Only the written word saves when all else fails, July 30, 2009
| By | Ernest Dempsey “http://ErnestDempsey.com” (Pakistan) – See all my reviews |
How to Write a Suicide Note: serial essays that saved a woman’s life
Desperation in shifting waves of rhythm; hope in scuttling across consciousness of living; rolling in the distance between self and the outside; a poetical delirium giving out vibes of bitter truth and sweet resilience – there is so much of substance in Sherry Quan Lee’s poetry titled How to Write a Suicide Note (Modern History Press, 2008) that one may assert it as a crash course in the impact of growing up as a woman and as an ethnic minority in a multicultural society.
For its title, Lee’s book stands in danger of rousing fear or concern, sounding like an offer of assistance in passing to the other side – the dreaded one. But thanks to the subtitle serial essays that saved a woman’s life, which gives a hint of the book’s greater purpose. And yet, it takes a while before an average reader can come to terms with Lee’s desultoriness so profusely showing in each page of her verse like a medium catching vibes from multiple dimensions and conveying them in a somewhat unsorted pattern. Persistence and concentration on behalf of the reader brings joy and depth to Lee’s message, interwoven with her personal story, cultural critique, and philosophical/existential interpretation of life experiences.
Lee’s poetry in How to Write a Suicide Note is one of the few that probe into the origin of emotional trauma as something beyond the individual; living as a Black-Chinese woman in a white-dominated society, her status as a woman of a minority class culturally pressured her into becoming (and acting) someone she really was not; hence, the pain of deprivation from the natural right of self-expression. For Lee, it is a historical trauma traveling through the medium of culture with individuals at the receiving end. What is purely individual, however, is her artistic fluidity with which she creates palpable imagery and brings spontaneity to the thought prevalent in the moment:
`I smoke wearing fleeced gloves. Smoke hangs in the air like
frigid poems burning holes in hands that need to write
suicide notes…’ (page 9)
In several poems, Lee points to the therapeutic effect of writing as a life-saving habit. Writing suicide notes in her verse symbolizes the involvement with life even when the straw of hope is not in reach; she shows that our thinking about life, about writing about it, and actually coming back to life through the written work, are all saviors of life. Only the written word saves when all else fails before the trauma of a scarred identity. And it is so tersely put in one of her poems Because Writing Saves Lives:
`When you can, write
When you can’t live.
When you can’t live, write.’ (page 16)
Reckoned as the first (and only) poetry book by the Modern History Press – as the publisher found its message so irresistibly revealing, and one of the very first books about living as a Black-Chinese woman in America, How to Write a Suicide Note is a unique read, full of life, and throbbing with the will to live again as a person out of the reach of trauma.
