Many Lives In One
Stephanie Sy-Quia, Amnion
Granta, 128pp, £10.99, ISBN 9781783787746
reviewed by Ben Ray
A constantly shifting constellation of voices, Amnion travels through space and time at dizzying speed in a startlingly complex, dense, and personal exploration of identity and heritage. If one were forced to summarise this twisting kaleidoscope of a publication, it could be described roughly as Stephanie Sy-Quia’s scrapbook of memories, anecdotes, and reflections, charting her family’s history across continents on a journey of self-discovery — but, of course, this would hardly do justice to this multi-textual experience. From the beginning, the traditional lines between truth and fiction, past and present, reader and writer are blurred. We join Sy-Quia in a role somewhere between spectator and witness as she travels the impressive geographical span of the histories and personalities that make up her story: from the Philippines to Spain to California to France and then to Britain, via empire, war, exile, and love.
In this messy, sprawling family saga, identities and roles are often porous — and none more so than the ambiguous role of the readers themselves. Although never outright invited to be a part of the narrative and always kept at arm’s length as an observer, readers are nevertheless actively acknowledged throughout as a present member of the audience — with sideways comments seeming to break the fourth wall and invite the reader directly into a secret dialogue. ‘She had a pair of shoes to match every dress. . . / I know, because she tells me’. As readers, we have no choice but to be involved — and thus to invest in the story along with the poet.
Early in the book, there is a particularly innovative sequence comparing the poet’s parents’ journey to ‘the broken pieces of Elgin’s grand tour’, exploring the poet’s subsequent construction from a palimpsest of brutal histories: ‘I / have made / a cathedral for all my colonialisms’. This reflects the poet’s fraught relationship with national histories and subjugations that are inherent to the story and her efforts to build a new world from the various old ones. However, when the expression of these societal complexities meets the active nature of the reader, the conversation can sometimes jar, with the poet assuming certain cultural outlooks. The language can sometimes take a didactic and even patronising tone, telling readers that if we know of Douglas MacArthur we should also know of ‘Wake, Guam, Davao, Baguio’ — that we are ‘gummy in our ignorance of Guam’.
Sy-Quia’s often stark addressing of stereotypes can tease and provoke, challenging readers to push back and break out of the Westernised box into which we are placed: ‘Shall I entertain you with the fetishism of a foreign name?’ This puts the reader in an uncomfortable position — in a situation where everyone, including the reader, is acknowledged and invested in the actions on the page, where do we stand in such contentious issues? No one, not even the poet herself, is spared from these searching questions: Sy-Quia often admits to her perception of the world being challenged and reshaped, with her visit to Indonesia disputing her sense of identity. Of her description of a monsoon, unable to ‘be’ in the space: ‘I kicked myself for noting it Conradian’.
Of the many interweaving themes within Amnion, love is always present in its many forms — not just love of family, but also of words. Language, in all its shifting shapes and dimensions, is ever-present and key to shaping the poet’s experience of the world. It is certainly a joy to see language through Sy-Quia’s eyes: ‘French and English were perpendiculars’. Inevitably, even this space is geographical and politicised: ‘England was unknown to me then. / Consequently, my English is unrooted’. Language permeates everything as a rare constant in a fluctuating world for the poet, a voice in its own right appearing with whole lines in German, French and Filipino, unpacking old English kennings in a choir of sounds.
Sy-Quia’s relationship with language is an intense and fervent one, occasionally racing ahead and leaving the reader behind on heady linguistic flights packed with dense, charged vocabularies and niche references: ‘And then I was Petrarch in Avignon’. The word ‘clerestory’ is used twice in the first forty pages. Certainly, Sy-Quia walks the fragile line between linguistic feasting and gluttony, prompting this reviewer to frequently reach for Google: ‘The orthogonals of your bodies become / panathenaic in a frieze of forms’. However, it is worth it for the glorious moments when the language fully pays off and shines with brilliance, seen most clearly in the title of Amnion, the innermost membrane that encloses a mammal’s embryo and a strong metaphor for the protective layer of family.
This passion continues into the realm of literature. References to Beowulf, John Donne, and T.S.Eliot are thrown in with casual familiarity, giving a window into understanding the poet’s journey. ‘I am English en-lessoned’, Sy-Quia writes, and Amnion’s acknowledgements are heavy with thanks to professors as proof. This deep relationship clearly isn’t just a passing wave to literary tradition, but an echo from a deep love with the field that fulfils a deep need within the poet herself: another clue, perhaps, in the search for identity. ‘Literature. . . / was a great fridge in the middle of the night and I was starving’. How could a reader not connect with such a powerful expression of literary love?
