Jennifer S. Cheng | Contributing Writer

1

A compulsion to begin twining threads into proximal space: body + language + geography. If, as Walter Benjamin observes, “language has a body and the body has a language.” If language is, according to John Berger, “a terrain full of illegibilities, hidden paths, impasses, surprises, and obscurities.” A bewildering correspondence: she may have always received them this way, as envelopes of intimacy and wilderness.

2

If we define ritual as poetry embodied: a formal conjuring of language, epistemically rooted in intuition and the unknown, while grounding the body in time and space. Ritual as the desire for a form consisting entirely of process—a series of discrete intersubjective gestures ever unfinished, imperfect, material yet ephemeral, concrete yet fluid, containing yet surrendering. There is a dialectical engagement with temporality—here and now, yet in conversation with past and future; and a similar relationship with the objects of one’s surrounding environment—to appreciate the smaller and mundane yet to invoke the larger and sacred. What is small is peripheral and marginal; what is large haunts and becomes an atmosphere. Ritual as a liturgical, artistic process of embodied utterances, which proposes, as poetry does, that attention, orientation, and care are ways of making meaning.

3

If text is also textural and contextual, then might we find meaning the way Tanizaki Junichiro finds beauty “not in the thing itself but in the pattern of shadows, the light and the darkness, that one thing against another creates”? As Roland Barthes says, “language is a skin: I rub my language against the other.”A text is an array of relational structures. A pattern with an underside. We drift our fingers across its syntactical weave.

4

One lives all the time with what cannot be said, what has been lost across distances, what has been erased. A child of dislocation learns of her history through broken language, literally and figuratively. She learns about distance, the feeling of distance, between continents, histories, loved ones, selves. She learns about silence. Her language travels through various terrains and textures of water and along disparate geographies; it is filled with gaps and blanks, haunted and hunting. Her language: felt rather than spoken. Her history: sensed rather than told. What is learned breaks apart from dominant through-lines, not only in what but also how. What is learned: always an underlying, in the periphery, or just beyond reach. What is learned, above all: porousness. Inside the home, her linguistic environment is a kaleidoscope—multiple, fractured, shifting—through which she learns to speak in accumulations, in tangles, from the present, from the past, in the margins, in the gaps between, in so much blank space. Inside the body, she internalizes a language of leaving, of perpetually leaving, and never quite arriving.

5

The truth is that language by nature can only ever provide a temporary half-home. It approaches wholeness not because of the structures but because of what is textural, dynamic, fluid inside. We collect and arrange debris from the world and conjure, like a spell, the rest. Language is a never-ending journey, and in the meantime, we make a series of loosely caught patterns. We are never quite sure where we are going, only that we are going.

6

In The Rustle of Language, Barthes proposes that a denatured language is the only kind of language that fulfills itself. Like Barthes, I am interested in a notion of text that “practices the infinite postponement of the signified” by way of “dislocations, overlappings, variations.” The result, according to Barthes, is a kind of rustle, which I imagine as a vast gauzy fabric, and which he describes as a “horizon…in the distance like a mirage… a double landscape.” There is a quality of the polyvocal that, rather than enclosing, opens up a field of plural meanings. Barthes writes that “the Text is plural…it fulfills the very plurality of meaning… The Text is not coexistence of meaning, but passage, traversal…”

7

Throat of the needle puncturing fabric, punctuating tiny holes; friction of the thread pulling through; strand, fiber, material; color and thickness and setting; tension as texture; raveling and unraveling; a recursive rhythm of return and departure; repetition, then rupture. “Language is what moves me from space to space,” I once heard Yiyun Li say.

8

Elsewhere Barthes theorizes writing in terms of fragments: “so many stones on the perimeter of a circle…at the center, what?” A text might circle an unsayable center, but if we consider the image of a nest, might the center be not a vacuous hole but something that holds and even homes? In the past I have described my process of writing as “sew[ing] shadows together to form a roof above my head” or “a net I am always weaving.” A child weaves for herself a net with which to catch herself; it is necessarily full of holes, hollows, crevices, gaps. Gaston Bachelard describes in The Poetics of Space how a bird’s nest is “a house built by and for the body, taking form from the inside.” A nest is a contextual construction—a ritual interaction with environmental detritus, configured by the body into an arrangement carrying its intimate imprint.

9

It is possible for language to be purely a textural landscape, inside of which, say, a mother and daughter exist. The field they share: the tenderness of language as affectively intimate yet functionally estranged (and vice versa). For my childhood home was a shifting web of various overlapping linguistic atmospheres, only some of which were precisely decipherable to me. What is true for an infant continued, for me, into adulthood: language was never only, or even primarily, the part about communication; it was the texture of the sounds, like a skein enveloping me, a shelter so deeply and sensorily ingrained, I could almost touch it. Even syllables empty of semantic meaning could make a thick canopy around my little body as I moved around the house. Text: full of dark corners and hiding places.

10

The mechanism of language is inherently violent; it encloses, delimits, excludes. In order to be whole, I entered the world pulling at silence. What does it mean to search for language amidst sites of silence? To seek an alternative utterance—one that is immigrant, in its untranslated body, at once home and un-home? A textile is a kind of field, where the stitch is a unit of articulation at turns reparative, protective, aesthetic. If, as Édouard Glissant proposes, “we clamor for the right to opacity for everyone”; if, as Trinh T. Minh-ha similarly claims, it is ethical “to leave the space of representation open” for everyone to inhabit as they wish, then: how might we approach text as a field of encounter between Self and Other? How might we consider the shifting relations between legibility/illegibility, opacity/intimacy, absence/presence, dislocation/location—as well as the roles of intuition, ephemerality, and marginality in meaning-making? What is the ghostly center, the interior gesture, of language; and how might we conjure, here, a home?

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Jennifer S. Cheng’s work includes poetry, lyric essay, and image-text forms, exploring immigrant home-building, shadow poetics, and the interior wilderness. Her hybrid book Moon: Letters, Maps, Poems (2018) was selected by Bhanu Kapil for the Tarpaulin Sky Award and named a Publishers Weekly “Best Book of 2018.” She is also the author of House A (2106), selected by Claudia Rankine for the Omnidawn Poetry Prize, and Invocation: An Essay (2010), an image-text chapbook published by New Michigan Press. A National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellow, she has received awards and fellowships from Brown University, the University of Iowa, San Francisco State University, the U.S. Fulbright program, Kundiman, Bread Loaf, MacDowell, and the Academy of American Poets. Having grown up in Texas and Hong Kong, she lives in San Francisco.