Vice-royal-ties

“Where should I touch you, Lima, to make you scream? What ecstasy / do you keep in that thorn of old neighborhoods?” The question appears in “Three” from Julia Wong Kcomt’s chapbook, Vice-royal-ties, which considers the legacies of the former Viceroyalty of Peru and Río de la Plata, where “[a]mid all the absurdity / the conquistador kisses my hand.” 

Comprised of two sections, “BI REY NATO” and “Seven Hopeless Poems,” and translated from the Spanish by Jennifer Shyue, this slim volume wrestles with impossible questions and is at once deeply rooted in Lima and constantly pushing against Peru’s perceived borders, with references to Gustave Flaubert’s Salammbô and works by Peruvian poet José Watanabe as well as famous Argentinian and Brazilian writers. Drawing on Kcomt’s own heritage, Vice-royal-ties centers the perspective of a tusán, or local born Chinese Peruvian, as in “The Red Rooster”:

Peru dies, Wata,
and all I remember is what you said about my aunt:
“She was hot, your aunt Carmen,
she didn’t look Chinese.”
I smiled unoffended, because in Peru nobody
looks like anything.

Shyue’s deft translation manages to highlight the text’s multilingual origins, preserving the Spanish in “[c]afé con leche” and “[m]adre / hay una sola,” and choosing “madreselva” over honeysuckle for its resonance with the rest of the mothers in the collection. A ghostly English gloss also helps us along when the text moves into Portuguese:

Kcomt allows notions of linguistic roots to unfold in surprising images, and voices a wish “[…] for the sea to part in two / so I can walk all the way to Macau,” a roughly ten thousand mile walk along the Pacific Ocean’s seabed. This eerie elegy leaves me yearning for a full collection:

Peru dies.
Like garlic bulbs
this whim of blouses
cut so masterfully.