture of mankind emerges. Some of the
poems leave the reader feeling empty and used; others leave us inflamed with
anger of injustice, tragedy. “Jiang
Qing,” a poem about Mao Zedong’s wife, ends with the bleak sentiment that,
With each new
Thought, your
hand around my neck still indents
me. Soon the wind will overtake my shadow.
Though the
imagery of the last line may be melancholically beautiful, the violent death
before it unsettles us. Chang never
allows us to be comfortable, happy. In
“Seven Stages of Genocide” a brutal murder in an unnamed concentration camp is
described in an unsettlingly passive way:
When they tire,
they bury my neighbor from
the neck down
and let the German shepherds at him.
How his fists
must have tried to clench.
In each instance
of torture, death, poverty, misery, suicide, oppression, the reader must draw
their own conclusions about the cruelty; Chang merely gives us the facts,
reimagined in articulate language that belies the bestiality of the situations.
In taking on the voices of a host of
real and imagined historical figures, Chang assumes the daunting responsibility
of speaking for these people with dignity and respect. The type of first person witnessing she
adopts in poems like “Jiang Qing” and “Seven Stages of Genocide” is a dangerous
tightrope to wander onto. An author who
speaks for someone who is now voiceless, in these examples Mao Zedong’s wife
and a Holocaust victim, has the responsibility of treating this suffering,
which they may never have personally experienced, with compassion and
truth. It can be difficult for a poet to
capture the realities of these situations.
After all, how many of us have lived through a genocide, or know what it
is like to be rejected by one’s people and forced to commit suicide. A poet must find something in their own
experience, even something as abstract as an emotion to connect to these
foreign experiences. And, as Kim
Addonizio and Dorainne Laux claim in their book on the art of poetry, The Poet’s Companion, “Our link to the
suffering of others is that we care about it, and what we care about we tend to
put into our writing.” And though
Victoria Chang addresses so many of her subjects in Salvinia Molesta with an air of detachment that allows us to insert
our own emotional responses, it is clear that the subjects she addresses are
near to her heart. She gives voice to people
like Iris Chang, a Chinese-American author who she obviously respects, and to
those whose suffering she finds fascinating, like Clifford Baxter, who
committed suicide, and Frank Quattrone, who was accused and then cleared of obstruction
of justice charges. She also bears
witness to the daily struggles of unnamed, imagined people, like the weary
Chinese woman who hangs up posters of Chairman Mao and finds herself
questioning her loyalties in “Hanging Mao Posters” and “After Hanging Mao
Posters”, two poems that frame the first section of the book, and the young
Taiwanese schoolboy who witnesses the brutal murder of a peddler by a soldier
in “February 28, 1947.” In all
instances, whether she tackles bloody brutality or quiet dissatisfaction, Chang
does justice to the complexity of human existence and suffering.
Like the stifling invasive weed it
is named after, Salvinia Molesta is a
fearsome but truthful epitaph to the world’s anguish, and a sad, yet
insistently elegant glimpse of the sorrow that is yet to come. In a live reading of her poetry, Victoria
Chang’s voice was calm and even, with the warmth of a mother speaking soothing
words to her newborn. The tales of
depravity and sadness that rolled off her tongue were tempered by her serenity,
her resignation, and just a touch of hope.
Her reading matched the tone of her poetry: the gracefulness of her
portrayals of wretchedness, her sympathy for her subjects. By writing about occurrences both disturbing
and painful, Chang dares to make human what so many of us dismiss as inhuman;
she makes us see that the atrocities we avoid thinking about are human
atrocities, committed by humans on humans.
She faces, head-on, subject matter that other poets avoid because of its
distasteful nature and the difficulty of portraying it with dignity and
accuracy. Victoria Chang is a brave poet
who does not shy away from the sad, the gruesome, yet who tells her stories
with sensitivity and beauty. Salvinia Molesta is a unique collection
of poetry and a must-have for every poetry lover.
The Lonely Alchemist
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