Sally Wen Mao

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Sally Wen Mao (?-present) is an Asian American poet and author of Mad Honey Symposium and Oculus. She received her MFA from Cornell University and currently lives in Brooklyn, New York and teaches in the Asian American Studies department at Hunter College. Source

Occidentalism

A man celebrates erstwhile conquests,

his book locked in a silo, still in print.

 

I scribble, make Sharpie lines, deface

its text like it defaces me. Outside, grain

 

fields whisper. Marble lions are silent

yet silver-tongued, with excellent teeth.

 

In this life I have worshipped so many lies.

Then I workshop them, make them better.

 

An East India Company, an opium trade,

a war, a treaty, a concession, an occupation,

 

a man parting the veil covering a woman’s

face, his nails prying her lips open. I love

 

the fragility of a porcelain bowl. How easy

it is, to shatter chinoiserie, like the Han

 

dynasty urn Ai Weiwei dropped in 1995.

If only recovering the silenced history

 

is as simple as smashing its container: book,

bowl, celadon spoon. Such objects cross

 

borders the way our bodies never could.

Instead, we’re left with history, its blonde

 

dust. That bowl is unbreakable. All its ghosts

still shudder through us like small breaths.

 

The tome of hegemony lives on, circulates

in our libraries, in our bloodstreams. One day,

 

a girl like me may come across it on a shelf,

pick it up, read about all the ways her body

 

is a thing. And I won’t be there to protect

her, to cross the text out and say: go ahead—

rewrite this.

Published:

2019

Length:

Regular

Literary Movements:

Contemporary

Anthology Years:

2020

Themes:

Intersectionality & Culture

Racial Injustice

Womanhood

Literary Devices:

Alliteration

the repetition of the same letter or sound at the beginning of words appearing in succession

Assonance

The repetition of similar vowel sounds that takes place in two or more words in proximity to each other within a line; usually refers to the repetition of internal vowel sounds in words that do not end the same.

Asyndeton

the absence of a conjunction (for, and, nor, but, or, yet, so…) between phrases and within a sentence

Personification

the attribution of human qualities to a non-human thing

Simile

a comparison between two unlike things using the words “like” or “as”