1Sarah Howe’s Loop of Jade (2015), the first ever debut collection to win the T. S. Eliot Prize, explores her multicultural heritage, bringing to the fore themes like cultural hybridity and deracination. The collection makes a complex and original use of intertextuality, which allows Howe to reflect on the specificity of her intercultural position. An epigraph, taken from Jorge Luis Borges’s essay “The Analytical Language of John Wilkins,” announces the book’s atypical structure, following the whimsical taxonomy of a “certain Chinese Encyclopedia” that classifies animals in the following categories:

(a) belonging to the emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame, (d) sucking pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous, (g) stray dogs, (h) included in the present classification, (i) frenzied, (j) innumerable, (k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, (l) others, (m) having just broken the water pitcher, (n) that from a long way off look like flies. (Howe 2015, n.p.)

3This article explores the collection’s use of a complex polyphony of voices to create an ambivalent, intercultural poetic subjectivity that resists a somewhat facile understanding of poetry as an unmediated confessional expression of autobiographic experience. As Mary Jean Chan argues, BAME poets like Howe tend to be associated with straightforward and authentic autobiographical narratives, and critics are often puzzled by work that “defies conventional expectations because it does not […] map directly onto an autobiographical lyric ‘I’ conforming to racial stereotypes” (Chan 2020, 4). She suggests that Howe uses difficulty and formal experimentation to challenge the idea of the writing of cultural identity as a straightforward, confessional act, foregrounding the dimensions of craft and artifice. Building on Chan’s highly illuminating readings, this article attempts to parse the intricate complexity of some of the poems’ intercultural and intertextual crossings, paying particular attention to Howe’s ambivalent engagement with the legacy of modernist orientalism. In his introduction to The Location of Culture, Homi Bhabha explores the idea of an “in-between,” or interstitial, subjectivity:

These ‘in-between’ spaces provide the terrain for elaborating strategies of selfhood […] that initiate new signs of identity, and innovative sites of collaboration, and contestation […].
It is in the emergence of the interstices – the overlap and displacement of domains of difference – that the intersubjective and collective experiences of nationness, community interest, or cultural value are negotiated. How are subjects formed ‘in-between,’ or in excess of, the sum of the ‘parts’ of difference (usually intoned as race/class/gender, etc.)? (Bhabha 1994, 1; emphasis his)

4I argue that Howe’s use of intertextuality becomes instrumental in creating such an “in-between” subjectivity that reflects on the degree to which it is shaped by cultural differences, while at the same time pointing to the idea that cultural identity cannot be reduced to a sum of these “parts” of difference.

“If we could only get there, all distances would be erased”: The Impossible Return to the Origin

5With its identical tercets, the collection’s opening poem “Mother’s Jewellery Box” clearly reads as a pastiche of Pound’s Imagist appropriation of the Japanese haiku tradition, illustrating how Howe’s work is obliquely intertextual even when it does not seem explicitly so:

the twin lids
             of the black lacquer box
                        open away –

a moonlit lake
             ghostly lotus leaves
                        unfurl in tiers (Howe 2015, 1)

6These lines not only foreground the aura of the object associated with the spectral origin, but they also meta-poetically stage the volume of poems itself as such an object: the speaker’s act of opening the box’s “twin lids” clearly mirrors the reader’s opening of the book’s covers. Moreover, the poem engages with the genre of ekphrasis, since the jewellery box is also an art object: opening the box reveals a miniature scene, a tableau whose “moonlit lake” and “ghostly lotus leaves” metonymically represent Asian artistic tradition as a whole. The poem underscores the ambivalence of the speaker’s position as someone who is connected to Asia through their maternal heritage, but is nonetheless not exempt from seeing it as an exotic Other, having grown up in a Western culture. As she opens the box and starts contemplating the exquisite jewels, the meta-poetic dimension is reinforced, since the beads of semi-precious stone become letters: “silver chains / careful o’s and a’s / in copperplate” (ibid.). Playing with the ornamental quality of language, the poem presents itself as an exquisite string of beads: the lines “twisted strings / of flattened beads” allude to the technique of juxtaposing images in identical tercets. Thus, the poem conjures up the pervasive influence in Western culture of what Anne Anlin Cheng calls “ornamentalism” – “the critically conjoined presences of the Oriental and the ornamental” (Cheng 2019, 18). She defines ornamentalism as “the peculiar process […] whereby personhood is named or conceived through ornamental gestures, which speak through the minute, the sartorial, the prosthetic, and the decorative” (ibid., her emphasis). The Asian box is thus ironically posited as a Pandora’s box, as the speaker reflects on how it defines her and her mother in terms of both race and gender, conjuring up the specter of what Cheng calls “constructions of Asiatic female ornamentality” (ibid.) in the Western world. At the same time, the text also raises the question of universality by reminding the reader that all poetry is to some degree ornamental, as it defined by its dimension of linguistic craft. The poem thus paradoxically also brings to the fore the ornamental quality of the English language itself, thereby creating a subtle intercultural subjectivity that positions both East and West as strange and alluring Others.

