Contemporary Poetry

dialects, idiolects and multilingual poetries 191

domesticity. While the child recognises that wrens are birds, and
yarn is knitting material, the translation becomes magically alive
when the speaker comments that ‘wrens are soft as yarn / my
mother made birds out of yarn’ (p. 18 ). It is in these small micro-
narratives that family histories become tangible. Moreover, the
persimmon is identifi ed by his mother in spiritual and nurtur-
ing terms since ‘every persimmon has a sun / inside, something
golden, glowing, / warm as my face’ (p. 18 ). Lee proposes that the
initial ‘strangeness’ of English language helped his writing: ‘I can’t
tell if my being Chinese is an advantage or not, but I can’t imagine
anything else except writing as an outsider.’ He adds that: ‘It’s
bracing to be reminded [that] we’re all guests in the language, any
language’.^54 Usefully in this context, poet Lyn Hejinian’s refl ection
on the Greek word xenos – suggestive of foreigner or stranger –
creates a meditation upon the fi gure of the border as a point of both
reciprocity and differentiation. Hejinian suggests that encounters
with difference create a site of ‘contradiction and confl uence’ since
‘the stranger it names is both guest and host... The guest / host
relationship is one of identity as much as it is of reciprocity’.^55 For
Mikhail Bakhtin, the meeting of the outsider with the dominant
culture necessitates dialogue and in many ways a sense of cultural
translation and examination:

In the realm of culture, outsidedness is a most powerful factor

in understanding. It is only in the eyes of another culture

that foreign culture reveals itself fully and profoundly... A

meaning only reveals its depths once it has encountered and

come into contact with another, foreign meaning: they engage

in a kind of dialogue, which surmounts the closedness and

one-sidedness of these particular meanings, these cultures.

We raise new questions for a foreign culture, ones that it did

not raise itself; we seek answers to our own questions in it;

and the foreign culture responds to us by revealing to us its

new aspects and new semantic depths.^56

At the close of the poem Lee presents us with the immigrant’s
perspective of cultural memory. The poem is infused with indica-
tions of amnesia and its close affi liation to acts of memorialisation.