The Structure of Grief
Gurmeet Kaur & Christy Tan on Victoria Chang
Writers’ Note
Victoria Chang’s Dear Memory is a multimodal collection of letters constructed from her family archive. Using legal documents, photographs and interviews with her mother, Chang assembles collages as an inquiry into her past. The book’s epistolary form configures conversations with the gaps, silences and absences of Chang’s intergenerational memories. We wanted to mirror this approach by writing letters to one another, as a way of inhabiting these liminal distances.
Dear Gurmeet,
It’s strange trying to recall memories of a book about memory and its slipperiness. The first time I read Dear Memory, I remember talking to you about it, but now I don’t remember exactly what I said. Memory re-contextualises and re-presents meaning, defamiliarising and shifting our perception, perpetually drawing new connections across time and space. The experience of remembering always carries with it an underside of grief——the inevitable loss between an experience and our limited capacity to express it——and often I find it difficult to locate exactly what is being grieved.
I think Chang shapes her grief through metaphors, which feels apt, as metaphors conjure presence through evoking absence. There is always a distance that Chang is perpetually reaching across and never arriving; mirroring the structure of memory. In memory and metaphor, she is unable to identify exactly what it is she is leaning into. Each time she tries to remember, she becomes a ghost——haunting her desire to know more than language permits. Chang’s metaphors perform a ghostly function, occupying the space between ineffable loss and the impossibility of cleanly representing it in language.
Reading Dear Memory makes me think of ‘racial melancholia’, in the way Anne Cheng theorises about it. Unlike mourning, which is discretely finite and accepts substitution, racial melancholia is pathological and interminable, denoting a condition of endless self-impoverishment that is paradoxically nourishing. The melancholic subject consumes the lost object and ‘becomes haunted, at once made ghostly and embodied in their ghostliness. Thus the subject sustains itself through the ghostly emptiness of a lost Other’. I think this is why diasporic poets are drawn to metaphor. Its poetic implications mimic the migrant experience of displacement, interpellation and assimilation. How do you think Chang’s diasporic experience shapes her relationship to language and memory?
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Dear Christy,
I can feel the racial melancholia in Dear Memory; Chang’s letters to her parents, teachers and friends excavate memory after memory, looking for answers through direct address but never receiving anything back. It’s as if writing letters is a mourning ritual to recover what has been lost, to piece together a history and integrate its knowledge with the self. Though racial melancholia itself may be interminable, Chang’s work is inherently hopeful as she creates a medium to grieve through. Her longing for answers begins with the first letter in the collection to her mother:
What city were you born in? What was your American birthday? Your Chinese birthday? What did your mother do? What did your grandmother do? Who was your father, grandfather? It’s too late now. But I would like to know.
Chang’s inquiry into grief reminds me of what Margo Jefferson says in Constructing a Nervous System (2022): ‘When I grieve my mind becomes a public domain for rhymes, fragments, phrases, bits of song. They surge in my ears and throat’. The structure of grief then is an experience of ruptures, gaps and discontinuity, punctuated in this book by an overwhelming number of questions. When grieving a person, there is a subject and linearity of time, but diasporic grief has no subject and the loss is ongoing, interrupted by assimilation, racism and violence. This type of grief is a kind of fragmentation as identity becomes ‘bits of songs’, memories, words.
In this sense, articulating a continuous, complete narrative of grief is difficult. Chang explores this in her earlier collection of poetry Obit (2020) where she writes that ‘we read to inherit the words, but something is always between us and the words. Until death, when comprehension and disappearance happen simultaneously’. If diasporic grief is endless and an uncontained series of ruptures, then death is something Chang seeks to contain, not just in words by in form too —through elegy in Obit and epistolary in Dear Memory. Chang writes:
An elegy reflects on the loss of a loved one. What form can express the loss of something you never knew but knew existed? Lands you never knew? People? Can one experience such a loss? The last definition of absence is the nonexistence or lack of. See how the of hangs there like someone about to jump off a balcony?
I wonder if it’s possible to hold grief in containers of form and genre when it remains an outpouring, tumbling out, rupturing the coherency of a present moment. What do you think is Chang’s relationship to grief and time?
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Dear Gurmeet,
I don’t think anything is ever really past. Everything that has happened is still happening, alongside everything that will happen. The (re)construction that comes with (re)membering isn’t about (re)turning to some original truth, but a dismembering and reconfiguring. Remembering is not simply the opposite of forgetting, it is a poetic and political act of creation. Time is just a way of making sense of it all. We never really have a beginning or an end, we’re always already in the middle of it all. I like that John Coltrane line—‘I start in the middle of a sentence and move both directions at once.’