8The second poem, “Crossing from Guangdong,” breaks with this ornamental modality exploring the lure of the exotic, and undertakes the actual voyage of return. An autobiographical exploration of Howe’s family history, this long narrative poem blurs the speaker’s experience of attempting to reconnect with her severed origins with the migration of her mother from China to Hong Kong in 1949 as an abandoned baby to be adopted:

                                                    I have made
the crossing. The same journey you, a screaming
baby, made, a piercing note among grey,
huddled shapes, some time in nineteen-forty-
nine (or year one of the fledgling People’s
State). And what has changed? (Howe 2015, 5)

9Thus, the poem superimposes different temporalities to create a collective, trans-generational crossing: “Something sets us looking for a place. / Old stories tell that if we could only / get there, all distances would be erased” (ibid., 5). As in Caryl Phillips’s Crossing the River, crossing here functions as a key postcolonial trope in the transhistorical exploration of the experience of dislocation central to diasporic identity.

10The poem revolves around the paradox that while the pilgrimage to the site of origin seems essential to finding a sense of identity, it often results in an experience of meaninglessness: “Tell me, why have I come?” (ibid., 2). While this crossing is presented as a necessary, quasi-subconscious process, the intercultural quest for the severed origins paradoxically brings an experience of emptiness and estrangement rather than fulfillment: “Wheeled my case / through the silent, still-dark streets of the English / quarter, the funereal stonework facades / with the air of Whitehall, or the Cenotaph, but planted on earth’s other side” (ibid., 2). It is not accidental that the first place the speaker encounters upon arrival in Hong Kong is the English Quarter, with its Cenotaph, an exact replica of the London one. By definition, a cenotaph is an “empty tomb,” which only serves as a token of an absent loss; an imitation of the London one, the Hong Kong Cenotaph replicates this absence. Encountering it has an uncanny dimension, as it serves as a haunting reminder of “the spectre of Hong Kong’s colonial past [that] still haunts the city” (Lai-Ming Ho 2017, 41). The uncanny similarity between Hong Kong’s English Quarter and London may be approached through the lens of Bhabha’s concept of colonial mimicry, which designates the often-subconscious copying of the colonizing culture that makes the colonial subject “almost the same but not quite” (Bhabha 1994, 86). Returning to Hong Kong as an adult, the speaker is acutely aware of the colonial forces and hierarchies that have shaped her childhood consciousness.

‘Voice’ isn’t a straightforward thing for me: […] the unique and unified poetic voice we’re all supposed to be trying to find within ourselves. A couple of years after we moved from Hong Kong to England [...] my mum came with me to parents’ evening. She listened as the teacher told her to take me to [...] places where I could hear English, because it was important for non-native speakers to get extra exposure [...] I could tell my mum was quietly furious: English was my first and only language. (Howe 2016a)

12In his essay Monolingualism of the Other, or: The Prosthesis of Origin, Jacques Derrida attempts to explore how having grown up in a colonial environment shaped his relation to language, reaching the famous conclusion: “I only have one language, yet it is not mine” (Derrida 1998, 2, his emphasis). Howe’s reflections on English as her only mother tongue that is nonetheless paradoxically not quite hers strikingly recall Derrida’s, underscoring the complexity of the process of reaching linguistic expression for the subaltern subject. The pilgrimage to the origins results in a thwarted sense of belonging: while the internal rhyme in the lines “So much taller now than when I left / fifteen years ago. Suddenly, I know –” creates the expectation of a sudden epiphany of belonging, the realization is a paradoxical one – that “turned always home, you can no longer see” (Howe 2015, 5). This final line provides a quintessential image of the dislocation of diasporic identity: for the speaker, home is everywhere and nowhere at the same time.