It is often hard to pinpoint exactly what this moving target of a book is, an ambiguity that is a credit to this poet and a mirroring of the messy compilation of human experiences. The various themes discussed here are piled in together in a shoebox of memories, anecdotes, and stories, turning this way and that in a tangle of histories to find the scene the poet is looking for: ‘Shall I go back further?’ This is conveyed also in the palimpsest of texts used — biographies, found text, speech and extracts from schoolbooks, a bread trail of ‘anecdotal crumbs’. The layout of the poetry is excitingly fluid and differs page-to-page, moving swiftly from heavy block text reminiscent of academic research to sporadic, sparse broken lines, reminding the reader there are always gaps in the archives. The spacing choice is reminiscent of Wayne Holloway-Smith, with the weight of implication and the unsaid hanging in the white church of the page’s space and words sliding across the page in a liquidation of language.
This creative formatting isn’t just an interesting take on the poetic form — it is a clear expression of Sy-Quia’s chaotic and all-directional storytelling. One strong example is the sidebar story of José Rizal, a 19th-century Filipino nationalist and revolutionary that Sy-Quia weaves into her narrative in a way that has echoes of Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman. This strange tangent is in part what makes this book feel so life-like – as in any family history, there are other people’s stories and wider events invading the poet’s personal space, bowing in and out of focus sporadically. A great aunt’s life is changed by the 1945 Massacre of Manila. Her mother’s life changes as the Berlin Wall falls.
The postmodernism of O’Brien is reflected in multiple elements of Sy-Quia’s work: experimentalism, intertextuality and unreliable narration all have their place in Amnion. The opening line of the book’s second chapter directly contradicts the opening lines of the first, detailing her parent’s first meeting: ‘I lied’. There is always an uncertain distance between the realms of truth and untruth within these stories, ensuring the reader never quite finds their footing on the rolling ship of history. Perhaps it is best this way – nothing in our lives and pasts is ever certain, family stories cannot always be corroborated like academic research. Sy-Quia willingly pushes this question of narrative truth even further, inviting several more layers of abstraction with an epilogue that comments on the poem itself and uses interview snippets with family members that ‘correct’ the original text.
However, it is Sy-Quia’s writing on burgeoning womanhood and her own place in society that in this reviewer’s opinion brings up some of the most powerful and memorable lines: ‘I wanted big-femur words like wise and kind’. Sy-Quia’s powers are at their height when translating those deep emotions we all grapple with growing up: ‘I wanted big-beamed love’. However, as always in this collection, this is never a straightforward journey and readers are not spared society’s grim reaction to young female sexuality: ‘The meaning which couches inside me. . . / what did I learn there? / To veil and loathe the office of my gender’.
The skill of Sy-Quia is to ensure that the complexity and depth of her writing only enhances the evident love she has for the human experiences of her family, her friends, and her blossoming sense of self. There are spontaneous bursts of warmth seen in anecdotal moments that bring the text alive: a memory of writing in ‘fourway biro green’, her mother’s ‘borrowed dress’ on her parents’ first date. This tenderness runs right through from the opening description of her parents’ meeting to her final homage to new friends and relationships, deftly tying the narrative arc of past and future together into a manifesto for identity. It takes many people to make a life, as Amnion testifies — and it takes a poet of great skill and dexterity to express this truth in such an artful and enjoyable collection as this.
In this messy, sprawling family saga, identities and roles are often porous — and none more so than the ambiguous role of the readers themselves. Although never outright invited to be a part of the narrative and always kept at arm’s length as an observer, readers are nevertheless actively acknowledged throughout as a present member of the audience — with sideways comments seeming to break the fourth wall and invite the reader directly into a secret dialogue. ‘She had a pair of shoes to match every dress. . . / I know, because she tells me’. As readers, we have no choice but to be involved — and thus to invest in the story along with the poet.
Early in the book, there is a particularly innovative sequence comparing the poet’s parents’ journey to ‘the broken pieces of Elgin’s grand tour’, exploring the poet’s subsequent construction from a palimpsest of brutal histories: ‘I / have made / a cathedral for all my colonialisms’. This reflects the poet’s fraught relationship with national histories and subjugations that are inherent to the story and her efforts to build a new world from the various old ones. However, when the expression of these societal complexities meets the active nature of the reader, the conversation can sometimes jar, with the poet assuming certain cultural outlooks. The language can sometimes take a didactic and even patronising tone, telling readers that if we know of Douglas MacArthur we should also know of ‘Wake, Guam, Davao, Baguio’ — that we are ‘gummy in our ignorance of Guam’.
Sy-Quia’s often stark addressing of stereotypes can tease and provoke, challenging readers to push back and break out of the Westernised box into which we are placed: ‘Shall I entertain you with the fetishism of a foreign name?’ This puts the reader in an uncomfortable position — in a situation where everyone, including the reader, is acknowledged and invested in the actions on the page, where do we stand in such contentious issues? No one, not even the poet herself, is spared from these searching questions: Sy-Quia often admits to her perception of the world being challenged and reshaped, with her visit to Indonesia disputing her sense of identity. Of her description of a monsoon, unable to ‘be’ in the space: ‘I kicked myself for noting it Conradian’.
