Description
Winner of the Omnidawn 2016 1st/2nd Poetry Book Prize
Selected by Cathy Park Hong
Written in and of the protest encampments of one of the most sophisticated Occupy movements in recent history, Goddess of Democracy attempts to understand the disobedience and desperation implicated in a love for freedom. Part lyric, part autoethnography, part historical document, these poems orbit around the manifold erasures of the Umbrella protests in Hong Kong in 2014. Leung, who was in those protests while on a Fulbright grant, navigates the ethics of diasporic dis-identity, of outsiderness and passing, of privilege and the pretension of understanding, in these poems which ask: “what is / freedom when divorced from / from?”
Henry Wei Leung’s Goddess of Democracy: An Occupy Lyric is a powerful poetics on civil disobedience. The voice is both impassioned and detached, coalescing into prose passages or atomizing into words scattered on the page. Leung not only documents disobedience, but historicizes it, turns it to a global question, and asks what comes after.
Cathy Park Hong, judge of the Omnidawn 1st/2nd Poetry Book Prize
If you want to hear faint whispers of a future poetics, give a listen to Henry Wei Leung’s Goddess of Democracy. Here, a deft lyric poetry interfuses with radical democracy to compelling ends. This is a book as beautiful as it is bold, as artful in its politics as it is political in its aesthetics. Read it now!
Mark Nowak
In a bright lexicon of social resistance, Henry Leung has created a poignant, spirited, and ethically-considered collection of poems. The innovative debut is especially welcome in our times of tumult.
Kimiko Hahn
Henry Wei Leung’s Goddess of Democracy tears down the wall between poetry and manifesto, offering new ways to imagine freedom. His is an original voice that speaks courageously to the fears and broken hopes of our time.
Ruth Behar
About the Author
Interviews
Reviews
Excerpt
Henry Wei Leung is the author of Goddess of Democracy (Omnidawn, 2017), which was a finalist for the 2018 PEN America Literary Awards (Los Angeles). He is also the translator of Wawa’s Pei Pei the Monkey King (Tinfish, 2016). With degrees from Stanford and the University of Michigan, Leung has received fellowships from Kundiman, Paul & Daisy Soros, Fulbright, the Luce Foundation in Translation, and the Salzburg Cutler Fellows Program in International Law. His writing has appeared in Bettering American Poetry, and received notable mention in the Best American Essays and Best American Nonrequired Reading. Now a J.D. candidate at Berkeley Law, he has done work with the San Francisco City Attorney’s Office, the U.S. District Court, and Berkeley’s Environmental Law Clinic.
A brief interview with Henry Wei Leung
(conducted by Gillian Olivia Blythe Hamel)
I was thrilled to see Goddess of Democracy win the Omnidawn 1st/2nd Poetry Book Prize – when I read it in the contest, the hybridity of its form immediately struck me in its ability to both encompass and illustrate the blind spots in its subject, with threads of documentary, imagistic fragmentation, and lyric essay woven throughout. I’d love to hear you talk about how this book formed and fomented for you – was there any one mode that initially catalyzed the work?
It started with the second-person. The lyric so often distills in the “I,” but what would a poetics look like if it could shift from “look at me,” or even “look at this,” to instead become: “look at you”? If the words were less like confession and more like prayer?
The poem that opens the book comes from an evening a few years ago, when a friend snuck me into his medical school’s anatomy lab. He showed me the cadavers, we put on gloves, folded back the ribs, and held the organs inside. He was very cavalier about it, even patting one of the cadavers on the head and saying, “Yup, this is a good one.” It wasn’t until after we left that he explained why he had brought me there. He spent so much time in that room, he said, that it had become a cold place. He stood over the cadavers memorizing facts and worrying about grades and test scores. These people had done the right thing, he said, by donating their bodies to science; but they had become objects. The faces usually remained covered, and some of the students even used the cadavers to play pranks on each other at night. He brought me there because he wanted me to write about it, wanted someone to help him see it in a different way again.
The poem came out in the second-person. It wasn’t addressed to my friend. Nor was it to some mirror of myself; nor to you. At first, I thought I was writing to the woman whose body I had held from the inside out that night. Yet I knew nothing about her, and could hardly remember her face. I had spent that night in an incredibly complex, problematic, illegal, brief intimacy with someone who, in a way, didn’t really exist. Not an implied reader, not quite an idea, neither a mere body nor a full subjectivity, absent of biography, emotionally real, a consciousness we can neither identify nor afford to neglect: I call this the “lyric you.”
I’d like to ask particularly about the visual quality of this work. Poems weave around the page, interspersed with reproductions of banners and signs, and the movement of the text across the series of erasures illustrates how the attention to and perception of a historical moment can shift over time. Could you speak to your relationship to the text as a visual medium? How does this align with/differ from the semantic effects of the language?
