A cup of fine tea: Jason Lee’s “45 Belgrave Square”

Jason Lee’s “45 Belgrave Square” [Read the poem here]
(First published in Issue #6 of Cha, this poem was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2009.)

This post is written by Tammy Ho, with help from Reid Mitchell and Jeff Zroback.

Lee’s “45 Belgrave Square” is a miniature drama in four acts about a narrator with dual Malaysian and British citizenship trying to renew his passport at the Malaysian High Commission in London, which is located at 45 Belgrave Square. That Malaysia does not allow its citizens to have dual citizenship provides the conflict at the heart of the poem. Will the persona be granted an extension of his passport or will he be discovered and lose his rights to the country?

The opening lines provide the poem’s establishing shot: ‘We waited under the buzz of a rotating fan, / sheets neatly printed against palms, / waiting for my annual summons to citizenship’ (L1-L3). For anyone who has ever had to wait in a government office for a passport or other form of documentation, the scene should be familiar and they should recognize the mixture of both monotony and apprehension. The persona sits nervously in a respectful, almost submissive manner with ‘sheets neatly printed against palms’, waiting for a ‘summons’ which can ultimately decide his fate. The tension of the scene is not only highlighted by the buzz of the rotating fan but the repetition of its movement also underlines the monotony of the experience. The persona is destined to wait both bored and nervous until called, but perhaps for the persona, this experience is particularly tense. As we will see later, there is a deception at the centre of their visit.

We learn a little bit about the persona and the situation in the following lines: ‘Dad led the way, preceding me by thirty year’s toil / under a hot tropical sun as we sat under / the crescent gaze of a woman with sharp brows / and a glorious headscarf striped across her forehead’ (L4-L7). The speaker, who is the son of someone who has lived in the tropics but whose age we do not know, seems to follow his father’s lead in this matter. Perhaps the son is still young and thus under the care of the parent. Or perhaps he lets the father lead because of his greater experience dealing with the Malaysian authorities and the country’s way of life, a possibility suggested by ‘preceding me by thirty year’s toil / under a hot tropical sun’. Whichever possibility you accept, however, it seems the father has been through this process before. Although the poem is ostensibly set in London, words such as ‘hot tropical sun’, ‘palms’ and’ ‘the buzz of a rotating fan’ give a sense that the action could be happening in Malaysia itself. The characters may also be figuratively feeling the heat as they sit under ‘the crescent gaze’ of a woman with ‘sharp brows / and a glorious headscarf striped across her forehead’. She is the official who will decide the father and son’s future. The poet’s use of the term ‘crescent’ to describe the woman’s gaze is well-chosen, reflecting as it does both the Muslim nature of the country and its flag. After passports are ‘handed back awaiting stamps / of approval’ (L8-L9), the son’s wait for their ‘tentative claim / to become native again’ (L9-L10). The agony of this prolonged bureaucratic torture will be an endless moment which lasts ‘well into the day’ (L10).

In the second stanza, the confrontation of the drama is introduced. The scene is narrated in a type of stream of consciousness, in which the persona imagines what is going on and what the official may be thinking: ‘Flicking through serried pages of childhood exploits / with no visible history, she looked deep beneath / my skin and seethed’ (L11-L13). The persona is aware that his documents provide scant proof of his Malaysian identity, that they offer ‘no visible history’ of his time in the country. Whether the speaker knows that he is actively deceiving the official or whether he is still under the guidance of his father and thus only has a sense that something is wrong is not entirely clear. That the official is indeed skeptical is revealed when she announces: ‘You don’t have the right stamp’ (L13). Within the poem, this statement is incorporated with the persona’s own narration, pointing to a similarity in their thinking. This suggests that the persona is complicit in the deception, that he is old enough to know what is going on. There is a sense that he is lying, she suspects that he is lying, and he suspects that she suspects. If the official did not know exactly what is going on, she quickly figures it out. Again, we see the conflation of the persona’s and the official’s voices in the following moment of realization: ‘Round eyes met almond eyes and the pegs didn’t fit, / which meant I was an illegal in England unless ‘you have a British passport’, she glowered’ (L14-L16). This moment is beautifully handled. It is almost as if they are completing one another’s thoughts, leading to the inevitable discovery of the family’s secret: that the persona has a British passport and is thus not eligible for a Malaysian one. Once this double identity is exposed, there is only one possible conclusion, that despite their ‘heavy protests’ (L18), the persona’s ‘rights to Malaysia’ (L18) will be ‘revoked’ (L19). What exactly the father’s legal status is is not made clear in the poem, although it makes for intriguing speculation.

