Acts of Sleepless Refusal: Review of Phoebe Wang's Waking Occupations
Phoebe Wang, Waking Occupations.
McClelland and Stewart, 2022. $19.95 CAD.
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Tirelessly reckoning with the contradictions of living on occupied land, Phoebe Wang’s Waking Occupations aches towards a body that is unbounded by capitalistic notions of space and time. The poems in the collection examine what it means to recover a country that has already renounced you, and how to live within that doubleness. The speaker is resigned, but unhappy with that resignation; settled, and unsettled by it. Wang navigates these dualities in encounters with events and works of art with startling precision, urging readers into waking, into “acts of sleepless refusal” (15).
Wang’s second collection is organized in four sections: “Partings,” “Still Lives,” “Brief Encounters” and “Without Elegies.” The first section begins with “for The Split Self,” a poem cleaved by caesurae that manifest as blank space on the page. Wang’s speaker is disrupted, split down the middle by “that shadow country”; its “well-meaning intentions and loopholed treaties”; a “dismantled aftermath” (7). But these caesurae are quiet, internal ruptures that do not disturb the overall shape of the poem: the speaker may have let “that shadow country” go, but the shadow country never needed the speaker. The shadow country holds its shape.
Similarly, when the speaker finally breaks from their passive self that clings to “that shadow country,” she rises “as a rupture”—not from, but “with that passive woman”. In this rupture, Wang masterfully evokes the impossibility of breaking from the mind’s “stateless borders”. The speaker has had enough “of being neither here nor there,” but where is there to go? The poem ends in a cascade of negations: this is “no day,” the speaker has “no role in the bell-tolled world,” the system is “not broken” and “No alarm is sounding”. Though the speaker turns away from the chimera of the shadow country, she offers nothing to positively replace it. Nothing changes.
If the poems in the first section are for the most part contained, not quite resigned but unsure of where there is to go, the following section, “Still Lives,” runs streamlike in well-paced couplets and tercets, catching here and there on an occasional powerfully end-stopped image. One of the longer poems in this section, “Still Lives,” shares its title with the section that contains it. This poem brings about a sudden shift in the scale of the work: we are invited to look upon not single nights or moments, but the whole trajectory of the speaker’s artistic life. Just as the speaker describes Monet’s Water Lilies as having a “bounded view / of lilies knit close” to “present an endless illusion” (46), so, too, does Wang knit domestic scenes and ecstatic ekphrasis into the endless illusion of an artist’s ongoing life.
Though the poem is titled “Still Lives” as a play on the plural of “still lifes,” nothing in this poem holds still—even light is “already changing its mind” (47). Like the rest of the poems in this section, “Still Lives” is constantly moving. Its tercets spill over, thrumming with the restlessness that characterizes the immigrant experience—that hunger “for colour,” that refusal to settle for “buying chestnuts and lotus roots in Chinatown” (45). Even the speaker transforms over the course of the poem: first an artist, “placing objects / in oblique relation to each other” (42), next a student of art under her father, and finally she is made a subject in art. Still, the speaker finds a way to recover her subjecthood, and has “cracked the roles she was cast in” (44). Even as the subject of the art, the speaker declares “I arrange myself . . . as easy / to dismantle as a genre, as a pose, as girlhood” (49).
Wang’s collection strives towards a mindful way of living in colonial time, gathering inherited dreams, knowledges and accumulations of grief and transforming them into “the gifts of futurity” (98). Underneath Wang’s sharp awareness of “this afflicted world” (49) is a profound humility and love for the world we have inherited. It is this love that guides Wang’s attention to the world, and that will awaken readers to share in that consciousness.
Bridget Huh is a queer Korean poet based in Tkaronto (Toronto), and is entering the third year of her undergraduate studies at Concordia University. In her spare time, she enjoys riding her favourite bus routes back and forth, going nowhere.