split fruit (citrus heart)
Donnalyn Xu on Cham Zhi Yi
This essay is part of our 2022 collaboration with Cordite poetry review, edited by Bella Li, Cher Tan and Leah Jing McIntosh.
For this series, Liminal commissioned Asian Australian critics to respond to a work of their choice from Cordite’s Archives. As part of this collaboration, Cordite poetry review published 30 new poems by Asian Australian Poets. Read more here.
Lately, I don’t have any poetry in me. The words are always too thick and ungraspable, or they’re too thin, seeping out of my loosely clenched fingers. I close my hand into a tight fist, wanting to wring this feeling out. Language passes through me, in cloudy shapes I only vaguely recognise as the distance between myself and the rest of the world. I read a quote from a scientist that says I am both a universe of atoms and an atom in the universe. This feels incomprehensible, so I imagine my body as a container waiting to be filled or emptied.
I begin to write about oranges in late autumn, when the citrus colours around me are slowly fading. I haven’t written anything for months, and the only beauty I can extract from the world is in the sensory and simple delight of fruit; how its shape and flesh calls to language, even when it feels lost to me. The poem ends up being clinical and exacting, written mostly in third person, as if I am holding myself out to myself.
In their poem ‘MANGOES AHEAD’, Cham Zhi Yi writes similarly of an array of fruit: bruised bananas, apple slices soaked in salt water, mangoes that aren’t actually eaten, mandarins that are. They are a writer of specifics, turning the act of baking banana bread into an ordinary ritual, and breakfast (or ‘brekkie’ as they call it) into a memory of light. Through a series of dream-like reflections on the preparation and consumption of fruit, the poem opens with the end of a relationship and closes with the start of a new one. Instead of following a linear structure, ‘MANGOES AHEAD’ weaves seemingly separate moments together, shifting between free verse, prose, black-out poetry, song lyrics and quotes. Biting into a fresh mandarin, the speaker asks: ‘do you know how it feels / to see a thing you’ve seen a million times, anew?’ The final line of the poem is an answer that propels us back to the beginning: ‘it is like this’.
Like segments of a mandarin, each stanza is separated by pages, so it can only be viewed in small pieces and never as a whole.
As I click back and forth, my tiny movements become part of the poem.
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when you wish me sweet dreams I want you to be in itsweet the way Ariana sings You’re such a dream to me
she puts it in my mouth and I let her:
Excuse me, um, I love you
Who starts a conversation like that? Nobody, but I do
with ease the emotion wells in me to meet the lyrics
I want to tell you
The poet Marie Howe says if you don’t know where a poem is going, write ‘I want’ to begin. The fifth stanza of ‘MANGOES AHEAD’ ends with ‘I want to tell you’ and we aren’t exactly sure what the author means to say. It may be something too intimate and garish to be spoken about directly. A feeling that can only be delivered in layers: the poet as the speaker as a mouthpiece for a pop star—a second-hand confession directed towards the anonymous and universal second person, who could be occupied by anyone. There is a certain power in writing about what is only recognisable to yourself; minor details you keep and hold out to the world. A fan dance.
The summer that I meet someone I will soon love, the weather is rainy and turbulent. The hugeness of my feelings is seasonably appropriate; my face is eternally warm with embarrassment, flushed to the heat. I leave most of my journal entries unfinished, with little apologetic notes around the questions I want to ask only days after we first start speaking. The key is potential, I write. Could you love me? Could I love you? Do you like talking to me?
In Larissa Pham’s essay ‘Crush’, she writes: ‘The crush exists at a point of distance. The less I know of you, the better, because then I can safely project my affections onto you. I can begin to write a story, a catalog of intimacies, a script we will inevitably fail.’ I send my crush this article, and we screenshot the parts that make us think of each other. It’s early January—we’re both in isolation and I feel younger than ever before. I want to start painting again, so I can choose where the sunset colours go—to mute a tulip pink with a wash of burnt umber made soft around the edges. I listen to music he likes. I want to share with him what I enjoy too.
Like the speaker in ‘MANGOES AHEAD’, I find myself looking for images buried in love songs written for other people. Mitski’s ‘First Love / Late Spring’ opens to a slow and despairing guitar riff; the view of a window; a sleeping figure; a peach tree. I don’t add it to my playlists for him because spring hasn’t arrived yet, and this summer is only tentatively blooming. It feels like a song I have to listen to by myself, at least for now. In the chorus, Mitski sings a line in Japanese, ‘胸がはち切れそうで’, which translates into English as: ‘my chest seems like it’s going to burst.’ Like others searching for more meaning, I read the lyric analysis:
The connotation of ‘hachikireru’ is to burst open (like filling a bag so full that it bursts at the seams). Because Japanese doesn’t have future modal verbs, it can also be read as present tense. Like ‘my heart seems to burst’, which adds another layer of meaning (though subtle). It makes the line more immediate and implies that the bursting is not a one-time thing.