My original purpose in Hong Kong, before the protests broke out, was to explore English in the plural. This was under a research grant I had pursued partly in reaction to New Criticism, Hollywood, and all these standardized narrative frameworks that pretended to hold a monopoly on what the human story was. The research was intended to prove what is in many ways obvious: that our stories are culturally and linguistically circumscribed, and that literature’s vitality in fact depends on facing up to these circumscriptions. Hence going to a “world” city that struggles so much with telling its own story because the world keeps imposing the universal upon it. I mean of course that Hong Kong has been gobbled up for other countries’ economic needs, but I also mean language—first a colonial English, now a colonial Mandarin—and how the doors to people’s stories are opened or closed by such languages. To recognize all this is to recognize the objectness of words, to see that they are more than placeholders and actually exist in space. Once the protests began, my research plan took a drastic turn, but I didn’t stop considering these issues. The more uneasy I felt, for example, about the rhetorical spinning of “democracy” by all the parties involved, the more the word looked like an object-thing: literally a symbol, literally marking boundaries and determining spaces, and of course carrying different weights when written in English or in Chinese.
The erasure poems have a similar objectness, and they serve a practical function in the book. They’re not based on a well-known or public text. Just the opposite: the base text was something new, and essential for exactly that reason. But putting a timeline in a poetry book is like starting a novel with a family tree: who’ll read it? So I started erasing, started taking away. Not surprisingly, this means the reader has to develop a relationship with the thing being erased. You don’t get to take part in the deconstruction of the text; but you are in on the re-constructing of it. My hope is that this makes it matter to you.
In reading and rereading this work through the contest and editorial stages, I’m continually impressed by its willingness to explore exhaustively the necessity, the valorization, and the failure of political action and the artist’s response to/engagement with political action. You closely examine the differences between the act of witnessing history and the act of engaging with/understanding it, which in turn is paralleled by the distinction between participating as an individual who may belong to a specific inside/outside community and as a writer, a role that is often purported to bridge such divides. I’d love to hear you say more about your conception of these divisions as you were writing this book.
I’ve stared at this question for a week and been unable to answer it—partly because the whole book is my answer; partly because the whole book is my failure to answer. In some ways, the project of these poems is a refusal to be. The section titles, a series of negations from different religious and idiomatic traditions, try to wedge their way into a complicated ethics of identity and positionality. Sometimes it’s just safer to say what you’re not than to say what you are. And maybe you can only be, at all, by negating everything. I think of the lyric in Joyce’s way: the cry of Sisyphus in the moment when he heaves the boulder over the edge, just before it starts to roll back down on him—a full-bodied, committed cry that comes to nothing in the end. He never makes it over, never becomes other than what he is; nor does he ever stop trying. I don’t read the Sisyphus myth as the futility of effort. I read it as a commitment to life, as a confrontation with the wall of necessity, even though we may never pass through that wall. I read it as survival.
I’d love for you to talk about any writers, artists, thinkers who have influenced you in this work; in what direct or indirect ways have you felt this influence? And perhaps you could talk about who you’re reading currently? With whom do you feel a kinship, a provocation, a catalyzing relationship of some kind?
At the start of the protests, I kept thinking of Audre Lorde, saying to an audience in 1977: “Perhaps for some of you here today, I am the face of one of your fears. Because I am a woman, because I am Black, because I am lesbian, because I am myself—a Black woman warrior poet doing my work—come to ask you, are you doing yours?” I kept thinking about her anger and her grace, and her relationship to death and language. I kept thinking of Simone Weil, whose life was an unrelenting poetics of surrender, who consistently found the divine in difficulty. I kept thinking of Jennifer Chang, who wrote, “Be the poem you want to write. And then write it.” I kept thinking of Olujide, to whom I once confessed that I needed ten more years of life experience to write the things I was trying to write, and he replied, “You don’t need ten years. You need the willingness to transform yourself now.”
Would you tell me a bit about yourself? Anything you might wish to share that would give a reader more insight into your life and work?
Next month, my wife and I are visiting NYU Shanghai to give a reading. Both of our books deal with facts that are politically sensitive in mainland China (the title of mine is a dead giveaway, and once I started sending the manuscript around we both understood that, even in Hong Kong, if I were to find a teaching post in literature I wouldn’t be able to hold it for long). We’ve been assured that we’ll have the same academic freedom there as we would in New York. All the same, we will both be censoring ourselves.
My younger, unmarried self would be appalled to hear this. Some of the others I’ve spoken to have had surprisingly predictable responses, and I could line them up based on their relative privilege and how much they might have to lose in a place like China. I was once baffled by a statement by Hisham Matar, a Libyan novelist who had published things that had put him and his family in danger, who said in hindsight that maybe the more courageous thing would have been to stay silent. I couldn’t understand it. Then I got married, and now I understand. I can’t afford the same bravado of my youth. Bravery is something else.
