[Tupelo Press; 2024]
In the poems in then telling be the antidote, Xiao Yue Shan looks at once backwards and forwards, superimposing past, present, and future to imagine the speculative possibilities of the future, and the fragile malleability of the past in memory. Time is glass-like here, easily subject to shattering. This sense of breakability remains across an ever-shifting geography, moving between Hong Kong, China, and Montreal. Shan’s speaker, over the course of the collection, unfolds various selves against the larger backdrops of history, place, and family—with a central focus on the mother-daughter relationship—moving with fluidity even as she rails against the unyielding boundaries of nations. The psychological and geographic landscapes of the speaker push continually against these boundaries as she imagines an affective and unbounded experience of place, unraveling myths both national and matrilineal.
Shan opens the collection with the phrase “a photograph of tomorrow,” which becomes an ars poetica for the collection. The use here of the photograph as a documentary object that bears witness to a past exists alongside the temporal marker of tomorrow as an as-yet-unexperienced futurity. Through this, the speaker’s desire to have her two selves, past and future, is made possible and tangible through language. In an early poem, “striations,” Shan writes, “the triangulation between you, I, / the always possible nature / of a very next moment.” This line extends the idea of the superimposition of selves from the opening phrase, turning it into this “triangulation” of self, other, and time, a dynamic that remains central through the collection through various iterations of the I-you dynamic—writer and reader, mother and daughter, self and self. Immediacy is central, the “very next moment” lending an urgency to Shan’s visionary imagination of a radical past/future holding space for the diasporic dislocations that make her selves.
Central also is Shan’s affective experience and imagination of her built environment. In “striations,” she writes, “the city is how I find you / and I will never see you outside it.” Here, in the triangulation of self, other, and geography, the line mirrors the way Shan understands this relationship—in the first line, “I” and “you” exist in immediate proximity, separated only by a word, and in the next line, with its marked absence of the word “city,” “I” and “you” take on a larger distance, a distance containing a negation. The city of Shan’s poem, while being the mediating object of this self-other relationship, is also itself the negation of that relationship. In a later poem, “the man I love ran off with everything except my poems,” she writes, “which is always I. I, I was to take back I, back from I.” Shortly after this line, she writes, “I and I, and I laying between them, being as much someone / as they are anyone.” In these lines, the repetition of “I” with the absence of the word “you” makes clear how Shan’s speaker here is reclaiming herself—finding, amidst the layered, multifaceted self this one sense of “I,” asserting that sense of self. Here the longing for a self is at the forefront. Language makes the speaker and her desires visible, and becomes the way to assert herself/her “self.”
Building on this resonance, in the poem “mong kok, october 2019,” she writes, “love was a small country / with borders made reckless.” Here, we see place conceived of via the affect of love, and love conceived of via spatial metaphor. Shan’s imagines this superimposition of abstraction onto abstraction to create an image that renders these ideas material. Later, in the poem “the nation of aphasia,” Shan writes, “and none of it / will mean that your life is a promise / your country makes to you.” In these two separate poems set in different geographies, Shan’s convergence of the self in relation to geography comes to the forefront. She pushes back against the borders of nationhood in relation to land and citizenship, asking the addressee of the poem to reconsider what national belonging means. The line breaks are precise, separating negation from self and self from country as Shan asks us to unpack the layered selves we carry and seek to understand how we make our selves.
Motherhood-daughterhood is the most salient I-you relationship of then telling be the antidote. From early in the collection, Shan centers us in the tangible nature of this relationship, the first filter through which the child reads the world. Even as the speaker is a self long distinct from the mother by now, that first filter is central to how then telling be the antidote understands its own poetic project. In an early poem, Shan writes, “my mother fingered a ripened / bowl of hot water, carving upon its surface the lines / by which our family would occur.” The mother is conjured in relation to the family, becoming the vehicle for the passage of time; by the end of the collection, time has become the vehicle for recognizing the mother, and thereby the speaker.
In the poem “inheritance,” Shan opens with the lines “my mother says about hong kong: that wasn’t your life. that was my life.” Here, we see how geographical division is the language for this matrilineal inheritance. To understand her mother is to understand Hong Kong, and to understand Hong Kong is to understand her mother. Towards the end of this poem, Shan writes, “in glass. the translucency of her. the in- / betweenness of her. I think I am in control / of this liminal indecision.” In these lines, we see the mother, so far a distant lens for family, slowly become clearer to the speaker. The self of the mother, by the end of the poem, has come into focus, no longer separated by geography—the translucence, once again a metaphor of sight and glass, allows us to read the mother through less opacity.
In the poem “kitchen,” Shan writes of the speaker’s mother’s cooking: “it is as her grandmother taught her mother, / how salt teaches the falls, / and how her mother has taught her, / how iron teaches the oil, / and how she has taught me.” These lines are towards the end of the arc of motherhood and daughterhood, and by now, these lines bring the mother into sharply defined focus—she is rendered here with a clarity that Shan has been writing towards. The speaker, with each sentence, with each line, with each word, gets closer to making sense of the diasporic temporalities that make this relationship.
Towards the end of the collection, Shan ends the poem “always the clock, always the corridor, always the staircase” on the line “I reach for you across this.” This line is, rather significantly, the crux of the collection; as we move through geographies and landscapes, both emotional and physical, that are turbulent and fraught but central to the speaker’s self, ultimately this is an act of generosity—to take all this history and make that leap, even with the weight of the many geographies that shape the speaker. then telling be the antidote is a catalog of possibilities for the self, and the ways we might reimagine the relationship between time and diaspora in service of more visionary futures.
Vika Mujumdar was born in New Jersey and raised in Pune, India. She holds an MA in Comparative Literature from UMass Amherst, where she is currently an MFA student in Fiction. Her work has appeared in the Cleveland Review of Books, the Chicago Review of Books, Girls on Tops READ ME, the Brooklyn Rail, and elsewhere. She edits Liminal Transit Review.
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