Review by cris costa

There are few writers out there who really understand the slipperiness of words, who not only hear how sounds coalesce and disband, but who can also create a text which speaks to this. There are even fewer writers who can do this and also write an important text—a text that not only weaves through the semiotic, exposing the weight of the words as sounds morph and move, but a text that tells us something important about the world, about its structure and our being in relation to that: Larissa Lai and Rita Wong outstandingly achieve this in sybil unrest (LINEBooks 2009)—to call it play would be an understatement. Presented like a driver’s-gone-anarchist’s manual for ‘civil unrest,’ the contrast between the red-orange and mustard-yellow on the cover is stark, glossy, unsettling; and in its sibyl’s appropriation of these colours, coupled with an image depicting a metamorphoses of laurel trees turning into women, hand-in-hand in a fateful walk—the cover preps us for the Sybil-multiplicity of the text, drawing attention to production, gender, and life cycle—of bodies and of meaning. It’s not the prettiest cover by any traditional standards, but its conscientiousness to form, including font, speaks to the poetics of the/this long poem.

As a mythopoetic tale of the tribe, a major thread throughout the poem is a persistent questioning of the creation of identity and identification in twenty-first century late-capitalism:

few men chew
chew choose the train
whether they built the tracks
or drove the last spike
or bought the containers
that make up the train
that goes on the tracks
that makes up the railway that cn built
that was bought out by Amtrak and Fairmont and who knows else
never mind the highway
the robbers barren
buy buy birdie
no point reinventing the deal
that worked so well the first time
this little piggy loves the free market economy
in the guise of democracy
cries we we we
all the way to the bank (16)

Searing and critical, this passage collects Hollywood and pop-culture, blends it to nursery rhymes, clichéd phrases of the English language, famous tales, and historical events, all the while exposing the elusive ground between/of denotation and connotation. This puts into crisis the very sounds, the stories, and the ideas that allow us to secure identification within the world—it is a new historiography which changes our relationship to history, and our relationship to the construction of ourselves.

Lai and Wong began working on this form as a collaborative project, “in the renga spirit,” via email exchange circa the start of Iraq invasion and the outbreak of SARS in 2003, a socio-political climate for which the text is responsible. Insofar as the poem appears to identify an external enemy, it also shows how the enemy, the Other, is the substance which composes oneself, the medium through which we construct the world. In the most recent edition of Cross Cultural Poetics, Wong writes: “When I speak of English as the enemy’s language, I see the enemy as being within the individual person—within one’s own language use and how one is programmed to look at things.” The poem is therefore conscious of itself, so much in fact, that it is of the subject—that is, its self-reflexivity is a self-reflexivity of the reader, of any subject who lives through and within our culture. None of this is without an implicit hilarity, as the text is laced with irony and wry humour; language is détourned through a regurgitation which exposes the grotesqueness of the twenty-first century carnival:

weekly menue feeds babely
tribe our beloved amazon
gushes effusive
i’m loving it
explaining her beef
as die cast
on probability of profitablilty
we clock our overdraft
in times new roman
loose mysteries
twist forked laughter
as goddess sign in the triplicate
‘the pleasures of being multiple’

(57)

The poem also seeks to draw attention to the idea of ‘multiplicity’ as a consequence of abuse, but simultaneously, a natural position of power. Titled in gesture of Sybil Dorsett (the pseudonym for Shirley Mason, a women with multiple-personality disorder whose tragic life was exposed in the novel by Flora Rheta Schreiber, Sybil, with its subsequent films), sybil unrest suggests how women can collectively resist the violent oppression of capitalism and patriarchy using the language of the system itself through multiplicity, through more than one identity. Or as Lai writes herself in an article also in Cross Cultural Poetics: “For the racialized writer to pome into the flow requires a complex of identifications, misidentifications, re-identifications and overflow.” sybil unrest is a truly subversive text that unveils the heart of poetry.

Works
Lai, Larissa. “Cellular Archive Landed Militant: Poetic Notes on Assassinated Futures.” XCP: Cross Cultural Poetics. 20 (2008): 64-66.

Wong, Rita. “XC-Poetics, or Toward 90 Addresses for a Poem.” XCP: Cross Cultural Poetics. 20 (2008): 173-78.

Bio: cris costa lives in Vancouver. She attends graduate school at Simon Fraser University, where she is currently working on urban CanLit, and is an active member of the Kootenay School of Writing. Born in Toronto, she received a BA in English at York U, helped organize the Scream Literary Festival as an exec member for a few years, and has been involved in other writing collectives.