Ocean
Ocean arrives. His form is small, slight, and unassuming – somebody you wouldn’t notice slip into the room during a lecture. He sits on the floor at his own poetry event and listens. After a short introduction, he rises and makes eye contact with the audience: professors, adjuncts, and undergrads alike, all crammed into the small workshop room to receive his brilliance. The light catches on his dangling earring and I am drawn to his jade necklace and stylish bowl cut.
Then he speaks.
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I think Ocean is a very good name for someone whose words make you feel like you’re underwater, resurfacing in the breaks between the spell he casts on you. There is a weight to each fragile intonation that paradoxically lifts you into a sense of rapture. The whole room is left breathless in its wake.
In one of the pauses between his poems, Ocean quips that he’s bad at small talk, but we all laugh on cue. He is nailing the comedic timing every time.
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My mother told me, “Be careful – you’re already Vietnamese!”
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Ocean understands lineage. He writes to intersect the aspects of the spoken tradition, connecting the dots from Western literary giants like Homer and Dante to the facets of his own identity: Vietnamese, refugee, queer, dyslexic. He forms his own mythology from the ashes of a long-forgotten phoenix.
In middle school, I fell in love with Shakespeare. In college, I fell in love with Dante. There is something so compelling to me about poetry as a narrative mode, like somehow poetry can convey my thoughts better than prose, a notion that seems absurd because we don’t think in sonnet or haiku. But the thing is, we don’t think in sentences either.
Think about how we think. We think in phrases and images and fragmented melodies, a disparate cloud of sensations and emotions: a song with the lyrics garbled, a conviction that more cats die than are born, an anxiety that feels like coffee jitters in your leg. A monologue that begins with Out, out brief candle, but you can’t seem to say for sure whether life’s a poor player that struts and frets all his time upon the stage or merely an hour of it.
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O’hara. And Baldwin – you should listen to Baldwin speak. Morgan Parker, Claudia Rankine. I am interested in hybrid texts.
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Jesus couldn’t have walked on water because surface tension and buoyancy say it isn’t possible. Virgil, Aristotle, and Plato lived virtuous lives, but they still ended up in Hell’s Limbo for eternity because they valued reason over faith.
Thus no miracle = no faith = no salvation.
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As a person of color, there is a literary publication pressure to exploit your background and to fall on cliches. That does not help anyone. It is important to write what is true to you.
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In our workshop about Power, Privilege, and Oppression for Peer Health Exchange, we are reminded that experience is not universal. For example, just because you’re a middle-class male and somebody else happens to be middle-class and male doesn’t mean you know everything about them. Yet there is an intersection of experience – certain cultural uprisings that pertain to your demographic, the food you eat, the way you were raised, and perhaps most importantly, how others view you.
I have never met a yellow Asian-American who couldn’t give me a ranking of bubble tea places, from best to worst.
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My parent say “torch” instead of “flashlight,” a remnant of the British colonial education system that flows in their veins as Burmese subjects. Electricity defined by fire. Modernity defined by antiquity.
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In high school, one of my best friends was Thai. We got along because people were always misnaming the Southeast Asian country our parents were from. (Malaysia? No. Vietnam? No.) He was on the swim team, but I noticed that he didn’t stick around with the other Asian guys on the team in the hallways. When I asked him why, he told me, “I don’t want to seem like I’m part of a yellow clique, you know?” I didn’t get it then but I do now.
The internal pressure to conform.
The external assumption of homogeneity that smothers your voice.
The us-versus-them mentality that develops in the rift.
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On a cold evening, a friend and I lined up at Dylan’s Candy Bar for a chance to meet Troye Sivan for his Blue Neighborhood album meet & greet. We were older than the rest of the people waiting, the typical teenage Youtube crowd. I didn’t care. How often do you get an Aussie singer to come to New York City, in reasonable distance from your local train station? So there we were, late but optimistic.
We never got to meet Troye, although we heard people at the front of the line yell in excitement when he approached the window to wave. We are disappointed but enter the store anyway to take pictures. Pics or it didn’t happen – pics so we can pretend it happened.
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Everyone performs on some level.
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Ocean intersperses witty one-liners against a flow of images – you recognize it’s a story but it’s simultaneously unlike any you’ve ever heard before and just like how you’ve felt your entire life. He talks about two rabbits in a bathtub of red, and I am transported to the morning the election results came out, my brother brushing his teeth with a mouth of foam as I ranted to him. How could this happen? Shouldn’t the White House be burning? Shouldn’t the sky be falling? Shouldn’t there be some external indication that something has gone terribly wrong?
My brother spits into the sink. Don’t be dramatic, he says.
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I mean – I write on paper, doesn’t that contribute to global warming?
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At the table, I see Drew’s back trembling before I hear his sniffles, quiet but loud in the reverent silence. His face is turned downwards as he takes off his glasses and wipes his eyes. He Gets It.
Does Ocean know? I want to yell. Does Ocean know that he is magic?
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When we read, we change words. Speech is a final manuscript.
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It’s easier for me to express my thoughts on paper because it feels safer. I can edit and mold the text like an oil painter, a cloth ready at hand to wipe away blemishes and start anew. To speak is to take words from a two-dimensional surface and to thrust them into a harsh reality without take-backs or do-overs. It is to speak something into existence. There is no space to clarify I meant to say this but I said that or I’m sorry that I can’t express this sentiment better or my voice is not good enough.
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Ron Pope sings like an angel, but he doesn’t know his grammar for shit. You wouldn’t say I was hoping that us might end up together, so why would you say you and me? I sing you and I over his crooning every time.
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Obsession is not sexy. It is not sexy to work on a short story or a poem for half a year.
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From my Notes app dated back to April 29, 2018 at 12:32 AM, constantly reworked as recently as yesterday:
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Thank you for being.
-Monica
The Junction Journal 