Chang recognises that the process of memory is alienating and disorienting. She writes, ‘Maybe memory is more like a homicide. Each time it returns, it’s a new memory, one that has murdered all the memories before.’ This reminds me of her earlier collection, Obit (2020), where she writes that ‘a picture represents / a moment that has died… When we / remember the dead, at some point, we / are remembering the picture, not the / moment’. Whether the memories really happened is perhaps irrelevant, it is what we choose to remember that matters. We are, as Marianne Hirsch says when writing about post-memory, “connected to the past not by recall but by imaginative investment, projection and creation… a site of potential collaboration with the dead”. Do you think her collages are an experiment in collaborating and communing with other temporalities?
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Dear Christy,
Yes, I experience her collages as a communion with memory, and by extension, the past. The way Chang structures text and image, reshapes, handwrites, assembles, and moves each memory becomes an act of memorialisation, slipping between temporalities with each collage.
Dear Memory is also an attempt at preservation; many of her collages are a continuation of the letters. Collages made of photographs and documents that belonged to her parents, layered with her annotations or captions in the form of poetry. Sometimes, they are her mother’s words from an interview Chang conducted. Using these familial materials is an act of recording, remembering, archiving first-generation stories of migration by making them anew. At some points, the collages become uncomfortable acts of violence, Chang obliterating her mother or grandparents by cutting out parts of their bodies, inserting tautologies of Chinese character. Through these acts of cutting and creating, Chang’s preservation is redone, and the ghosts that haunt her are severed, mutilated.
In Indeterminacy (2022), David Campany describes Helmar Lerski’s 1936 portraiture project Metamorphosis Through Light where Lerski took 175 photographs of his subject’s face from different angles, positions, lighting, and so on. Campany notes that ‘[b]y the time you have looked at the entire series you have a lot of ideas as to what this person may have “really” looked like but no sense at all of the person. It’s endlessly descriptive and endlessly deferring; disturbing, but strangely liberating.’
Dear Memory works in this way too: she interrogates her childhood, her mother’s migration, and her father’s illnesses from different angles, creating a body of work that is ‘endlessly descriptive and endlessly deferring’ into the future with no one responding to the epistolary. In the collages, the cutting, replacing, adding and moving almost divorces the past memory from the present moment, gesturing to what is irretrievable with time. The collages become a way of accepting that loss through creation with the remaining detritus of our lives.
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Dear Gurmeet,
I think the cutting and re-forming of collage replicates the inherent violence of memory. As she writes, “history has been narrowed down so much that I can no longer get in”. Through the physical constraints of collage, she gets to reconfigure and reconcile conflicting temporalities. The dislocation and disjuncture between text and image resists being totalised or subsumed into a clear and legible narrative. I like this because I’m interested in the way loss structures a poem’s form (as well as a poet’s subjectivity) rather than simply the content of what is lost, which is always intrinsically irretrievable.
I feel this kind of opacity—refusing to be palatable or consumed by the colonial, patriarchal gaze—is important in re-asserting her family’s agency and aligns with Trinh Minh Ha’s ethics of speaking nearby rather than about. It ‘deliberately suspends meaning, preventing it from merely closing and hence leaving a gap in the formation process’, which ‘allows the other person to come in and fill that space as they wish’.
I think there is a distinction to be made between opacity and omission, although the two are intertwined. Where the first can be an act of asserting incommensurability, the latter is an aesthetic choice that poetry is very much predicated on. What is omitted is just as important and intentional as what is disclosed, and Chang appears to be invested in both these things. However, I think omission can sometimes risk being too ambiguous and not as politically robust as opacity. Do you feel like Chang’s poetics are conducive to any kind of political project outside of the lyric ‘I’?
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Dear Christy,
I agree that opacity is a powerful tool to reclaim agency and refuse the demands of the white gaze. I think this is why I am drawn to Chang’s writing on silence; writing in and around histories and memories and inhabiting margins and white space as a way to obfuscate. In a letter titled ‘Dear Silence’, Chang writes:
Somehow, writing feels more related to beginnings than endings. Writing feels outside of time. In a windowless room. Not in a room at all. In a state of being half-awake and half-possessed. In an endless snowstorm, ploughed under. Alone. As I reach for memory that has become extinct.
In writing towards ambiguous and abstract subjects like silence, Chang subverts our expectations of the epistolary mode. There may be some chance of a response from a person, but there is no chance of a response from silence. The book as a whole is made up of silences as there are no answers to Chang’s letters. Though Chang’s intention may be ambiguity through omission, what emerges is a denial of answers, leaving readers to get comfortable with opacity as a legitimate response to the transparency that is demanded of assimilating migrants.
