Incense Tree: Collected Poems of Louise Ho

Appendices

163 Appendices 165 Introductory remarks to “Sheung Shui Pastoral 1977” The Hong Kong Arts Centre has organized yearly poetry-readings since 1974 and one of the more prominent poets taking part has been [Louise] S. W. Ho. Her poems have always been received with great enthusiasm, especially for their concentration and clarity. Although of Chinese origin, her medium of expression is English and in her poems she achieves a subtle synthesis of her Chinese environment and her Western education. When she was still studying at the English Department of Hong Kong University her poems were already noted for their outstanding quality. They show the mastery of language in expressing and reflecting Hong Kong through her own reaction to it. The Hong Kong Arts Centre is pleased to announce the publication of this selection of poems by [Louise] S. W. Ho. Helga Burger-Werle October 1977 Programme Manager The Hong Kong Arts Centre 166 Introduction to “Local Habitation” Dialect without a Tribe1 It has always seemed to me that Werner Herzog’s film Fitzcarraldo has a special appeal for those of us living in Hong Kong. Fitzcarraldo tells a story about a crazy Irishman (played — why not? — by the German actor Klaus Kinski) and his attempts to build an opera house in the midst of the Amazon jungles in Peru. It is an enterprise that involves among other things moving a heavy boat over a mountain. We can leave aside Fitzcarraldo’s exploitation of the natives, or Herzog’s method of filmmaking which it is said spoiled the region for other filmmakers and ethnographers, and focus for the time being on the film’s mythic dimension. It is not the philosophic myth of Sisyphus that we find, but something else: an urban myth about desire and obsession. As such, the myth can serve as a superb hyperbole for Hong Kong cultural life, because in this city — “that last emporium” — it is obsession that brings skylines or poetic lines into being. What Louise Ho writes in “Raw” might have been spoken by Fitzcarraldo: Raw as an open wound that insists On the extremity of pain In order t o reach fulfillment Is every desire And it matters little whether it is desire for philately or philandering, for askesis or acquisition. In certain situations, to get anything done at all requires extreme measures. 1.This has subsequently appeared as part of a chapter in Hong Kong: Culture and Politics of Disappearance, by Ackbar Abbas (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997). 167 The extremities in Louise Ho’s poetry are masked initially by what seems to be a reliance on English Literature as a form of poetic authority. From the title of her volume, Local Habitation, to many details of phrasing, echoes of Shakespeare, the Metaphysicals and the Moderns are everywhere. However, it soon becomes apparent that the references to English Literature are there not to show her cultural credentials or to prove that she has earned the right to write in English. English Literature figures in Louise Ho’s work somewhat like the Don Quixote figures in Pierre Menard’s. It is never a question of working in English Literature but rather of re-working the literature. That is why even if the allusions are to English, their meanings get changed by the new context they find themselves in. For example, the project suggested in the title of portraying the city by giving to airy nothing a local habitation and a name works itself out in unexpected ways. In poem after poem, it is the very attempt at naming and precision that reveals the frayed edges of a city where nothing is but what is not. This can take a humorous form, as in “What’s in a Name”, about the city’s incongruous sounding name when transliterated into English from Chinese: I whispered it I insinuated it only as acronym. For it rhymed too well with ting tong sing song King Kong and ping pong Or it can take a more serious turn, as in the poem about the Tiananmen Massacre, which begins by invoking Marvell, Dryden and Yeats, and modulates quickly into the problem of naming: The shadows of June the fourth Are the shadows of a gesture, They say, but how shall you and I Name them, one by one? 168 In poems like these, English...