![]() ![]() ![]() My mother moved me to an elite school, / where my ears were incised by new grammar, new words.” He draws out the full implication: “I once spelled grammar as grammer, grimmer, rim.” A language is a system that can enclose as much as open, as “rim” here implies.īy collapsing the personal and the political, Wong’s speaker employs a tone that is simultaneously intimate and public, with Hong Kong and its current crisis echoing out through his relationships with family members and lovers. Then, he addresses the issue of language, and how language is never neutral, but an outcome of historical circumstance. “The year Margret Thatcher was elected,” Wong writes in the poem, “I was born,” building a direct link between self and Thatcher’s reign. The title of the poem alone suggests a focus on boundary-breaking and spillage, with it being unclear (deliberately so) if the “city” mess and “mother” mess are two different messes or part of the same. In poems such as “City Mess, Mother Mess, Fluids Mess,” Wong addresses these baroque political entanglements directly, often relating these entanglements to family history and personal history. The cross-hatching in these poems of macro-power and micro-power, of polis and eros, ideology and “lived experience,” is dizzying, and seems incredibly modern – where issues of identity and language will only grow in their multi-faceted quality as we move about the globe. Yet, Wong’s book is in many ways an exploration of this very intricacy. ![]() The situation in Hong Kong is so complex – with the territory being a creation of colonialism, but a creation whose current citizens are threatened by what could be seen as another colonial power – that it disrupts our usual political categories. The persona used by many book reviewers (at least in the US) is often one of serene moral authority, where the writer is firmly ensconced on the “right side of history,” and what that “right side” might be is imagined to be static and unchanging with the coming years and decades. The complexity of the Hong Kong situation by necessity complicates this book review. (It has become fashionable in the US to see “freedom of speech” as a right-wing issue, but as recent calls by Republican politicians to ban the teaching of critical race theory demonstrates, “free speech” is crucial for emancipatory causes.) Yet anyone who cares about the right to dissent, and the right to free speech more broadly, should be concerned about crackdowns against protestors in Hong Kong. Modern Hong Kong exists because of the British Empire, and there is an argument by some on the Left here in the States that the US should not support Hong Kong’s call for political autonomy from Beijing due to this colonial history. The reason for this is that Hong Kong itself, as a territory, as an idea, as a symbol, and as a place where more than seven million people live, is incredibly complex, and it short-circuits any appeal for ready-made answers. When I started writing this review of Nicholas Wong’s brilliant Besiege Me, a poetry collection about Hong Kong’s history and current crisis, I quickly realized that this was going to be one of the most difficult reviews I’ve ever written. Nicholas Wong, Besiege Me (Noemi Press, 2021), 80pp. James Pate reviews Nicholas Wong’s brilliant new collection of poetry on Hong Kong. ![]()
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