Drag Poetica

Each month we feature a guest post from a contributor to Poetry’s current issue. Wo Chan’s poem “june 8, the smiley barista remembers my name” appears in the January 2020 issue. Previous posts in this series can be found on the Editors’ Blog.

1

My first memory is my mother’s singing. The second is my mother’s nipple. My third is a small ongoing scene: my brother is sitting, pretending to meditate like the Buddha under a cold stream of faucet water that splashes down from the bathroom wall spout. He has left the door open, and it is summer. Zazen, he sits, baby fat shining. Between his giggling and palm-to-palm mudra he chants, “Amituofo, Amituofo ...” 

2

I was born in Macau, an island in the South China Sea one hour by ferry away from the British colonial Hong Kong. It was 1991. My first language was Cantonese. I have been told that I was an outgoing child, performative, plump as a clementine. I loved soy-roasted chicken wings and saying hello to strangers at the fruit market. We went to the fruit market everyday. My mother would buy vegetables and meats daily, running into neighbors and friends at the market. Among my three older brothers, I remember our childhoods in China the least. I was five when we left, and I could write the characters for “cake” (so boasts my mother) which I cannot do today at twenty-eight. Though she could be misremembering.

3

It is January 10, 2020. I’m a drag performer and poet, and I live in Brooklyn, New York. I am not from here. It is the warmest January day by many records in the American Northeast. My friends are lucky that it is a Sunday and they are sketching each other, reclining in parks, reading sci-fi novels by a pond, or simply ambling with geese in leisure. I am sure the weather disconcerts them too—so early, so warm. I refuse the invitations to go outside—partly in fear, partly in protest, and partly in righteousness. I write by the window, too moral and self-important to enjoy the season’s softening.

4

I actually think my first memory is both the sound of my mother singing and the image of my mother’s nipple. My third memory, then, is the sensation of shitting myself in the supermarket. Around the corner from our Macau apartment (the one-roomer my brothers and I shared with our mom) was a small, air-conditioned supermarket us four kids would wander on days when it was hot. I remember trailing behind them as we walked down the cool, wide aisle, and then the sudden sensation of a turd plummeting out of pant short. It was summer, and I was still too young to wear underwear regularly. I don’t remember if the shit left a mark upon landing, but I remember the floors were a gleaming white. My tyke-sized bod stiffened with fear and embarrassment as my brothers turned back and saw me standing rigid in the snack aisle next to my turd, as if I were on a beach standing next to driftwood. I remember the gestures of my kid brothers springing to action, huddling and hauling my stiff limbs—planked up and petrified with terror—out of the market and bolting as a unit into the hot, cramped Macanese streets, back to the Chinese district where we lived, and up the flights of metal stairs to the third story where they laid me down on the kitchen floor and cleaned me. I don’t remember what happened next, only darkness. Given enough darkness, music begins to play.

5

If poetry is language fantasy, then drag is life fantasy. Drag is the fantasy of living styled into iconic, recognizable moments. A moment is like a story, but more salient and malleable. In other words, moments are somewhat queer. It has something to do with a unit of perception, the way that a mora or phoneme measures a dry unit of language. Unlike a story, however, moments are tied to the temporal and cannot be replicated and transmitted easily the way a story is reprinted or a poem republished without the bulk of it being lost. You kind of have to be there. As so, drag can be the stylization on the subjective impact or flavor of time. Memory italicized makes a moment. Dialogue recut makes a moment. Dreams coauthored, voices pantomimed—they make a moment. But, if moments are everywhere, as I so liberally theorize, why then are we not tripping over the clutter of every moment all the time? Because moment is coded; again, queer—moments live in the pockets of aesthetics or language. It’s in the timing or the color or the curation. And that is precisely why “moment” exists as the vocabulary of drag. (I think a parallel concept exists in poetry with the idea of “the lyric”? But I have never received a consistent answer as to what “the lyric” is.)

6

It is January 10, 2020, and I am a drag performer and poet living in Brooklyn. In class, Charles Wright once said that a poet has about three to four “flood subjects”—subjects the writer returns to for all their life. For him, he said it was God, landscape, and his backyard. I think I will be writing about my mother, the abject (shit), anecdotes, and “hello, my name is Wo Chan” for the rest of my life. All of my drag in some way is about introducing myself to the world, as a body and verb-maker onstage that has a cultural history, political beliefs, and material needs. I think you not only have to introduce yourself into the world, but also to stand still in the presence of love and (spot)light in order to see the world begin to shift into a kinder, more recognizable aspect that reflects you and those you love. I mean this specifically for folks who are marginalized and cannot recognize themselves outside of the animal or avant-garde.

7

What does this look like in practice? My dream as an artist is to combine the mediums of poetry and drag. Between moment, lyric, culture, body, and memory, this is an example of what I mean when I try to put all these together. When I watch myself perform in recording, I am always anxious, ready to critique my shortcomings made direly visible in the relic of the performance. But the moment that astounds me is always my joy. I think I am more comfortable with doing the thing than explaining the thing, but I understand that both avenues (practice and theory) have their necessary uses. I think drag is a way for queer people to talk to each other in a coded and rich language that deepens the experience of shared living as it is happening. It is rooted in our pleasure and thus our preservation. So, what are the implications now that we have started to talk to each other?