You were instrumental in the selection of the image that is used in the cover design for this book. Would you describe your considerations regarding the cover image? How does this cover align with your intentions for the book?
I saw “Absent of Speech” at a gallery exhibit with my wife just before we left Hong Kong. It was easily the most interesting piece in that space, an “erasure poetry” of another kind. I met the artist briefly, and I appreciate that he brings art and politics together without any pretense. It’s an honor to have his work on the cover, to foreground my poems with the artwork of a Hongkonger. My wife, who was working in the Hong Kong art world when I met her, was also crucial in the process of selecting the image, and in talking through what the cover could be with me. I’m grateful for your design vision as well! I hope the cover opens a window for readers, before they even begin to read. Thank you for all your hard work, and for taking the time to think through this book with me.
An interview with Henry Wei Leung
(conducted by rob mclennan for rob mclennan’s blog)
1 – How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
My first book coming out should’ve been the career-making moment. Instead, it made me confront my long unspoken disappointment with the twin industries of academia and literature. Goddess of Democracy took three years to write, edit, finish, and publish–the same three years it took for the activists and student leaders in the protests I was writing about to be prosecuted, jailed, barred from the legislature, exiled… and none of them will ever read these poems. So I changed course for a JD in law, and decided to apply all that I’ve learned about language and storytelling to a setting with more material consequences. My recent “work” is therefore very different, whether I’m working on a civil rights or securities case, whether the facts are petty and boring or outrageous and rile me up. The stakes of a poem are held in the next generation, the next century, in language itself. The stakes of legal writing are in a person’s one day in court, in their chance to tell their story and set the record straight.
2 – How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
There’s no first or second or last. Fiction was all I knew as a kid because none of my teachers assigning Shakespeare, Blake, or even Langston Hughes had any idea what they were talking about–or really cared. And the library didn’t have much poetry more recent than the Beats. It took a while for me to find poetry because it took a while for me to encounter poets.
3 – How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?
The process is only ever consistent when it comes like a strike of lightning. As in “Disobedience,” which seems to be the poem of mine that’s quoted most often, and about which I never know how to answer questions. In those cases, the poem writes itself in a single draft, in a feverish focus. Sometimes I think the “practice” of writing is no more than that: to get your reflexes ready for when you hear the thunder coming.
4 – Where does a poem or work of prose usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a “book” from the very beginning?
Usually a piece doesn’t come together until I have the title. That makes me a project writer, I suppose. Same in my legal writing so far: I can’t put the facts together in a sequence until I know what the case is about or what it should be about. No content without a meaningful form. No surprise without a structure.
5 – Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
I find readings unbearably redundant. Have you ever been to one where the vast majority of the audience were not other writers, editors, and friends or followers of the author? The first reading I ever gave in public was after I won a local poetry contest when I was seventeen. I was invited to read with half a dozen adults. At the end of it, each of the other readers was immediately clustered by a circle of their own people. It was like a private club, and I was the only stranger. Every other reading in the last fifteen years has felt about the same. The only difference is that I’ve made more friends, who then cluster around me afterward, which has never been the point for me. But I did read once at an independent film screening and panel discussion, which was a wildly different and fruitful encounter; poetry in that case became an unexpected part of the audience’s evening. I felt that it came a little closer to being part of the world.
6 – Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?
Previously: democracy and addressing the other in the second-person. Now: justice. Because I can tell you what injustice is, in both structural and granular detail, but what justice actually is I honestly do not know.
7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Does s/he even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?
My basic expectation is for the writer, by mastering language, to transcend language, and therefore be outside the larger culture, to belong to no time, to be the wilderness. And perhaps, then, to be in a position to give counsel to the times. To guide the species back to its humanity.
8 – Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
Essential, but I try to avoid it.
9 – What is the best piece of advice you’ve heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
“What are the words you do not yet have? What do you need to say? What are the tyrannies you swallow day by day and attempt to make your own, until you will sicken and die of them, still in silence? Perhaps for some of you here today, I am the face of one of your fears. Because I am woman, because I am Black, because I am lesbian, because I am myself — a Black woman warrior poet doing my work — come to ask you, are you doing yours?”
10 – How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to translation to non-fiction)? What do you see as the appeal?
I don’t believe in genres. That’s a term for agents and markets. When we write, there are only forms or structures, and the appeal is simply what implement works best for the task at hand. Oliver de la Paz said that every book for him means starting over and re-learning poetry, because he has to abandon the form that carried the previous book. I agree with that. Translation is different, though. It feels more tangible, more like a craft with the hands, chiseling at something with a pre-determined form. It’s also free of the usual pitfalls of solipsism.
11 – What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?
Most days I read on the commute to work and write on the commute home. Some days I catch my breath and see people’s faces.
