Let’s Say It in Human Terms What then may I do but cleave to what cleaves me. --- Li-Young Lee It took me numerous readings of the poem The Cleaving, most of them are voluntary, and a number of years of life experience in the U.S. as an immigrant to finally see and communicate with the poet’s quest for a human truth that is revealed after the multiple layers of consciousness have been uncovered. In a time when we have less and less patience with the world around us, I come to understand the lengthy composition of this particular poem which is made with tangible pain by the poet and it unfolds like a heavily stitched drapery that must be viewed in whole. Lengthy because the immigrants story in this country is not a short one; lengthy because the human struggle to sit face to face with one’s soul cannot be easily achieved. I find myself unable to talk about or think about the poem by merely analyzing some selected lines or phrases. The images and the noises in the poem are all mixed and intermingled in my mind like the dreams I have in which more than one languages are spoken by both the regular visitors of my dreams and strangers whose faces are often blurred. Through the images and sounds we are invited into a deeper level of understanding of who we really are and what we are made of. Some of the images are not unfamiliar if we can recall how the images of immigrants are created and stereotyped in this culture. The Chinese butcher is taken out of a picture the poet sees everyday, and it is also an image that reminds me of how Chinese immigrants were portrayed in early Hollywood films and other main- stream literature through the eyes of stereotype. And not surprisingly, discriminatory remarks are also found in journals of a founding member of American thoughts and philosophy. That is something the poet discovers that we, who read, have swallowed without much questioning. And that is why the poet asks What then may I do/but cleaves to what cleaves me. A bright moment I hold up an old head from the sea and admire the haughty down-curved mouth that seems to disdain all the eyes are blind to, including me, the eater. They look foreign, act foreign, sound foreign, un-American, sad, sleep deprived, mute and afraid. They eat all the four-legged creatures which shocks the civilized other. No body knows when they come and no one cares when they die. Their life becomes nothing but a repetitive mechanism which consists of two parts: exhausting the body and feeding the body so that it can get back to work again. that jut jaw to gnash tendon; that wide nose to meet the blows a face like that invites; those long eyes closing on the seen; those thick lips to suck the meat of animals or recite 300 poems of the Tang; This poem, as I read it now, develops from feeding the body to the starvation of the soul. For only when the soul is fed and found, we can talk about love with a capital L. What do we eat to keep our soul alive? Which dead animal should we butcher in order to see our own soul more clearly and less tinted? While at every street corner there seems to be a supermarket, what choices do we have when it comes to feeding the soul? When we try with great effort to stay healthy, eat less fat, our grand plans for the future seems to grow more inorganic. The butcher’s action is not a scene during a hunting season in the Wild West. It is a daily thing, and he has performed the same chopping, cutting, slitting for hundreds of years, if not thousands. This is how we were fed. This is also how we survived so that the soul can have a place to reside. It is no use to pretend that our souls are transparent and forever protected by a walking carcass. Obviously, there is another kind of death that is sadder than the death of a fish or a hog. I would eat the gutless twitching on the scales, three pounds of dumb nerve and pulse, I would eat it all to utter it. The deaths at the sinks, those bodies prepared for eating, I would eat, and the standing deaths at the counters, in the aisles, the walking deaths in the streets, the death-far-from-home, the death- in-a-strange-land, these Chinatown deaths, these American deaths. Such violence! But aren’t we violent beings even before we came into this world and we had to tear our mothers open. See how violently our blood boil and how noisy our bodies can be when we know we are human because of a simple word we all capable of uttering. The noise the body makes when the body meets the soul over the soul’s ocean and penumbra is the old sound of up-and-down, in-and-out, a lump of muscle chug-chugging blood into the ear; a lover’s heart-shaped tongue; flesh rocking flesh until flesh comes; the butcher working at his block and blade to marry their shapes by violence and time; Through every noisy syllable the poet celebrates Love, or Life, which are interchangeable terms for him. Such are the noise and violence we were born with and we need them in order to taste life whole-heartedly. Such noises and violence are no longer greasy and slimy like the butcher’s cutting board. They are natural, sensual and beautiful. However, there is another kind of butchery that I cannot help comparing with what’s going on in the poem. This other kind of butchery has nothing to do with feeding the body, put aside the matter of the soul. The other butcher may have never held a knife or bothered to touch a dead animal. Yet, he kills with a better skill and power that are remote-controlled by a button. A village, a nation can be wiped out without making much a mess. With the same blank face, he too can preach the words of God. He comes out clean while having others do the dirty job. The terror the butcher scripts in the unhealed air … The material abundance has not helped reduce the inner pain and suffering as the body of the world suffers from serious violence. We seem to have gotten all we like to possess, materially speaking, but we go famished. We gang the doors of death. What is wrong with this eating disorder of the soul? Is this a poem about immigrants only? Do we not hear great noises being made daily on television, in newspapers? Are we still capable of revising our definition of butchery when our tax dollars are being used freely to wage new wars? Is our life style still considered healthy when consuming an organic diet we often witness a fresh killing on that flickering screen? What kinds of noises are we making and hearing everyday? There is much noises in the world we cannot hide from while the genuine sounds often remain unheard. Which kind of violence should we worry more, the feeding of the body or the feeding of the greed? What I find most impressive about this poem is the disappearance of the poet’s self who is able to love and identify with the rest of human race. Traveling in multiple worlds, realms, the poet has found a bigger voice for the voiceless. I think that this bigger voice, the voice of Love, is achieved through the poet’s manifold consciousness which speaks not for one individual or ethnic group only, but for all of us who are interested in the soulful matters and willing to look deeper than the skin. and I feel urged to utterance, urged to read the body of the world, urged to say it in human terms, my reading a kind of eating, my eating a kind of reading, my saying a diminishment, my noise a love-in-answer. --zuozhou '04