“The Emperor was a Fickle God”: Approaching China through the Lens of the Intertext

13Antony Huen suggests that the lines “carved wooden doors, weathered, almost shrines / (like in those postcards of old Hong Kong you loved)” (Howe 2015, 3) in “Crossing from Guangdong” may be read as an example of photographic ekphrasis. Indeed, the old postcard is presented as a spectral, pervasive visual intertext that mediates the experience of return, in a certain sense making the actual experience impossible since it immediately conjures up the ornamental, static image of Hong Kong “‘in the old days,’ rather than the city as it is at present” (Huen 2022, 13). If the return to Hong Kong is marked by “the impossibility of reaching a clear image of the city” (ibid., 14), it seems even more difficult to reach a clear image of China, a country of origin Howe is connected to without ever having lived there. The Borgesian sequence that follows tackles outright the need to work through various literary and cultural constructions of China (and Asia as a whole), taking a more oblique, intertextual route to approach and question the idea of origin. The poem “(a) Belonging to the emperor,” which is emblematic of Howe’s use of “‘ancient China’ as a cultural or aesthetic trope” (Huen 2022, 17) in order to reflect on the sense of cultural identity and belonging, begins with the following lines:

Today my name is Sorrow.
So sang the emperor’s first nightingale.

The emperor was a fickle god.
He preferred to be thrilled by an automatic bird

in filigreed gold. A music box, a leitmotif. (Howe 2015, 7)

15With a sudden twist, the second part of the poem confronts this rich intertextual cluster with what seems to be an autobiographical layer:

I see my father bathed in the blare of that same
aria, prodding the remote

to loop. Chiamerà, chiamerà –
His face is red. Beneath his glasses, it is wet. (Howe 2015, 7)

17Once the proliferation of intertexts has made the reader see China as a distorted land of legend, the poem “(b) Embalmed” incisively brings to the fore the collection’s political dimension. With its epigraph taken from a 1958 speech by Mao Zedong, this poem confronts literary representations of China as an exotic Other with the violence of history, putting the theme of political repression at the center: “The First Emperor? He buried alive 460 scholars. We have buried 46,000!” (Howe 2015, 8). For the Western reader insufficiently familiar with Chinese history, a note situates the poem in the context of “The events known as the ‘burning of books and burying of scholars’ [which] took place during the reign of Qin Shi Huangdi, first emperor of China, between 213 and 210 BC” (ibid., 63). In an acerbic critique, Howe thus telescopes and ironically sums up the whole of Chinese history – from the first emperor, who self-invented the title “huángdì” (皇帝), meaning “emperor,” which would continue to be borne by Chinese rulers for the next two millennia, to the Chairman of the Communist Party and architect of the current People’s Republic of China – as an endless practice of repression and violence. The poem confronts the burying alive of scholars and other political dissidents with the practice of embalming political leaders after their death and placing them in imposing mausoleums: Qin Shi Huangdi is famous among other things for building a city-sized mausoleum guarded by the life-sized Terracotta Army; upon his death in 1976, Mao Zedong was likewise embalmed and his body placed in a mausoleum prominently located in the middle of Tiananmen Square in Beijing. The poem’s transhistorical exploration of violence and repression in Chinese history becomes even more disturbing since it ventriloquizes the voice of one of the scholars buried alive, giving him a voice that crosses time and history to bear witness:

West of this chamber where our breaths guttered out, nine horses
were led backward down a ramp into the pit, tethered & sealed in.
At the command, craftsmen rigged up hidden crossbows to impale

intruders. (ibid., 8)

