Writing from the Ashes: On the Burning Haibun

There’s a story I often tell to illustrate a point about the importance of revision: the initial draft of what would eventually become the first burning haibun was nearly five pages long, a mess of conflicting narrative threads and overambitious erasures. After over a year of editing down, whittling away, and writing again, there was only a single sentence of that first draft remaining, the sentence that opens the published version of the poem—“Once, my mother accused me of throwing alcohol and gasoline on my emotions.” It’s one of the truest lines I’ve ever written, a nearly direct quotation from my mother, spoken across the kitchen counter when I was seventeen. But more important than its presence as a seed of unembellished truth within that poem is the way it served as the final key for me to understand my entry point to the content and structure of the newborn form emerging across my computer screen. A first spark for the flames. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

I have an obsession with memory and its disjunctive nature, particularly in spaces of trauma: the ways that traumatic experiences distort and destroy memories, leaving behind only fragmentary recollection. This is something I know both as scientific fact and as a truth that runs through my body like silt in my veins. This was something that, in mid-2016, I had only just begun to try and reckon with via my earliest attempts at this form. Around this time, as I worked on the earliest iteration of my debut collection, Wound from the Mouth of a Wound, I developed a deep interest in the ways that trauma intersected with and threaded together my various identities as a disabled, neurodivergent, trans woman, and survivor, as well as their shared nature as medicalized conditions.

Now, reflecting back, I can’t help but think of how, riffing upon the work of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, the queer crip theorist Robert McRuer defines disability within his 2006 book, Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability, as

the open mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances and resonances, lapses and excesses of meaning when the constituent elements of bodily, mental, or behavioral functioning aren’t made (or can’t be made) to signify monolithically.

When I first read this, I was immediately struck by how McRuer’s framing of disability’s relation to hegemonic conceptions of the body and mind was also deeply true of not just queerness, as Sedgwick’s original quote posits, but specifically of transness—this relationship between gender and sex as a social dissonance, a failure to signify the monolithic, cisheteronormative understanding of our genders. But McRuer also names this relationship an “open mesh of possibilities,” a framing through which I was able to begin thinking about the potential of generative failure within a text, the possibilities opened by writing into the dissonances and lapses in meaning that my body contains.

It was through the synchronicity of reading McRuer alongside Ocean Vuong’s debut collection, Night Sky with Exit Wounds, that the burning haibun first began to form in my mind. There are two particular poems within Vuong’s collection that served as catalysts for the creation of the burning haibun form: “Immigrant Haibun” and “Seventh Circle of Earth.”

Vuong’s “Immigrant Haibun” is composed of seven shorter prose segments that constellate around the speaker’s family journeying over sea from Vietnam to America, shifting between the twin personae of the speaker’s mother and father. This structural and narrative tension within the poem served as inspiration for the burning haibun’s mechanical utilization of the multiple strophes, to generate a similar sense of narrative tension within the form.

Vuong’s “Seventh Circle of Earth” narrates the last moments of Michael Humphrey and Clayton Capshaw, a gay couple who were burned to death in their own home in Dallas, Texas. Formally, the poem embodies this act of violence, written as footnotes to a vanished text. I was struck by the starkness of each page, the superscript numbers hovering in a field of white. But in spite of what is missing, what is vanished, or burned away, Vuong’s lines, tucked neatly in the footnotes, refuse this erasure and demand the voices of the dead be heard. This poem inspired and emboldened my use of erasure as a way of entering spaces of complex memory, spaces within my poems where both my recollection and personhood were challenged. I knew, as I pressed toward the completed form, that like Vuong, my utilization of erasure could not exist merely as an aesthetic flourish. Rather, it was imperative that the form center upon a structural employment of the technique as an act of queer/crip resistance to the multifarious forms of violence that individuals, the state, and other systems of power leverage against us, targeting not only our histories and narratives, but also our lives.