Of the many interweaving themes within Amnion, love is always present in its many forms — not just love of family, but also of words. Language, in all its shifting shapes and dimensions, is ever-present and key to shaping the poet’s experience of the world. It is certainly a joy to see language through Sy-Quia’s eyes: ‘French and English were perpendiculars’. Inevitably, even this space is geographical and politicised: ‘England was unknown to me then. / Consequently, my English is unrooted’. Language permeates everything as a rare constant in a fluctuating world for the poet, a voice in its own right appearing with whole lines in German, French and Filipino, unpacking old English kennings in a choir of sounds.
Sy-Quia’s relationship with language is an intense and fervent one, occasionally racing ahead and leaving the reader behind on heady linguistic flights packed with dense, charged vocabularies and niche references: ‘And then I was Petrarch in Avignon’. The word ‘clerestory’ is used twice in the first forty pages. Certainly, Sy-Quia walks the fragile line between linguistic feasting and gluttony, prompting this reviewer to frequently reach for Google: ‘The orthogonals of your bodies become / panathenaic in a frieze of forms’. However, it is worth it for the glorious moments when the language fully pays off and shines with brilliance, seen most clearly in the title of Amnion, the innermost membrane that encloses a mammal’s embryo and a strong metaphor for the protective layer of family.
This passion continues into the realm of literature. References to Beowulf, John Donne, and T.S.Eliot are thrown in with casual familiarity, giving a window into understanding the poet’s journey. ‘I am English en-lessoned’, Sy-Quia writes, and Amnion’s acknowledgements are heavy with thanks to professors as proof. This deep relationship clearly isn’t just a passing wave to literary tradition, but an echo from a deep love with the field that fulfils a deep need within the poet herself: another clue, perhaps, in the search for identity. ‘Literature. . . / was a great fridge in the middle of the night and I was starving’. How could a reader not connect with such a powerful expression of literary love?
It is often hard to pinpoint exactly what this moving target of a book is, an ambiguity that is a credit to this poet and a mirroring of the messy compilation of human experiences. The various themes discussed here are piled in together in a shoebox of memories, anecdotes, and stories, turning this way and that in a tangle of histories to find the scene the poet is looking for: ‘Shall I go back further?’ This is conveyed also in the palimpsest of texts used — biographies, found text, speech and extracts from schoolbooks, a bread trail of ‘anecdotal crumbs’. The layout of the poetry is excitingly fluid and differs page-to-page, moving swiftly from heavy block text reminiscent of academic research to sporadic, sparse broken lines, reminding the reader there are always gaps in the archives. The spacing choice is reminiscent of Wayne Holloway-Smith, with the weight of implication and the unsaid hanging in the white church of the page’s space and words sliding across the page in a liquidation of language.
This creative formatting isn’t just an interesting take on the poetic form — it is a clear expression of Sy-Quia’s chaotic and all-directional storytelling. One strong example is the sidebar story of José Rizal, a 19th-century Filipino nationalist and revolutionary that Sy-Quia weaves into her narrative in a way that has echoes of Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman. This strange tangent is in part what makes this book feel so life-like – as in any family history, there are other people’s stories and wider events invading the poet’s personal space, bowing in and out of focus sporadically. A great aunt’s life is changed by the 1945 Massacre of Manila. Her mother’s life changes as the Berlin Wall falls.
The postmodernism of O’Brien is reflected in multiple elements of Sy-Quia’s work: experimentalism, intertextuality and unreliable narration all have their place in Amnion. The opening line of the book’s second chapter directly contradicts the opening lines of the first, detailing her parent’s first meeting: ‘I lied’. There is always an uncertain distance between the realms of truth and untruth within these stories, ensuring the reader never quite finds their footing on the rolling ship of history. Perhaps it is best this way – nothing in our lives and pasts is ever certain, family stories cannot always be corroborated like academic research. Sy-Quia willingly pushes this question of narrative truth even further, inviting several more layers of abstraction with an epilogue that comments on the poem itself and uses interview snippets with family members that ‘correct’ the original text.
However, it is Sy-Quia’s writing on burgeoning womanhood and her own place in society that in this reviewer’s opinion brings up some of the most powerful and memorable lines: ‘I wanted big-femur words like wise and kind’. Sy-Quia’s powers are at their height when translating those deep emotions we all grapple with growing up: ‘I wanted big-beamed love’. However, as always in this collection, this is never a straightforward journey and readers are not spared society’s grim reaction to young female sexuality: ‘The meaning which couches inside me. . . / what did I learn there? / To veil and loathe the office of my gender’.
The skill of Sy-Quia is to ensure that the complexity and depth of her writing only enhances the evident love she has for the human experiences of her family, her friends, and her blossoming sense of self. There are spontaneous bursts of warmth seen in anecdotal moments that bring the text alive: a memory of writing in ‘fourway biro green’, her mother’s ‘borrowed dress’ on her parents’ first date. This tenderness runs right through from the opening description of her parents’ meeting to her final homage to new friends and relationships, deftly tying the narrative arc of past and future together into a manifesto for identity. It takes many people to make a life, as Amnion testifies — and it takes a poet of great skill and dexterity to express this truth in such an artful and enjoyable collection as this.