Pantoum: Flowing Repetition
The pantoum form comes from the Malay pantun, a quatrain with an abab rhyme scheme. The first couplet is called a pembayang, and usually depicts common imagery that sets up the meaning for the last couplet, or the maksud (Gotera 254). Pantoums take this idea and expand upon it. In the pantoum, the second and fourth lines in a stanza become the first and third lines in the next one, resulting in an abab bcbc cdcd rhyme pattern. Shirley Geok-Lin Lim’s “Pantoun for Chinese Women” incorporates aspects of both the Malay pantun and the French pantoum forms while expressing the suffering that the traditions of a patriarchy cause.
Formally, Shirley Geok-Lin Lim leans more towards the Western pantoum, but the Malay side shows especially in both the subject and the title. “Pantoun for Chinese Women” describes the murder of a daughter, who is unwanted just for being a daughter. In China, overpopulation has become a large problem, so much so that a one child policy was only recently lifted. In our patriarchal society — and especially in China, where men pass down the family names and are the ones doing the ancestral rituals — potential fathers would often rather have a son than a daughter, and in this poem, the father believes a “child with two mouths is no good” and opts to kill it (Lim 24). In addition, China has outlawed abortions (with a few exceptions), which would lead to more killing of children like this.
The way that the lines repeat in the poem and certain lines keep showing up suggest that the mother keeps thinking this situation over and over. There’s a juxtaposition in her mind, since she knows killing her kid is blatantly wrong, but the societal expectations and her husband are convincing her that her daughter is worthless. The speaker has to convince herself that “Women are made of river sand and wood,” to believe that her daughter is expendable (Lim 24). This line is repeated in the next stanza but prefaced by “My husband frowns, pretending in his haste” (Lim 26). The husband also convinces himself that women are expendable and worth no more than sand and wood. This mindset in both the husband and wife are extremely detrimental to the speaker, who is already going to be suffering from killing her daughter. The poem ends with “They say a child with two mouths is no good” (Lim 32). Concluding the poem with this line suggests the mother has convinced herself that her daughter was worthless just for being a daughter, which means she would be too.
Gotera, Vince. “The Pantoum’s Postcolonial Pedigree.” An Exaltation of Forms: Contemporary Poets Celebrate the Diversity of Their Art, Edited by Anne Finch and Kathrine Varnes, U. of Michigan P, 2002, pp. 254–261.
Lim, Shirley Geok-Lin. “Pantoun for Chinese Women” An Exaltation of Forms: Contemporary Poets Celebrate the Diversity of Their Art, Edited by Anne Finch and Kathrine Varnes, U. of Michigan P, 2002, pp. 261.
