–By J.S. Porter
for Karen Wisdom
The name pulled me in. It’s a poem in itself. I didn’t know how to spell it or say it. Mystery. Strangeness.
And can she ever write.
I knew her poetry before I acquainted myself with her prose. Small volumes put out by Pedlar Press in Newfoundland had more space than print, more non-ink than ink, as if they were ancient Buddhist scrolls or linked haiku. You can breathe between the words and take a long breath between the lines. Words and lines suggest more than they say
If you look on poetry as an exercise in panning for gold, separating the genuine from the fake, then the pan seems unnecessary in Thammavongsa’s case. There is only gold.
THE HEART,
the real
heart,
is ugly
Nothing
here
can break,
or be broken
And nothing
can come
from here
but blood
“Heart” is an exploration of the multiple meanings of the word heart. There is the physical bodily organ that pumps blood –it can’t break or be broken– and there is the metaphoric heart, the emotional heart, that can always break and be broken.
The physical heart is ugly, the speaker says, and by extension the emotional heart is beautiful. What breaks and can be broken is beautiful—think about that—and what can’t break or be broken is ugly. All the physical heart is good for is blood, simultaneously an embodiment of life and death. When the blood flows you live, when it stops flowing you die.
You could write a small tract on this one little poem from Found. (Small Arguments and Light are equally airy and spacious. Her more recent poetry in Cluster is more conventionally laid out. It seems cluttered with words as opposed to being shorn of them.)
Born in the Lao refugee camp in Nong Khai, Thailand, in 1978, Souvankham Thammavongsa was raised and educated in Toronto. As well as being a gifted voice in poetry, she is an accomplished writer of fiction. Her debut collection of short stories, How to Pronounce Knife, won the Giller Prize in 2020.
In the story “How to Pronounce Knife,” which is also the title of the book, a school child from Laos is gently reprimanded by a teacher for failing to recognize that the word knife cradles a silent k. In Lao, generally what you see you say. The father says of course you pronounce the k in knife (“kahneyff”).
The father acknowledges that “his friends, who were educated and had great jobs in Laos, now found themselves picking worms or being managed by pimple-faced teenagers,” but implies that they still have authority at home. Alas, however, their dexterity in the old language doesn’t carry through to the new language’s nuances and subtleties.
The argumentative girl gets into trouble because she insists on pronouncing the word knife the way her father taught her – with the k pronounced. At supper, the father seems “small and shrunken” to the daughter. She wonders what else he doesn’t know, what else she will have to learn on her own.
Souvankham Thammavongsa is contending for another Giller this year for a novel called Pick a Colour (good on her for keeping the Canadian u in colour). Her debut novel about a boxer-turned-manicurist, published by Knopf Canada, is on the shortlist. The jury praises the Toronto author’s “inimitable style, crackling wit and profound confidence.”
Thammavongsa has become a master of the immigrant story, particularly the south-east Asian story of immigrants trying to make a living and a life in North America. The award winner will be declared on November 17th of this year.
I’m rooting for Souvankham Thammavongsa, the Toronto writer with the beautiful name.
