A Body Electric and Grieving: Tess Liem’s Obits
& I bet
I’m taking a risk
when I don’t know the dead.
—Tess Liem, Obits.
we have to pray for their demise with spiked hands,
with all the brilliant silences,
to understand the whole language,
the whole immaculate language of the ravaged world
—Dionne Brand, Inventory
My memories of my dad from when I was growing up are of him renovating, remodelling, and rewiring the houses we lived in. He’s working feverishly, his quick hands careful on the wires: fishing, weaving, cutting, stripping, fishing, weaving. A moving record of a life—a fractured, unknown family history: a body electric and grieving. Growing up without parents, without vital connective tissue. Like the circuitry of this old house, his grief has many entrances and exits. Although he would never say it, grief resonates in the interstices of his work: in a brow swept, roughed hands, a curse to the rain gods, a nod back. To the unknowing eye, this is just work. To mine, I see his griefwork.
The work we do to mourn: using our hands as tools, we write, we rewire, we recalibrate. Or at least we try. But it can be difficult work, the work of grieving, especially when the subject of your mourning is unknown or strange.
“How do you know / yourself when / you don’t know / your family?” Tess Liem asks in her haunting debut collection Obits.—a lingering, hauntingly beautiful work that explores the contact point between personal and collective trauma. Hers is an unbelievably accomplished debut and an exemplary collection of what might be called poetic griefwork—a process of writing through death and mourning that both performs and questions the labour of grief. On its face, the work bears the trademarks of elegy—Liem laments the death of her aunt alongside the countless deaths of people she doesn’t know: mass shooting victims, missing and murdered women, and dead fictional characters converge in her lines. But under Liem’s poetic hand, these words of mourning move beyond elegy to delineate the contours of grief as an electric space where bodies, memory, and the world collide. In her work, death is a vibrant yet troubled cultural connection point, and she holds death and mourning up to an impressive myriad of lights: the city, literary history, familial history, metaphor, labour, failure. She trades elegy’s archetypal consolation for a brooding questioning of collective complacency and communal witnessing. She moves deftly between the collective and the personal, writing trauma and mourning through a familial lens and bringing the collection full circle as a form of griefwork informed by her mixed-race queer identity.
As Liem understands, you don’t come to a knife fight with rocks. You come with fragments, shards.
The opening poem, “Dead Theories,” introduces Liem’s metaphysical beef with grief and its quantifiable “sums.” Here and throughout the collection, Liem cautiously interrogates the efficacy and purpose of both cultural and personal accounting for the dead—especially for those we don’t know but who come onto our subway screens and car radios as second-hand statistics:
After the screens above the metro platform reported forty-nine dead in Orlando, someone told me a man with platinum hair & his own TV show broke down crying reading their names What did that do.
I write names of missing & murdered women in a notebook. I set up alerts. I add up. Each day a new sum. What does that do is the same as asking What doesn’t that do.
I doubt they want to be poems.
There is an exhausted melancholy that haunts these poems and is evidenced here by the transformation of questions into statements with a period. Liem queries the “use value” of mourning, whether it be via the media or our own personal reflection, and her query is felt in the form of her poems: in many poems her lines are centre-justified, some left, some right, some left adrift, wandering. She is searching: for moorings, for meaning, for a way of doing.
In Liem’s work, this choir of collective and personal grief resounds, yet she is a self-conscious conductor of its music. She is anxious about authorship of these stories; she feels compelled to write about the dead, but grapples with the labour of doing so. As she says in a recent interview, “I was concerned that in writing poems for or about the dead I would turn them into objects or tropes in service of my own feelings of loss or loneliness … If a metaphor identifies how one thing is like another, I was interested in how certain things were not like anything else. I was interested … in quarrelling with metaphor.” As Liem understands, you don’t come to a knife fight with rocks. You come with fragments, shards. Throughout Obits., she uses repetition and fragment to quarrel with metaphor in attempts not to cohere, but to make strange, to decidedly unfit things together.
Specifically, Liem’s speaker quarrels with the meaning of “obit”—the abbreviation of “obituary” traditionally used in newspapers to denote the section of biographies for local residents who have died. Over the course of 11 poems entitled “Obit.” that are scattered throughout the collection’s four sections, Liem queries the very definition of an “obit” by building a mosaic of disparate fragments to the point where our understanding of the obit is ob(l)iterated:
Obit. A body, a testimony, a story told in code.
Obit., a body, the one they lost in a blackout. Neon light bent into the shape of a girl.
Obit., a body, a river to follow, or a feminist theory popularized in the 1980s.
Obit., a body, an omission, a whisper.
Obit., a body, an art that can harm.