As Solmaz Sharif reminds us in her essay “The Near Transitive Properties of the Political and Poetical: Erasure,” “the proliferation of erasure as a poetic tactic in the United States is happening alongside a proliferation of our awareness of it as a state tactic.” The dual nature of this textual strategy cannot be separated, at least not without rendering it meaningless. Later in the essay, she writes this:

Every poem is an action.
Every action is political.
Every poem is political.

To erase—within the realm of poetry—any text, even a self-authored text, is a political act; the poetical act of erasure is one that necessarily exists always in a dialectical relationship with erasure as a stratagem of state violence. I knew then that if erasure was to be the chosen mode for this form—if I were to erase my own words—then this strategy must in some way resist the forms of erasure leveraged against me, or else it would only recapitulate this violence.

It was from these thoughts that the first burning haibun took shape, with what would become the first sentence as a seed: “Once, my mother accused me of throwing alcohol and gasoline on my emotions.” No longer just a throwaway line, this memory became the launching point for conceptualizing the poem’s use of erasure as a literal burning away of the text, and a discussion of alcoholism as a complex lineage. At the poem’s center lies the question of whether my own struggle with alcohol was an heirloom handed down to me by my father or part of a lineage of queer addiction as a method of coping with bigotry and structural poverty. In each strophe of the poem, I turn away from the logic of the last, attempting to produce—from what language remains unscorched—another iteration of the argument, a different vantage point from which I might come to understand my own history of addiction.

Before I show you an example of the burning haibun, let me define the basic parameters of the form. The burning haibun is an alteration of the traditional haibun—a Japanese haikai form originally popularized by Matsuo Bashō in the seventeenth century; it is composed of a prose poem and a haiku that functions as a kind of capstone or postscript, either amplifying or complicating the prose portion’s contents but employing greater segmentation. I was originally drawn to this form by the duality of its nature, defined both by the expansiveness of the prose poem and the terse compression of the haiku, allowing me to marry my competing maximalist and minimalist aesthetic impulses.

Making two key interventions upon the haibun, the burning haibun integrates erasure to fundamentally alter the form’s structural potential. Rather than the poem’s haiku existing exterior to the initial text, the haiku is derived, through a series of erasures, from the initial text itself. The haiku is a kind of hidden message, a moment of stark truth concealed beneath the lyricism of the initial text. The second intervention is that, unlike traditional haibun, which often exist as travelogs or meditations upon an external landscape, the burning haibun’s focus is upon the interior landscape of memory—an environment often rendered fragmentary by trauma.

BURNING HAIBUN

Once, my mother accused me of throwing alcohol & gasoline on my emotions. Once, my father’s breath was a guilty verdict. His car curved inward like a palm, how it birthed him back as a fist & I became the bloody rise of crescent moons hidden inside. I skin my knuckles & smell the alcohol before it enters the wound. Yesterday, I read that cleaning a cut with this clear burn will worsen the scar, make the undamaged cells forget how to rebuild. Maybe each scar is the skin’s blackout. Each blackout, erasure down to the cell. Once, my father tried to collision a child into perfect. Once, I tried to drink myself into blackout or erasure myself into something more poem than memory. Since the birth of words we have languaged our history into burnable things. Papyrus, paper, plastic film. Once, I bought a box of cassettes just to watch their innards burn, flashpoint from wound to wound. Once, the cops accused me of lineage, my blood a guilty verdict, each breath my father’s. How we first called delirium tremens the blue devils—alcohol possessing the body. How each drink curls me into a tighter fist & this too is not mine or if I claim innocence, each bruised wall, each jaundiced dawn without midnight before it, becomes a guilty verdict. My mother marries an alcoholic & gives birth to kindling. This is to say, my father calls his child a faggot & watches them burn. Did I inherit this addiction from my father or the queer of my blood? Once, I swallowed liquor like guilt & named this family.

