The Past
If, as Faulkner said, the past is never dead, it’s not even past, then Wendy Xu’s third collection reckons with history as slipping around the margins of living memory. Hinged around Xu and her family’s migration to the United States in 1989, three days before the Tiananmen Square Massacre, The Past considers how personal narratives of migration and displacement continuously demand to be voiced and revisited. In one poem, the speaker dreams they are arranging flowers for an unremembered occasion. Is this about mourning or celebration? They note: “We don’t remember how we got here, so we have woven a beautiful story of replacement.” In a later poem Xu writes, “My work contained no genius, only an agitated bouquet of ideas.” The act of writing through the past, whether in order to recover or humanize historical narratives, is interrupted and silenced by the presence of the dead.
Notably, The Past contains a sequence of Tiananmen Sonnets, a form invented by Xu that experiments with combinations of either 6 or 4 lines and words. Accompanying these meditative sonnets are greyed-out columns of text, erasures representing the outlines of tanks “Punching through time.” The conceit is thought-provoking and precise, recalling the register of Liu Xiaobo’s June Fourth Elegies. In one sonnet, the speaker migrates to a “fragrant new century” while “some protestors disappear / during beverage service.” These sonnets highlight divisions between form and content, between the blank anonymity of the past and the “anniversary of language.” In the lyric essay “Notes for an Opening,” Xu laments: “how much the tragedy skews the appreciation of the craft of the poems themselves.” Later, she notes, of the massacre, “I have mythologized it to the point of memory.”
The difficulty of pledging oneself toward a stable history, especially as a diasporic writer, gives The Past its complex tensions. Ultimately, by exploring the limits of the lyric self and the political subject, Xu enacts a poetics of self-critique that allows her to come to terms with, and possibly refute, received history.