BY HEATHER IRVINE
Do we ever really understand the forces that make us? And if we do find the key to decoding our own personal histories, in uncovering where each of us comes from––are we able to change what that means for how we move through each day? From the mother who carried you to the mother you will become, what is passed on? These are the questions that drive Foretokens: ‘to decipher the riddle of her’––the mother––motherland, mother tongue, mother’s pain. The new collection has been shortlisted for this year’s T. S. Eliot Prize:
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Born in Hong Kong to a Chinese mother and English father, Howe moved to England with her family early in her childhood. Much of her poetry deals with experiences of emigration, racism, and being mixed-race. Where Loop of Jade craned its neck backwards to Hong Kong in search of belonging, Foretokens nimbly looks both ways: back, again, into Howe’s mother’s difficult past, and forwards, as Howe herself steps into motherhood.
Howe’s mother grew up in an impoverished, tumultuous China. Sold by her family to strangers, she was one of countless children to grow up enslaved to the households who bought them, cooking and/or cleaning and/or working the land. In ‘A History of My Relationship with My Mother in Twenty-three Arguments about the Laundry’, Howe draws out this hard past, highlighting the living trauma in her mother’s obsessive habits as she takes over the washing for Howe as she herself becomes a new mother. Here are three generations of mothers and children caught in a cycle of inherited pain and dirty laundry.
This thread continues in ‘Fore/mother’ and ‘History’, which consider China’s long history of women and children sold as slaves. ‘Famine and slavery in China are cause and effect,’ reads the source text for Howe’s poem ‘History’––a PhD Thesis by Clarence Martin Wilbur on slavery in China published in 1943. The history of Howe’s domestic arguments with her mother is inseparable from the ancient social history of a nation’s starved, fragmented families. In Howe’s words: ‘every family / is a kind of story, however broken, a stone passed / through many lives’.
Foretokens presents considered pieces on the way motherhood, for Howe, is also a study of what she passes on of her fractal cultural identity, of her own mother’s trauma. Her children figure prominently, first in poems on pregnancy. ‘Waking’ takes the Romantic approach: pregnancy is nature’s beautiful, terrifying thing in this poem of love, fear, and promise addressed to you, the unborn darling, ‘quiet passenger in your heart-lulled craft’. Then, in ‘Expect no logic from a pregnant woman’, we read the frustration of an academic, evicted from her world of the mind by the relentless demands of her childbearing, childrearing body. The voice of the pregnant woman and new mother churns ruthless (‘a well-thumbed / copy of How Not To / Hate Your Husband / After Kids’) and exhausted in short two- to four- word lines––the rhythm of constant interruption to which ‘Mummy the philo- / sopher’ is tied.
Later, motherhood shows up sweet again and blessed with poignant humour in ‘Parallax’. Howe tugs at the early bond of mother and child, two lives so interlocked that ‘you mixed up you & I’ in a ‘toddler Jedi mind trick’ of confused deictics. And in ‘Epic’, Howe is a mother herself still navigating cultural and racial identity, who sees in (or more precisely, around) her infant daughter’s eyes the ‘epic- / anthic folds’ common to people of East or Southeast Asian descent. From those folds she draws a story of her own childhood, of the shame she was made to feel by some fair-complexioned little English girl. Her Chinese inheritance an ‘invisible / yellow stain’.
Howe’s poetry curls on the page in wonderful shapes and expressions, operating from a joyful-in-spite-of-itself fascination with form. Yes, the poems are poems of maternal anxiety, colonial history, and, in Howe’s words, ‘ancestral pain’. Still, there is joy in giving poetic form its head, discovering where it guides its themes in an organic process of surprise. A stand-out is the ‘Songs Spun of Us’ sequence interspersing the collection. These are short poem-fragments that mimic DNA sequences, each line built between two of the four bases of genetic code (A, G, T, and C). They twist down the page with the look of undulating double helixes.
This importance of the visual is not surprising––Howe’s research interests as an academic lie in the relationships between poetry and visual art forms in 16th- and 17th-century English literature. ‘Poetic form is like the most satisfying of crossword puzzles,’ said Howe in a 2016 interview with Time Out Hong Kong. It’s no wonder that poetic form is the medium through which Howe parses the puzzle of her inheritance. With Foretokens, she approaches the next great puzzle: what she passes on to her children.
About Sarah Howe
Sarah Howe is a British poet, academic and editor. Born in Hong Kong to an English father and Chinese mother, she moved to England as a child. Her pamphlet, A Certain Chinese Encyclopedia, won an Eric Gregory Award, and her first collection, Loop of Jade (Chatto & Windus, 2015), won the T.S. Eliot Prize and the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award, and was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. In 2014, she co-founded Prac Crit, an online journal of poetry and criticism. She is currently the Poetry Editor at Chatto & Windus and an Honorary Visiting Professor at the University of Liverpool.
About the writer
Heather Skye Irvine is a writer who is particularly interested in art and literature as objects saturated with the potential for cross-cultural understanding. She was born and raised in Hong Kong and aims to emulate the city’s melding of East and West in her writing. Find out more on her website and LinkedIn.
About the editor
Rhoda Kwan is an Australian-Hong Konger writer and journalist based in Taipei, Taiwan. Her work has appeared in The Guardian, NBC News, The Times and the Mekong Review. She was previously Assistant Editor at Hong Kong Free Press, and bookseller at Daunt Books in London.
Photo credit: Hayley Madden