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Dear Gurmeet,
Knowing that our assimilation is predicated on the dispossession and oppression of First Peoples, I think it is important that migrants divest from colonial notions of nationhood and citizenship. Rather than seeking recognition from the settler state and white Australia, the potential of anti-colonial and anti-racist alliances across different racialised and oppressed groups prioritises self-determination and co-liberation. Unsettling the knowability that the colonial state expects and imposes on us is part of resisting the colonial impulse to classify, categorise and contain.
In an interview with Dorothy Wang, Monica Youn speaks about how social constructs like race and gender act as containers in the poem and how they're deeply saturated in the form. Youn describes whiteness as ‘the free space around the container, as a space of agency where you can step in and step out, choose to leave the subject of your observation confined in that container… Whiteness is the privilege of being”, or as Wang says “not delimited in the same way as the racialised container”. I don’t think it’s possible to evade the politics of a poem. I believe that every poem is political. In fact, the poems that seem the least political are often the most political, as they have that unquestioned veneer of neutrality Youn interrogates in her work.
To be ignorant of the politics that constitute a poem, the material conditions that make a specific way of seeing and being in the world possible, is a very shallow and unrigorous form of reading. As Elaine Castillo writes in How to Read Now, “White supremacy makes for terrible readers”. I’ve also been thinking a lot about how language can be a form of mastery, which Julietta Singh writes about in Unthinking Mastery: Dehumanism and Decolonial Entanglements. The ways in which we use language to objectify something we can never fully know or understand, in order to make it coherent and gain a sense of control over it. I think this is why I’m drawn to a poetics of haunting, or what Jane Wong calls Going towards the Ghost. Haunting communicates in ways we aren’t immediately familiar with, demanding new modes of being attentive and receptive to the Other. The ghost does not stop where language ends. It speaks not to raise awareness but to raise the dead.
I’m interested in the limits of language and what it conceals rather than reveals. I’m interested in what leaks, what lurks and lingers beyond the archive, between the margins. There is an ongoing and historic lineage of Asian-American poetry about haunting and ghosts—Don Mee Choi, Diana Khoi Nguyen, Monica Sok, Jane Wong and the reappraisal of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, just to name a few. Perhaps this has something to do with how ‘Asians’ have been racialized, their relationship to invisibility, assimilation and the model minority myth.
For those who have been made invisible, to actively choose to be illegible—not distorted or erased as an external imposition—feels meaningful. Silence, not as a site of repression or being perceived as passive by the white gaze, but as something that is opaque and unreadable. There are some things that exceed language, things that exist between people that language can not reach, things that recoil back into themselves when identified through singular means. If I am a ghost, I am both the haunting and the haunted. Ghosts are a form of reclaiming power. Do you feel like you are a ghost when you write? What are you haunting/ returning to? And are you attempting to exorcise or preserve it?
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Dear Christy,
Like other Asian diasporic writers, I find ghosts compelling for their ubiquity. Since colonisation, the West has created cultural fantasies about the East (the dichotomised language of East/West as the first example) and ghosts as a metaphor counter this. For those of us culturally estranged through assimilation, ghosts fill in the gaps for knowledge we cannot know, knowledge we have lost, knowledge outside of our existence because of disturbances in linear histories.
I know only a handful of family stories; the rest is folklore and conjecture. Lately, I find myself leaning into conjecture and contested memories as a site for remembering. Though we can’t know what is ‘truth’ or ‘fiction’ in remembrance, there is a shadow, a ghost of a past truth. Ghosts are sites of resistance, symbolising what cannot be erased. Ghosts haunt my writing, playing out the past into present, overcoming temporalities by alluding to what may have existed.
In Second Memory (2021), Alycia Pirmohamed and Pratyusha write:
There are other ways to unfurl. They do not all require an intimacy of pain. Sandeep Parmer writes: “I clear a path to retrace my steps.” I retrace it to the beginning and stop again at the moment where I was asked for an outpouring of trauma. Soft blue like a gentle still heart. Stillness, a boundary line eroding from where I stand.
While there are pressures on marginalised writers to perform trauma for white literary establishments, ghosts and haunting offer an alternative. In their blurry, milky, porous outlines, there are no clear answers. Similarly for diasporic writers, there is no linear, ‘factual’ narrative to return to. Before language, there are ghosts—and ghostly traces allow us to clear a path to pre-verbal understanding of the past that is more echo than words.
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Christy Tan lives in Melbourne on Wurundjeri Country. Her writing has appeared in Overland, ArtsHub, Revue, Cordite Poetry Review, Going Down Swinging, Runway Journal, Peril Magazine, The Suburban Review and more.
Gurmeet Kaur is a poet and critic living on Wurundjeri Country. Her work appears in Kill Your Darlings, Mascara Literary Review, The Suburban Review, Ambit, Cordite, Sydney Review of Books, Peril and elsewhere. She is one of the 2023 New Critics at Kill Your Darlings.