▼

Once, my mother accused me of █████ my father’s breath▐███ ████ his ████████████████ fist ████████ hidden inside. I ███████ smell the alcohol ████████ forget how to rebuild.▐█ Each █████ blackout █████ erasure down to▐██████████ █████████████ birth of █████████ burnable things.▐███ ██Once, I ██████ just ██ watch the █████ wound ▐███████ accuse █ me of █████ my blood ██████ my father’s▐███████ ███▌possessing the body. How each drink ███████ too is not mine or ██ I claim ████████ guilt ██████ my mother █████ gives birth to █████ his child a faggot & ██████ I inherit this▐█████ queer of my blood ███ I swallow ██████ & name ███ family▐
 

▼

 

█▌father▐█████████▌ hidden in ▐█████ ████▌erasure █ of ██ me ███ each drink▐██ ▌mine▐██ my █ faggot ██ blood▐███████

Though the burning haibun was formulated as a rhetorical extension of my intersecting identities and complex relationship to linear time—those “overlaps, dissonances and resonances” that Sedgwick and McRuer discuss—it has been a great joy of mine to see others adopt the form and begin to shape it in new directions, in order to contain their own interior landscapes. One example is “sundress: a burning haibun” by Winniebell Xinyu Zong, which uses the form to deliver a cutting critique of rape culture. The poem also integrates visual experimentation and a contrapuntal within its four sections, the titles of which also reduce down: “一 : sundress: a burning,” “二 : undress hun,” “三 : un run,” and “四 : urn.” Reading it, I was particularly struck by how Zong’s initial prose section, which hinges on her speaker’s declaration that “there are 57 reasons why one would burn their lover,” itself burns into the contrapuntal which embodies an internal argument over how the speaker reacted to the violence central to this poem, both before and after the event:

██ i should have ████▌ felt something ██ i refused ████████ ██▌i refuse ███ to be a dry ███ woman ██ my body▐████████ ▌if only ███ my body ██ had listened ██ listen▐██████████ ███████████▌& stopped fighting  ██ stop fighting▐█████ █▌he ██ left ██ no bruises ██ on me ██ bruises▐█████████ █████████▌that lasted until morning ██ last ██ until █ morning █ ███ i had no hymen left █ to █ puncture ██ i ██ have no hymns in me ████████████ why was █ i burning ██ that’s why █ i’m █ burning ████████▌i was touched so feverishly ██ i was █ almost ▌loved ██

There’s also Ros Seamark’s “Burning Haibun #1: First Episode Psychosis Pentecost,” which blurs the borderline between interior and exterior landscapes; its recollection of a childhood psychotic episode is deeply entrenched in its relationship to place. “i confess a childish faith in the high desert,” Seamark writes, “it’s there, in that smoking, highway-slashed/floodplain that i learned to speak, and to breathe.” Imagery of the Central California desert pervades the poem, even as it interrogates how this first occurrence of psychosis arrived, divine and without fear, though they will later be taught to fear it. The poem’s rhetoric and imagery toward its end simmers down from:

     i know i am a creature made of creatures; the mirror can never show me what is real. and
suddenly—something catches fire: the clatter of the pipes to my left congeals into a nocturne,
actual and holy as the water. there is no imagination here, no choice, just music, as involuntary as
the television buzzing in the background and for years it visits me and i know no fear.

to

                                              ███████i know i am a creature ███ ██▌of▐██████ the mirror ██ never ████████████ real.▐██ █▌fire ███ congeals into ██████ holy ███████ fear. ██████

There are many more exciting interpretations of the form than I can discuss at length here, but a few other personal favorites of mine are Wren Cuidadx Romero-Gilhooly’s “a light,” sterling-elizabeth arcadia’s “estrogen, progesterone, spironolactone, estrogen, progesterone,” jason b. crawford’s “This Has Never Been My America,” and francxs gufan nan’s “balding haibun.” Seeing this form move beyond my own work, experiences, and circle of friends has been a joyous thing, an opportunity to see what happens when others take their words and set them ablaze.