18This voice, ventriloquized but resonating with historical veracity, functions as a guide, leading the reader through the mausoleum of the first emperor and telling modern visitors the uncensored story of his death. Howe’s poem adopts the point of view of one of the scholars buried alive (“we felt our own drowsy bones newly whiten and stir,” ibid., 9), operating a critique from the inside to create a bridge of transhistorical memory between the “long-lost books” of the pioneer dissidents and those of the “unborn historians” (ibid.) of the present and future. The enjambment between “impale” and “intruders,” strategically positioned between two stanzas, foregrounds the idea of the threat that hangs on any dissident. Interweaving fact and fairy tale, the poem returns to Andersen’s motif of the mechanical bird given as a gift to the emperor and the deathly illness befalling him:

the land of K’un-ming sent a Gold-sifting Bird as tribute. Men said
it’d hatched 9000 li distant, its netting an auspicious sign. This bird
is sparrow-shaped, but its colour is yellow. The Son of Heaven kept

it in the Garden for Numinous Fowl, feeding it true pearl for sweet-
meat & turtle brain for drink. […]

          We didn’t wait long for him: whisperers blamed the mercury
pills held up as the Elixir of Immortality; so his alchemists claimed.
Regular ingestion will induce limbs to itch & crawl with imagined

insects, the hands & feet to swell dropsically, skin to pucker & shed,
poisoning the tiny invisible demons of bodily decay &, incidentally,
the patient. (ibid., 8)

19Although the story of the emperor’s death sounds fantastical, as if taken from an Andersen tale, it is a historical fact. China’s first emperor obsessively sought to reach immortality, and his death was caused by ingesting mercury pills that his alchemists had presented to him as an elixir of life. The poem astutely blends the fantastical China of Andersen’s tale with various historical records: Howe’s account draws on both Sima Qian’s monumental history of Ancient China Records of the Grand Historian: Qin Dynasty (written ca. 94 BC), and on a 1968 scholarly article by American Sinologist E.H. Schafer (Howe 2015, 63). The second half of the poem turns to the question of the rewriting of history by the Chinese authorities, using the story of what happened upon the emperor’s death as emblematic of an ancestral practice of censorship and fabrication of truth:

                                                          The Exalted Being expired
while on a circuit of the subject states comprising his newly unified

Empire. At his death, the capital was still two months away by road.
It was summer: the Supreme One’s sleeping-carriage was starting to
smell. We felt our own drowsy bones newly whiten and stir. The First

Minister & co-conspirators, fearing rebellion in the uncivil frontiers,
contrived to mask his demise: they changed the corpse’s robes daily,
ordered its usual meals, & had every carriage loaded up with a picul

of salt-fish, for the stink. (ibid., 9)

20There is a stark contrast between the mock-epic description of the officials’ struggle to conceal the reek of the decaying body and the news of the Emperor’s death from the populace, and the spectral stasis of his mausoleum complex. This imposing monument functions as a synecdoche representing the decay and paralysis of the culture itself, also reflected in the rigid prose-like tercets of the poem. Subverting the Romantic logic of Andersen’s tale, in this version the nightingale does not save her master from death, but ends up being embalmed with him, “laid in its tailor-made / sarcophagus, complete with jade saucer,” and meant to “brighten the [mausoleum’s] spiritual plane / with exotic plumage & nine-tone songs” (ibid.). The poem’s ironic imagery thus again returns to the reflection on the conjoining of the ornamental and the Oriental begun in “Mother’s Jewellery Box,” yet here it seems that the ornamental becomes symbolic of the absolutist culture and its repression of the individual.

21Huen sees this poem as ekphrastic as it describes not only Chinese art objects like the “Gold-sifting Bird,” but also the process of construction of the mausoleum itself; as he points out, ekphrasis also denotes describing the process of making works of visual art, a technique “traceable to Homer’s account of Hephaestos’ making of Achilles’ shield” (Loizeaux qtd. in Huen 2022, 18). Going further, he suggests that the poem may be seen as an example of what he calls “transcultural ekphrasis” (Huen 2022, 18): in this case, ekphrasis has a transcultural dimension, not only because of the intercultural position of Howe herself, but also because her description of the “Gold-sifting Bird,” “an almost word-for-word adaptation of Schafer’s translation of a fourth-century [Chinese] description” (Huen 2022, 18, Schafer 1968, 337), also engages with the image of the bird made by “Grecian goldsmiths,” which would “keep a drowsy Emperor awake” (Yeats 1973, 218) in the final stanza of W.B. Yeats’s “Sailing to Byzantium” (Huen 2022, 18). One might add to this that Howe’s imagery ostensibly also revisits Marianne Moore’s poem “To Statecraft Embalmed,” an apostrophe to a mummified Egyptian ibis, which grows into a scathing satire of the paralysis of the absolutist culture:

