One Who Hears The Sounds of The World: Review of Larissa Lai’s Iron Goddess of Mercy
Larissa Lai, Iron Goddess of Mercy.
Arsenal Pulp Press, 2021. $19.95 CAD.
Order a copy from Arsenal Pulp Press.
“Rain on me blood, water or milk liquid silky as the ilk of connection springs unexpected forms from the fountain of hope, dope enough to relax all this thinking.” (98)
The experience of Larissa Lai’s Iron Goddess of Mercy is a purposeful wading through text that churns like rough water throwing up debris, seafoam, and dislodging sunken things from the seabed. The language is disruptive, the lines are rubble, and through the powerful invocation of the speaker, the words are transformative.
As I go through Lai’s poetry, I encounter the nebulous and evasive tendencies of diasporic memory. There are moments tender and reflective, questions incisive and stubborn. Throughout the poem, the speaker is powerful and angry.
“hum for your life from amitabha to om mani pedi” (134)
Lai is adamantly formal in her disturbances. The 64 parts structured after the I Ching—the Book of Changes, an ancient Chinese text used for divination—are written in epistolary voice, performed as rants and woven together with haikus in the haibun form. And yet, as heavily as forms are invoked, they are also overwhelmed and broken. The rant poems have no line breaks. Sentences, fragments and questions tumble together. Haikus break from their syllabic rigour. Each letter starts with one addressee and then more addressees pile on.
In a conversation with Kai Cheng Thom hosted by Koffler Centre for the Arts, Lai invokes the epistle as both an address between intimates, and to the public. To the intimate reader, the poems spit a proliferation of images that are, regardless of affect, familiar. The journey is a sequence of recognitions and realizations. Lai winks at and rants to the reader who already knows. As Thom puts it, the rants shimmer:
“Dear Departmental Compartment, Dear Representation, Dear Committee, Dear Museum that already knows all about it, Dear Buddhist begging Shirley to accept that the white man won, Dear what kind of psychology does your trauma belong to, Dear don’t Speak until the guests are gone, Dear Curb your anger and we’ll throw you crumbs,” (41)
These letters, however, in addressing a variety of nouns abstract and concrete, human and not, also take on a political energy. If the epistle is always relational, then the ranting letter invokes relations that to be laterally animated against something larger. In this performance, besides the reader-intimate, reader-public who has heard but does not know, who is here for the first time, is also addressed. As in a whirlpool, the language ripples outward, reaching wide. The sentences and questions running into each other are urgent, and in their breathlessness, press for attention and demand witness.
Oh yeah and also
I will not get Over it
Easily so there
(47)
In Iron Goddess of Mercy, Lai takes up the trauma of sexual violence in war as a central absence that is always present. It is an unrepresentable site of silence that all other signifiers whirl around. At times the speaker is in deep, wrestling through the site and event of the personal, and at other times, the speaker moves through time and space, naming and tracing the sites and events beyond the personal to place them with each other.
The rants are the speaker’s attempts to understand larger structures of history that culminate in the body, the life, the memory. And while rage and grief are primary kinetic forces in the text, there is also humour, play and intelligence. There is desire to trace the record and an awareness of its impossibility. In these attempts, the speaker takes on various postures of emotion, entering and exiting from different perspectives, resulting in a polyvocality that is the speaker’s voice in rupture and reconstitution.
If the island’s turtles all the way down, what joss can Prospero toss? (100)
In the book’s acknowledgments, Lai mentions the I Ching as a turtle oracle, referencing the Shang tradition of practicing divination through turtle shell readings. Through Iron Goddess of Mercy, “turtle” becomes a new form of divination for what it means to reach beyond the frame of colonial histories and structures that dictate our stories. By invoking the ancient and mythical, the literary and the spiritual, the speaker chants through Events and histories present and ongoing, and in chanting, seeks new language to address the present.
The references in Iron Goddess of Mercy are endless, signifiers that come chaotically unmoored, loosened by the speaker’s attempt to grasp multiple histories, places, and events. As words traverse distance and across generations and contexts, they collide and combine to form with more precision, the memory of the speaker. Whether in historical references, literature, popular and traditional cultural symbols and rituals or place names, these combinations of signifiers and allusions have a logic to them, evoked by bursts of meter, rhyme and alliteration. But the signifiers are also in chaos, placed in relations and associations that shake reader-intimate and confuse reader-public.
Amidst the whirling rants and haiku inhales, where it seems the speaker might lose control, specific and precise constellations emerge: fragmented lineages of family histories, diasporic inheritance and communities, immigrant experiences and memory. The poem is both witness and interruption. In new language, Lai presents us with relations older than the speaker can fathom or grasp, older than what can be and is known, carried through both silence and story. This is a canon of intertext built on axes that have been broken off and reconstructed. Part of its reclamatory power is to remain unfathomable. From this abundance of everything, new worlds are possible.
The Goddess of Mercy’s full name is 觀世音菩薩, or 觀音 — one who hears the sounds of the world. Iron Goddess of Mercy gestures to bodhisattva, oolong tea, colonial histories, and mythologies all at once: multiplicities and collisions of meaning, history and reference points that shape and inform diasporic memory and inheritance.
In an ongoing moment of reckoning where we are pushing against old language and structures that divide and diminish us, the whirling revisioning of Lai’s language in Iron Goddess of Mercy forms new synapses, memory structures for how we who hear the sounds of the world can imagine belonging, and the grounds on which we can build our relations.
“If I speak my Hush what world will whirl back to me?” (144)
Jasmine Gui is a Singaporean-born interdisciplinary artist, arts programmer, and researcher based in Tkaronto. She is the co-founder of TACLA, a community archive initiative and runs Teh People Studio and San micropress. Her research and creative practice explores translations, traversals, memory and grief. She is the author of two chapbooks, writes mostly poetry and nonfiction, and does experimental paper arts as one-half of the creative duo, jabs.