Naming the No-Name Woman, Jasmine An’s Two Sylvias Press Chapbook Prize-winning tour de force, was published in 2016, after winning the 2015 Prize. It feels as if it could have been written yesterday, and will probably feel that way when I read it again in a decade.
Through the actress Anna May Wong An explores identity, racism, class, and gender. Wong is the mirror through which others (An, for instance) may see themselves; hers is the life through which they can understand their own. The limitations imposed upon her by a racist, sexist society are a springboard to demand something better, something more, something fair and equitable in which bodies and selves and identities belong not to a society which would impose them upon a minoritized group but to the people of that group themselves.
There are similarities, here, to At Night My Body Waits: much like Saúl Hernández, language has a big part to play in Naming the No-Name Woman. But it is, in many ways, a different kind of language. An is a third-generation American, a Midwesterner like me; Wong was a first-generation American. Wong had a Chinese name, which she knew: Wong Liu Song. An has a Chinese name, too, but her relationship to it is a little different, as she writes in “Realizing I’ve Forgotten the Chinese Character for Thought, And By Extension, My Given Name”:
I don’t remember my own name. / I think I never learned it / was mine to claim, / but I don’t remember.
An draws impossible, beautiful parallels between things ranging from the beautiful to the grotesque, building up a portrait of herself along with Anna May Wong. There is defiance here, in the images of Wong, in the sexual pleasures of which An writes, in the butterflies and the Chinese water dragons and, perhaps most explicityly, in the mangroves of “Cross Pollination,” which scoff at miscegenation and race to the waters of the world where eventually “The saplings wear crabs / as crowns, let shrimp swirl between their silt legs as the tide rubs them / in and out.” Does the voice of the anti-miscegenation root like it? Not at all! But the root loses even as it will win, drinking of the rich rot:
But the mangroves slurp from the detritus waters, shoot up until they pull / the root into the air. Thrust high into the canopy, she wraps herself around / their slimy trunks and sways with them, sundered from the ground, yet / no long suffocating.
Strange and horrible and beautiful, a defiant cry to the world and a claiming of identity and sexuality and self: Naming the No-Name Woman, like those mangroves, thrusts itself up to claim its own space and its own identity, now and forever.
Essentially a Nerd 