Dissonance(s): Jody Chan’s haunt
Grief and grieving are never short of sanctioned expressions but choosing how the aftermath of loss might look for you takes courage, the kind of deliberate and tender courage that Jody Chan’s debut book haunt is sure to have. This is a delicate yet clear-cut poetry collection that doesn't shy away from serious topics such as immigration, the queer body, inherited trauma and gentrification while interrogating any clear boundaries between what one is expected to do in order to survive trauma and the acknowledgement that trauma and the consequent depression are here to stay: “at the funeral we learn to substitute a stone for a mother/begrudge this stolen soil for swallowing our mother.” Re-imagining the present without eschewing or reinforcing the past, inhabiting one’s own haunted space in order to make a home out of it, unpacking trauma and healing while being taken care of by ghosts also means that hope can find a spot in one’s grieving body.
there was no screaming, only the sound of silence
for the mess of slaughter. what did you expect, love?
not all ghosts are dead. apologize to your butcher,
haven’t you learned by now that trust is just an omen?
your body most valuable for the way it inherits silence
like an empty bottle whose first flaw is thirst.
beneath the bloodstreak, crater of minced glass,
your skin is still the blankest page.
scrub the carpet to bone, strip the drywall down —
look, it can be like the rape never happened.
haunt troubles the waters of complacency, showing that not every chain of unresolved issues and past trauma has to be a neat one, one that includes closure at any cost. Chan chooses to focus on nuances, on complicating matters up to a point that verges total disappearance. Scrubbing memories resembles getting rid of evidence while embracing ambiguities becomes a daily routine for a queer body that collects everything, from permissions, approvals, and addictions to the acknowledgement that love might be supernatural after all: “now I too want desire & intimacy to be mutually exclusive diseases.” Fantasies, sexual or not, have also become stale as the body grows weary of them, gentrified as it is by loss and lack of belonging to any place that actually feels safe. The mechanics of haunting is laid bare, just as the body reveals its own structure: bones, muscles and nerves, all working to survive.
you leak loneliness / like slowly starving fruit flies / wrinkled corpses / in the
living room / accusatory specks / everywhere you look / live long enough inside a wreckage / & you become a wreckage / haunted / by the people you thought would be better off without you
Sometimes, Chan’s verses might come across as tense, as pulling no punches when trying to convey their rather clear message: survival is not to be mistaken for freedom. But there is still room for joyful anticipation, tenderness, hopeful invocation and a refusal to harden against all odds. Unlearning predetermined histories and toying with queer identities that refuse to translate themselves for heteronormative sensibilities, haunt resists the confinement of categorical definitions — it imagines its own incomplete love story instead.
I will never be disowned, thanks to you
my table is set with a thousand spoons, a songburst
plucked from a robin’s beak, this telescope
aflare with sun, lighthouse tracking home
for everyone you had to grieve before you were ready.
from now on we keep our promises of survival & steel
remembers how to be soft & madness will not be
a metaphor for violence & your last love will say
yes you came back, yes the border will open.
Jody Chan is a writer and organizer based in Tkaronto/Toronto. They are the Poetry Editor at Hematopoeisis, and their poetry is published in BOAAT, Looseleaf Magazine, Nat. Brut, The Shade Journal, and elsewhere.
