Jenny Xie's "The Rupture Tense"
By Neha Mulay
Jenny Xie’s The Rupture Tense begins with a quote by Walter Benjamin that ruminates on the nature of the photograph and its perceiver—“No matter how artful the photographer, no matter how carefully posed his subject, the beholder feels an irresistible urge to search such a picture for the tiny spark of contingency…”
The Rupture Tense is poised at this moment of contingency, arching its way into remembrance yet atrophying around a somewhat habitual, circuitous mode of forgetting amidst the gaps created by erasure.
“By negative space, by forgetting’s lining,” we enter Xie’s plaintive world in which the “stone,” turned over, reveals the weighted legacy of the Chinese Cultural Revolution. The first section of Xie’s book, in particular, addresses the violence of suppression and the state’s regimented silence, weaving them into poems that enlarge and swell within language as an approximation of an untenable dissolution.
The first section of the book, “Controlled Exposure,” wrenches its way through the legacy of Li Zhensheng, a photographer who documented the events of Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution. The poems move between Zhensheng’s fervor for photography, the state’s propaganda machine, and the very functions of Zhensheng’s lens and the fractured nuances of its capture.
Xie considers staged performance as it blends into the enhanced depiction of sanctioned action. The poem notes, “in Li’s photographs, the spectators are simultaneously the actors.” It is this very precise, unnerving depth that forms the hallmark of Xie’s collection.
The first section of the book is punctuated by a series of “Red Puncta” poems that situate us within the very biological scape of opening, which, for Xie, is also the very site of rupture. A traversed reality exits in mango replicas, crowds assemble to envisage the relics of class conflict, and even the “loudest metaphors” are inadequate for remembrance.
The titular poem of the collection, “The Rupture Tense,” sprawls across numerous pages, commencing with a self-conscious return that considers the schemata of origin as it seeps into the heel of a traced, “transpacific” dislocation that seeps within and beyond borders. The poem is dedicated to Xie’s family in Anhui, China, and it reflects on Xie’s return to her country of origin.
Yet, as Xie notes, “The descent is an occasion / for utterance.” The ledgers and writings of the past may be tenuous as shaky ground, but, as Xie notes, moving through these melded liminalities creates a precipitous breath of possible speech.
In Xie’s The Rupture Tense, a gossamer language, stemming from a fissured temporality, questions the very trajectory of sight—in this collection, an astute awareness of the gyrating, navigated chasm of vehicular language articulates the seemingly inestimable and considers the dual parameters of “recognition” and “resistance” as well as a fraught homecoming.
Interactions with cousins and relatives are depicted with gestures of urgency, self-consciously nostalgic yet making space for the profound among with dislocated and the “mercenary.” The descriptions of Shanghai are disorienting; as tender as they are unnerving—the city is a map of an imprinted, imagistic remembering, and the “Evening sprouts / electric umbilical cords.”
Xie’s collection elucidates the tenor of loss, not just its pitch but also its circumventions; the pained, half-recognition of an estranged homeland, felt through the intricacies of an illusory knowing, extricated and opened, felt pervasively as its own dimension—in Xie’s poems, there is the self that returns and the self that cannot quite grasp departure in the first place.
So, in Xie’s work, the language sticks, and it germinates uncomfortably within the skin—as Srikanth Reddy aptly notes, “Xie ingeniously leverages Western prosody” as she etches through the boundaries perpetuated by continuous dualism and its contorted, experiential thrums.
The ingenuity of Xie’s collection lies in its kernels of a codified understanding, its staunch awareness of the permutations of being, and the escalated dislocation of severed, phantom memorabilia. And yet, even as these poems delve into Marianne Hirsch’s concept of “post-memory,” they also engage in a distant rendering, a leakage into the future, and a radical juncture of poetic imagining —in “Alternate Endings,” a poem is described as “Anything that continues / Anything can contain you.”
The tense and its somewhat illegitimate verse collude in considering a renewed rendering that is envisaged through a recurrent distance—latitudes of sound, configuration, landscape, distance, time, and the vial of language that goes on spilling through the portions of the sequestered heart.
In “Present Continuous,” the speaker expresses the devastation of containment—“Truth is, I’m just two brushstrokes—no more, no lesser.” And yet, as the collection demonstrates, in its elevated, reaching devastation, the self is always in voracious transit, heralded with transmissions and memory, cataloging and cobbling through the pervasive ligaments of distance.
For Xie, selfhood is a hook that refuses to catch, a question posed within a rapid well of loss. Amidst retention and erasure, Xie’s collection configures its own capacity for considering all manner of dissolutions, the trajectories endured by the body, the space created by the twists of language, and the eternity held within the collapsing measure of the tense. Amidst stillness and reduction, The Rupture Tense always reaches, not towards, but further, sharply defined in its analysis yet cognizant of the perennial sojourn that arises between memory and recollection.
As Xie writes in “Distance Sickness,” “Where to locate you in the interminable station?” Moving between the modalities of “calligraphy ink” and images, the entrenchment of memory and experience calcifies into “something altogether different.”