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Written by Yunqin Wang
Belarusian poet Valzhyna Mort’s first collection written in English, Collected Body, is a complex tapestry of characters and their familial stories. In the collection, readers are constantly threatened by a sense of imminent death. Yet, instead of an end, death here becomes a means of union.
Mort has placed her characters in their most vulnerable state, and at the same time let them fight off death in an extremely corporeal way. In Aunt Anna, the first prose poem of the book, Anna entered a childhood garden and “all she wanted to do was to eat” (28). In this way, “her belly couldn’t stop growing” (28). We are thus immediately introduced to the overarching metaphor between body and space, body and history in the collection. As Mort noted earlier in Aunt Anna that “A child...would learn that history had to be tangible like meat at dinner, but like meat at dinner, it also remained an abstraction” (19), we find the characters, in order to survive and to preserve their remaining relatives, try to fill up their physical bodies. It becomes their way to keep in contact with reality as well as history. In Zhenya, the second prose poem, the handicapped girl Zhenya moves from one place to another, yet gets lost. However, although lost in the physical world, she wishes for her body to extend — she “approaches that world…; reaches out for it… - insistently, aggressively, she knocks on the air, demands the air top open itself into something to walk through, to sit on, to lean against” (45). In the end, the swelling belly of Aunt Anna “became [her] younger brother”(28), and in the case of Zhenya, a classmate of the speaker, “we are finally pushed to reflect Zhenya in our own distorted ways.” (49)
The theme of reflection is not uncommon in the collection. To reconstruct each character’s personal history, Mort emphasizes how the characters are in relation with their intimate others. In Aunt Anna, for instance, thinking of her grandmother, the speaker feels “she bit [the teeth] through you, threaded a needle through the bites, and sewed you to that soil like a button….She threw over your head - a noose” (21). To assert her own existence, the speaker in Zhenya declares that her lover is “[her] plan for immortality”, “audience for [her] privacy” (49). In Island, “a road comes up to my face and stands like a mirror” (59). And at the end of Aunt Anna, Mort draws a surreal image which resembles the relationship of men to the world and to the dead, “... the building bared their hollowed heads and drained themselves into the eye sockets of the sleeping dead on the ground floors.” (25)
While death and memory are two main threads of the book, what makes Collected Body distinctive is how Mort tackles fearlessly taboo subjects, draws on raw physicality. Sylt I recounts an incest between an old father and four young sisters. However, the poem adopts neither an angry nor a harrowing tone. It is told calmly in an idyllic setting. The simile between body and food comes back. As the incest happens, “her teeth, crossed out by a blue line of lips, chatter, / scratching the grains of salt. Her bitter tongue / bleeds out into the mouth as red oyster, which she gulps, breathless.” The next stanza comes right in with the aftermath of the act, “Their father turns away to dry his cock” (7). Here, the violence, as a history desired to be erased, is expressed by the sister’s inability to digest. In contrast with Anna and Zhenya’s effort to enlarge their bodies, the girl feels “rough and indifferent toward her full breasts”. “It bothers her, what did he find there after all?” (7) Her body has become a shield crumbled, a vessel empty and evasive. Furthermore, the emotional distress of the speaker is expressed not through the description of her tormented flesh but the setting. “Sailboats slip off their white sarafans, / baring their scrawny necks and shoulders, / and line up holding on to the pier as if it were a dance bar.” (7) By stripping the subject of its horror, Mort has enabled us to look at the body and the story more clearly.
Just like her characters who resist to be erased from history, Mort also refuses to leave anyone out of her lyrics. The speaker whispers In Zhenya that “looking for Zhenya I find you” (49). In Aunt Anna, it is unavoidable to talk about Anna’s sister-in-law, young brother, husband, mother and children while the poem should be just about Anna. A new character is even introduced by the end of the poem. Mort writes, “A poem named after Aunt Anna, pages about Aunt Anna, and not one word about Boleska… (Boleska, if you are reading this, please find me, everybody is dead)” (32). The poet’s final attempt to refrain from the digression has failed, yet the introduction of Boleska is inescapable. It is both the result of the speaker’s wish to cling to her memories, and also because death ultimately united all.
Inevitably, all bodies decay in the end, yet Mort has seeked a way. In Love, located in a haunting apartment where “the neighbor is counting precious stones: / amiodarone, zofenopril, metoprolol, mexifin”, the speaker meditates, “Oh yes, she will inherit those jewels” (12). The jewel seems to be a hallmark that symbolizes the speaker’s awareness and acceptance of human mortality. By the end of the poem, the sweat of her lover “disperses, and multiples / like cockroaches” (13). Yet, remember the earlier stanza in the poem, “The spit shooting down the sink — / she still counts as his body. / The noose of his saliva over her pussy — / she still counts as his body… He folds her inside / and he ships her, and ships her, and ships…” (12) Mort, as well as all her characters, have given their stance before the unabashed acknowledgement of death: in this life journey, we should not leave anything, anyone out. And it’s with our bodies that we try to take in as much as we can.