Dear Memory

 

In this haunting and luminous work, Victoria Chang gives us a series of epistles and found collages to address the melancholic remembrances of things past.  Dear Memory:  Letters on Writing, Silence, and Grief (Milkweed Editions, 2021) is an elegy and lament for the dead and gone:  her ancestors, her teachers, and friends.  She quotes poet Mary Jo Bang:  “What is an elegy but the attempt / To rebreathe life / Into what the gone once was…”  The book is filled with light and shadow, the pneuma of humanity and the human condition.  More poetry than prose, the book is a connotative tour de force of what it means to be alive and to live with the breath of memory and regret.

Chang is a poet, a teacher, and program chair in the Creative Writing Department at Antioch University.  She believes in writing that puts language at risk, allowing words to build into something beyond the self.  She asks:  “Can I be the hawk and the storm that tries to murder the hawk?”  The question is fraught with danger.  She confronts and sifts through memory and goes directly to how our lives often play out in the blood, the DNA of who we are, and what we do with our brief time in this human epoch.  She documents the sorrow and grace of her existence, both visually and in words.  “Perhaps something never happened if no one remembers it,” she writes.  “Perhaps there’s no truth.  Just memory and words.”

Coupled with her words are these haunting collages, many composed of documents and paper fragments of her past.  She writes dialogue with her mother directly in the spaces on each picture as if conducting an interview.  Other collages are family photographs, some with faces etched out as if demonstrating how they dwell in the shadows of her history.  Collectively, the collages tell the parallel story; they weave into and out of the word-epistles.  The letters and the collages are rare jewels.  They both enhance and magnify the threads that bind the story together from word to image.  Her poet’s sense of the spare and lyrical is ever-present in the art and the words.

Often, Chang’s language stuns us with its beauty and insight.  “Maybe our desire for the past grows after the decay of our present, she writes.  “When the present is more than we can hold, it turns into history.  And the future turns into water.  The water between your countries.”  It is this water that her family journeyed over to find their destiny.  Chang feels her place in America, but the book she creates also pays homage to those who made that journey and who, in turn, made her a unique part of a new nation, a new home.  This is an immigrant story, and Chang pays artful attention to this most American of ideas.  She wonders if memory is different for immigrants, “for people who leave so much behind.  Memory isn’t something that blooms but something that bleeds internally, something to be stopped.  Memory hides because it isn’t useful.”  It is clearly the calling of the poet-artist to bring the memory forward, to shine light, muted or harsh, to illuminate the darkness of experience, of grief, of sorrow, of regret.

There are gaps in her family history that she does not fully understand and wants to explore.  Memories, dreams, reflections, all kaleidoscope together in the form of questions she did not ask at the time, or did not find the answers to later.  “The things that didn’t matter at the time are often the most urgent questions after someone has died,” she writes.

She devotes much to a discussion of silence and grief.  What is not said speaks volumes.  It is silence that cannot be undone, and in that way, Chang tells us, it is like death.  The story ends when no one remembers the words, the people in the photographs, the significance of things.  But the dead are wise.  They know things.  “By the time we die,” Chang writes, “we know everything we need to know.”  Those of us left behind must wonder what the dead have taken with them.  It is up to the living to remember the strands of the story and continue it.

Chang circles back to writing at the end.  She recognizes that dragging a “not-yet-ready memory” into the light is often painful.  It is difficult and lacerating.  “More and more,” she writes, “I think writing is not a choice but an act of patience.  An act of listening to silence, into silence.”  It is in silence that, paradoxically, we hear voices.  In silence, we communicate with the dead, with our own souls, and where the world is still enough to hear our own breath rushing in and out of our lives.  It takes bravery and courage to listen to the silences and become aware.  Victoria Chang models such heroism for us, and the result is a shimmering and beautiful book.