12 – When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
I get on with my life. Louise Gluck once went a decade without writing. So did Jack Gilbert. The life is a process of the writing. Recall Rilke’s admonition to live forty years to write one good line.
13 – What fragrance reminds you of home?
Angel’s trumpets.
14 – David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?
I’m less interested in the school of thought that says beauty multiplies itself, and more interested in the school that says beauty comes out of the devastating moments of beauty’s absence: i.e. beauty as emergent necessity, sui generis. In other words, I think books come from the failure of civilization to protect our imaginations; they come from life at its most abysmally ugly moments. I think books come from the failure of books.
15 – What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
Simone Weil, tremendously. The Bhagavad Gita. Rumi. And comic books, which I find to be both emptying and life-sustaining.
16 – What would you like to do that you haven’t yet done?
Cook a perfect cast iron ribeye without a thermometer. It’s so simple but I can’t get it right.
17 – If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?
I would’ve been a martial arts instructor. It was either stay and do that (or join the military for the cash), or apply for college.
18 – What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
Language is everything for a broke immigrant kid in a non-English-speaking household. I had to confront the world as an alien either through the body or through language. In other words, for me: either through martial arts or through literature. Literature seemed to take me down a deeper path at the time.
19 – What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
Albert Camus’s The First Man (his last and unfinished). Steve Barron’s DreamKeeper (2003, originally an ABC miniseries).
20 – What are you currently working on?
Drafting a legal order for something I’m not allowed to talk about. And a novel.
. . . Leung uses the deeply symbolic statue known as the Goddess of Democracy as the focal point for thoughts on such issues as the misinterpretation or misrepresentation of a social movement and what it means to take a political stand. What makes this collection magnetic is the measured way that Leung unpacks his own roles—witness, outsider, American, and translator—in the Hong Kong protests. “I can’t declare myself ‘for’ or ‘against,’?” Leung writes. “These two words are as useless as ‘us’ and ‘them’ in the face of understanding, in the face of all our failures to understand each other.
Addressed to the Goddess of Democracy,…[Lueng] bears witness to the ongoing struggle for human rights up to the 2014 Umbrella Revolution in Hong Kong. We experience the protests at street level through a ‘torn off’ I both inside and outside the movement: ‘I myself have been here:/ been a hollowing throng of sweat/ …I stood among and gave you/ neither stay nor shore nor help.’ Throughout, there’s a grappling, an urgency, and a passion that makes the experience very real. VERDICT Sometimes challenging, but a strong testimony in verse for those interested in both poetry and politics.
These reflective last lines, “even I spend my best years / in a golden future’s cage” sit the reader squarely in impassibility: the promise of a better tomorrow can become today’s trap. Through a present tense, imperfect statement, not “I spent my best years” or “I had been spending my best years,” but “I spend” as in “I am now spending,” Leung underscores the complexity of the cage’s confines.
Written in and of the protest encampments of one of the most sophisticated Occupy
movements in recent history, Goddess of Democracy attempts to understand the
disobedience and desperation implicated in a love for freedom.
life sentences sonnet for the Goddess
Tiananmen Square, June 1989
1
You were born in papier-mâché, a face plastered white, a thirty- three foot emolument on the fourth day, facing the portrait of the Chairman of Mao.
2
Father died that year we snuck through Hong Kong for San Francisco you were not the Statue of Liberty we landed in the great quake.
3
Nushen, “goddess” – not far from nusheng, “schoolgirl” – your hair cropped like Mother’s – like that girl ruling masses from a megaphone – her skinny hand pocketed – her four abortions.
4
And wasn’t I the forgery of a body never meant, never mine, never mind, so that someone in the rubble would forever look like me?
5
Goddess, your body was expedited from the body of a man leaning on a pole, flipped upright. Severed, his pole became your torch.
6
Some people have stared at heaven’s gate for decades waiting for a sign. Some people settled, and settle for seams.
7
A tank severed your hand, then the rest. You reemerged in harder mediums in tourist troves, where I was taught to lust for image, just images.
8
I fell in love with love’s treasons. Which of these remain forbidden words: goddess, swallow, roam, freedom, I?
9
G.O.D. in Hong Kong means Goods of Desire, a fashion brand which sounds like jyu hou di: “live better.” Does anyone say “God” except at first mistaken sight? Goddess of—
10
One day, my heartbeat quit its symmetry. An EKG said A.Fib and asked if I’d had heart attacks before this? I died of—
11
A place can be a people, just as grammar is the making of a religion. Why does this language only desire nouns and noun states and not move? Body of—
12
Listen: that year we were two eggs from one hen, dipped in black ink. We were thrown at the portrait of the Chairman of Mao. A thunderstorm washed us clean, washing the aberration.
13
But I’ve never had heart failure. But the machines insist. The machines insist.
14
What I mean is: we were the aberration. What I mean is: Let me be your country. Let me be nothing for you.
