Ars Poetica (When I keep learning you, something breaks)

After Cindy Juyoung Ok

I saw an antelope in my mind when talking to Aissatou about Cameroon. I was trying to not say anything ignorant. I said, I did my thesis on the law of territory concerning the British and French Cameroons. I said, they carved up Africa with a straight line. Aissatou said, let’s eat some fucking poulet yassa. The effigy was summoned, it appeared in my mind.

Association has its roots in mechanical movement. At least, this is what I heard somewhere. Once, Jae writes to me, or actually I don’t know if Nabokov said it, but the point still stands. What is the etymology of the word “mechanic”? I walk into the quarry of the past so that I can say in circles where this sort of language operates like currency, I walk into the quarry of the past. My nice grandmother went to school till she was sixteen. Then she left because she had no money. She taught herself English, then taught herself to teach. I know so little about her despite giving legal advice to leave my grandfather. He stopped abusing her after the heart surgery. She says, I am too old to not have a husband. Phung says, I am the first woman in my lineage to live alone.

Yesterday I saw Ling standing in the corner of the room. That’s not true, it was this morning. Where are my poems? she asked again. I said, I am searching for the entire capacity for love. Here is where it finds me—here where I am not there. I kept looking and she kept asking. We lay on lines of ruined bees. Everywhere we looked, it was the exogenous march of bodies.

At music festivals it’s always about the acoustics of the friend group. The presence lingers long after the body leaves. The body, or movement. The body, as in every DJ moves like Peggy Gou now—skeptically. The room calls out to the sea. When I do a close quarter combat exercise with night vision goggles, the bodies look like we are in a techno club. It’s not a place if you haven’t place-made. It’s not a homeland if it’s not a home.

Aissatou and I went to a Masego concert and she nearly fainted. I am Masego’s wife, she said, and I said, me too. I talked to her white friend all evening. When I look at Aissatou, I am convinced of her sheer belief. If I squint, I can make out the bees. When I write “these days I keep returning to my dishonesty”, I cross out the word “my”. At my high school graduation, everyone cried. Three hundred boys crying, the rugby boys crying the hardest, is a kind of minor miracle. I loved those boys with joy. When she moved to Geneva, I told Aissatou to look for Marie. Marie is a white friend. Jae says, collective cultures operate in nuclear silos, that’s why no one holds the door open for you in Singapore, or Seoul.

I was always a cold child. I feel awkward looking my grandmothers in the eyes. Even the nice one. I am unable to connect to those I love aphoristically. My uncle wanted to give me his motorcycle and I didn’t get my license for three years. Then I moved to France. Go to the gym with me next week, he asked. I said I wasn’t free. I was afraid of birds. I understood he was forgiving me, and I was not ready to be forgiven.

When I look at Ling, she is always running her hands through her hair preemptively. Every time I reference her mother, Ling tightens her eyebrows like a bow. I thought you’d be over it by now, I said once. I thought you had sense, Ling said.

We are in a car and the car is lurching. My mother is saying, how can we not see my mother? (This is the nice grandmother. We are back at the nice grandmother.) We were coming back from a run and my father kicked my mother out of the house. Every time I think of birds, I think of candles. I have become a person of wandering eyes. I am tired of prose poems. No prose poem saved my mother. My mother says, I didn’t need saving. One version is, she gave herself up. Another version is, we tell ourselves stories to keep us off the ledge.

When I thought I couldn’t find pleasure, I found pleasure in detaching from my emotions. Abstraction is so safe. It doesn’t demand anything of you. Everything I scrutinise is a distraction from unsayable things. Jae and Naomi came to visit me in France. When Jae left five years ago I cried for many days. I didn’t speak to Naomi for a year. I told her a year later, I felt like I lost you both. She said, don’t be mad at me, I couldn’t have you and not him. I think about this all the time. How we rather lose the forest than the tree. How being together is tough sanctuary, or not sanctuary at all.

My brother sends me a video of my nice grandmother dancing with a parrot. It sets my body on fire. Cursing my clichés, I ask her for a recipe because I don’t know how. She texts me, don’t overcook the cabbage, remember to add meatballs. She sends two emojis.

In an email, Phung writes, it doesn’t need to be good, just true. The email is two thousand words long. I think of the French Cameroons.

I understand this is a poem that lacks focus. I understand poetry has no focus. I understand the poem is a container. No one in my family has ever had a container. No one in my family has ever heard of Nabokov. I am the first person in my family to dream in bees. I am the mouthpiece of the chorus. In collective cultures, I. In tough sanctuary. In love.

Everyone who loves me is in the room. The room has no shape. The room has a key to my shame. Everyone I love is not effigy. Everyone I love I ask to run towards me. I do.

Christian Yeo Xuan (he/they) is a writer and actor based in Singapore by way of Paris and Beirut.