The fallout of the discovery is that the persona becomes ‘alien / to this colonial enclave in an excolonial Empire’ (L19-L20). What the ‘enclave’ refers to is open for interpretation. Does it represent the High Commission? An embassy after all is a kind of mini colony within another country. Does it represent Malaysia itself? Perhaps it is both: the embassy is a metaphorical stand-in for the country. Or does it refer to the boy’s own potential life within Malaysia, represent his lost ability to return to live in that country? Maybe the phrase ‘became alien / to this colonial enclave’ signifies the slipping away of his right to go back to the former dependency as a kind of neo-colonist, where he could lead a life of relative ease and prosperity.

The third stanza reveals that apart from grieving his loss of dual citizenship, the persona also laments the end of his connection to the home of his youth: ‘Under the whirring fan, I saw my childhood / sucked out of this dual existence’ (L21-L22).The fan from earlier in the poem has sped up, moving from simply ‘rotating’ (L1) to ‘whirring’ (L21), a change which reflects the persona’s own state of mind in which everything seems to have quickened because of the crisis. The fan’s new speed makes it capable of sucking away his ‘dual existence’. The speaker is now left disconnected from his childhood experiences, ‘dry from the orange tipped sunsets / that tasted of innocence and the luscious peel / of mango that shrivelled up like a disused tongue. / A fruit sagging by the lull of evening’ (L23-L26). Severed from an innocent youth in which he ate mangoes in the tropical evenings, the persona compares himself to the same fruit drying and sagging. The ‘disused tongue’ also suggests that the persona may be forgetting a local language spoken in his youth but which he no longer uses in Britain. The lines resonate with Langston Hughes’s “A Dreamed Deferred” in which one of the metaphors for a delayed dream is a raisin drying up in the sun.

In the final scene, the persona and his father leave the embassy and return to the city, ‘a realm inherited / by English hordes and partisans’ (L28-L29). As they ‘limped’ (L31) down to Trafalgar Square, he is reminded of the nature of nationhood and duty by Nelson himself who ‘stood proud across my brow, / signalling do or die invites and hailing his / newest recruit to hoist the colours’ (L33-L35). Frustrated and angry by his loss of Malaysian citizenship, the persona feels trapped by the realities of his situation and forced into a kind of service by his homeland. He recalls a line from ‘an old textbook’ (L35) which reads: ‘England expects every man to do his duty’ (L39), a sentiment that perhaps provides an echo of the ‘old lie’ in Wilfred Owen’s “Dulce et Decorum Est”. The closing image of the poem provides a dramatic summation of the persona’s feelings about the nature of citizenship and our bonds to our native countries: ‘how truly mankind is press-ganged into service’ (L40). The drama ends with the persona and his father standing under Nelson’s Column, a reminder that our destinies are largely dictated by the location of our birth.

A cup of fine tea: Aryanil Mukherjee’s “Hand Movements of a Puppeteer”

Aryanil Mukherjee’s “Hand Movements of a Puppeteer” [Read the poem here] (First published in Issue #9 of Cha)

–This post is co-written by Tammy Ho and Jarno Jakonen.

Mukherjee’s poem “Hand Movements of a Puppeteer” is a montage of disjoint images, flashes of seemingly disparate moments: coldness between birds and rubber-tree leaves (L1-L6), dahlias grown for judged competition (L8-L9), a boy in an airplane playing with the window shutter (L10-L11), a tree falling in the forest (L14-L15), and finally— the namesake of the poem — puppeteer on festival grounds (L20-L22). Despite the apparent randomness of the images, they are linked by cohesive themes.