There is nothing to be said for you. Guard
Your secret. Conceal it under your “hard
     Plumage,” necromancer.
          O
Bird, whose “tents” were “awnings of Egyptian
Yarn,” shall Justice’ faint, zigzag inscription –
[…]
         Show
The pulse of its once vivid sovereignty?
You say not, and transmigrating from the
      Sarcophagus, you wind
         Snow
Silence round us and with moribund talk,
Half limping and half ladified, you stalk
         About. (Moore 1915, 104)

A Feminist Critique of Traditional Gender Roles and the Taboo of Intercultural Crossing

23Other poems in the collection, such as “(c) Tame,” target another form of violence often found in Chinese culture – the one against women. Bearing as an epigraph the Chinese proverb “It is more profitable to raise geese than daughters” (Howe 2015, 11), the poem presents the practice of female infanticide as a fable, in which the violence perpetrated against both mother and daughter triggers a magical transformation recalling those in Ovid’s Metamorphoses:

This is the tale of the woodman’s daughter. Born with a box
          of ashes set beside the bed,
in case. Before the baby’s first cry, he rolled her face into the cinders –
          held it. Weak from the bloom
of too-much blood, the new mother tried to stop his hand. He dragged
          her out into the yard, flogged her
with the usual branch. If it was magic in the wood, they never
          said, but she began to change:

Her scar-ridged back, beneath his lashes, toughened to a rind; it split
          and crusted into bark. Her prone
knees dug in the sandy ground and rooted, questing for water,
          as her work-grained fingers lengthened
into twigs. The tree – a lychee – he continued to curse as if it
          were his wife ­– its useless, meagre
fruit. Meanwhile the girl survived. Feathered in greyish ash,
          her face tucked in, a little gosling. (Howe 2015, 11)

24While the poem specifically targets Chinese culture, the allusions to Ovid endow the narrative with a more universal dimension: the girl’s transformation into a goose is a satiric denunciation of the objectification and dehumanization of women in patriarchal society as a whole. The magical transformation of the mother into a lychee tree and the daughter into a goose revisits the story of Daphne, transformed into a laurel tree as Apollo seeks to rape her, as well as the story of Philomela and Procne, who turn into a nightingale and a swallow while fleeing Tereus’s murderous rage. Like Philomela, the young “goose daughter” is mute, and is thus deprived of the power of language with which to denounce the aggression she has been the victim of – another form of censorship. The fact that the father calls the girl “Mei Ming: No Name” (ibid.) symbolizes the violent dispossession of identity that women are victims of. Furthermore, as suggested above, the girl’s transformation into a goose reads as a parody of Philomela’s turning into a nightingale; the poem harks back to the motif of the nightingale who leaves the emperor that mistreats her: unsurprisingly, in the second half of the poem the daughter joins a flock of wild geese, escaping her father. The collection thus transforms the omnipresent motif of the bird’s flight away from the male figure of power into a potent poetic narrative of escaping ancestral oppression. Yet the end of the poem surprisingly places the emphasis on the sense of belonging and the need to return: “Some say the fable ended there. But those / who know the ways of wild geese / know too the obligation to return, to their first dwelling place” (ibid., 12). Like “Crossing from Guangdong,” this poem points to the severed origins that haunt the speaker like a phantom pain, and the need to return, at least through the vehicle of the poetic line.

