Books
Grace Yee
Joss: A History
I have to confess that in reading Grace Yee’s new collection of poems, Joss: A History, I started at the end, beyond the end in fact, in the eight pages of notes that give the textual sources of so many of these poems of found and recontextualised materials from the historical archive. This is largely because I’m a fan of the methods of literary composting that Yee employs here, and which she also used in her much-loved and prize-winning debut of 2023, Chinese Fish. An important aspect of what Yee captures via these methods is how the projections of retrospective linear time perforate and occlude, eating away at historical biases and conventions like so many silverfish in the library.
Just as in Chinese Fish, the skill of Joss: A History lies in its blending of chorus effects with that of solitary predicaments. Time and again Yee issues a tenuous thread of meaning until it metamorphoses midline, in ways that resemble both the psychic and polyphonic disjunctures of migration, and also the multiplicities of digital life. She reminds us of other poets equally sensitive to the way language and its morphings display who we are, from Paul Celan to Susan Howe to Michael Farrell.
The flyleaf states that the collection was inspired by upwards of a thousand “chinamen” buried in the White Hills cemetery in Bendigo. To this colonial inspiration Yee brings a 21st century response that lies suitably beyond formal templates. She abuts bullocks with body scanners, Lao Tzu with your morning moccachino, the Union Jack and the Southern Cross with lipstick holders, Nana Mouskouri with a bonsai forest, asking all of us, not only those in Box Hill or Beijing, to tune in to the precisely eclectic music of our diasporas, or our double diasporas.
Most often what Yee reveals through her techniques is the racism the Chinese have been subjected to in both colonial and contemporary Australia. This would come as no surprise to anyone with any kind of literacy in how mass mobs of humans treat minorities, but the real fascination in Joss: A History lies in how such content is stylised by Yee. With her recomposing ear, Yee refreshes the historical record with live questions, such as: “how do we daughters of the middle kingdom – world famous for self-effacement – begin to deconstruct the status quo of colonialist anthropological government?”
Sometimes Yee rearranges her archival sources, recontextualising them and forcing new combinations, while at other times she treats the objects of her research as textual readymades, as in her poem “NON-EUROPEAN ANCESTRY”, where she allows the honour roll of Victorian Chinese Australians who served in World War II to reconfigure itself by simply listing the names and home places therein. Like most list poems, this creates a tumbleweed effect, the reader accumulating connections and pathos as it goes. The poem has a cartographic aspect, too, in the way places such as Orbost, Ensay, Pyramid Hill, Geelong, Koroit, Carlton, Murrumbeena, Yarram, Camberwell et cetera, are reframed and felt differently via the list of their residents’ names: Alfred Norman Ah Chow, Christina Alice Ah Yee, Harold Edward Stanley Anguey, Gordon Vernon Ah Yee, John Coto Clarke, William John Conkey, Norman Clarence Hee, Colin Brain, Keith Edwin Chung. In a slow reading, each of these names becomes a portal to biographical as well as cultural variousness, while the conceptual nature of the poem’s technique once again draws our attention to the made-ness of both official history and literature.
The textual mycelium of voices underlying never-quite-postcolonial Victoria is very much directed in Joss: A History at how these archives still live in the present, in modern individuals with unbound feet, for instance, young women whose metatarsal joints are not “ceremoniously oiled” nor “crushed and bowed in luminous breathtaking waxing crescendos”. Unlike Lady Yao in the Sui Dynasty, whose feet were bound “to make them look like the new moon”, these are women who are “well-heeled, muscular, arched and unfettered, tripping and gadding in shoes our grandmothers (supposedly) could never have conjured”.
That “(supposedly)” is of course important and speaks to how, as Yee has described in an interview, the past for her is “persistently, insistently present”. The poet’s response to this complex reality involves an innovative method of historiography that in its powerfully “live” effect is reminiscent of that great Latin American rememberer Eduardo Galeano, even if Yee’s lines don’t always run to the right-hand margin. To convey her sense of how the past persists, she draws from techniques of poetic erasure, collage and assemblage to properly embody her listening view rather than just to state it. Thus she shows us how caricatures produced by nationalist programs foreclose both the horizons and depths of individuals who cannot conform to category, whose creaturely realities can never stay obedient or as easily fluent as a sentence of takeaway Aussie prose.
Another confession I can make here is that I also have an ancestor in an unmarked grave at White Hills cemetery in Bendigo. My great-great-grandfather came here from Riposto in Sicily in the 1840s and as we look back it’s easy to forget that he did not in fact migrate from Italy to Australia, because neither “Italy” nor “Australia” existed as nations when he arrived. Like so many of the people to whom Yee pays loyal testimony in her collection, our Antonio remains a living voice of the ground, undefined by the ideologies of the modern nation.
Giramondo, 80pp, $27
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on June 28, 2025 as "Joss: A History".
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