Kiran Bhat
Blinding the Male Gaze Down Under:
A Review of Thuy On’s Turbulence
Thuy On’s poetry collection Turbulence was published by UWA Publishing in 2020. It is available for purchase here.
In the last few years, there has been a wealth of writing by women-of color coming out of Australia. From the geography straddling poems of Michelle Cahill’s oeuvre to the quiet protests on Aboriginality by Evelyn Araluen and Ellen Van Neerven, it has become the zeitgeist for the current Australian canon to write itself away from its largely male and white origins and to center itself on the other migrant perspectives that have made the Australian nation equally as fertile for creativity and art. Of these writers who belong to Australia but are of a non-Western migrant background, Thuy On’s work draws upon a unique background. On is first and foremost known as a book critic and has taken to publishing poetry late in her career. She has published scores of book reviews in literary journals, and she currently works as the Reviews Editor and Arts Writer for ArtsHub, an Australian national online arts organization. Thuy’s foray into poetry begins with her recently published debut, Turbulence, which came out early last year. While On is not as seasoned as some of her contemporaries, she dissembles the punctuations of an Anglocentric Australia with as much prowess as any acclaimed writer. From the exotification of people of color to the staid beliefs about what a woman must or must not do, Turbulence serves as an excellent example of what protest poetry can do if laid in the hands of an artist who values both the aesthetics and the politics of poetry.
The importance of sexuality—its urgency, the need for its freedom—is of great concern to the collection. Whether it comes to the annoying questions which come up thanks to online dating or the expectation of how an Asian woman must behave in bed, On is quick to dash any preconceived expectations about how a woman should behave. For example, when On baulks in the poem “Swipe Left,” “go scratch your boy band vinyl / your bae-babe-baby / bind up your geisha doll fetish / tight in a foot-sized box,” she is purposefully re-appropriating a certain form of eve-teasing to give it echo and sound. The image of the scratching of a vinyl following a collection of three words used to harass women causes the reader to immediately hear the vinyl scratching but with the sound of a sexual harasser hooting at a passerby. The sounds merge and layer to create another sound, the cacophony of two cacophonies juxtaposed. Sarcastically mentioning “geisha” and then demanding the listener to throw it away into a box is a note to the reader that she wants to vanquish the stereotype of Asian women from the perspective of the white gaze. On is in power, in charge of herself, and in control of how she wants to be read, and she drives her point further at the start of her next stanza:
an Oriental tease?
no not me.
There is a purpose to her lack of punctuation and capitalization. On often likes to use poetry to dis-center the syntaxes of English so that her space as a person of color from a non-English historical perspective can properly stand. In this poem in particular, the forwardness of the “no not me” serves to show the quickness with which On rejects the place that she, in Western society, is forced to take. She doesn’t need to give a long-winded answer to justify herself; a short punch of three words gets to the point, and expresses herself.
A better example of said style can be found in the beginning stanzas of the poem, “Whirling dervish.”
To colour inside the lines
I have to
coffee poetry cupcakes sex
to recall the muscle memory
of non-calamity.
The use of line breaks here is purposeful. The second stanza is not used to start a new point but to link back into the first one. This creates a double reading to the first stanza. If one reads the first stanza alone, one gets a sense that On has to set about a certain schedule of behaviors “to colour inside of the lines,” i.e. in order to fit in and function routinely. If one however starts the reading at “I have to,” one realizes how important these behaviors are—not necessarily to On’s functioning but to be one with “non-calamity,” to be able to find peace despite her sense of being.
The list of the third line also plays a particular role. Much akin to the Sufi dance of the dervish, On italicizes and lists four words in what appears to be a fragment of nouns. The particularities of the punctuation and its lack of organization are meant to draw us to something else. “Coffee poetry cupcakes sex” are listed at random because On is attempting to be honest. She could have used the verb forms of some of these words but “writing poetry” or “baking cupcakes” is too round-about compared to saying simply what she likes. The use of all four at once gives the sense that they are functioning like their own compound verb, an assortment of things that On must do at once for the sake of her own meaning, and by calling attention to her creation using italics, she is allowing the impact of her lines not to be at the end or at the beginning of her stanza, but at the very center, where the reader often skims.
Conversely, the poem “Verb” takes advantage of On’s sense of disconnect with the English language in order to drive home the point of culture’s hidden abuses.
You came at me
knife and fork in your eyes
I was curled like a comma
but there were no pauses
between us
no space at all
In this poem, language is both the aggressor and the dispossessed. The alliteration between “curl” and “comma” not only reminds the reader of a comma’s almost intrinsically defensive state, it puts the reader into a similar position of one under attack with a sense of suffocation that occurs as one is toppled by another. The reader is not only being buried under broken lines; the reader is forced to feel the discomfort of violation—as if the fragmented sentences were as much victim as interlocutor.
Whiteness is as much an aggressor as maleness in On’s poetry. She tasks herself with assaulting the word “white” and the imagery associated with it. Sometimes the reference to whiteness comes from the assimilative aspects of it, like in the poem “Shapeshifter” in which On denigrates constantly having to change one’s cultural behaviors to fit into a Western country: “to banish your demons and whitewash your soul.” In the poem “Solid White Lines,” the whiteness involves the inability to think in gray, to have to see individuals in simplified ways; On complains to an imaginary listener that ‘all you want is a life of solid white lines.” In the poem “Grim(m),” the whiteness is both a color and personality trait. On represents an abstracted individual as a hideous folk creature who “shrivels when the winter sun blinds,” whose breath is stilled “by the chill of appraising me,” and who lives off of the savior complex of protecting the narrator “in the whiteness of day.” With the staccato stutters of On’s fragments, one gets the sense that On is launching a tirade against a certain experience—to be defined by whiteness and the way that it attempts to define her rather than to be seen on her own terms. On is tired of the assumption that she needs to be saved, and it is whiteness—whether the color, or the assumptions of goodness and pureness behind it—that must do the saving, and this point is hammered home by the end of this poem in which On summons her private protest with a sense of diffidence.
you become shadow
and my head bows
too heavy for the stem that holds it.
As the world flitters and fumbles, we turn to certain words to describe frenzy, disorder, disorientation. Turbulence, to be stuck in the air, to be tottered around, and yet to be rooted. While the barriers between the human body and the outside world prevent the full frenzy of being one with the air, Turbulence is a noble attempt at dissolving the friction between body and language. The poems glide as much as they rattle, the poems stab as much as they float. The poems are purposeful in their hyperventilation. In creating poems that do not attempt to appease or rectify this distance but to very much lash out against it, On is creating a space to render the felt experience of Otherization. She is giving the many women who have faced these experiences a chance to breathe.
Kiran Bhat is an Indian-American author, traveler, and polyglot. He is known as the author of we of the forsaken world… and has published books in five different languages. His writing has been published in journals such as The Kenyon Review, The Southern Humanities Review, 3:AM Magazine, The Chakkar, and many other places. You can follow him on Twitter and Facebook @WeltgeistKiran.