The other day I was walking down a subway platform, when a woman going the opposite direction came my way. Her frame was stiff, like she was marching, and on the front of her t-shirt read a curious phrase:
DEFENSIVE FORCE FIELD
I took the words in as she passed. In one light, I took the phrase simply, as a straightforward warning—to stay back, to leave her alone—and I felt sorrow in acknowledging the ever-present need for that warning, the unevenly distributed danger of walking around. But looking at it from another angle, I found an almost magical humor to the phrase, a catalytic smirk of irony ushering in this invocation of a field that does not—in the world as we know it—exist: an impenetrable zone of protection from the harms of power-over.
I desperately want to believe in the sci-fi fantasy of a mode of speech that, in its strangeness and poignancy, in the precision of its perception and the courage of its obstinance, could ensure its speaker’s safety, could expose how diseased the violent among us truly are, and could blunt the speaker’s vulnerability to harm.
Chia-Lun Chang’s Prescribee explores the myriad impacts of language when it is used as a tool of control and oppression, and assesses the potentials of utterance as a force for rebellion. The world of Prescribee is a globe fundamentally altered by the modern rise of the English language and the violent power English wields within an internationally dispersed system of patriarchal capitalism. English is the horizon through which Prescribee’s protagonists will either fail or succeed, be loved or be scorned, become or become subsumed. Through Chang’s uniquely twisted explosions of a poetic ear/voice, it is also perversely the tool her figures take up in their bids to disrupt such live-or-die dichotomies, to claim spaces for living beyond failure and success.
At times, I think Chang operates from a desire similar to my own: the desire to believe that when speech rises to the level of utterance—when it attests to the vitality of life itself—it can defend us against anything. But Prescribee never misrepresents speech as being so simple in its power to affect, so easy to put to use. Instead, the book confronts us with the reality that speech has significant limitations, particularly the speech of the disempowered Other, whose voice is forever inflected with an accent that disturbs the hegemonic ear:
My lips aren’t placed where they’re supposed to be
The R sound eases its way out
Standing here, I annoy you,
drag you, punish you
Throughout Prescribee, Chang’s speakers face a bitter pressure to acquiesce to authority through the performance of normative roles within the distinct but intertwined contexts of the economic (“To advance society … add gas to a Mazda”) and the romantic/erotic (“Nest me, please”). Chang explores the overlaps between the two in poems like “Engli-shhh isn’t Yours,” inspired by a 1967 Time Magazine article that relays how the U.S. military advised its troops in Vietnam when taking Rest and Recuperation trips to Taipei: “Do not purchase the company of a girl for more than 24 hours at a time; they seldom look as good in the morning.” In the poem, the speaker reckons with what English does and does not offer to sex workers servicing foreign military powers:
But bombs are owned by soldiers,
I needed to speak English
to kiss them who
bangbang without paying.
What kind of kung fu is that?
Chang’s poetry holds anger with a unique depth and richness. “Being angry constantly takes energy,” she writes. “How do I come up with a long-term plan?” The speaker goes on,
… When I negotiate,
pages I wrote are seared by liquid
the sound I made erupting,
as there’s a bone stuck in my tongue.
Reminder: as a traitor, I need no bones.
As a server, I provide comfort: no
communication.
Her poems revel in sarcasm and confrontation, deploying tongue-in-cheek at maximum volume to call out hypocrisy, suppression, and cruelty with language and imagery that rises to a corresponding level of the comically absurd. In the above, the speaker meets the hostile male gaze with mutual disdain, not merely highlighting the misogynist contempt that saturates the Time quote, but further illustrating the grotesque dynamic with which militarized power infuses the exchange. The soldier does not want a “girl” for the night, but rather a monstrously subservient creature, a wordless, boneless form that would disappear before the sun comes up. Chang’s speaker challenges the powerful by offering them what they didn’t know they were asking for: a figure of abjection that they would prefer not to recognize as a product of their own making.
Western male figures appear as the likely antagonists throughout many of these poems: customs officials, bosses, art creeps at art shows, Mark Twain and John Sotheby. But from the start, Chang makes clear that the pressure to obey emanates not only from the outside Western world onto the foreign body, but rises as well from within the foreign family, through their embrace of assimilation as the natural path to one’s best life chances. In Prescribee’s opening poem “Parents,” the speaker explains: “I came to the United States for love. When men asked about my past, I replied, Father said we must not talk about // feelings.” In the second half of the poem, Chang’s speaker describes her mother:
I taught my mother to build her name too many times, each time she became a shalom, she demanded to know,
Have you found your love. I cut out part of my language to make love to them.
Through aligning immigration, language, taboo, familial love, and romantic love, Chang positions English (and the kinds of lives it makes possible) as a near-biological imperative, an “inescapable / Inseparable / Inevitable saga.” Defining the family as a pivotal site of this sense of imperative amplifies the frustrations of Chang’s speakers, adds to their exasperation when they meet failures, and complicates the effectiveness of their refusals. “You can’t talk to me / Like that,” one argues, “I was born without consent.” Another relents, “I have removed the crumbs / in my body / in hopes of / losing and being invisible.” It is perhaps in direct relation to such moments, where what one can say is so overly determined by the circumstances of one’s oppression, that Prescribee continually mines the breakdowns of grammar and sense-making for its moments of potency, for its sense of action and charge:
Your soldier uniform is attached with
perspiration and admonition. Documented, not a typical
penetration. Stay, joy, so I can burn you to the sun. I am all
the way naked, as a red moon
after the prolonged tide in the dusk.
I think back to the woman I saw on the train platform, how the slight off-ness of her t-shirt’s phrase destabilized me, and held me in a space of thought. Chang produces this effect again and again, arriving at surreal images and phrasings through a mercurial sense of improvisation. Prescribee is primarily concerned with scenes and contexts where the possibilities for what to say are so intensely constrained, yet Chang faces that with a talent for poetic invention that makes those constraints seem to lose solidity, makes the borders of what is possible seem to momentarily fade. I love it when her moments of invention feel vaguely threatening, almost humorously so, as when one speaker implores, “Let my … Grumpiness pilot you an unlimited outline.” But what stays with me most are the lines when Chang carves out a space simultaneously removed from the world and emphatically present, like a shadow and a light combined:
I go, I lie, I tree and I were