Decade of the Brain
Janine Joseph’s Decade of the Brain tracks the agony, bewilderment, and repetitiveness of traumatic brain injury and its long aftermath. Using invented forms and typographies, the poems speak as though directly from the brain, as well as about it, observing the remaking of memories and the selves that have multiplied in recovery from a car accident:
[…] the Janine I was was ram-rattled into the
Janine I am now. When the concussion receded, I journeyed across
kame and kettle in my habit of skin, immigrant again in this after
life of a life without my grandmother tongue.
In addition to the collapses of language and floods of thought, the book details the sustained symptoms of vertigo (“the wind spinning my brain // from myself”), hair loss (about which “no one can do a thing”), and tinnitus (“a tenor sings / in your canal”). These systems of body and brain are inextricable from the nation-state that acts on them: “ching chang chonged out // of the mountains where I made a home.”
A profound dependency on institutionalized systems for healing—from grief counselor to machine technician, neuropsychologist to acupuncturist—parallels the experience of living with undocumented status in the United States, which Joseph regarded closely in her debut, Driving Without a License. In Decade of the Brain, visas are exchanged for intake forms (“My torso scored in order / of severity”), and lawyers for medical professionals that multiply. With the speaker’s recovering “head in his hands,” one specialist asks “what it is like” in the Philippines, adding, “But I guess you don’t tan if you’re a colored.”
The speaker remembers “hallucinating, // as a child, a double on the dashboard and my double / would say, Don’t you say a word,” and wonders about the sensation of different selves in the aftermath of the accident: “it is possible something split in me // the first time I lied myself a citizen.” Though the collection establishes a discreteness of before and after naturalization and before and after the crash—“It was like that, all the time, / after.”—it also elucidates the numerous faint breakages that make up each “after.”