Jenny Xie Interviews Sally Wen Mao

Jenny Xie talks to Sally Wen Mao about her second book, Oculus (Graywolf, 2019), for The Margins. In this book, "Anna May Wong, along with other historical and fictional women of color, is resurrected and recast to startling effect," writes Xie. "In poems that show Wong time-traveling and inhabiting a spectrum of filmic and real life roles, Mao gives vivid voice to the woman behind the flattened stock figures on the Hollywood screen." From their interview:

I feel many poems in the book map out the intersections between the white heteropatriarchal gaze, the Oriental other, and the glassy eye of the camera, the live-feed video-cam, or the screen. In what ways were you thinking about spectatorship in this book, which is bound up in the performance of a self?

Yes, it’s a tricky boundary between spectacle and image. The former implies exploitation, being the unwilling object of a gaze, and the latter implies self-presentation, a performance of self. The image is a familiar obsession that predates social media. The ambiguity when the performance of self becomes self-destructive, or when performance of self becomes pathological. That gray area interests me as a poet because it’s so wrapped up in everyday life now that it’s almost mundane. So much of this performance is tied to feelings of worth and value; in essence, it becomes ongoing, an entire existence all on its own—an online presence, an uninterrupted performance of self. No one knows what is truly authentic, or how to define that anymore, and this interests me. When and how does the image truly affirm? Is it possible to represent the self at all?

What is the vision of the future in this book, if there’s a coherent vision? I found the technocultural threads wondrous—robots, cyborgs, mutant odalisques, teledildonics!—especially as they contrasted with long gazes into the historical past.

I’m not sure if there is a coherent vision of the future in this book, other than a kind of foolish, guarded hope that somehow technology doesn’t fail us, that we are truly progressing, we don’t fail ourselves or each other. That somehow the traumas and wounds we seek to seal with personas (robots, cyborgs, social media) are healed in some way...

Read it all at The Margins.