After reading this explanation, I picture my heart bursting repeatedly, with a present-tense immediacy. Akin to a bag torn open, the contents of its weight spilled on the ground. One comment reads: ‘i didn’t know other people felt this way’.
Most of ‘MANGOES AHEAD’ is written in the present tense, eliciting the same visceral reaction within me. It deliberately evokes an experiential feeling for the reader, though as Alexander Chee observes in his essay ‘The Autobiography of my Novel’, writing in the present tense is also a form of ‘self-hypnosis’ for the writer, casting a spell over their state of mind—‘a confrontation with the past through the structure of narration’. As the speaker of Zhi’s poem drives down a road and sees the sign MANGOES AHEAD, we are there with them, awash with the same desire of what lies ahead:
This once, I don’t live in fear.
I see the sign.
I want.
And I act on it.
The phrase ‘I want’, with nothing to follow it, becomes an assertion of selfhood itself, an expression of desire usually denied. In each simple line, the image of the mango is absent. There is no evocative language to draw out its shape and taste, and it is only after this realisation of desire that the speaker can indulge in the fruit, now that it is coloured by their careful attention.
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When I stop writing, I tell myself that it’s okay to live without documenting everything. I make a list of fractured images so I don’t forget:
On an hour-long ferry ride, we listen to [Maurice] Ravel’s ‘Une barque sur l'océan’ through shared earphones.
An apricot split open down the seam of its wrinkled skin, to the core.
A man eating mandarins on the train throws each seed onto the floor, one by one.
There is a poster of a red Matisse painting on his bedroom wall, from the first exhibition we saw together.
These details are pointless and untethered, but they stick out to me like the sharp glare of sunlight in an unfocused photograph. It reminds me of how Zhi notices their friends Elyshia and Soo-Min slicing apples for each other through lockdown—a short and flickering memory, whose place in ‘MANGOES AHEAD’ is an enshrinement, but also seems to ask, almost hesitantly: where do I put this? How do I make sense of it, without having it become monopolised, tokenistic, made merely a flattened image in a text?
For many writers of colour, personal writing is confined to two genres—memoir and autobiography—where the written self is expected to be authentic, accessible and relatable. This is especially true of the poetic form, where the speaker is often presumed to stand in place of the author. In a conversation with Soo-Min Shim, Zhi notes:
It feels like once a representation of the self in any way comes into existence and is publicly received it can never be taken back. There may not be consistency between the iterations of self you’ve chosen to make visible but why can't we embody all of those selves?
Having a crush—and writing about it—is perhaps a similar feeling: of not wanting to reveal all of yourself, but still wanting desperately to be known and seen. I wonder if there is an ethics to writing about love in this way; if it allows you to make sense of your own feelings away from the person involved. Writing about a crush turns them into a character, just like the version of yourself that is being written into existence. I have often thought about wearing vulnerability as a costume, about how sometimes private grief is a public feeling. There are some things I still want to keep to myself, though I’m not sure what they may be. I am learning, in new ways, what a body can do with its desire—but I want to learn in the old ways, too. I am studying love, considering the things I have read about, wanting to read them again while my heart unfolds.
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My first encounter with Zhi’s work was a gift. Pouring over the pages, I attempted to read Zhi’s work beyond the institutional framework applied to most experimental migrant writers, where food becomes a palatable trope; as a cultural object conveying memories of home. In their debut poetry collection blur by the, Zhi signals an awareness that their poems will be consumed, digested, and devoured by a white audience:
complicated relationship with the word craft / i wish it wasn’t so colonised that it keeps being said to keep / me out
I find myself leaning against this tendency to analyse ‘MANGOES AHEAD’—how some lines are pulled out from the margins, while others are pressed together in prose, separated only by slashes. I know this is imbued with meaning, but which one? Instead, I instinctively latch onto images that I recognise—fruits, feelings, song lyrics—as I let these fragments wash over me. In response to the vulnerability of this poem, I must also allow myself to be a vulnerable reader, giving in to the desire to be split open.