25The sonnet “(d) Sucking pigs” playfully addresses the taboo around intercultural crossing in traditional Chinese culture. Drawing on Howe’s own experience of being a person of Chinese ancestry married to a Jewish person, the poem explores the comic impossibilities created by the taboos of traditional cultures:

Between choosing canapes and favours I read
how the groom’s family by Chinese tradition
should gift to her kinsmen a piglet, milk-fed,
just a moon at the teat, crisped to perfection,

when quite satisfied the bride’s still intact.
I imagine your mother cranking the spit.
Crackling’s coy, brittle russet then succulent fat –
that atavistic aroma makes me salivate,

you physically sick. (ibid., 22)

26In Chinese culture, the roasted piglet symbolizes the bride’s virginity, another dehumanizing idea comparing the woman to an animal, while the offering given by the groom’s family in return for the “intact” bride emphasizes the idea of marriage as an economic transaction. In Jewish culture, however, pork is not kosher and is therefore prohibited. As Chan observes, the poem revolves around the “irony that a type of food can symbolize purity for a particular ethnic group (the Cantonese) and filth for another (the Jews)” (Chan 2020, 16). The poem’s humorous exploration of these atavistic cultural taboos gets even more playfully irreverent in the second half, parodically overcharged with references:

                               So as pet names go, Shikse’s
not a bad fit. (I did play your Circean temptress…)
Wikipedia says it comes down from Leviticus,
how your God labelled creatures unclean to ingest;

but then, disgust seems to blur into reverence.*
Cf. Xu Bing, A Case Study of Transference (Howe 2015, 22)

27The speaker’s playful appropriation of the derogatory term Shikse, a disparaging term for a non-Jewish woman, of Yiddish origin and derived from the Hebrew term שקץ shekets, meaning “abomination,” “impure,” or “object of loathing,” aims at deconstructing both cultures’ rhetoric of purity. The very fact that the term has entered the English language through Yiddish and is in common usage particularly in North American culture is a good example of linguistic intercultural crossings. The reference to Wikipedia, parodically used to introduce the allusion to the Book of Leviticus, situates the poem within the context of a contemporary culture that increasingly disregards the taboos of tradition. The volta of the sonnet’s irreverent exploration of cultural taboos comes in the mock-rhyming couplet at the end, with the reference to conceptual artist Xu Bing’s 1994 performance A Case Study of Transference, which parodically stages the idea of intercultural crossbreeding between East and West by presenting two copulating pigs, the male printed with nonsensical English words and the female printed with Chinese ones. Playfully alluding to the psychoanalytical concept of transference, the piece also questions the transmission of prejudice and superstition from one generation to another, since, as Chan points out, “the mating of the two pigs […] will logically produce piglets free from blemish (since those ink stains are not genetically inherent to the pigs)” (Chan 2020, 17-18). Xu Bing’s performance makes a disturbing spectacle out of the anxiety of miscegenation, whose enduring legacy Howe also touches on in the poem “(l) Others”: “A personal Babel: a muddle. A Mendel? / Some words die out while others survive. Crossbreed. Half-caste. Quadroon” (Howe 2015, 46). As Howe herself points out, the collection hinges on a central pun between “the idea of the crossbreed (a word that sometimes turned up in my hearing during my later childhood in England) and the crossing of geographical boundaries”:

The Chinese term for people like me, 混血 (hùnxuě), has its own tangled skein of past associations, meaning literally ‘mixed blood,’ but with just a hint of ‘muddled’ or ‘confused blood.’ In early twentieth-century colonial Hong Kong people like me were a taboo […]: an unpleasant reminder of what ensued when the Empire’s implicit racial hierarchies were transgressed. (Howe 2016b, 164-165)

28One may also make a parallel between Howe’s witty satirizing of the rhetoric of racial purity through the use of the term Shikse, and Mina Loy’s satiric exploration of the Victorian anxiety of miscegenation through her ambivalent appropriation of the pejorative term “mongrel” as a key trope for selfhood in the semi-autobiographical long narrative poem “Anglo-Mongrels and the Rose,” which transforms the intercultural marriage of her English mother and her Hungarian Jewish father into a mock-epic narrative of the crossbreeding of the “English Rose” (Loy 1982, 121) and its imperial Other.

