Beyond This Realm

Poet Kika Man reviews  JinJin Xu’s hybrid poetry There Is Still Singing in the Afterlife from Radix Media, 2020

 JinJin Xu is a film maker who teaches hybrid ballet/poetry workshops, Xu is also a poet combining all of the former in her work. Throughout There Is Still Singing in the Afterlife, she looks for ways to go beyond the red dust, to transcend the earthly plain of our lives. Xu’s debut chapbook carries itself with an elegance people would expect upon thinking about qipao’s, something Xu is no stranger to. She puts it on and engulfs readers in “opium highs” and “emerald lamps perfume”.

From the beginning, Xu allows the reader to come up close and intimate, integrating matters of life, of the body, and matters transcending what is around us. In “There They Are,” the opening poem of the collection, she introduces her family, who are central to everything that follows. Family is something permeating everything, family is a part of history – historical and personal – and growing up is inevitable in Xu’s work. The line that keeps resonating in my head – “dew on the page” – seems to be the best comparison to the kinds of mists and perfumes Xu leaves us wandering in, and each of her lines unfolds multiple meaning: “When I say words out loud they become real,” she writes in “To Red Dust.” Thus, it is sometimes hard to grasp what is happening, but the intimacy and closeness allow for glimpses of personal narratives and bring the reader home to a world with a history spanning centuries.

The cultural oddities one encounters when living in many places, such as the combination of Shanghai and New York City, also find their way across. As Xu questions Chineseness and exile, readers may ask, who is the intended reader of these poems? In “To Her Brother, Who Is Without Name,” Chinese and English melt together almost seamlessly as she talks about “neon qipaos” found in thrift stores and learning languages from abandoned homelands. In this way, her poetry reminds me of Mary Jean Chan who also transforms English into something of their own. It is a journey many diasporic writers come across and the merging of languages can lead to transformations in poetic language – “早点睡 you whisper a / mother s prayer”. This is something Xu is already well-versed in as can be read in her poem “Night People” or “夜間” and “To Red Dust.”

In many ways, Xu’s poetry reminds of a choreography. “To Red Dust” is a sequence to read over and over again. It is something I can see a room displayed with every inch of wall covered in extracts of the saga. “We touch them, mouthing prayers because we want things too badly to speak them out loud.” These words dance and the movements in between the lines is of such subtilty that one cannot help but to stand still and watch. The poem is honest and critical, it brings together so many worlds not many people have the privilege to be part of in a Westernised world.

Though it lingers below the surface, the fragility and uncertainty of human life does not fail to emerge. Despite a very lyrical tone, Xu’s poetry also makes space for the realities of our bodies, sometimes lifting the covers to talk about her mother’s cancer, to talk about the intimacies and taboos between the family. Xu successfully lifts the boundaries between different genres. “Showing My Mother a Censored Film She Cannot Unsee, in Three Acts,” encompasses three acts, screen stills, and each act is set in different regions in China in across time, transcending while weaving together China’s complex history. She proves how the fluidity of genre, topics, worlds, and combinations of form and content go beyond typical constructions.

This radical fluidity is also evident in the next poem – “The Revolution Is Not A Dinner Party” is an erasure poem of Mao’s Little Red Book. Erasure, as a form, is a revolutionary way of re-writing history, a kind of hijacking or detournement, according to Guy Debord, creating one’s own kind of self-censorship. Though the clean lay-out does not show the physical act of erasure, the rendering of Mao’s words and imagery to simply blacked out peritext gives a new way of reading a book that has been quintessential to the period of complex violence and silencing in China.

The collection finishes with poems of homecoming. “Against This Earth, We Knock” transcends the aforementioned matters of identity and returns to the body, to nature. “Blood rises when winds change faces. […] & I forget my way home / when winds change faces.” The closing, title poem, “There Is Still Singing In The Afterlife,” embodies simultaneous presence and absence: “pillows soft with / out bodies single bed sheet concealing / your absence.” Xu is a sensitive writer who manages to compose lyricism, choreography, and a wide array of experimental imagery with different languages to completely engross the reader in a one-of-a-kind perception of the world.

Kika Man 文詠玲 (26 May, 1997) is a writer and a student from Belgium, and also from Hong Kong. She has always been writing and playing and learning and reading. To them, all of these are one and the same. Kika writes about mental health, traveling and dreaming, about her mixed heritage. Alongside writing poetry, Kika is part of Slam-T (a spoken word & slam poetry platform). They have majored in Eastern Languages and Cultures: China at Ghent University and are currently chasing after a degree and PhD in Cultural Studies and Gender Studies. Kika’s first poetry book will be published soon in 2021-2022.