Xie explores power of the concealed, overlooked
Poet peeks at the past of her family and China to examine consequences of sight
Poet Jenny Xie was exploring the library stacks at the Shanghai campus of New York University, where she was on a fellowship, when a book with a bright-red cover caught her eye. In it, she found hundreds of photos of China’s Cultural Revolution.
The images, taken by Li Zhensheng during the dramatic, often violent period of upheaval that gripped China between 1966 and 1976, had been clandestinely preserved until their U.S. publication. Xie devoured the book in one sitting.
Born in Anhui province in eastern China, Xie had moved to the United States to join her parents when she was about 4 years old. The photographs, she said, provided a window into a past shared by generations of Chinese people, including many in her family, and of which she had seen little visual documentation.
“Suddenly, there is this opening into the past of people I love,” Xie said recently. The photography, she said, “made me think about how deeply strange it was that I have no visual understanding of what so many people in my family lived through.”
The connection she felt with the images reverberated. Xie is a sight-oriented poet. Her debut collection, titled “Eye Level,” won the 2017 Walt Whitman Award and is a feast of scenery: Phnom Penh’s rain-slicked tin roofs, Corfu’s white sailboats lining up like “grains of rice.” It is also preoccupied with the ethics of seeing: A viewfinder “slices the horizon,” a camera “neuters the present” and to bestow one’s gaze is to spend “a soft currency.”
Not long after Xie returned to New York, the pandemic started. Cloistered in her apartment, she returned to Li’s photos often — her own copy of the book became a sort of a portal, she said, connecting the past to the present.
Looking at scenes in which people considered “class enemies” were humiliated and sometimes tortured in front of an audience, known as “struggle sessions,” she’d focus on specific people in the crowd and wonder what had happened to them.
Over time, this obsession, along with snippets of her 2019 stay in China and other memories, became fodder for a new collection, “The Rupture Tense,” recently released by Graywolf and already on the longlist for the National Book Award for poetry.
In the book, the poet not only peeks at her family’s past and their country’s history, but also explores the subversive power to be found in examining what has been concealed or overlooked: Li’s long-hidden archive, the older generations’ silence about the past, and the unexamined trauma that goes on shaping how family members relate to one another.
Nearly a half-century after the end of the Cultural Revolution, discussion of the period is still largely muffled in public and private spaces in China. Overseas, however, the works of documentarians and novelists, such as Yang Jisheng (who, like Li, was a state news reporter) and Ma Jian, preserve the records and explore the legacy of the era.
“The Cultural Revolution was like a surreal nightmare. It’s a wake-up call today to read Jenny Xie,” poet and novelist Qiu Xiaolong, who was a teenager in Shanghai during the Cultural Revolution, wrote in an email. “In poetics, she chooses a uniquely working form, controlled language, to mold these inhuman experiences into an organic whole.”
Xie is not the only one who stares into this abyss, but her processing of the
experience is particularly evocative. Xie’s lines have an unmooring effect: She slyly dissects images and concepts, rearranging the landmarks of the mind.
Tracy K. Smith, who taught Xie more than a decade ago, appreciates her deftness.
“It is a marvelous and subtle use of metaphor that does the emotional or even the spiritual work in her poems,” Smith wrote in an email. “Metaphor bears witness to the feeling that the tools and terms we have been taught to rely upon are never enough.”
The four sections of “The Rupture Tense” oscillate between the past and the present. In the first section, a handful of short poems focus on Li’s photographs; the blocks of text, confined on the page, appear like epigraphs. The brutalization described varies: At a “struggle session,” “a man’s character, stripped down
to what he owns, yields to plain sight”; at one winter execution, there are “eight stripped trees matching eight individuals on their knees.”
In these photos, Xie looks for such striking, small details, which, she said, “pierce us, that bruise us, that pull us into having an emotional relationship with a photograph.”
Shortly after Xie was born, her father was accepted into a doctoral program in mathematics at Rutgers University. His wife and daughter eventually joined him in New Jersey.
Around age 7, Xie became nearsighted. Eyesight has been a source of anxiety in the family, she said; many members have impaired vision, and one of Xie’s grandmothers became blind after an ocular hemorrhage.
“My parents always sort of instilled in me a fear that my vision was imperiled,” she said, “reading in low light, watching TV, these sources of pleasure were always bound up in the fear that I could lose my eyesight.”
Her fascination with physical vision extends to the interpretation of what is seen: She thinks about how a sight is “constructed and enabled and reinforced” by its context.
“There are consequences to how we see, what we see and also what we allow to remain unseen,” she said.
Li, the photographer, died in New York in 2020. Upon hearing the news, Xie sat down and wrote a poem in his memory. In it, her description of how memories work — “coded into cells to cross-pollinate with other images in the mind” — seems to gesture to the future, where a reader might feel pierced by her words and go interrogate the past.