Chinese Blackbird E-Book

Sherry Quan Lee

• Herausgeber: Modern History Press
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Serie: Reflections of America
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2009

Seitenzahl: 56

Beschreibung

Critical Acclaim for Sherry Quan Lee's Chinese Blackbird
"Quan Lee eloquently expresses how painful and confusing it can be to embrace the many complex identities that one body can contain. With evocative imagery and words that cut straight to the heart, Quan Lee details her lifelong struggles with both the vagaries and concreteness of race, class, gender and sexual identity. Her guilt and shame are palpable. But so too are her emotional and intellectual triumphs. Like a favorite sad song when we have been dumped by the love of our lives, this volume will be oddly comforting to anyone who has ever been overcome by that sorrow which seems insurmountable."
--Eden Torres, Assistant Professor Women's Studies, Chicano Studies, University of Minnesota
"It's been a long time since I've been treated to a voice so full of honesty about one's struggle to come to terms with her identity. Through elegant poetry, full of exquisite imagery and detail, Quan Lee takes the reader on her personal, transformative journey in which she explores how race, class, gender and sexual identity inform who she is. Along the way, she encounters rocks and boulders that would have stopped many of us. Instead, she turns them over and examines the creatures hiding in the darkness underneath, leaving no stone on her path unturned. Quan Lee is a courageous woman. She is one of my sheroes."
--Carolyn Holbrook, Adjunct Assistant Professor, Dept. of English, Founder and past Artistic/Executive Director of SASE: The Write Place
"In Chinese Blackbird, Sherry Quan Lee renders stories of her complex cultural heritage with the lyrical touch of a poet coming into self-possession. Through the generative power of language, Lee creates an inspirational and a multifarious self. This self blows breath unto the page and into the reader, who may have felt quiescent or invisible, often feeling forced to choose among various enriching worlds, until she experiences the truth that only good literature can unveil about the joys and struggles of defining oneself on one's terms."
--Pamela R. Fletcher, Associate Professor of English Co-Director of Critical Studies in Race and Ethnicity, College of St. Catherine
Modern History Press is an imprint of Loving Healing Press

Leseprobe

Sherry Quan Lee

Book #3 in the Reflections of America Series

Chinese Blackbird

Copyright © 2002, 2008 Sherry Quan Lee. All rights reserved

EditorCover Design

Sun Yung Shin

Holly Heewon Lee

Interior DesignCover Photography

Liz Tufte, Folio Bookworks

Charissa Uemura

First Printing: March 2002 by Asian American Renaissance. Second Printing: July 2008 by Modern History Press

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Lee, Sherry, 1948-

  Chinese blackbird / Sherry Quan Lee.

        p. cm. -- (Reflections of America series; bk. #3)

  ISBN-13: 978-1-932690-68-2 (trade paper : alk. paper)

  ISBN-10: 1-932690-68-9 (trade paper : alk. paper)

  1. Racially mixed children--Poetry. 2. Racially mixed women-- Poetry. I. Title. II. Series.

PS3562.E3644C47 2008

811'.54--dc22

2008022999

Published by: Modern History Press, an imprint of

Loving Healing Press

5145 Pontiac Trail

Ann Arbor, MI 48105

USA

http://www.LovingHealing.com or

[email protected]

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Modern History Press

Reflections of America Series

The Stories of Devil-Girl by Anya Achtenberg

How to Write a Suicide Note: serial essays that saved a woman’s life by Sherry Quan Lee

Chinese BlackBird by Sherry Quan Lee

“The Reflections of America Series highlights autobiography, fiction, and poetry which express the quest to discover one's context within modern society.”

From Modern History Press

Preface

Taken as a whole, the poems in this book tell a story: A girl is born of a Chinese immigrant father and a black mother with a “passing jones.” The father leaves and the mother encourages her children not to identify themselves as black. The girl grows up and encounters abuse and neglect, she battles with ignorance and racism, depression and suicidal urges. She goes through several marriages. She starts to write. She starts to ask questions about who she is, who her father was, who her mother was, about the heritages that have formed her. She raises her children and manages to help them to grow up with a buoyancy that she finds striking, given their heritages. She moves through the death of her parents, the death of a last marriage. She discovers her love of women; she falls in love with a woman. She survives and flounders and flourishes. She continues to ask questions about who she is, about the bewildering cruelties and beauty of the world around her. She continues to write, past doubt, past uncertainties, past rejection, past the official guardians of literature. She persists on her journey. She will not be silenced.

And after you finish this book you will say to yourself, if you have any sense at all, this woman is a hero. This book is a gift. This book is a small and powerful miracle. If you read it with an open mind and heart, it will tell you much about America; it will tell you truths that are not there in our culture of mass media or in our canonized literature. It will tell you how complicated a thing it is to grow up in this country as a person of color with a mixed racial and cultural heritage. It will tell how much silence there is around the desires of someone who loves those of the same sex. It will tell you how, for certain people, so very few tools are given to speak about their identity, to find out who they are. It will tell you how those tools can be constructed, poem by poem, line by line— only with honesty and courage, only with tenacity, only with a fierceness that will not give up. Poetry was not given to Sherry Quan Lee; she had to go out and find it. She had to fight for it.

The poems in this book run a wide gamut of tones—sometimes lyrical, sometimes wry and biting and caustic, sometimes passionate, sometimes grieving, sometimes angry. They often move quickly and contain surprising juxtapositions of imagery and tone. They are alive and highly cognizant of the ironies of the poet’s experiences and her position in the world; they explore the misperceptions and censoring and condescensions and critiques and insults she has battled. At times there’s a surprising ability to find humor in the midst of difficult and painful situations, and this comes in part because the poet does not take herself too seriously. At the same time, this is not a wit that comes from distance or safety; it’s a wit created out of and within adversity. At certain points, there’s an aphoristic quality to the lines, a bit of wisdom or truth distilled and wrestled from experience.

Sometimes I feel like a boxer punching myself.

I reverberate.

The good thing is, some things shake loose.

Overall there’s an emotional honesty in these poems that I trust. I’m struck by how vulnerable this poet is, how willing she is to look at the pain inside her and around her with open eyes, unflinching. She knows that words cannot erase wounds but they do allow them to heal: “I turn my bruises into stories/ and watch them disappear.”

Like any reader, I have my own particular favorite individual poems in this book; they include Dear M.F.A. Faculty, Parthenogenesis, Chokecherry, Theun Wing, Vampire, Naming. But the individual poems also gather themselves up into something larger; they gain power from the vision and voice that they come together to form. Unlike so many volumes of poetry, at the end of this book you will leave with a strong sense of who this poet, who this woman, is. You will feel as if you have encountered a very real and complicated individual, a person who has made her descent into the underworld, as good writers must, and come back with her own particular vision, one balancing darkness with the light of articulation and the passion for clarity. You will feel a certain wonder and awe that one person has gone through so much and not only come through it, but has come forward to tell her tale.

—David Mura

IN MEMORY of MY MOTHER Mom, I Miss You

Sarah Ella Franklin Quan 1913-1999

Acknowledgements

I have been writing for my life since I left my mother’s house when I was eighteen. It was a house with a white picket fence that protected me from who I was: Chinese, Black, and Female. But there are no boundaries to hold the emotional traumas of longing, shame, and terror that Toi Derricotte so courageously speaks about in the black notebooks. But, writing and revealing are, for me, acts of freedom, forgiveness, and love that also have no boundaries. Ironically, I have also been running for my life