“An anchoring of sign to thing”: An Ambivalent Revisiting of the Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry

29The allusion to Xu Bing’s use of the contrast between Chinese and English characters to stage the cultural collision between East and West underscores another powerful undercurrent that traverses the collection – the focus on the alluring otherness of Chinese ideograms, on the exotic ornamentality of their “spidery” (Howe 2015, 4) forms and on their supposedly very different way of capturing reality compared to Western alphabets. For instance, in “(n) That from a long way off look like flies,” Howe playfully alludes to the allegedly pictorial quality of Chinese characters in the image of an insect accidentally crushed between the pages of her “undergrad Shakespeare” (ibid., 51). The fly is implicitly compared to a Chinese character: “Two sheer wings, stilled mid-word, / trace out a glyph in a strange alphabet” (ibid., 51). While the Shakespeare volume reads as a metonymy for Western literary tradition as a whole, the crushed insect seems to represent the tradition of Chinese literature and ironically points to the enduring legacy of the “misleading idea that Chinese is a pictographic language” (Longxi 1988, 125). As Howe herself acknowledges, the poem “(k) Drawn with a very fine camelhair brush” engages with the reflections of Ernest Fenollosa in his seminal essay “The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry,” which was edited by Pound and served as a major inspiration for his experimental modernist poetics. The poem critiques the “fantasy of Chinese’s ‘visual’ immediacy [that] persisted well into the twentieth century, despite being founded on a basic misprision about how the writing system actually works” (Howe 2016b, 174). Howe openly invites the reader to interpret her poems through the lens of Pound’s, which becomes a means to address the specificity of her intercultural position. She seems to suggest that while for her, Chinese culture and writing in particular have the same kind of fascination as they did for Pound, she is nonetheless conscious of his shortcomings:

I found Cathay’s intuitively brilliant but sometimes linguistically ill-founded moves as a ‘translation’ from the Chinese oddly enabling, not least as a way of navigating what sort of cultural space I might inhabit as a half-Chinese person who grew up not speaking Chinese: is it possible to recuperate a Chinoiserie-like ‘inauthenticity’ – that being the way I sometimes think of myself and my Western reference points – at the same time as critiquing it? (ibid.)

30Howe’s inclusion of Chinese characters alongside the English text clearly revisits Pound’s use of them in the Cantos, as well as Fenollosa’s belief in them as a kind of ideal language for poetry. She also situates this in the context of a broader tradition of Western fascination with Eastern writing systems:

Landing at Canton, the first Jesuits believed
they’d stumbled on the lost language of Eden –
that Ham had helped offload the Ark
then set off for the East, its walled lands,
taking with him Adam’s perfect tongue
that named the animals one by one.
As the hopeful missionaries learned to see
in that strangely branching pagan script
the fletched fir of tree, the strung                          木
crescent of moon – they found God’s awe               月
in each fabulous character – each one
a nest of lacquer boxes
worlds within worlds
where meaning was a garden
where you could wander forever
in the scent of peach blossom, following the river. (Howe 2015, 39)

This last scene being our mistranslation –
since what he sees is not the fierce miniature
offspring of a fly and a dragon’s astonishing tryst,
but a word, like two jeweled eyes, of mirrored              蜻 蜓
worlds. He learned them as a child: each tapering
stroke of snake-thin insect; how the camelhair tip
traces through green tangles up go and stop.
This last gesture – a sketch of a man at rest –
also happening to hold the word for scholar. (Howe 2015, 40)

32Using a Fenollosa-like reflection on the different ideas suggested by the combination of elements in the Chinese ideograms for dragonfly, the poem develops a playfully irreverent poetics of creative misreading and mistranslation, which generates a proliferation of serendipitous finds. Howe’s poem ostensibly reflects on what John Wang calls Pound’s “superb handling of the language” and “genius in translation” (Wang 1965, 350), which were all the more striking given his very limited understanding of the language and almost entire reliance on Fenollosa’s notes. Although Howe is clearly conscious of the limits of this Poundian fascination with Chinese characters, in this poem her criticism limits itself to a light joke at the end: the poet-scholar gets so carried away in his poetic meditations that he falls asleep and wakes up only to see his boat has disappeared, a playful reminder not to forget “words’ tenuous moorings” (Howe 2015, 39).

