A Facet’s Gleam: Ai and the Believable 'I' (Part II)

From time to time Poetry features online exclusives by contributors on its Editors’ Blog. This post is part two of a two-part series by Phillip B. Williams on Ai’s use of persona. Part one can be found here.

II.

I’m not really searching for myself when I’m creating these characters. It’s human nature that I’m exploring, the behavior of everyone, every man and woman.… My whole career has been an exploration of the human psyche or the human response to things that occur in life.
—Ai

It is difficult for me to explain how Ai writes in such convincing voices on the level of prosody because her prosodic decisions, especially in her work before her book Fate, with its blank verse, are subtle and seem based primarily on rhetorical strategies accumulating into a distinct personality. The same could be said about any well-rendered speaker of any poem, openly persona or not. What I can recognize, I share with the understanding that there is much more to be said about her work.

When it comes to rhetoric, I return frequently to anaphora. The repetition of a word or phrase at the beginning of a sentence or set of dependent clauses is easy to recognize, as it builds momentum by way of dramatizing progression in thinking and thus mimicking a progression in time. Ai’s poem “The Kid,” for example, slowly builds a persona’s psychological state by repeating the word “I.” Here is the first stanza:

My sister rubs the doll’s face in mud, 
then climbs through the truck window. 
She ignores me as I walk around it, 
hitting the flat tires with an iron rod. 
The old man yells for me to help hitch the team, 
but I keep walking around the truck, hitting harder, 
until my mother calls. 
I pick up a rock and throw it at the kitchen window, 
but it falls short. 
The old man’s voice bounces off the air like a ball 
I can’t lift my leg over. 

The turn of the poem is subtle: “The old man’s voice bounces off the air like a ball / I can’t lift my leg over.” Because it is the first and only time that we get what The Kid cannot do, I see it as the pivotal moment of decision, powerlessness at its peak and therefore ready to rupture in the next stanza. But let’s go back a bit. There are four instances of “I” in the first stanza. In the second, there are eighteen, including “I’m.” The second stanza is noticeably longer, nearly double the amount of lines in stanza one and over four times as many first-person pronouns. It is noticeable sonically too, where in some lines the speaker says “I” twice, as in “I’ve bitten. I laugh” and “I’m nimble, I’m quick.” Also, the presence of anyone else in the poem is rendered to mere object in the second stanza. Where “My sister rubs the doll’s face in mud,” “She ignores me,” and “The old man yells for me,” give autonomy to his family members, the second stanza leaves them as responders to and recipients of violent actions that grammatically have a distant operator or seemingly no operator at all:

1. “his skull splits open,” instead of “I split his skull open.”
2. “I stand still, get her across the spine,” instead of “I stand still and get her across the spine.”
3. “one bullet for the black horse, two for the brown,” instead of “I shoot the black horse once and the brown horse twice.”
4. “I catch her climbing out back, shoot,” instead of, “I catch her climbing out back and I shoot.”

The Kid is strangely distant from these moments of violence, though it is obvious that he has committed them. Where the “I” becomes more active is at the end of the poem: The Kid is suddenly an adult who in some ways could not bring himself into direct relation with his own violence but can wear his father’s suit and shoes, take his mother’s nightgown, and pack up his sister’s doll, bringing with him essences of the very people he killed, which shows a reliance on family. After all, he is 14 and still reciting nursery rhymes (i.e. the echo of “Jack be nimble, Jack be quick”). Ai has made sure that beneath the incredible violence bubbles vulnerability, loneliness, and the frightening simultaneity of understanding and lack of awareness.

What does it mean to also have the speaker, The Kid, introduce himself at the end of the poem as “Jack, Hogarth’s son,” giving himself a name while also naming what I’m assuming is the father, evidenced by The Kid’s donning of his “old man’s best suit” and walking away with possessions that once belonged to other family members? The son becomes the father, the caretaker, and, strangely enough, the family archivist. After having erased his family, how do we read his eventual investment in their preservation? This desire for continuance of the family line post murder complicates the violence experienced earlier in the poem, but to a baffling degree. What is missing is the “why.” The Kid’s intentions, remaining unknown throughout the poem, surpass their vagueness by coexisting with the particularities of his non/violent actions.

Ai has found a way to balance mystery with knowledge, giving the reader the “how” of the murders and the interior mind as the how occurs, but leaving purpose for the reader to explore on their own. I like to think of this as another method of creating a believable persona: forgoing the obvious.

Imagine if Ai, through the speaker of The Kid, wrote:

“And I was angry that day. Angry
enough to spit. Last night they didn’t
give me the supper I wanted. Last night
they made me go to bed early.”

What a shame that would be, having to deal with this bratty child whose murders are instantly made petulant, vapid, and unbelievable because written with the intention to convince, to defend however weakly such odd cruelty.

The persona poem demands not just the (re)telling and satisfaction of predetermined audience expectations, but a revision of how one sees and imagines both actions and the people committing said actions. Otherwise, the poem risks falling into stereotype, moralizing, and empathy, the latter potentially catering to a voyeuristic desire to experience others’ lives without having to take on the risks and burdens of those lives, even the ones we imagine. Where Ai’s persona poems shine is in their ability to shock a reader out of preconceived notions of reason, morality, and understandability.

 

III.

I can work with an idea if I get a character, but only if I have a character. If I have an interesting idea I want to work with, I must create a character to complete that idea.
—Ai

Ai’s life work culminates in her various, convincing personas that express oft-ignored ideas about the larger world in every grotesque, fearsome, and ugly expression. There is no confusion: we see through Ai’s eyes and her eyes only, but she is playacting as a performer would, getting into character to better understand the persona from whom she wishes to speak. The personas allow for just enough distance that Ai can play with time, place, and mood. Ai knows, first, what she wants as a writer. The imperative nature of the voices—their believability as contextualized by their expression through rhetorical strategies—comes through not merely as didacticism hidden behind a mask, but rather as a real life attempting to stretch in a vocalized two-dimension. The page, as any other medium, has its resistances, one of which is to crafting a body that breathes, moves, touches, and interacts with others on the level of flesh. It is Ai’s microscopic attention to how a particular use of language can build a character that brings to life, to full body, what could very easily be a flat pantomime of an ill-imagined or, worse, a dully replicated reality. This is the problem with facade.​

Facade protects power by obscuring the very structures that make possible said power. There’s a rallying cry but against whom/what? There’s bigotry but in the same murky glass in which we always get it, murky because the poet has chosen facade (to hide) over facet (to reveal another side of). In this murkiness said bigotry remains protected. We hear a voice but the (un)body has been flayed to unrecognizability. Or we get a voice that is hyper-recognizable, which makes us squirm because the voyeurism in which readers are forced to participate repeats and substantiates harm rather than critiques and deconstructs it. Complicity is remarkably sacrificed for sensationalism.

In embodying these speakers, Ai’s use of understatement, a relatively terse line, and sheer surprise of the material itself offer her plenty of options to show how power forces the powerless into corruption and how those in power betray us all. In this way, she makes it difficult to agree or disagree with her personas.

There is no occlusion, no illusion, no mask behind which to hide, only from which to reveal. Ai wears masks to unveil a truer, darker, more visceral version of the world and from that darkness we discover the effacement of our own masks.