Flowers and trees. In the second stanza, it is ‘the dahlias without doubt’ (L9), and in the third stanza merely ’strange flowers’ (L12). The first stanza mentions ‘rubber-tree leaves’ (L3) rubbing off each other, and the fourth stanza ponders whether a tree falling in the forest makes a sound. Together the descriptions of flowers and trees paint a serene picture of plantlife that ties into the ‘acoustic undulations’ (L18) of the last stanza, as tree leaves can be imaged to undulate in a wave-like motion. A notion of life and death is present in this imagery as well. The dahlias bred for beauty get their moment of fame in a competition where blue ribbons are awarded, the rubber-tree leaves are ‘perspiring in persistence’ (L4) and touching each other as if every moment could be their last, and finally, the trees in a conservation get uprooted silently, without anyone being around to listen to them. This is quite similar to the human experience: our youthful illusion of being at the spotlight, our persistent desire to connect with other people, and finally the somewhat disappointing fact of dying alone.

The colour blue. If the poem was a painting, it would be blueish all around. The very first line describes the sky, and the first stanza ends with a description of coldness without snow, colour for which is generally blue. The ribbons awarded for winning dahlias in the second stanza are blue, and the ‘blue embroidery’ (L13) of the sky is brought up again in the third stanza, this time more explicitly. Blue is the colour of sadness, and it is ever-present in the narrative. This emotion is emphasised by other motifs of futility: ‘there’s little space to swing’ (L2) in the rubber-tree forest of the first stanza; ‘lifting up and down window shutters’ (L11) is unlikely to do any good, the troupe of trees falling in the forest not being registered, and finally in the last stanza the attempt of the narrator to try to read the hand movements of the puppeteer at a fair.

Sounds and hums. Indeed, the poem is about wave-like motions, background hum. Birds are mentioned in the first stanza, and while not mentioned explicitly, a reader may extrapolate their chirping, or even humming, in the cold. The second stanza has a piano as a source of background music, although it seems that the Dahlias do not care for it. This is an inexplicable reaction at first, but becomes clear when put in the context that ‘perhaps death is a hum’ (L18), and if anything, the moment when the dahlias are awarded their blue ribbons is the time when they would prefer to ignore this background hum. Acoustic references continue in the tree metaphor, where the sound of a falling tree equates to its uprooting happening at all, and finally when the hum of death at the final stanza is described as ‘acoustic undulations’ (L18).

Like pieces of a puzzle, the disparate feelings come together in the final stanza: ‘perhaps death is a hum; acoustic undulations / heard / as we explore the festival grounds / trying to read the hand movements / of a puppeteer’ (L18-L22). Exploration of the festival grounds is a metaphor for life, and wherever we go, death is always lurking in the background. It’s the music in the background, waves of sound and matter, made visible in the moving of the god-like puppeteer’s hands. The reader can imagine this act quite vividly: a puppet may move in seemingly organized way, but attempting to figure out which way it will move based solely on the flicks of wrist and fingers of the puppeteer is a futile exercise. The fates that control us are just as indecipherable.

A cup of fine tea: Donna Pucciani’s “Lunar Eclipse”

Donna Pucciani’s “Lunar Eclipse” [Read the poem here]

(Published in Issue #9 of Cha – first piece in our “Lost Teas” section)

–This post is co-written by Tammy Ho and Jeff Zroback, both have not yet seen a red moon.

Pucciani’s “Lunar Eclipse” begins with these opening lines: ‘The night of the red moon floats / on the breath of a drunken sailor / who cries out for vodka and his mother’ (L1-L3). What is the reader to make of the ‘red moon’ image? Although we can assume that the colour comes from the ‘lunar eclipse’ of the title, the red moon is also a natural phenomenon which was likely considered portentous by our ancestors and has collected many metaphorical meanings. For example, in the Bible, the blood red moon is associated with the coming of the Lord: ‘The sun shall be turned into darkness, and the moon into blood, before the great and terrible day of the LORD come’ (Joel 2:31, KJV). There is also the old sailor’s rhyme ‘red sky at night, sailor’s delight; red sky at morning, sailors take warning’. Whether the poet wanted the reader to connect the red moon with one of these particular meanings is uncertain. However, what is clear in the poem is that the sailor in question has been affected by this natural occurence and thus the red moon provides a powerful backdrop and catalyst for the poem’s events. The poet does not tell us the sailor’s interpretation of the eclipse, but it has clearly caused some primal emotional reaction in him. Drunk, he cries out for his mother out of fear or loneliness or both. Yet, the heaviness of the sailor’s mood and the oppressive red moon are lightened by the phrase ‘the red moon floats / on the breath of a drunken sailor’. Not only do these lines suggest just how drunk the sailor is (his breath could float the moon), they also add a sense of buoyancy to the possibly negative omen of an eclipse. If the red moon signifies the end of the world, for the sailor, it is perhaps also a moment of delight.

