By Laura Jane Lee

Bright Fear
Mary Jean Chan
Faber & Faber (2023) / 72 pages / SGD 23.76

Mary Jean Chan's second Faber collection, Bright Fear, follows hot on the heels of their highly acclaimed debut Flèche, the winner of the 2019 Costa Book Award for Poetry. Continuing the thread of several similar themes – queerness, race, language, mother – Bright Fear nevertheless offers a subtle stylistic turn: what Flèche rendered as hard and impenetrable has here crystallised into a clear, bright thing; clarity almost to the point of being lacunose, these spaces becoming vessels Chan artfully fills with light – both textual texture and motif. To this they write in 'Ars Poetica (XIII)':

I am asked why my poems are so clear. I'll confess:
it's what happens when you want to be understood.

It becomes evident, then, that for much of Bright Fear, the central poetic conceit is linguistic. Sometimes, the poem's title declares it – 'In the Beginning Was the Word', with its direct biblical reference, accords language divine sway and potency over the self. "Taught to revere a language from the age of six" "for twelve years", Chan enters the poem on linguistic terms by interrogating the normalised linguistic hierarchy of a mission school education in formative years, the thread of thought sustained till the rhetorical question where the poem turns:

Later, I fell in love
with English of my own accord. Or did I? Love, when socially accepted,
becomes habit.

In realising that language and love are both subject to policing and standards of social acceptability, the speaker becomes conscious of their efforts to translate the self, and the resultant loneliness. Their fraught relationship with English vacillates between the softness of "the best kind of evening light" – one of the many invocations in the collection of the light motif – and a harder "white shield", which evokes the blade-wielding fencer of Flèche.

Chan takes a similar approach in "imperfection's school". Set likewise to the backdrop of a school, the poem would take on meanings of a vastly different dimension if the reader understood the title to be an oblique inversion of the name of Chan's alma mater – coincidentally also my own – the Chinese name of which means "outstanding". Read thus, the poem lends itself to the interpretive possibility of unlearning the insularity and repression of prescribed perfection in environments which deny the existence of depression and equate dyslexia to being "slow" or "lazy". The speaker in adulthood relearns in "imperfection's school" that there are a myriad possible and equally valid ways of existence in this world. Crucially, the poem relates this, too, in inverse – starting with the present in the first stanza and moving into the past in the second, before folding in on itself as it returns to a series of statements in the present tense ("depression / does not / exist / in families / like ours / trust / the doctor / if he is / your father"). This structure is further highlighted by the poem's form, which calls to mind the double-helix structure of a DNA molecule – one wonders if this speaks to the genetic basis of neurodivergent conditions such as dyslexia and depression, which may be inherent in nature.

But Chan's mastery of form truly comes to the fore in 'Sestina', which aside from the title did not even register as a sestina upon the initial reading. There is a fine line between repetition which is incantatory, and repetition which is prolix – Chan's rendering of the sestina as a prose poem is remarkably deft in that it presents itself as neither. The speaker of the poem, multilingual, confronts questions about their "impeccable English", considers "(eating) a lychee without… going / into too much detail about exotic fruit". Chan once told me "never (to) put a mango (or a lychee) in a poem if it's not doing something" – one of the caveats of writing, as Chan does, as a BAME (the catchall UK term for Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic) writer in Anglophone centres of literary production, "historically white space(s)". The difficult reality for the self-aware speaker, then, is one of perpetually living in translation, in the liminal space between languages; and indeed, the poet-speaker's migration itself can be understood as translation too: to translate a mathematical function on a graph is to move it around the plane. So the triumph of the poem is perhaps its resolute declaration: "Multilingual mouths are Chinese."

The issue of multilingualism and translation is addressed head-on in one of the final few poems of the collection, 'The Translator', as Chan concludes the linguistic theme running through Bright Fear. The speaker declares, "I am a translator", in that they assume the role of mediating between their mother and their partner; yet calling to mind John Berger's view on translation as a triangular rather than binary affair. He writes in his 2014 Guardian article 'Writing is an off-shoot of something deeper' that:

…true translation is not a binary affair between two languages but a triangular affair. The third point of the triangle being what lay behind the words of the original text before it was written. True translation demands a return to the pre-verbal. One reads and rereads the words of the original text in order to penetrate through them to reach, to touch, the vision or experience that prompted them. One then gathers up what one has found there and takes this quivering almost wordless "thing" and places it behind the language it needs to be translated into. And now the principal task is to persuade the host language to take in and welcome the "thing" that is waiting to be articulated.

It is with such a view of translation that Chan's poem is truly animated. If one considers Berger's view further, of "a spoken language (as) a body, a living creature", and that the speaker is translating from their mother tongue – their mother's tongue – to English, the multilingual translator "refusing soil / and other forms of burial" becomes more than a poetic statement: it is a linguistic one.

And so, perhaps for the entirety of Bright Fear: it is as much a statement about poetry as it is a statement about language. That being said, it is but one of many ways into the collection which readers may consider. Ultimately, the true mark of Chan's craft is its expanse: there are many paths the reader may take into their work, and much the reader may take away from it.

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