Liem’s discomfort with metaphor registers in the list-like quality of these iterations; here, each “obit” begins with “a body,” but then she breaks down the concept along theoretical, legal, and aesthetic lines so it no longer bears resemblance. And in another suite of attempts to find the “right” expression of an obit, each poem builds off and revises the failed fragment of the previous, ultimately ending in a list of crossed-out attempts: “Memorial / Proof / Story / News / Poem / Theory / Data / Finding.” In place of trying to find imaginative likenesses, to impose a generalized, one-size-fits-all “official” narrative of loss, Liem instead opts for the poetics of defamiliarization, of fragmentation, of things being “not like anything else.”
As in Dionne Brand’s work—most notably in Inventory and her most recent work, The Blue Clerk—the poet becomes a clerk whose “job” it is to record, observe, attend to, and collect the facts. “I have nothing soothing to tell you,” Brand writes. “That is not my job. My job is to revise and revise this bristling list, hourly.” Liem takes this “job” of revising her lists just as seriously; in these notebook scrawlings, she creates a statistical inventory of the dead and a poetic inventory of grief, and attempts to put the two into conversation. She maps the limitations and momentary liberations of the language we have available for grief, and what results is a self-conscious “Aesthetic distance”:
As a witness to my distance
because I don’t just see the images as documents of atrocity,
I write a lyric of witness
I also see them as aesthetic;
Which is a lyric of distance
& that doesn’t sit easily
Which is a lyric of uneasiness
with the other way of seeing them.
[…]
Lyric, you know, some days that’s all there is
& look how the poet – how I circle back on myself
continually
What to make of this sadness!
What does it do!
We witness the poet in suspension: the left and right justified lines reflect the author quarrelling with herself—or shall I say, finishing her own sentences, ensuring a balance of view. The visual and tonal effect of these lines is architectural, with the left side speaking with surety about the lyric the author is writing while the right quickly qualifies these pronouncements, making them unsure and tentative. Some days, all there is, is lyric. A circling back. A witnessing, using whatever words are available to you in the moment. Liem knows she’s “taking a risk” not knowing the dead, and it’s this self-conscious and self-aware author position that separates her griefwork from traditional masculine elegies that claim to know the dead. Unlike the male writers she critiques, such as Shakespeare and Baudelaire, Liem does not write comfortably about the dead; rather, she confronts her own limitations in writing, and in so doing, she opens a collective, cathartic space for those of us who are not sure what to do with all the worldly trauma we are dealt, daily. This act of “listing” the fragmented meanings of obit is the score of our collective—albeit uneven and disparate—witnessing.
... Obits. attempts to chart the geography of grief—to hunt out its interstices, corners, streets.
And yet, despite her discomfort in writing about and for the dead, Liem expresses a relentless need to do something. It’s not work that comes easily, especially when those we’ve lost have nothing but reported death toll numbers to mark their passing. Poetry, however, seems an apt medium by which to remember the dead, to process whatever fragments we have to re-member: M. NourbeSe Philip’s Zong!, Dionne Brand’s Inventory, Claudia Rankine’s Citizen, and Juliana Spahr’s this connection of everyone with lungs come to mind as just a few recent examples. These works, like Obits., use the poetic unit of the fragment to unearth ancestral histories—our own and those of others—and reanimate them in the present moment. Obits. even more explicitly queries whether poetry can mourn or grieve for the dead—or, more importantly, whether it should. The poet searches, metapoetically, for a bodily labour with which she can create purposefully, beautifully, amidst a trauma-saturated world that can make one feel helpless. In “My body in three movements (one),” she expresses her desire for active, hands-on creation: “I thought it out, decided to become / an electrician,” she writes, longing to “drop Shakespeare, stop writing, & learn / how to do something useful with my hands.” I too have always been jealous of my dad’s work as an electrician—the practicality of it, the way it produces something useful, the way it responds to problems with tangible solutions. Similarly, Liem craves action, response-ability. She is also keenly aware of the ways in which traditional male labour has historically overshadowed female labour, and she thus desires active response as queer resistance: “I’ll start a queer construction company / to advocate for our rights […] I am trying to figure out a way / to want to be in the world.” Liem covets skilled labour while also writing through this desire, which is also creative and productive. Her imagined “body all wired, lit & bending” not only embodies resistance to the ignorance of historical male writers and theorists, but provides an outlet for her creative energy and a way of signalling the female, queer, labouring body responding to the world.
Liem seeks response, but she also interrogates the ways in which we have been conditioned to remain passive, unaffected, and desensitized to death. It can be said that Obits. attempts to chart the geography of grief—to hunt out its interstices, corners, streets. To mark its sites of complacency, its moments of contact and connection. In her work, the city—and more specifically, its subterranean veins, the subway—becomes a trope of grief, a place of complicity, and a well-attended ceremony of collective witnessing. Down there, the “air is bad with obits”: from the strangely calm announcements of unauthorized persons at track level to the while-you-wait roll call of the endless tragedy that trails across the news screens, the subway is a space of liminal being and non-being, filled with the white noise of distant death and the ever present danger of the hurtling metal tube. As Liem writes:
I am away from myself for as long as it takes to get down to the metro platform
where all the people are waiting, where we gather every day
as if it is no big deal to be together, where I only look up to look at a screen
at the time of the next train & news about some other place where the air is bad with obits.
that will not be written up.