In the second stanza, we see that the eclipse may have foreshadowed a coming storm: ‘In cloud-purple foam, his ship tosses, / and after black waves pummel the rocks / sun-splinters dash a blue morning sky / with a handful of gulls’ (L4-L7). This description of the sailor’s world is effective, mixing both danger and beauty. For example, while ‘[S]un-splinters dash a blue morning sky / with a handful of gulls’ is a particularly captivating image, it is also one which may provide a sense of foreboding with its echo of the albatross from Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” (1798). This blend of contradicting impressions also suggests disorientation — for example, ‘cloud-purple foam’, ‘black waves’, ’sun-splinters’. Whether we have really moved from night to morning, or whether the eclipse is disturbing the normal cycles of the day is not clear. Perhaps we are seeing the world through the sailor’s eyes, distorted by fear and drink. Or are we in the midst of the world’s end?

By the third stanza, the sailor has embraced the storm. Or perhaps the storm has embraced him, driven him into insanity. The poet writes: ‘He dreams of how to make thunder, / dances all night under the deck, / beats time on a barrel’ (L8-L10). Here, the mariner seems to associate himself with the storm, even dreaming up ways ‘to make thunder’, such as ‘danc[ing] all night’ in a kind of rain dance and ‘beat[ing] time on a barrel’. As the stanza progresses, he offers himself further to the storm and his delirium: he ‘captures the wind / in his ears, and with his sun-blistered lips / drinks up the storm drop by drop’ (L10-L12). Drinking and ‘drop by drop’ have several meanings. They refer to the sailor’s own drinking and they may also represent his submission to his own internal turmoil. But ultimately, they are part of the sailor’s attempt to completely incorporate the elements of the storm; he ‘captures’ the wind ‘in his ears’, instead of merely hearing it and he ‘drinks up the storm drop by drop’ with ‘his sun-blistered lips’. Apart from revealing the accumulated sea experience of the sailor, the echo of ’sun-splinters dash a blue morning sky’ with the sailor’s ’sun-blistered lips’ also adds to this sense of communion between the man and nature.

Perhaps in the end, the sailor, too, has been eclipsed; and has succumbed to the delight of his own personal apocalypse.

A cup of fine tea: Anna Yin’s “Raspberries”

Anna Yin’s “Raspberries” [Read the poem here]
(First published in Issue #9 of Cha, this poem was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2009.)

–This post is written by Tammy Ho.

There is not a wasted word in Yin’s “Raspberries”. The poem is a concise exploration of a moment; a modern interpretation of the kind of classical Chinese poems in which a specific scene, thought or feeling is condensed and captured in the most economic way. Yet, despite its focus on a particular instant, Yin’s poem still allows for any number of interpretations.

The poet’s inspiration is clearly nature in this work, and throughout the poem, she uses different natural elements in simple yet powerful images. But people are present too—we see a world in which the natural and human spheres are closely blended. Take, for example, the first lines: ‘On our bed / we lie like flatfish’ (L1-L2). Already, the mixture is evident, even if the exact meaning of these lines is not entirely clear. Does the metaphor suggest post-coital exhaustion? Or does it reveal a sense of apathy and laziness as the couple rest motionless, the way certain species of flatfish lie on the ocean floor? The lines may also contain the obvious double meaning of telling lies, which may suggest that the relationship is somehow tainted. Is the poet imagining a couple who no longer love each other but continue the relationship out of sheer habit?

Next, Yin takes us out through the bedroom window into the night air: ‘Outside, stars grow old. / A white cocoon / casts its image on the river’ (L3-L5). The notion of stars, entities which have a life span of millions of years, growing old perhaps reveals a certain arrogance on the characters’ part. Are they projecting their own weariness onto the stars? Considering its placement next to the stars, it seems likely that the cocoon being described is the moon. This is also suggested in at least two other ways. Firstly, one can imagine that a white crescent moon resembles a cocoon when it is reflected on the water. Secondly, there is a kind of subtle poetic rhyming slang in which ‘cocoon’ immediately suggests ‘moon’.

