Joss: A History
Grace Yee
ISBN:9781923106314
Reviewed by NATALIE DAMJANOVICH-NAPOLEON
Grace Yee’s Joss: A History challenges contemporary poetry readers with the unspoken premise ‘How far can we deconstruct history to examine and understand it?’ Yee’s Joss takes up the mantle of a documentary poet (docu-poet) such as Pasiley Rekdal, who in West: A Translation scrutinises the legacy of Chinese labour in the American West that helped construct the great railroads, using and responding to historical documents and traces of Chinese culture. In
Joss, Yee reviews the impact of Chinese workers in the goldfields of Victoria, New South Wales and Aotearoa inspired by the unmarked and segregated graves of over a thousand ‘Chinamen’ she discovered scattered across White Hills Cemetery in Bendigo. Yee uses the tools of documentary poetry throughout Joss which Jospeh Harrington writes traverses and crosses boundaries “in the sense that it decreases the distance between writing history and poetry, while experimenting with the received forms of both.” This new collection builds upon Yee’s work in the triple award-winning Chinese Fish yet differs in the ways it interrogates and re-narrativises history and Chinese settler experiences through docu-poetry techniques. Somewhat more fragmented and ambitious in scope, as Yee writes, “They sutured these documents”, the poet employs fragmented, pastiched lines and surrealist techniques to highlight the unique experiences of Chinese settlers, the absurdity of racial discrimination and how the struggles and cultural nuances of migrant minorities in Australia are ultimately subsumed, fragmented and erased by the White Australia narrative.
A ‘joss’ is a physical statue in Chinese deity worship. In Chinese tradition the statue is not viewed as a simple representation of the deity but contains the actual spirit of the deity, which serves as an apt metaphor for Yee’s collection. These poems are not representations of Chinese people across the goldfields, rather an attempt to embody the spirit of these ancestors within each poem. In a poem such as “best quality vegetables” Yee utilises the finest properties of her work, with a bio-poem that uplifts her ironically named character “bound feet lily flower” while also leaning into her critique of Australian culture: “we don’t go / to the theatre, dance halls or picture shows, because this is / the time of the larrikins and my life is a silent feature film.” The word “larrikin” is ironically repeated throughout the collection. From a term that originally meant “hoodlum,” larrikin has evolved into an affectionate “Ocker” term that bears interrogation, for one era’s or group’s larrikin is another’s murderer. As Yee explicates in the prose poem that combines several assaults and the failures of the justice system into one poem, “Playful Bodily Harm,” with the “Death Result of Unmistakeable Larrikin Assault on any Chinaman.” The evocative “my father was not a gardener” asks the reader to see the Chinese gardener as greater than the role he inhabits of immigrant labourer, and rather as someone who “rode out to orion’s belt in his sherlock hat” yet lived a life of quiet tolerance as “every night he out-walked the doughnut boys fuckin’ asians out.” These contrasts typify the moments in the poems in Joss, fragments of beauty are abutted against corrosive encounters of racism to jarring effect.
However, at times the narrative within the poems in Joss moves between the past and present in dizzying ways that may leave the reader unsure of where the narrative “I” sits, in the past or the present. While this shift in time works in a poem such as “chinoiserie,” in other poems like “Alluvial Mining” the shifts leave the reader confused as to the logical leaps and connections being made between the past and the present. The poems where narrative disjunction works to full effect are evidenced in the three erasures in the collection, “the march,” “the history of botany bay” and “the work” which utilise the satirical qualities of erasure to critique articles from the Bulletin’s “Anti-Chinamen Special of 1888” as
foreigners
surrender to
everlasting
white planet history
Here Yee is asking us to both face and acknowledge this overt racism that was entrenched by the White Australia Policy and Australian culture. In “longest imperial dragon” the poet points her lens directly at this policy and its effects that ripple out today, “paw paw 婆婆 said, the way through / the immigration restriction act is through the prime minister’s / stomach after the second world war Chinese restaurants / became gwei lo 鬼佬 palatable.” [page 4] The latter poem is an example of the successful rendering of Yee’s surrealist mash-up techniques where enjambment is used to full contrastive effect with, for example, “prime minister’s” scraping against the unexpected “stomach” that opens the following line.
When Yee allows her work to lean into its documentary poetry qualities the poems shine and speak for themselves. The list poem, “2.8km west of Ballarat Bird World,” that recounts the state of the graves of Chinese miners is poignant and touching, as is “Non-European Ancestry” that recounts the names of “Chinese born Australians Who Enlisted in World War 2.” This is where documentary poetry excels, in bringing unknown history to the fore with poetic techniques. Of this style “(heffernan lane)” (with an accompanying archival photograph of women in traditional dress) is a standout poem that combine’s Yee’s skills for bringing history to life in prose poetry while making social commentary, acknowledging the poverty and cultural erasure experienced by a people with a rich history, where she wonders “how do we daughters of middle kingdom – world famous for self-effacement – begin to deconstruct the status quo of colonialist, anthropological government?”
In the last poem of the collection, “This story” Yee writes, “Dysphasia is an inability to arrange words in the proper order due to pressure from a central lesion (thieves looters slavers omniscient narrators).” With such a prescient line that could have set the tone for the collection it may have been prudent for the poet to place “This story” at the opening of Joss. This would have allowed readers the opportunity to embrace this fragmented style of poetry structure and time shifts within the poems from the outset. While ultimately readers may find Joss a more difficult read than Chinese Fish, the scope of Joss casts a wider net. Even though Yee may have not hit the mark with every poem in this collection, as a whole Joss succeeds in opening up the reader’s mind to seeing how the Chinese miners whose lives she examines and their ancestors today spend their time “building tolerance for life’s implacably white horizons.” As historian Anna Clark explains, in the past “the nation’s collective memory was nudged by persistent noise generated outside the formal discipline” of history and will continue to be by important works of docu-poetry such as Grace Yee’s Joss.
References
Clark, A. (2022). Making Australian history: Vintage Books.
Harrington, J. (2011). Docupoetry and archive desire. Jacket2. https://jacket2.org/article/docupoetry-and-archive-desire\