33However, “(g) Stray dogs,” which begins with an epigraph from Canto LXXXI – “Thou art a beaten dog beneath the hail” (ibid., 29) – engages in a different, more acerbic kind of Poundian critique, tackling the later Pound’s ideological dead ends. The poem appropriates a number of phrases (in italics) from The Pisan Cantos and from ‘Ezra Pound Speaking’: Radio Speeches of World War II. As Mary Jean Chan observes, its form clearly evokes that of a cage, critically reflecting on Pound’s decision to lock himself up in systems of thought that were rigid and uncompromising, as reflected in the image of him “Squat at his crate-cum-desk, […] spread[ing] flat the worn-out covers of his dog-eared Confucius” (Chan 2020, 29). The image of Pound trapped in this cage with his books ironically revisits Xu Bing’s performance, in which the two copulating pigs were placed in a cage and surrounded by books. As Aaron Loh contends, “For Pound, the Confucian societal model provided this symbol of order” (Loh 2001, 135). The poem “(m) Having just broken the water pitcher” makes it clear that Howe rejects the idea of order as a supreme value in civilization, insisting instead on the importance of truth. The poem opens with a meditation on the striking similarity between characters expressing two very different ideas: “my thirtieth year / had hastened by before I learned to see / how plum blossom lies on one sidelong stroke / of gum-suspended soot away from regret” (Howe 2015, 48). The poem revisits the legend of Cangjie, a court historian to the Yellow Emperor who is credited with having invented Chinese characters, finding inspiration in a “hoofprint” in the mud, “stamped there by some invisible creature” (ibid.). Yet this initially innocuous meditation on the poetic and visual power of Chinese ideograms veers towards the political, returning to the theme of censorship:

                 Five thousand years later

in some remote coal-mining district
sits an anonymous blogger, his face lit
by more than just the ancient monitor.

He ponders how strange it is (how useful …)
that I beg you for the truth is pronounced
the same as I beg you, Elephant of Truth!

Or that sensitive words (as in filters,
crackdowns) sounds exactly like breakable
porcelain. Done typing, he clicks Submit. (ibid., 48-49)

34Rather than the withdrawn poetic reveries of the poet-scholar in “(k) Drawn with a very fine camelhair brush,” one finds here the acute imagination of an anonymous dissident trying to develop a strategically ambivalent language in order to eschew censorship. As Howe’s note explains, the poem draws on “the ‘Elephant of Truth’ meme, and the evolving menagerie of punning animals invented by China’s netizens to bypass censorship” (ibid., 64). The Chinese authorities’ denial of obvious truths and historical facts is denounced as the elephant in the room. Here once again, one finds the omnipresent figure of the emperor instigating political repression, since “the man who invented writing [was] charged with this burden by the emperor” (ibid., 48). Suggesting that language “belongs” to the figures of authority rather than to the people, the poem thus revisits Derrida’s meditations on being dispossessed from one’s own language in The Monolingualism of the Other, connecting them with an epigraph from Wumen Huikai’s The Gateless Gate: “If you cannot call it a water pitcher, what do you call it?” (ibid.). As Peter McDonald suggests, “Updating this emancipatory Buddhist tradition of creative doubt, Howe links it to the many coded forms of word-play Chinese bloggers use to evade censorship” (“Sarah Howe: Artefacts of Writing”). McDonald gives the example of campaigners in the Chinese #metoo movement in 2018, who “inventively crossed languages and sign-systems to get around the surveillance systems, combining the emojis for ‘rice’ and ‘bunny,’ the related Chinese characters (米兔) and their pronunciation (‘mi’ and ‘tu’).”

Conclusion

35In its close reading of Howe’s collection, this article has sought to show that intertextuality becomes an oblique route allowing Howe to reflect on her intercultural position, working through various constructions and misconceptions to elaborate a textual space shaped by an “in-between” subjectivity. The collection’s proliferation of intertexts critically reflects on cultural differences but also creates surprising intersections between them, in order to move away from a facile representation of selfhood as defined only by the origins and towards a more complex sense of fragmented cultural belonging. The poems construct an ambivalent, cross-cultural subjectivity which initially presents China as a strange and alluring Other before engaging in a more critical, transhistorical exploration of Chinese culture from a more insider’s point of view. The political and the esthetic dimensions of this intertextual poetics go hand in hand, as for instance in its ambivalent exploration of the legacy of Pound’s appropriation of Chinese culture and writing system in particular.