Zhi’s manipulation of form is elastic; inescapable. In blur by the’s blurb, they describe their poetry as ‘a yearning for freedom from grief, memory, and—ultimately—from definition’. Modes of analysis, which are fundamentally embedded in institutional and structural ways of thinking, are increasingly becoming incompatible with poetry that is, as Zhi desires, undefinable. The paradox of the minoritised poet is also a paradox for the minoritised critic who must write about poetry in a way that ‘makes sense’—using poetry as a text to support a particular reading or meaning, or as a springboard for theory, rather than allowing it to perform the work of theory itself.
I feel similarly occupied by metaphors of consumption—not just of experience and taste, but how we devour and digest the things that might inspire poetry. Anything too close is unbearable. I want to write with a certain impersonality that makes me untouchable; the shape of my desire turned inhuman, unactionable. Yet, even this feels overly sincere.
In her essay ‘Against Sincerity’ (1993), Louise Glück suggests that ‘great poets’ use materials that are subjective, but methods that are not, regardless whether there is a sense of detachment in the finished work. This begs a familiar question: what does detachment look like for someone in my body? I think of how Sara Ahmed describes methods in What’s the Use?:
Methods are often taught generically as if you use a different method in order to create a different output. Maybe methods are not simply tools, or if they are tools, maybe they do different things depending on who uses them, with this who being understood as not simply an individual but someone shaped by many histories—intellectual, social, other.
For the ‘racialised’ poet, writing is not merely the process of translating experiences into poems, but instead becomes a bodily act. In reading their work as autobiographical, the self is rendered knowable. In the above-mentioned conversation, Zhi indicates that the question of selfhood is deeply intertwined with poetic craft:
I want only to be recognisable to myself for a long time—which I don’t know is of that much use to anyone but myself—how much of it is hiding, how much of it is wanting to be more truthful to myself but needing for that process to retain a certain sense of privacy.
[...]
Poetry is fun for me. Most of the time, I don’t know what the fuck is going on but it’s quite freeing to fuck around and say exactly how you feel but in a way that makes sense to you. It doesn’t have to make sense to anyone else—that’s also maybe a problematic take on poetry. I think that’s what I used to do but now I am starting to think about readability because, like you said—who do I write for? Who do I want to empower? What use is art if I live in it alone?
I have carried the last three questions with me through moments of deep uncertainty and hesitation. Too often, I use language to evade myself, wanting only to be someone who notices things so the objects of my desire might reveal something human inside of me. I am interested in this discomfort of bodies, that slippage; how we write about feelings so they can exist outside of us, but still always meet ourselves in each piece of writing we encounter. By interrogating the conflict between an undefinable selfhood and readability, Zhi reminds us that aesthetics are not politicised, but inherently political.
One stanza in ‘MANGOES AHEAD’ reads like a response to Zhi’s statement above, posing a series of questions that have no question mark to signal its asking. They are listed in a stream of statements that jump out at the reader:
what’s wrong with not measuring a thing
what’s wrong with giving it all
what’s wrong with coming into it bruised
and wanting to go harder still
what’s wrong with having cake for breakfast
what’s wrong with begging for sweetness
my sugared heart encased in my sugared body
eat me
This is a poem that is ultimately about queer joy and love, but it also makes me think of writing with pleasure and relish, about anything that touches you—crushes, uncertainties, signs, and moments that don’t necessarily fit together into a neat ending. To not measure a thing, and still seek the precision of a single action. To be vulnerable yet opaque, open to desire at every sign.
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Works Cited
✷ Ada Limón, ‘Ada Limón on Preparing the Body for a Reopened World: The Challenges of Emerging from Lockdown’, Literary Hub, 2021.
✷ Alexander Chee, ‘The Autobiography of my Novel’, How to Write an Autobiographical Novel (Mariner Books, 2018).
✷ Julietta Singh, Unthinking Mastery (Duke University Press, 2017).
✷ Louise Gluck, ‘Against Sincerity’, Proofs and Theories: Essays on Poetry (Ecco, 1995).
✷ Sara Ahmed, What's the Use? On the Uses of Use (Duke University Press, 2019).
✷ Soo-Min Shim, ‘Interview #189 — Soo-Min Shim and Zhi’, LIMINAL, 2021.
Donnalyn Xu is a Filipino-Chinese poet, writer, and arts worker living on Dharug land. Her work has been published in Overland, Peril, Voiceworks, Cordite, and elsewhere. She has previously worked as a gallery assistant and a bookseller, and spends the rest of her time as a poetry editor for Voiceworks and a casual academic in Art History at the University of Sydney.