In the next lines, the poet continues to conjure the natural night-time scene: ‘In sparse shadows / a willow dangles. / Along the thorn fences / raspberries bleed’ (L6-L9). With only a handful of carefully selected words, Yin manages to evoke a strong sense of atmosphere, transporting the reader to the still river’s edge. Yet, although very little seems to be happening, there is a sense of unease and violence filling the night air. ‘Sparse’ and ‘dangles’ suggest a certain limpness and helplessness, perhaps taking us back to the ‘flatfish’ of the second line and echoing the characters’ feelings for each other. The more violent language of ‘thorn’ and ‘bleed’ increases the tension. But it is not an active form of aggression; instead, it is more passive as the raspberries slowly rot on the bush and bleed their juices. That the reader is supposed to identify the bruised fruit with the couple is indicated by the fact that ‘Raspberries’ is the title of the poem. Like the berries, they too are slowly decaying on the fence.

The slight violence of ‘bleed’ and ‘thorns’ also provides emotional foreshadowing for the final section of the poem, which reads: ‘They remember -  / once being the fire  / drawing the moth / flapping its wings / to flames’ (L10-L14). Here, we are presumably transported back to the passionate start of the characters’ relationship in which each of them was self-destructively drawn to the other. But if they had imagined being consumed by the heat of their relationship, they were wrong. Instead, as we see in the opening lines, their love does not end in a great conflagration but ebbs into motionless regret.

A cup of fine tea: Phoebe Tsang’s “Song for a Commuting Gravedigger”

Phoebe Tsang’s “Song for a Commuting Gravedigger” [Read the poem here] (First published in Issue #6 of Cha)

–This post is co-written by Tammy Ho and Jeff Zroback.

In Tsang’s bleak but beautiful “Song for a Commuting Gravedigger”, we see the experience of someone going to work on a winter’s day. Whether this person is actually a gravedigger or whether the title is more metaphorical is uncertain. We tend to fall on the side of the metaphorical. In our reading, the gravedigger seems like a commuter who is slowly seeing his or her life go by through work and travel; he or she is slowly digging his or her own grave. Or perhaps the poem reveals a death wish in the persona, a desire to escape into the frozen wilderness, never to be seen again.

In the opening stanza, we see that the commuter in question is a slave to daily routine. ‘Tethered to track and schedule’ (L1), the individual is sitting on the bus to work watching as ‘the highway rattles past’ (L2). That this trip is associated with death becomes clear in the rest of the stanza. The commuter sees ‘white fields and hillsides scarred / by trees so thin you can see / right through their ashen bones’ (L3-L5). Tsang’s imagery here is beautiful. Anyone familiar with a snowy climate will easily be able to envision the leafless tress of winter, which look like the skeletons of their summer selves.

The commuter longs for freedom outside of the bus and routine: ‘I want to be free of time and machines’ (L9). For the persona, this freedom will take the form of getting off the bus and scattering ‘footprints for snow to swallow later / like signs of rabbit and deer’ (L7-L8). Maybe the narrator longs for a temporary respite from responsibility, a wish to make childish tracks in the snow; a fleeting moment of abandon which would slowly disappear. Or perhaps his or her fantasy is something closer to “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening“, a desire to give in completely to death, swallowed by the snow, forgotten like covered footprints. Regardless of the form this fantasy would take, the speaker is too frightened to give in entirely to his or her desires. ‘[A]fraid of just being jobless’ (L10), the commuter carries on to work.

The final stanza thus takes us back to the bus where the commuter is continuing the journey to work. For the persona, death will not come today. Instead, he or she can only fantasise about escape: ‘Only my eyes will cross the frozen / shoulder into the embrace of / leafless skeletons’ (L11-L13). The word ’shoulder’, presumably that of the road, takes on a nice double meaning when put next to ‘embrace’. Again, there is not only a continued sense of the narrator’s death wish in the desire for the embrace of ‘leafless skeletons’, but also an echo of the earlier description of the trees as ‘ashen bones’. As the poem ends, the commuter escapes further into fantasy and a desire for anonymity and imagines a different journey, wandering ‘bough after bough / through sleeping woods like a homeless ghost’ (L14-L15). Tsang’s reference to Frost’s poem is made even more explicit in the use of ’sleeping woods’. And like in Frost’s poem, the narrator still has miles to go before sleep. He or she does not escape into the cold oblivion of the snow today but will instead continue to watch death slowly approach through the window.