We all know the drill: half-awake and undercaffeinated, we shuffle down the subway stairs like cattle to await our aluminum chariot that rushes us toward our day. Liem captures this underground space in her collection as a vital contact zone between the living and the dead. The subway is a radical space of inbetweenity—literally, as the subway is a point along a journey—but also an inbetweenity of consciousness, floating about our day, needing to get where we’re going while being continuously pelted with an onslaught of past, present, and future suffering. “Stand back from the yellow line,” bellows the PA system. But it doesn’t need to. We’ve all heard the stories. Its threat is luminous enough, constant. For Liem, the yellow strip denotes the presence of a gap and a dividing line:
Cruddy yellow lines on either side A gap
You won’t trespass Sway your edges […]
Let yourself be swayed One way or the other
Stand on the cautious yellow
Stare down the tunnel & shrug
In form and content, Liem captures the staccato awkwardness, and also the aggregated collectivity, the shared, yet momentary, social and bodily space that the subway produces. Glancing up at the screens—the endless roll call of trauma—or contemplating the threat of the yellow line that brings us all closer in communion with death, often our response is to “stare down the tunnel & shrug.”
Death, the (dis)comforting anonymity of it, the impossibility of accounting for it, pervades these gaps and troubles these lines into unsure fragments. Liem meditates on those obits “that will not be written up,” and attempts an accounting of the unaccounted using the space of the page as an unmarked grave. As she writes through grief in our modern world, she confronts the futility of attempting to make sense of de-sense-itized death:
In some moment of conceptual energy
I attempt an inventory
49 6 14
9 1,000+
A wish to be meticulous
Having failed, I call the numbers a poem
Again, a searching: the speaker turns over the dirt of the page’s field looking for roots, something to signal life. She experiments with space and language’s inability to express such grief and trauma. This ambivalent dance of hopefulness and despair makes Liem’s voice incredibly powerful. Her self-aware poetic is a divining rod of cultural ennui and unrest. She quarrels with her desire to quantify the dead, to account for them—and what results is a beautiful failure and a poem.
Obits. is a collection of others and othering, threaded together with trauma. She writes probingly of the others we encounter on the subway platform and on its screens, together receiving the world’s death. But she also explores the othering gaze upon her queer, mixed-race body. Liem repeatedly “circles back on herself” throughout the collection to consider the ways in which her own relationship to trauma and racism complicates her view of death and mourning. In her attempts to quarrel with metaphor and avoid generalizing the experience of the dead, and of grief and mourning, Liem threads together the ways in which western culture and media have generalized other aspects of being in the world, including queer sexuality and race. The second section of Obits. entitled “Ibu, saudara, isteri” signals Liem’s deep dive into her Indonesian heritage. In a beautifully intricate series of two poems entitled “Exact Fraction,” Liem’s work shines in its vulnerability. In third-person perspective—the gaze that others her—she contemplates the queerness of her “mixed / race / face”:
She is off-white, right? Off-white, exactly right. […]
Each fraction takes space. Each fraction takes too much
space. She takes place in too many spaces. She is
half. She is an exact fraction. An excellent
fraction. Each half exactly half. Exactly.
She numerates, she denominates,
she divides, she
fractures
exactly.
Here, as in the “Obit” series, Liem uses the deconstructive powers of poetry to break down and complicate the concept of her own racial identity. The form of this poem—with the lines gradually reducing into “exactly”—mimics the ways in which her mixed race queer body is deduced, reduced, spoken for. However, these fractures and fractions that “other” her also gild her with self-knowledge. In another poem in the same section, she pieces together oral fragments of Indonesian into meagre, imperfect, and yet formative mouthfuls of linguistic inheritance: “My own oral tradition began in the kitchen … satay, batwan / bakwan, gato gato / gado gado / sambal olek … if we never named / anything we ate / I wouldn’t have a language to look for.” Liem’s childhood spent cooking with her father—like my childhood spent with my father, among wires—creates a living record of connectivity among fragments, missing histories, pages torn out.
In Obits., Liem gives us a gorgeous example of the self-conscious, vulnerable, brooding underbelly of poetic creation. Through her self-conscious authorial gaze, we see a moving portrait of grief as vibrant, elusive, and resistant to precise definition. As a debut collection, Liem’s Obits. shines brightly—hers is an electric body of work, a light rail of sparking connectivity, desire, and electric feeling in a world seemingly devoid of meaningful connection with the dead or the living. This resounding “lyric of witness,” as Liem puts it, calls to us in our personal and collective responsibility to acknowledge and scrutinize the narrative of death, trauma, and history we passively digest. Her work jolts us tenderly, unsoothingly, awake.
